A couple of days ago the algorithms of Twitter churned up this little gem and brought it before my weary eyes: A professor at a small-town college wrote, “Few things are bolder than praising Western Civilization in a Sociology department.” When one commenter responded that the notion of “a single uniform ‘Western Civilization’ is absurd historical revisionism,” the original poster replied, “Nope. It was created by Thales and passed from him to Plato to Aristotle to Augustine to Machiavelli to Descartes to Beethoven to The Beatles to Ronald Reagan.” That’s…quite the genealogy. As it turns out, the author of the original tweet has a BA, MA, and PhD in psychology, so their deep knowledge of the history of “Western Civilization” is something they have apparently cultivated in their leisure hours.
That’s true for practically anyone who contends for the coherence of some historical subject or even some interdisciplinary field of knowledge called “Western Civilization” over a longue durée from ancient Greece to Simi Valley, California. This is dilettantism re-imagined as depth.
And that’s one of the guilty pleasures of conceiving of “Western Civilization” as a coherent object of inquiry or body of thought. In its most innocent constructions (if there are any), the notion of Western Civilization has become the name for a kind of polymathy that was (ironically) only possible when knowledge was conceived of as a united and harmonious whole rather than as a multiplicity of inquiries and disciplines. “Western Civilization” as a course is (among other things) both a nostalgic nod to a certain obsolete conception of knowledge and an invocation of a certain imagined and now-obsolete knower, both alike untenable.
As I wrote on Twitter, “I’ll say it again: if ‘Western Civilization’ were a coherent subject, if it constituted an actual field of study, there’d be PhD programs in it from the highest prestige universities to the least selective institutions. American Studies has a longer/more prestigious pedigree. ‘Western Civilization’ is, at best, the name for a catch-all general ed class developed in the 1920s that served as a sort of curricular sampler putting a presentist spin on the remnants of the classical course. At worst, it’s ethnonationalist jingoism by another name. And believe me, I’d be thrilled to teach the gen ed survey courses in ‘Western Civilization.’ But I’d teach the history of the course/concept right alongside the readings on the syllabus. There’s no other responsible—or intellectually fruitful—way to do it.”
Clio inspects some of our reading.
Why would I be thrilled to teach that survey course, given all that “Western Civilization” means at its worst? Precisely because of that panoramic sweep through the past and the impossibility it promises: a swift journey through five thousand years of history spread across five continents that is somehow going to reveal or at least allow the conscientious student of the past to discover or construct an underlying whole, a single throughline or set of throughlines, a unity and enduring continuity beneath the multiplicity.
And I have to come clean: this is the fantasy of mastery. One can’t get much more Western than that; it’s the “civilization” part that’s so tricky. And the valences of “civilization” as anything beyond a technical denominator for “city-based (hierarchical) society” constitute another hugely problematic discourse, with or without the modifier “Western.” As it has functioned in American discourse from the late 19thcentury to the present, “Western Civilization” has stood in rhetorical opposition to a number of imagined antitheses – “Oriental Civilization,” “Eastern Civilization,” “Islamic Civilization,” and so forth. But “civilization” on its own? Its antitheses have usually been things like “savagery” or “barbarism.” (Here again I commend philosopher Tommy Curry’s book on Josiah Royce, Another White Man’s Burden.)
“Western,” “Civilization,” and “Western Civilization” — my reading this summer is focused on untangling the history of these terms in American thought. This means tracing these terms not just through academic discourse, but in broader popular usages.
In short, this means I get to eat my cake and have it too: that is, in studying the history of the idea of “Western Civilization” in the long 20thcentury, I get to embark upon not one but several sweeping journeys through that imagined past called “Western Civilization,” and I get to do so in multiple languages.
For example, my current reading focuses on a century of debates among Latin American intellectuals about how or whether the civilization(s) of that region and its peoples were or were not part of something called “Western Civilization,” or if they represented something new in the world (or both), and if that civilization as manifested in Latin America (“Latin America” being itself an idea minted in the 19thcentury) was of a piece with the civilization of North America. Was it possible to speak of a single overarching “New World” civilization, and was that or was that not a continuation of or a rupture with “Western Civilization”? A rich, robust debate invoking these and other questions was running throughout the long 20thcentury, and it was a transnational debate that involved intellectuals from South America, Central America, and North America, and Europe. So I am reading José Enrique Rodó’s “Ariel,” his missive “to the youth of America,” alongside Roberto Fernandez Retamar’s later riposte “Calibán,” along with the poetry of Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral, essays by Octavio Paz, and so forth.
I first encountered both “Ariel” and “Calibán” as a freshman at Stanford, in a Spanish literature survey course. It was mostly Spanish literature – that is, literature written by Spaniards — but one of the questions framing the course was the relationship between (national) Spanish literature and a world literature written in Spanish. The Arielismo of the Uruguayan Rodó and Retamar’s autochthonous rebuke, rooted in fellow Cuban José Martí’s vision of “nuestra América,” stake out the terrain of this debate. And it was an important debate at Stanford – not just in literature courses, but in the larger dispute over the Western Culture requirement.
Richard Cándida Smith’s excellent book
Does “Western Civilization” include Latin America? People answered that question in different ways in the 1980s – and, I suspect, they still do, depending in part upon how much work “Western Civilization” is doing as a synonym for white ethnonationalist jingoism. When right-wing commentators portray refugees seeking to cross into the United States along the southern border as existential threats to “our civilization,” then it’s fair to say that their conception of “the West” probably does not extend too far south of the Rio Grande.
But the cultural linkages between the United States and the nations of Central and South America have been conceived differently on both sides of that border. Richard Cándida Smith’s excellent recent book, Improvised Continent: Pan-Americanism and Cultural Exchange, contextualizes conceptions of Pan-American cultural linkages/continuities as strategic responses to fascism, communism, and (often) U.S. jingoism. The book focuses on Latin American artists and writers whose work found audiences in the United States and how that work helped construct and express a notion of “Pan-American” unity (though not uniformity), a hemispheric civilization that might stand as the last line in defense of human liberty.
So while I’m rolling my eyes at the notion of “Western Civilization” as a thing, I’m having a fine time reading others’ engagements with that idea, and am particularly happy to return to Spanish-language texts, ostensibly because they’re relevant to my research (they are), but more fundamentally because I derive extraordinary pleasure simply from the act of reading them. Spanish was my first declared major, so it is a real pleasure to return to where I started from. And I certainly believe in pleasure, guilty or otherwise.
There must be hundreds of thousands of these floating around, because this copy only cost me about $5 plus shipping.
That brings me to some other key interlocutors on my docket for the summer: Arnold Toynbee and Will and Ariel Durant. Toynbee was a historian, a classicist by training. Thanks to the theory he developed about laws of civilizational development and decline – a theory set forth in his ten-volumeStudy of History (he added two volumes later), which was abridged first into a digestible two-volume set that did brisk sales for a good half-century as (among other things) a perennial book club selection before appearing in one further edition as a much condensed and somewhat revised single-volume illustrated edition — Toynbee became a household name on both sides of the Atlantic, a public intellectual who was featured on the cover of Time magazine, frequently quoted in American newspapers, and invited to speak to both academic and general audiences all over the world.
The Durants and their theories were taken far less seriously within academe, but, as Joan Shelley Rubin points out in The Making of Middlebrow Culture, they were widely and wildly influential beyond academe. Their complete multivolume series The Story of Civilization had sales figures of over 500,000 sets through the Book-of-the-Month Club alone.
If one is interested in understanding how the idea of “Western Civilization” developed and how it was and still is understood by non-academics throughout the United States, one must pay attention to the sweeping, authoritative pronouncements of Toynbee and the Durants. Their projects and they themselves as personages legitimized for many the notion that “Western Civilization” could be mastered, that it was possible to have a knowledge of the whole, soup to nuts, ancient Mesopotamians to modern Minnesotans. Their works and their theories stand as the (sometimes unrecognized) reference point for many people’s inchoate ideas yet certain convictions that there is something called Western Civilization that has been or can be fully identified, described, historicized, and understood. It is hard to historicize the notion of “our civilization” when there are probably still hundreds of thousands of complete sets of books by that name sitting in home and school and church libraries all across the United States. If “Western Civilization” does not cohere as a single over-arching concept or idea that corresponds to any historic reality, tell that to someone who has the full Toynbee or the abridged Toynbee or all those Durants.
Oh, how I wanted all those Durants. I wanted the whole set, just as at one time I wanted the whole set of Ante Nicene, Nicene, and Post Nicene Fathers, or all eight volumes of Schaff’s History of the Christian Church, or a full print edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I would see a set of Our Civilization every once in a while at Half Price Books, for sale as a set, always in the $150 to $200 range. But I could never justify the purchase, especially at that price. Why did I need with ten volumes on the history of Western Civilization? I could never satisfactorily explain that to myself.
After reading Rubin’s book in graduate school, along with Sennett and Cobb’s Hidden Injuries of Class, I understood my life-long desire for the emblems and conveyers of comprehensive and authoritative knowledge a little bit better. But by then I was deep into my dissertation project, which was not, as I envisioned it then, going to require a detour through Arnold Toynbee or Will and Ariel Durant.
But the journey of this book is another voyage entirely – thank God. And this book must grapple squarely with the history of the concept of “Western Civilization” in American discourse, because that concept did a lot of deleterious work in the 1980s and it is being leveraged in even more overtly menacing ways today. I must do my part to bring clarity.
And what does this focus on the history of the notion of “Western Civilization” mean? It means that I don’t just get to read Toynbee and the Durants; it means I have to read them. Or that’s what I’ve told myself anyhow, after having dropped $75 on a full set of the Durants and $50 on the two-volume abridgement of Toynbee (shipping included) from used booksellers on Amazon Marketplace.
Also en route: Civilisation: A Personal View, by Kenneth Clark, the full-color book that accompanied the 1969 BBC series that subsequently aired on PBS stations in the U.S. in the early 1970s. (I recently watched the series streaming on YouTube.) Clark’s popularization of the idea of Western Civilization as a coherent and sustained aesthetic/philosophical project stretching across thousands of years and thousands of miles was a smashing success in the United States. So it too goes into the hopper of this chapter.
More immediately, though, it goes into the hopper of my own thoughts and experiences. The guilty pleasure of writing this chapter, much like the guilty pleasure of writing this book, is this: I get a do-over. If I absorbed the idea of “Western Civilization” uncritically as a college freshman at Stanford (and I certainly did), I get to return to that idea now and turn it upside down and look at how it was put together, dismantle and reassemble it, explain its origins, explain its functions. Rather than be contained within the vision of Toynbee or the Durants or Kenneth Clark, I get to take the whole worlds of thought they spun out and contain them within the story I am telling. Their magisterial visions, however incompatible they may have been with one another, are something I will master as historic phenomena contained and analyzed within my own narrative.
Mastering mastery – that’s the guilty pleasure of writing about “Western Civilization.” And it is a most Icarian impulse. For now, simply knowing that this is the case will have to stand in for staving off disaster. Besides, these mental flights may not have to end in a fall. For whatever else I am, I am no one’s wayward son.
8 Thoughts on this Post
S-USIH Comment Policy
We ask that those who participate in the discussions generated in the Comments section do so with the same decorum as they would in any other academic setting or context. Since the USIH bloggers write under our real names, we would prefer that our commenters also identify themselves by their real name. As our primary goal is to stimulate and engage in fruitful and productive discussion, ad hominem attacks (personal or professional), unnecessary insults, and/or mean-spiritedness have no place in the USIH Blog’s Comments section. Therefore, we reserve the right to remove any comments that contain any of the above and/or are not intended to further the discussion of the topic of the post. We welcome suggestions for corrections to any of our posts. As the official blog of the Society of US Intellectual History, we hope to foster a diverse community of scholars and readers who engage with one another in discussions of US intellectual history, broadly understood.
L.D.,
Very good post, but also one on which it’s somewhat hard to leave a helpful or constructive comment, partly because it’s not *entirely* clear (at least to me) why you have to dig down this deep into the place of “Western civilization” in the U.S. “imaginary” (sorry, horrible word)
for purposes of the book. I completely get the Latin American angle, but wading through the Durants and Toynbee seems more… optional, maybe?
Assuming, however, that you have good reasons for digging down this deep into “Western civilization,” you might want to look at William McNeill’s The Rise of the West and its reception, and also his retrospective 1990 essay “The Rise of the West after 25 years,” reprinted at the beginning of the 1991 edition of the book (U. Chicago Press). Not saying you have to read the book, since there’s a limit, in terms of time etc., to what you can read, but a glance-through sufficient for a footnote reference might be indicated. It’s not clear to me offhand that McNeill thought in terms of “Western civilization” per se, so you might ultimately find that it’s not that relevant. I don’t think the book argued that “the West” is superior to “the East.” He does use the idea of multiple civilizations and cultural diffusion (probably (?) a more defensible notion than Toynbee’s challenge-and-response), and the book’s title obviously suggests that “the West” (if not “Western civilization”) was doing some work in the overall narrative.
Also might want to take a look at Bronowski and Mazlish, The Western Intellectual Tradition. Both this book and McNeill’s were written (mostly) in the 1950s (the McNeill is a more ambitious book and took longer to write), so they are products of basically the same historical moment. The McNeill, a scholarly book, was also a big commercial success; I don’t think Bronowski/Mazlish was a commercial success on the same scale, but it probably appeared on quite a few syllabuses and it went into paperback.
Louis, thanks for wading through this. I haven’t blogged in a while (not here, anyway), and this post was super-bloggy and boggy. I appreciate your perseverance.
Short answer to your question: because I want to, and because I can. I have always enjoyed that quixotic attempt at the sweeping comprehensive account of the whole, whatever that whole may be — the history of Christianity, the world of the Phoenicians, you name it. The pleasures of “the outline,” as Rubin describes them in her chapter on H.G. Wells and the Durants, are real enough to savor while I have a good excuse to do so. And it took me quite a while to realize how very open the structure of this book can be for me — how much freedom I have to not stick to the scope of the dissertation. So I’m reading these and writing about them because I will enjoy the task.
More to the point, though: the Stanford debates would not have resonated with the general public as they did (and they did!) without 1) a concerted effort by right-wing groups to gin up controversy, but also 2) a broad sense among the general public that “Western Civilization” was a precious heritage that was newly imperiled. I am quite certain that Kenneth Clark and the Durants and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Toynbee, profoundly shaped that broad sensibility.
Toynbee is an interesting case because he revised (or signed off on revisions of) his work — but not his main theoretical conception — throughout his lifetime. The intro to the 1972 one-volume edition explains the addition of sub-Saharan African civilizations to his overall account with the simple assertion that there was very little scholarship available on those civilizations at the time. In any case, Toynbee and Durant are a nice pairing, and Toynbee is particularly important because he bridged the academic / popular divide in his career.
Thanks, I take the points, and if you will enjoy this (Durants, Toynbee) then you should do it, of course. (I remember both the Kenneth Clark and a few volumes of the Durant being around when I was a kid/teenager. The Clark was well illustrated, as one would expect. The Durant books did not appeal much to me, for whatever reason, and I don’t think I did more than dip into them briefly.)
Toynbee is a trip. Models, covering laws, rules of development, canonical lists of civilizations of various types and sub-types — eleven chapters in, and I’m struck by both profound admiration for the sheer ambition of this scheme and utter amazement that so many people credited it with truly authoritative explanatory power (and many people still do). It is quite the system. I guess for those wishing for more Theory in history, this is one way to go, though I’m pretty sure it’s not what they have in mind. It’s an interesting read, anyhow, from an interesting mind. But — golly.
I never read Toynbee, but had the nagging feeling that I should’ve for my own work. There is (or was) a picture of Toynbee in the hallways of Loyola’s History Dept. Maybe that picture served as a some kind of unconscious reminder that I should’ve looked into his work as a grad student. But, as you know, LD, there is SO MUCH WORK out there on these topics. And when you roll everything related to the “great books idea” into that mix it was, well, overwhelming.
BTW: The slim *Great Conversation* volume in Britannica’s GBs set refers to “western civilization” multiple times. Hutchins was the main connector. But Maritain brought the idea into the great books world, hard, at the 1952 gala release event for the Britannica set. – TL
I’m about a third of the way through this version of Toynbee now, and here’s what I can say, in no particular order:
I don’t think your project suffered at all from not engaging with Toynbee.
Toynbee is a splitter, not a lumper, but his whole project is an exercise of the great man theory in historiography — that is, the historian as great man.
Toynbee was indebted very much to Bergson, rather than / more than to Darwin.
He was a champion of human agency in history over impersonal “forces,” but at the same time tried to rationalize the entire human past to develop rules of “challenge-and-response” that could be roughly predictive of the range of possible outcomes when “a civilization” is faced with an existential threat/crisis.
Toynbee has had a significant influence on a certain style of history and the development of certain fields within the academy, and probably a wider influence outside the academy. “Global history” or “world history” — maybe even the recent iteration, “big history” — all have some degree of indebtedness to Toynbee. And MacNeill (mentioned above by Louis) and others who have taken up some aspect of rise-apogee-decline-fall narrative w/r/t “Western” civilization in particular owe a great deal to Toynbee.
There’s no shame in anyone’s having read and admired Toynbee. Indeed, I wish this historically questionable but interestingly original book purporting to give a sweeping account of pretty much the entire human past had been sitting on our bookshelves when I was growing up. This is very much a “coffee table book,” and my surmise is that the success of Kenneth Clark’s book may have had something to do with the idea of giving Toynbee’s fifty-year-old (by then) thesis the glossy illustrated treatment.
Had I read this book at a young age, I could formed some truly bizarre ideas about what history is and what historians are supposed to do — but they might not have been any worse than the ideas I did form. And I would have at least been able to “name check” a lot of peoples and periods of history that were not on my radar screen, as well as being able to look at some illustrations from different “civilizations” that are for the most part presented comparatively rather than hierarchically.
Toynbee is important to my project as one of a few major “influencers” on the discourse of civilization in the 20th century — who has it, who doesn’t, what is it, how is it in danger, how must it be protected, etc. His Bergsonian streak strikes a chord with me, but his attempts to turn history into a philosophical theorem (or vice versa) are irksome. I can all but guarantee you that he was way more admired than read among book-of-the-month-club and other middlebrow readers, and within academe, probably somewhat more read and somewhat less admired.
Read him if you wish, but I am pretty sure that Will and Ariel Durant are much much closer to “great books” culture than Toynbee. (Again, I’d highly recommend Joan Shelley Rubin’s chapter on Will Durant and the “outline” craze of history.)
Thanks for this. Sounds like I can steer clear of Toynbee. Of course I read Rubin’s book (about 3 times while dissertating), and absolutely concur with your take on her excellent narrative about the outline craze. I couldn’t avoid the Durants because Adler really disliked the Durants’ *Story of Philosophy* and, if I’m remembering correctly, reviewed it. I spot read it.
I feel bad about making fun of poor Arnold and his earnest systematics. I’m taking stock at my own blog. Toynbee is on to something — at the very least, he has an answer for historians dealing with writer’s block. At least I hope he does!