The Idea of the West

Georgios Varouxakis. The West: The History of an Idea. Princeton University Press, 2025. $39.95. 512 pp.

What is the West? Many take the idea for granted, but few can define it. In this meticulously researched, engaging, and sometimes bewildering new book, The West: The History of an Idea, intellectual historian Georgios Varouxakis takes readers on a two-centuries-long tour of the many uses, definitions, and redefinitions of the term. Along the way, readers may find their own long-held assumptions and stereotypes challenged and even undermined. 

The book makes a number of arguments, but for the purposes of this review, it’s worth focusing on just a few major ones. The first and most innovative argument of the book is this: The idea of the West as a transnational sociopolitical community distinct from the rest of the world is more recent than we think. This idea received its first sophisticated and coherent articulation in the 1820s from French philosopher Auguste Comte. 

While historians and other academics had long looked to past societies like ancient Athens or medieval Europe as representing the “West” against some “other,” Comte was the first to coherently put together a future-oriented political program to be adopted and followed. Most scholars locate the future-focused version of the West’s inauguration in the 1890s, when the idea was used to justify imperial and colonial expansion. By contrast, Varouxakis argues that Comte and his followers wanted to build a West that was anti-imperialist, committed to science and reason, liberated from dogmatic Christianity, and fueled by altruism and sympathy. 

As a progressive positivist, Comte saw the “Western Republic” as a via media between a hyper nationalism (of the French variety) and an overly abstract universalism. He imagined a way station that transcended the parochialism of family and nation and would one day be realized and embraced all over the world, even if it would take a full seven centuries from his own writing to come to fruition (that was Comte’s timeline). Neither tied to a particular nation like France (although Paris would be the center of this Republic until Constantinople would replace it), nor embodied by an abstract and universal cosmopolitanism, the Western Republic (or l’Occident) would be set off against its Other—in particular, Russia and the Orient. Still, over time this republic would non-coercively welcome the rest of the world into its fold.  

Contrary to a common conception of “the West,” it was not to be a society (or society of societies) committed to democracy, individualism, or liberalism. It was instead a rejection of the hyper-individualism of the modern period, and it was an attempt to recover an older other-centered ethic that had been lost to a prior age.

The second major argument Varouxakis presents is that despite this idea of a transnational West that had its origin in Comte’s work, and despite Comte’s legacy that his disciples clearly carried across continents and centuries, the history of the idea of the West since Comte is complicated and contested. Put another way, while the specter of Comte hovers over the entire narrative, his vision is not always fully realized, nor is the meaning of the term always stable. This complicated history manifests itself in a number of different ways and carries with it some significant implications. 

First, there are implications for those who like the idea of the West and believe its history is a simple and clear-cut battle between a Judeo-Christian West and a godless Other. Those in this camp need to recognize the complexity of the historical uses of this term with too many meanings. More than that, a close reading of history may very well upend long-held assumptions about the West and its significance. Perhaps the best example of this is the development of the idea in Britain. 

Many casual users of “Western Civilization” will often identify it as one and the same with liberal democracy. They often find that somehow and at some point Britain came to embrace the West as being just that—liberal and democratic. Varouxakis complicates this picture by showing that while a few liberal voices in Britain were certainly also champions of Western Civilization, the more consistent and coherent users of the term were disciples of Comte and therefore much more illiberal in their thinking. 

Like Comte, these disciples believed that some unit of organization—in this case, the West—needed to exist between the family and country on one side and Humanity on the other. But, also like Comte, this “West” would exclude Russia as an Eastern power. It would be committed to the values of “altruism,” “living for others,” and “sympathy,” not freedom, democracy, and individualism. However, the most ironic piece of this story is that the liberalism we associate with Britain actually emerges in seventeenth-century Whig theory. The latter explicitly tries to defend the “liberties of Europe,” not the West as such, and this a full two centuries before Comte’s disciples in Britain defend the West (not Europe) as a decidedly illiberal project. 

Or take the more familiar East vs. West framework we associate with the Cold War, where surely the fault lines of Eastern totalitarianism against Western liberal capitalism are clean and clear. But even here the history is complicated, as the period begins with the acknowledgement that it was indeed Soviet Russia that helped to save “western civilization.” Indeed, it took forty years of gradual evolution for the idea of the “West” to finally crystallize around the shared commitment to economic, religious, and political freedom over and against Soviet planned economies, state-sanctioned atheism, and one-party politics with no free and fair elections.

Readers of the book who have preconceived notions of what “the West” actually means will find their preconceptions unsettled in these ways and others. Yet they will also probably find a historical source to support their point of view somewhere within Varouxakis’ narrative. For example, there are those today who seek to defend Western civilization as a common inheritance that includes ideas and books from ancient Greece and Rome, Christianity, the Renaissance, and into the modern period—in a nutshell, an inheritance worth preserving precisely because to lose it would have us descend into barbarism, the very opposite of civilization, Western or otherwise. Where do the protectors of this version of the West go to find solace in Varouxakis’ narrative? Likely not in August Comte. Instead, readers in this camp will find sympathetic voices in thinkers who taught these Western sources to soldiers headed off to the Great War, all for the purpose of providing inspiration and justification for fighting against a militarist and expansionist Germany. 

Given the winding road of the history of the West, it is instructive that there seems to be something of a settlement on its meaning for today, even if there are differences in its application. This can be seen most clearly in Varouxakis’ penultimate chapter on the dispute between Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama after the end of the Cold War. Fukuyama of course is well known for his view that the West—in its embrace of liberal democracy and capitalism—had now emerged triumphant over the defeated ideas of Marxist totalitarianism, which found its fullest expression in Soviet Russia of the East. 

Samuel Huntington’s ideas of what the West embodied were not much different, but he diverged from Fukuyama in his vision of what the world’s future likely entailed. For Huntington, the coming years and decades would see a “clash of civilizations,” a conflict of the most basic sort between the West and the great civilizations of the world as we know it. He saw nothing certain about the global triumph of any particular civilizational expression, including the West. Indeed, Huntington contends that it is only the West that even believes in universal ideals, and that all of the non-Western civilizations—whether Chinese, Islamic, or otherwise—are all partial in their visions. Therefore, we see here in the latest debate about the West a return of the Comtean question: Will the West become a universal civilization, or will it endure as one of many civilizations forever in conflict with each other? While we may have some agreement on what the West stands for, we may have less confidence in its future in the world.

The history is complex, indeed. But Varouxakis also raises the question of whether Western Civilization—however one defines it—is something to defend in the first place. He considers this question several times in the book, but perhaps none more poignantly than in the Great War itself. For example, there were many who noted the hypocrisy of the “Western powers” that suddenly found common cause with the long-excluded Russia in their fight against Germany and the Central Powers. But perhaps more troubling is what it says about a civilization when it produces not the peace and altruism long promised by its founder, but instead destruction on a scale that had never been seen before in human history. One could likewise ask: What kind of civilization deliberately excludes and exploits the weakest members within its borders, such as in the treatment of African Americans in the United States and of those in the furthest regions of the colonial empires of Europe? This crisis of confidence and feeling of decline continued through the interwar years, as Oswald Spengler expresses in his Decline of the West, a fitting rejoinder to the optimism of Comte’s Western utopia.

And so, perhaps the best way to conclude for readers of all sorts—but especially Christians—is to offer two words of caution. The first is to those who would defend the “West” and “Western Civilization” as something either resonant with or even inspired by a Judeo-Christian worldview. And that word is simple: the origins of the idea of the West in one of its most dominant forms (the Comtean one) and in its subsequent historical uses is either non-Christian or even anti-Christian. Indeed, I went into the book expecting a heavy dose of Judeo-Christian connections to the idea of the West, and while the link is not completely absent, I was struck by its muted nature. 

Besides the post-Christian progressive vision of Comte himself, consider the voice of Black writer Richard Wright as one representative example to follow in the Frenchman’s footsteps. As someone who identified with the West, he considered “the content of [his] Westernness [residing] fundamentally…in [his] secular outlook upon life.” The progress of the West would be realized the more it emancipated itself from the influence of “mystical powers” or the priests who would speak in their name. Armed with the tools of trial-and-error pragmatism, human life can be sustained without recourse to divine help. A West liberated from divine help is a West worth preserving, at least according to Wright.

Overall, the West as an idea has many champions who are quite open in their antipathy toward the Christian religion, and it would be foolish to ignore those influences on the meaning and use of the term for us today. Still, the second and final note I’d like to offer is a bit more optimistic. In the concluding chapter, Varouxakis urges readers to move from the parochialism of “Western” ideas to adopt a language that is universal in its appeal. What, after all, was so attractive about any of the Western projects that Varouxakis so painstakingly chronicles? It was always their global appeal. 

Altruism, sympathy, love for others, freedom, individualism, democracy, capitalism. These are not ideals that belong to just a few but rightfully can be embraced by all of God’s creatures in different places, at different times, and in different ways. Certainly for Christians who embrace a global faith, the least we can do is see the inheritance of the “West,” however defined, as a mixed bag of common grace insights and ideas in rebellion against God, combined with the perspective that none of what is worth keeping in the West should ever be kept from those who would embrace its ideals.