Western Civilization
Discussion
The critique of Civilization as an essentialist concept
Marlene Laruelle:
"The three objections above are powerful, but they all depend on a particular understanding of civilization as a primordial collective identity. If by “Western civilization” we mean this primordial thing, then the critique succeeds. But the question is whether we can preserve the historical substance without preserving the essentialist form."
Contra-1. “Western civilization” is itself a construction
"There is no uninterrupted “civilizational” line running neatly from Athens to Rome to Christianity to the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and finally to modern liberal democracy. Josephine Quinn’s How the World Made the West is particularly devastating to this mythology. What we call the West emerged through continuous borrowing, migration, trade, conquest, translation, imitation and hybridization. There is no “West” without Mesopotamian institutions, Phoenician networks, Egyptian knowledge, Greek and Roman appropriations, Islamic scholarship, Indian mathematics, Eurasian cultures and innumerable other circulations. The “West” was never culturally autonomous and self-sufficient.
Contra-2. The West’s boundaries constantly move
Partly related to the first point, but still worth making separately, is that “the West” has meant many different things over time: Christendom, Europe, the anti-Soviet Cold War bloc, the North Atlantic democracies, etc. This instability is not accidental, as collective identities are constructed relationally: “the West” has repeatedly defined itself against a changing outside, whether Islam, communism, or other geopolitical and cultural adversaries. As that imagined outside changes, so do the boundaries of the West.
That is why the category remains so difficult to delimit. Once a core of North America and Europe is defined, who else belongs? Is Latin America “Western”? Russia? Israel? Australia? What about Japan and South Korea, routinely incorporated into the geopolitical West but rarely into narratives of Western civilization? The West has continually redrawn its borders according to the political and historical argument it wants to make.
Contra-3. Civilizational language turns political disagreements into existential ones
Then we can move from debating the “West” to debating the concept of “civilization” itself. To put a vast literature very briefly, civilizationism tends to essentialize collective identities: historically contingent and politically constructed communities are recast as deep and coherent, timeless cultural entities.
Political differences are consequently interpreted less as conflicts of interests or competing policy preferences than as expressions of supposedly fundamental differences between ways of life. Once questions of migration, secularism, education, family policy and minority rights are framed as conflicts between civilizations, they look like questions of collective survival. Compromise can then appear not as ordinary democratic negotiation but as civilizational betrayal."
(https://laruelle.substack.com/p/should-we-rescue-western-civilization?)
Why Western Civilization is worth defending, under certain conditions
By Marlene Laruelle:
Pro-1. Civilization is not identity but inheritance
"That is where the distinction between identity and inheritance becomes useful. These criticisms invalidate civilization as identity, not civilization as inheritance.
The fact that the West was constructed through centuries of hybridization does not make its historical formation unreal. What matters today is that there is a substantial intellectual genealogy from which we can draw. Greek philosophy, Roman law, Judaism and Christianity, medieval universities, Renaissance humanism, the Reformation, the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, capitalism and socialism, constitutionalism and colonialism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, fascism and antifascism, slavery and abolitionism, patriarchy and feminism all form part of a dense, interconnected historical archive that came to be associated with Europe and the West.
Nor do changing boundaries necessarily invalidate the category. Historical formations do not possess perfectly stable borders. “Europe,” “the Mediterranean,” “modernity” have all changed their geographical and conceptual meanings over time. A category does not need immutable boundaries to capture a real historical configuration. The question is not whether we can draw a timeless line around “the West,” but whether the term identifies a sufficiently coherent field of institutions, ideas, conflicts, and inheritances to remain analytically useful.
That does not make the category arbitrary. Its coherence comes from historical sedimentation: institutions, texts, concepts, and controversies accumulated over time, repeatedly referring back to one another and being transmitted across generations. “Western civilization” is, in that sense, a historically layered web of references.
Finally, distinguishing inheritance from identity also addresses the most serious criticism of civilizationism. To speak of a Western inheritance need not mean primordializing Western people or treating political conflicts as struggles between mutually exclusive cultural essences. An inheritance can be shared, disputed, transformed, selectively appropriated and criticized. One can inherit conflicting tensions between Christianity and secularism, empire and abolition, capitalism and socialism, universalism and racial hierarchy.
Seen this way, recovering a Western intellectual genealogy can sit comfortably within the framework of global history. The global turn has taught us to stop imagining civilizations as self-contained containers and to reconstruct them through circulation and entanglement. But interconnectedness does not mean that every historical formation dissolves into a global whole. Ideas circulate unevenly; they become particularly dense and institutionalized in certain places and traditions. The West can therefore be understood not as an autonomous civilization that generated itself, but as a historically specific node within much wider circuits of exchange.
But there is a Western archive, historically constructed and internally contested, and more open-ended than bounded…None of this makes it less real as an intellectual genealogy, or less valuable as a repertoire of resources from which we can still draw.
This is why I would distinguish civilization as identity from civilization as archive. There is no coherent Western civilization acting as a historical subject across twenty-five centuries. But there is a Western archive, historically constructed and internally contested, and more open-ended than bounded. Of course, an archive is never neutral either: what gets canonized or forgotten reflects relations of power. The task is therefore not simply to inherit the archive but continually to reopen it. None of this makes it less real as an intellectual genealogy, or less valuable as a repertoire of resources from which we can still draw.
Pro-2. Yes to Deconstruction, No to Erasure
One of the most important resources contained in this archive is its capacity for self-criticism. The Western intellectual tradition includes not only the doctrines and institutions that came to define it, but also the traditions that attacked them from within: Marxism, anticolonialism, feminism, civil-rights thought, the radical right, and later Foucault, Derrida, postcolonial theory, or Judith Butler—I let the readers decide what they find the most transgressive.
What is sure is that the genealogy of the West includes the genealogy of its own deconstruction, and there is no reason for a Western-civilization curriculum to stop with Locke or the American constitutional tradition; it can continue through Marx, Nietzsche, fascism, anticolonialism, and Derrida. Slavoj Žižek pithily made this point recently: “The reason we should stick to the name ‘Europe’ is that the European legacy provides the best critical instruments to analyze what went wrong in Europe.” The same is true of “the West” generally.
What should be resisted is their political capture on either side: the canon should be criticized, expanded, and reread, not purified of works that make us uncomfortable, nor surrendered to the right as its exclusive inheritance.
But the reverse danger also matters. Recognizing the exclusions and hierarchies embedded in older texts should not mean dismissing them because they fail to conform to today’s moral vocabulary. That kind of presentism impoverishes the humanities just as much as a frozen conservative canon does.
Conservative American universities deserve credit for preserving the Great Books tradition and the practice of sustained engagement with difficult texts. What should be resisted is their political capture on either side: the canon should be criticized, expanded, and reread, not purified of works that make us uncomfortable, nor surrendered to the right as its exclusive inheritance.
Pro-3. Western civilization without Western-centrism
If this archive is open-ended and contested, it cannot be treated as the exclusive property of the West. Ideas have genealogies, but that does not make them the exclusive property of the societies in which they took recognizable form. Greek philosophy may have become central to European intellectual life, but it emerged from a much wider Mediterranean world that has the right to claim inheritance too.
The same distinction matters even more for values. Human dignity, equality, and justice are not “Western values” in any proprietary sense. Their modern formulations have particular histories, but neither their meaning nor their validity is geographically bounded.
Talking about Western civilization, then, does not have to mean adopting a Western-centric view of history. One can study a specific intellectual inheritance while situating it within wider global exchanges and recognizing parallel traditions elsewhere. Western civilization can therefore be studied as one strand within global or world history, rather than as the universal center from which the rest of humanity is measured.
Pro-4. Liberal societies need collective storytelling
Last but not least, liberal societies have a storytelling problem. Liberal democracy knows how to organize rights and institutions, but it is often much less comfortable telling a collective story about where a society comes from, what it has inherited, and what it wants to carry forward. Its illiberal competitors are better at providing narratives of continuity and rootedness, which helps explain the appeal of civilizational language.
The challenge is therefore not to abandon collective storytelling, but to do it better: to create forms of belonging that acknowledge historical complexity while building positive shared mythology.
The answer cannot simply be to treat every collective narrative as suspect because it is constructed. All political communities construct stories about themselves; the real question is whether those stories are pluralist and capable of revision. The challenge is therefore not to abandon collective storytelling, but to do it better: to create forms of belonging that acknowledge historical complexity while building positive shared mythology.
So… should we rescue Western civilization from the right? Yes, if we are clear about what exactly we are rescuing. First, the West is contingent and fluid, not a timeless cultural bloc with essentialized borders. Second, civilization is best approached as inheritance rather than identity: a set of shared but contradictory legacies, open to interpretation and critique. Third, rescuing Western civilization means reinventing a positive collective story, not building a fortress around a threatened identity.
After all, no political imaginary is created from nowhere. Societies need stories that connect past, present, and future, and resources from which to imagine what they might become. Political imaginaries need roots—but roots are not walls.
This is all a way of saying that Western civilization cannot be a static enterprise. We only do justice to the West’s inheritance and to its dead by reactivating their legacy in the present. After all, no political imaginary is created from nowhere. Societies need stories that connect past, present, and future, and resources from which to imagine what they might become. Political imaginaries need roots—but roots are not walls."
(https://laruelle.substack.com/p/should-we-rescue-western-civilization?)
Responses
From Carlos Perona (Europos):
"From a first reading, I do think this article is directed against a bit of a strawman. That the “West emerged through continuous borrowing, migration, trade, conquest, translation…” or can “be understood not as an autonomous civilization that generated itself” is accepted by most people. “generated itself” is a particularly radical claim. Who actually argues this? And yet…
“…the West is contingent and fluid, not a timeless…” My body is contingent, and also relies on “continuous borrowing” of food and air from outside itself. But it would be absurd to conclude that it does not constitute a unity and has no right to its own space and provision. Similarly, my house is made of different parts - that doesn’t mean I can add more parts (new doors that go nowhere, or new, unrelated “parts” appropriate to different types of building) indefinitely without compromising its functionality or structural integrity. That’s where the “Right” discourse on identity comes in.
“civilizationism tends to essentialize collective identities…To speak of a Western inheritance need not mean primordializing Western people or treating political conflicts as struggles between mutually exclusive cultural essences.” No more than I essentialize my house and family, I suppose. But de facto I have to treat them as coherent unities. I’m not sure what the alternative would be. Having said that, the argument that “civilizatonism” (who, exactly?) leads to conflict is debatable. We are at least as likely to start conflicts by failing to recognize different civilizational spheres with their own identities (political traditions, aesthetic canons, etc.) and instead pushing for universal institutions.
“Human dignity, equality, and justice are not ‘Western values’ in any proprietary sense.”
I agree. But precisely the more “Right wing” (in a certain sense) a person is, the less likely he is to want to bother exporting these, or to treat “the West” as an ideal category all humans ought be fitted into (rather than as "*his* identity, distinct from others). We come here to an important distinction: By “Right” do we mean neocon interventionism or today’s rising nativists? These are quite distinct.
“What is sure is that the genealogy of the West includes the genealogy of its own deconstruction…” Ok, but the critical theories that articulate that “deconstruction” are often universalistic in unhelpful ways, and have served as justification for foreign intervention. From “the natives of Madagascar must be made to pay a head tax in order for them to develop Enlightenment calculative reason” to “the women of Iran need us to bomb Tehran” etc.
More fundamentally, however, the desire to play down continuity and play up hybridization (and, at the extreme, to treat the legacy of the past as an inheritance as opposed to an identity) is aesthetic. Both dynamics have their place. However, in terms of people, there’s a tremendous degree of continuity from the Iron (and often Bronze) Age populations of Europe to modern ones. There’s beauty in this. Some people’s vocation is to combine, others’ vocation is to contribute to an existing identity. Both are legitimate, but the Left often pathologizes the latter on principle.
I also don’t regard civilization as just a historical accident. Consider the history of the concept of Europe. The modern geographic delimitation of the continent already shows up in Herodotus, but by the time we get to Plato, Europe also constitutes a spiritual jurisdiction (European souls are judged by one son of Prometheus, Asian souls by another). This probably draws on the pre-Socratic Hymn to Apollo, where the sun-god calls on the “men of Europe,” likely because this was understood as the northern, geographically contiguous portion of the world, and was therefore the realm of the “hyperborean” (far-northern) god (Apollo). Plato also refers to Athenian and Spartan resistance against Persia as having been on behalf of all of Europe’s barbarians. Think of how strange it is for an ancient Greek to make common cause with western and northern barbarians (even as a rhetorical flourish). Virgil will repeat the same idea vis Carthage. You also have “Europeans” appearing as a demographic category, defined by common descent, in the pre-Christian Book of Jubilees, which early Christians made much of, producing a robust sense of “Europeaness” (st. Jerome, st. Isidore of Seville). There’s beauty in the fact that a classical Greek concept of continent-as-civilization became a reality (one that is precisely fundamentally Hellenic!). More conservative folks emphasize these coherent trajectories and the continuity of identity."