By Ricardo Duchesne
This broadly researched publication argues that the advance of a libertarian tradition used to be an quintessential part of the increase of the West. The roots of the West's more suitable highbrow and creative creativity will be traced again to the aristocratic warlike tradition of Indo-European audio system. one of several interesting subject matters mentioned are: the ascendancy of multicultural historians and the degradation of ecu background; China's ecological endowments and imperial windfalls; army revolutions in Europe 1300-1800; the technological know-how and chivalry of Henry the Navigator; Judaism and its contribution to Western rationalism; the cultural richness of Max Weber as opposed to the highbrow poverty of Pomeranz, Wong, Goldstone, Goody, and A.G. Frank; swap with no development within the East; Hegel's Phenomenology of the [Western] Spirit; Nietzsche and the schooling of the Homeric Greeks; Kojeve's master-slave dialectic and the Western kingdom of nature; Christian virtues and German aristocratic expansionism.
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Additional resources for The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (Studies in Critical Social Sciences)
Example text
For Nisbet, the idea of progress, as we shall see further below, had exerted a powerful influence on Western civilization since ancient times. But in the 1970s he saw widespread popular cynicism and animosity towards this idea and towards Western history in particular. Looking at a wide range of public, educational, and media trends, he could not but conclude that antiWestern sentiments had “grown and spread to not merely the large majority of intellectuals…but to many millions of other people in the West” (317).
As Hegel liked to remind his readers, God ratifies Satan’s prophesy after Adam has eaten the forbidden fruit: “Look, Adam has become like one of us, and knows what is good and evil” (in Rosen 1974: 8). Adam and Eve were happy in paradise but they had not yet asked the reason why they were happy, what the good life was. They were not human, for they had not achieved anything, had not worked, and had not disciplined their basic instincts. Paradise is for beasts. the fall of western civilization 41 Nisbet thinks that the myth of a past ‘Golden Age’ characterized by peacefulness and happiness is inconsistent with the idea of progress since this myth would perforce require one to view all subsequent history in terms of decay and decline.
McNeill recognized that “such borrowed elements entered a distinct institutional and cultural setting” that affected their importance, but he did so incidentally in the context of persistently asserting that world history writing should be mostly about cross-cultural exchanges (63). ” The high culture of the West, for all its accredited virtues, was immaterial to the vast majority: a civilization was “no more than a shorthand summation for myriads of messages exchanged among large populations” (64).