Yves here. In his recent book, The West: The History of an Idea, Georgios Varouxakis seems to have bitten off more than he could chew. Nevertheless, the underlying overly-ambitious effort provides Satyajit Das with grist for discussion of what the West has meant to different parties in political and cultural contexts.
By Satyajit Das, a former banker and author of numerous technical works on derivatives and several general titles: Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives (2006 and 2010), Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (2011) and A Banquet of Consequence – Reloaded (2016 and 2021). His latest book is on ecotourism – Wild Quests: Journeys into Ecotourism and the Future for Animals (2024).
‘West’, for most, is a directional vector. It is not, as often assumed, fixed. In a spherical planet, east and west or north and south depend on your reference point. In The West: The History of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 2025), Georgios Varouxakis, a Professor of the history of political thought, encounters the same problem in tracing the social or political concept known as the ‘West’.
Erudite, well-researched and accessible, the book traces the history of the term. Professor Varouxakis argues it emerged in the 1820s, primarily to distinguish Europe from Russia. The central figure was French philosopher Auguste Comte, rarely read any more, who used the terminology. Wanting to abolish empire and conquest, he and the positivists sought to create a republic led by the five great Western nations: the French, Italian, Spanish, British, and German. He found ‘Europe’ to be confusing because of Russia, which was to have no part of this new arrangement. But through its tortured history, the term has co-existed or been used interchangeably with: European, occidental or even Christendom.
Professor Varouxakis traces the changes in the concept chronologically. He covers the 19th century debates about Europe versus the West and the emergence of Britain and Germany as influences. He traces the impact of the Great War, the inter-war interregnum, World War 2, the Cold War and its aftermath. Central to the term’s significance is debates over the status of Russia, Germany and America, and the vexed difference between Europe and the West.
From the beginning, Russia was a key complication. While Peter the Great brought her into the European power system in the 18th century, Russia came to be seen as a menace – the other within – threatening to dominate Europe especially after the Napoleonic wars. That remained a recurrent theme through the two 20th century World Wars, the Cold War to the present. Fyodor Dostoevsky summarised this paradox of geography and culture: “In Europe we were hangers-on and slaves, but in Asia we will be masters. In Europe we were Tatars, but in Asia we will be Europeans.” Dostoevsky advocated that Russia did not need Western validation and should embrace its Eurasian destiny. This thread still shapes the relationship between Russia, the West and East.
Britain had its own idea of the West, with often confusing meanings and shifting criteria of membership. Its expansion was often justified as exporting a vague Western civilisation to new lands. Writing in the 1850s,
Karl Marx approved the role of the British Empire in India. He agreed that the intentions of imperialists were selfish, greedy and the justifications flimsy. But he thought that the colonisers were unwittingly doing the work of history. The outcome was positive despite the obvious human suffering. Germany has always been equivocal about its relationship to the west. Germany’s role in the two World Wars, especially the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact and later invasion of the Soviet Union, confounds any simple East-West dichotomy.
For 19th century Americans, the term referred to initially the unexplored Western part of the continent. Escapees from Europe, immigrant Americans resisted reintegration. As John Jay Chapman wrote in 1916:
“the myth of America as promised land is finished. We are going to be taken back into the fold. We are Europeans. European history, both past and present, is our history, and Europe’s future is our future. The thought of this allies us with every form of intellectual life in Europe and destroys at a blow the mind killing theory on which we have all been brough up – namely that America has a private destiny of her own, a fate distinct from Europe’s fate.”
Walter Lippmann promoted a “Western alliance” under which the US would enter the Great War. Later, he argued that to meet the challenge of Japan, American isolationism was insufficient and she must join with the “liberal powers of the West”. Lippman used the term “Atlantic Community”, defining unity and shared civilisations.
Europe was cautious about America joining the Western club. Writing in the aftermath of World War 2, French philosopher Simone Weil anticipated the current antipathy towards the US: “We know very well that after the war the Americanisation of Europe will be a grave danger…Europeans look upon Americans as having no civilisation while Americans believe that Europeans are primitives. Just as Hitlerisation of Europe would doubtlessly set the scene for Hitlerisation of the world, so Americanisation of Europe would set the scene for an Americanisation of the terrestrial globe…the second evil was less than the first but not by much.”
The debates live on. In January 2003, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld distinguished between old and new Europe during a press briefing drawing a distinction between European nations opposing the impending Iraq War and those supporting the US. Today, Europe is reassessing its relationship with Trump-ite America. Ukraine and Israel assert that they are fighting to preserve Western civilisation. But as Eli Halevy cautioned: “each country believes that is fighting for civilisation. But what does it mean by civilisation?”
While Professor Varouxakis traces the shifting patterns of ideas with skill and dexterity, the book cannot overcome a fundamental hurdle. A term as abstract and contested as ‘West’ remains an elusive target, used by everybody loosely in pursuance of specific objectives. As a result, the book ends in a tame conclusion: it is a complex and evolving term.
Despite its considerable achievements, there are several issues with the book.
First, The West eschews, probably deliberately, offering a cohesive framework within which the fluctuating currents can be understood. That is a missed opportunity. The book, at times, resembles the student Rudge’s description of history, in Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys: “just one f***ing thing after another”.
Second, words matter in geo-politics, economics, identity, culture, and philosophy. They assert a favoured narrative and approach. The term West or anything similar only has currency in juxtaposition with its opposite, gaining significance relative to each other. Just as directionally, West contrasts with East, in these contexts, the word is synonymous with value systems or the defence of a proposition. For reasons perhaps of political correctness or avoidance of controversy, Professor Varouxakis skirts this issue.
He rejects flawed colonial and racial orthodoxies which blame the West exclusively for many problems and the endless search for the non-Western roots of Western civilisation. He believes that values, like democracy, rule of law, and individual rights, are universal not Western. But the arguments are unconvincing.
Western is used to assert the superiority of certain beliefs. Oswald Spengler used ‘West’ to exclude Russia. Europeans and North Americans defined themselves against Africans, Arabs, Chinese, the Indians, Ottomans and aboriginal populations. Western was always, in part, a justification for European imperialism and colonial conquest. It is difficult to ignore the grave injustices in the treatment of native peoples, who the colonial power sought to Westernise.
The term has always been employed to champion certain systems of thought. Otherwise, why would beleaguered Ukraine and Europe claim to be protecting Western values against eastern enemies? French intellectual Raymond Aron formulated its political premise in his 1955 critique The Opium of the Intellectuals: “The true ‘Westerner’ is the man who accepts nothing unreservedly in our civilization except the liberty it allows him to criticize it and the chance it offers him to improve it.” Social critic Allan Bloom argued that only Western nations were self-critical, whereas all other dominant cultures were ethno-centric. In his view, the West which emphasised “thinking” was superior. Neo-liberal economics asserts the dominance of Western market economics over competing systems. But as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney argued at the 2026 World Economic Forum, the claimed virtues of Western values while undoubtedly desirable are not consistently achieved anywhere not even in the West.
Third, Professor Varouxakis avoids religion. This is disingenuous. Many of the figures he traces explicitly or implicitly invoked the heritage of Christian Europe. The differences between the Catholic and Orthodox Church have always influenced the treatment of Russia. Religion is an essential part of the concept of West and is inescapable in any debate.
Samuel Huntington in his 1992 lecture The Clash of Civilizations identified distinct civilizations (Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and African). There was a religious undertone, especially the Christian/ non-Christian, particularly Islamic, schism. Huntington argued that Western ideas (individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state) are fundamentally different to the central beliefs of Islamic, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist or Orthodox cultures. He worried that the West’s view that these values and beliefs were universal was simply untrue.
Fourth, Professor Varouxakis writes from through Western eyes. Outside of passing coverage of Rabindranath Tagore, non-Western thinkers are generally absent. Even the picture of a Tagore sympathetic to the West, in contrast to other Indian intellectuals like Mahatma Ghandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, is incomplete. It does not mention that Tagore, on receiving the news of the Japanese Imperial navy’s victory over Russia in Tsushima, led his students on a victory march around the school compound celebrating the success of the East over the West. Central European thinkers, like Czesław Miłosz and Milan Kundera, caught in the abyss between East and West during the Cold War, get only brief mention. Given the regions’ influence over Western culture, this is puzzling.
Fifth, the phenomenon of ‘Westoxification’ (Gharbzadegi in Persian) is ignored. It describes the unquestioning imitation by Eastern cultures of certain aspects of the West, especially dress habits, behaviour, materialist consumerism, entertainment, and language. Formulated by Iranian philosopher Ahmad Fardid and adapted by Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, it argues that many in the East have limited intellectual understanding of Western concepts. This leads to reasoning and conduct inconsistent with their environment and ill-advised attempts to apply Western solutions to Eastern problems. In his 1996 essay The West Unique Not Universal, Samuel Huntington provided a pungent critique of Westoxification: “the argument that the spread of pop culture and consumer goods around the world represents the triumph of Western civilisation depreciates the strength of other cultures while trivialising Western culture by identifying it with fatty foods, faded pants, and fizzy drinks. The essence of Western culture is the Magna Carta not the Magna Mac.”
Sixth, the book does not consider that views, particularly in previous centuries, were shaped by what was known of the rest of the world. With information exchange limited and travel restricted, specific arguments were highly localised around small intellectual circles and a specific environment. Today, mixing of scholars from different backgrounds, due to both immigration and greater interchanges of ideas, influences the debate.
Finally, the book rarely examines literature or the arts. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities and Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, just to name a few examples, offer telling perspectives on the concept. Perhaps, the sharpest insight of the differences between West and east was offered by Junichirō Tanizaki in In Praise of Shadows: “We Orientals tend to seek our satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are; and so darkness causes us no discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable. If light is scarce, then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty. But the progressive Westerner is determined always to better his lot. From candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light—his quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow.”
The West inadvertently exposes the nature of Western social science scholarship. A word is used by someone in a particular context. It becomes the object of ever more intense study. Someone somewhere writes about it. Another responds and before long it is an entire discipline with a life of its own. It develops its own currents and counter currents. The idea of the West, for example, has created its own doppelgänger. Fashionable books, like Oswald Spengler’s 1918 The Decline of the West and its successors including the novels of Michel Houellebecq, are founded in cultural and spiritual pessimism. This creates its own antidote. Frenchman Henri Massis defended the west and its heritage, at length, shaping today’s many alt-right modern thinkers and techno optimists.
The study of abstractions like the ‘West’ shows that most ideas evolve out of specific environments, cultures and society and are shaped by particular reasons. There is no one West and no correct definition of it, only the endless history of arguments about it. As Joseph Conrad wrote in Under Western Eyes: “words as is well known, are the great foes of reality.”
Satyajit Das May 2026
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