The West: A New History of an Old Idea

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Safiye Sultun chapter? While noting the Ottomans’ claim to have inherited the Byzantine claim to world empire and the battle with the HRE Hapsburgs and their similar claims, the “Third Rome” of Moscow is ignored. In fact, none of the chapters in the book is Russia-oriented, despite Mac Sweeney’s repeated notes in earlier chapters that for Europeans of this time and earlier, “Russia” often fell out of their definition of “Europe,” meaning that a chapter with Russian ties should surely support her thesis. We’re grokking more lightly. Mac Sweeney argues that we assume the grand narrative of Western Civilization is pristinely and homogeneously White and European. We have collapsed it down to a linear progression from Greece and Rome through Christianity, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and modernity. By the 17th century, Mac Sweeney argues, this narrative was racialized to support imperial projects that peaked in the 19th century. Mac Sweeney sets out to explain to ordinary readers why this should be so – and why the idea took hold in the first place. She must be a terrific teacher, as well as a talented writer, for this challenging task is pulled off in style. One by one she takes on hoary old myths – about the character of the ancient world, the nature of the Crusades, or the superiority of European powers in imperial contests – explodes them with panache, and leaves us instead with a richer, fuller understanding of epochs, worldviews and fascinating individuals from the past. What do you think of western civilisation?” an English journalist asks Gandhi in a widely shared but probably apocryphal anecdote. The anti-colonial replies that “it would be a good idea”.

Not everything can be covered in such a large sweep, and Mac Sweeney’s breadth of knowledge and elegant style keep the book highly engaging He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. I recommend this book as an antidote to the prevalent notion of history as an unbroken sweep from Greece and Rome through the Middle Ages and Enlightenment to the present day. This was a fascinating read. Mac Sweeney diligently lays out her argument that the idea of “the West” did not come about linearly. Decades of decolonisation in politics, culture and scholarship have certainly dented the notion that “the West” has driven progress across the world. But for many conservatives in politics and academia, particularly in the English-speaking world, the idea of a “western civilisation” that stretches “from Plato to Nato” remains something worth defending. Indeed the idea remains a subconscious foundation from which it can be hard to escape. Naoíse Mac Sweeney argues that “the standard narrative of Western Civilisation is so omnipresent that most of us rarely stop to think about it, and even less often to question it”.

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Edward Said chapter? Modern wars within academia; she referenced Huntington and his clash of civilizations ideas in the intro. Said is a representative type of reimagining the West. She notes his feeling out of place in both Orient and Occident, though she spoils the literary parallel by contracting Orient and West. A highly readable, vigorous repudiation of the Western-centric school of history…[Mac Sweeney] argues convincingly that it was a departure from Greek and Roman senses of who they were and how they fit into the world.” — Kirkus (starred review) As befits a classicist and expert on the history of Troy, she starts with half a dozen scintillating chapters on the Greeks, the Romans, and how later cultures disdained, manipulated, or claimed their inheritance – not just in what we now think of as countries of “the west”, but across Anatolia and the Middle East, and from sub-Saharan Africa to India. In all these instances, Hellenic and Roman cultures were regarded as fundamentally distinctive – indeed, even the idea of the Hellenes as an ethno-political unit, rather than an assemblage of different states, was largely conjured up by the Byzantine emperor Theodore II Laskaris in the 13th century. Before its invention in the Renaissance, the notion of a unified Greco-Roman “classical antiquity”, let alone one whose inheritance was confined to Europe, would have seemed even more unfathomably bizarre. Odds are strong that you first became fully aware of the term “Western Civilization” through an introductory survey course in college or AP history in high school. And you’ve lived your life since then believing that “the West” boasts “a common origin resulting in a shared history, a shared heritage, and a shared identity” grounded in the classical era of Greece and Rome. But younger historians are now rethinking Western Civilization. Writing with great clarity, history professor Naoise Mac Sweeney challenges the origin myth in her brilliant new book, The West. Only here, in the newly emerging United States, was that heritage in full flower. “North America remained unblemished by the decadence of the Old World, and was therefore the rightful heir to millennia of European culture,” Mac Sweeney writes of the revolutionaries’ thinking. And, using tortured reasoning, they enshrined the concept of “freedom” as its central aspiration—despite the fact that so many of the Founding Fathers were slaveholders. Racism allowed them to slither out from the contradiction.

My only frustration was that as interesting as I found this, it was written with an academic flair that would hardly make it accessible to the broader public. Some of the turning points she mentions across history could provide greater clarification on how the West came to be, perhaps giving folks pause, sparking introspection, or general dialogue among the people. At the end of the book she notes that “the biographies I have presented to you in this book are ones I have selected, based on my own personal experiences and interests. I imagine that you might select differently should you undertake a similar exercise.” Fair enough. She then goes on to say that, “this book is therefore necessarily my own subjective interpretation of Western history, focused not on great men like those of Spofford and Bacon, but rather on individuals whose lives I feel encapsulated something of the Zeitgeist of their age.” Here then is the problem; by consciously avoiding “great men”, and choosing individuals who encapsulated their zeitgeist, she includes people who demonstrably did not encapsulate the topic of the chapters. In the chapter on Livilla, for instance, the focus was on how the Romans (who are wielded as weapons in the polemics of western civilization) are really from the east, being (according to Virgil) descendants of refugees from Troy. As important as Livilla might be to her zeitgeist, her profile was irrelevant to the crucial point of the chapter. I may wish to know about Tullia as an example of someone who captured the zeitgeist of her time, but in a chapter that attempts to discuss whether the Renaissance was really a rebirth of classical Greco-Roman art and culture or an unconnected “birth”, Tullia’s profile was irrelevant.

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The other elements that underpinned imperialism were Christianity and racism based on skin color, which defined the people of “the Rest” as inferior to their colonizers. “Western ideas about racial distinction and hierarchy began first to emerge and then to crystallize in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, although it was not until the eighteenth century that these ideas became more systematic and assumed a ‘scientific’ veneer.” Naoise Mac Sweeney argues Western foundations of are less stable than we tend to believe. And that is okay…. Her capsule biographies…present a number of fascinating counterfactuals. The story Mac Sweeney tells…is a rejection of how both Western traditionalists and their counterparts in the rising East view cultural history.” — Washington Post We tend to imagine Western Civilisation as a golden thread, leading through the centuries from classical antiquity to the countries of the modern West - a cultural genealogy that connects Plato to NATO. It is an idea often invoked in the speeches of politicians and the rhetoric of journalists, and which remains deeply embedded in popular culture. But what if it is wrong? The format of Mac Sweeney’s book (its descriptive American subtitle is A New History in Fourteen Lives) means that, despite the fascinating selection of characters, its sweep can feel uneven, skipping for example from William Gladstone to Edward Said. It is inevitable that not everything can be covered in such a large sweep, and Mac Sweeney’s breadth of knowledge and elegant style keep the book highly engaging.

The West: A New History of an Old Idea" by Naoíse Mac Sweeney offers a comprehensive examination of the concept of "the West" throughout history. While the book presents a wealth of information and covers a broad range of topics, it falls short in certain aspects, leaving it deserving of an average rating. Joseph Warren chapter? Stand-in for all US Founding Fathers, in part. Also a claim by Mac Sweeney of US phil-Romanism vs European philhellenism. I think she pushes this too much; also, philhellenism is not phil-Athenianism, and that didn’t develop in Europe until Romantic times. Skimmed this totally.That contradiction, and other flaws in the case for “Western Civilization,” began coming under fire in the twentieth century, most prominently in the work of the Palestinian American scholar Edward Said. “By highlighting [the] interplay between politics and culture,” Mac Sweeney explains, “Said laid the foundations for a reassessment of Western Civilisation, allowing us to see it for what it really is—an invented social construct, one that is extremely powerful and has far-reaching consequences in the real world, but a construct nonetheless.” Odds are strong that you first became fully aware of the term “Western Civilization” through an introductory survey course in college or AP history in high This novel looks at the ideologies and principles of today’s Western stance as it attempts to move away from white racial superiority and imperialism to one that values democracy and liberalism. The author chooses 14 individuals from varying eras to dispel inaccuracies – starting with the classical world (with Herodotus, a reintor of history and Livilla, granddaughter of Emperor Augustus) and moves through the Dark Ages, Renaissance, etc (including Francis Bacon, Njinga of Angola, and my namesake Phillis Wheatley) to land at today’s views and perceptions. Basically - how it starts with narratives to explain how it started and how we got here (today).

Is it time to retire Western Civilisation? Historian and archaeologist Naoíse Mac Sweeney certainly thinks so, and this big-picture history is her manifesto. The West is presented through the lives of historical figures whose stories cut against the Western grand narrative, which, as Mac Sweeney sees it, posits a pure and exclusive tradition running “from Plato to Nato”. Naoíse Mac Sweeney sets the record straight on the modern myth of Western Civilization. Authoritative and impassioned, this glorious book takes us beyond prejudice and preconception to a new story about the world in which we live.” —Jo Quinn, author of The Hellenistic West This is a book to savor. Naoise Mac Sweeney challenges us to rethink what it means to be of the West, by illuminating how views about geographical and cultural origins have shifted from antiquity to the present day, by exploring the biographies and ideas of some surprising, intriguing and often little-known individuals. The writing is as accessible as the argument is pointed.” —Lawrence Freedman, author of Strategy: A History One commendable aspect of Mac Sweeney's work is the extensive research that went into its creation. The author delves into the historical, cultural, and philosophical dimensions of the West, providing readers with a deep understanding of its origins and evolution. Mac Sweeney's meticulous attention to detail is evident throughout the book, as she includes a multitude of primary and secondary sources, enabling readers to explore the subject matter more extensively if desired.Some of the persons Mac Sweeney instantiates are well known even to non-historians: Herodotus, Francis Bacon, Phillis Wheatley, Edward Said. Others will be less familiar to general readers: Tullia d'Aragona, al-Kindi, Njinga of Angola (aspects of whose story will ring a bell for anyone who's seen The Woman King, although Njinga was much less appealing as a person than the movie's protagonists are). Chapter by chapter, historical figure by historical figure, year by year, century by century, the common understanding of the "West"'s origins and what regions were included under that rubric shifts and shifts again.