Was the Cold War the Western Bloc Versus the Eastern Bloc?

Hello, everyone, and welcome to A Single Tree Does Not Make a Forest. Today we’re continuing the “Western Trilogy” by asking another naïve question: Was the Cold War the Western bloc versus the Eastern bloc?

The narrative of a Western bloc and an Eastern bloc during the Cold War is so deeply ingrained that we usually forget it is a historical narrative stabilized after the fact, rather than the conceptual framework through which people at the time truly understood the world.

I don’t know whether everyone remembers the six-part series on freedom that I did last year. In that series, I discussed what freedom meant to the ancient Romans, what it meant to fascists, what it meant to the British, and what it meant to the Soviets. What I wanted to do was unsettle some of the positions and concepts we may take for granted. Liberals today will say, “Of course fascists weren’t liberals. Fascists were the opposite of liberals.” But fascism had its own internal understanding of freedom, and at least within fascist logic, that understanding was internally coherent.

Through our analysis of the concept of “the West” over the past three podcast episodes, I likewise want to say that today we take it for granted that we already know what the West is, or at least we think we know, so all that remains is to pick a side. All I want to say is that this concept is not actually all that stable.

First of all, it did not always exist. The concept of the West emerged at a very recent point in time: the nineteenth century. It emerged in response to a very specific geopolitical development, the rise of Russia. What’s more, the countries we now take for granted as belonging within the West did not necessarily see themselves as Western.

In the previous episode, Episode 335, I explained in detail that even a mere hundred years ago, mainstream German thinkers still distinguished themselves from the West. Germans themselves would say, “We are not Westerners. We Germans are Europeans. Germany represents a non-Western spirit and a non-Western culture. We Germans oppose Western civilization.”

That at least shows that the concept was unstable.

My position is to loosen the soil

Let me chat a little more at the beginning. Ever since I became a famous intellectual, the biggest criticism I’ve faced is that my position is unclear. There really are people who assume I ought to be their ally, and in fact I may indeed be their ally, yet these so-called allies will criticize me by saying, “So, Zhongshu, are you actually on our side? Which side are you taking? Isn’t your position far too unclear?”

When I first started commenting on American politics, a bunch of people on Xiaoyuzhou said I supported Trump because I criticized the Democratic Party. No matter what issue I discuss, whether it falls on the left-right political spectrum, concerns gender or men and women, or involves ancient versus modern, there are always people saying my position is unclear. The same goes for East and West.

The people who criticize me have generally believed that I ought to belong to the same camp as they do, and then they accuse me: “Which side are you on? Do you support Western values or oppose Western values?”

On the one hand, many people say, “You’re a product of Western education. You’re a lackey for Western values.” There are plenty of voices like that. On the other hand, many people also say, “You’ve offered so many criticisms of the West within the Chinese-language context. You’ve deconstructed the origins of universalist rationalism and criticized concepts such as freedom and democracy. In this day and age, you’re helping those Han chauvinists do evil. Get off Xiaoyuzhou and go to Hupu instead. You’re an ungrateful wolf raised by the Western educational system.”

There are plenty of voices on both sides. And this does not happen only among listeners. There are also prominent intellectuals with well-known names, people in the Chinese-speaking world whom I deeply respect, who have come to me and said, “Little Tree, why are your loyalties so crooked? You shouldn’t say such-and-such things in public.” These are people I respect enormously, people whose work I grew up reading, and even they say such things about me.

But I think my position is actually quite firm. It is firm because, for me, what matters is my commitment, my exacting standards, and my nitpicking. I do not prioritize taking sides in real-world politics. What matters most to me is rigorously tracing concepts through intellectual history: their origins and development, as well as the distortions they inevitably undergo in history and politics. Every concept is inevitably distorted when it is brought into politics. For me, tracing these distortions is the most important thing.

Compared with that, I care relatively little about whether, in your view, a concept historically helped forces of good or forces of evil. This includes the episode I did with Zhao Yufei on Rousseau, Episode 327, “How Rousseau Influenced China’s Modernization.” Didn’t I spend that whole episode roasting all the Chinese thinkers who introduced Rousseau into China, from the Republic of China period through the twentieth century? I roasted everyone, from Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei to Wu Mi and Yu Dafu, and then all the later scholars too.

Yesterday I was chatting with Brother Laoxiang, who is also a friend of mine. He is teaching Confucian political philosophy at New York University this semester. Brother Laoxiang said to me, “I think you’re a little too demanding. You’re just mean. Think about how urgent the situation was for those Chinese thinkers at the time. Yet there you are, accusing them of not reading Rousseau carefully, saying their language skills were poor and that they misread Rousseau in all sorts of places. You say Yu Dafu understood Rousseau less well than you do.”

Brother Laoxiang was criticizing me in good faith. He said I was not considerate of others, that I was not considerate of Yu Dafu. So I argued back.

“Why should I be considerate in the realm of ideas?” I said. “I am exacting. That is my position. My very clear position is that I want to be like a vicious dog, obsessively investigating and reflecting on the origins of intellectual concepts and on whether they have been distorted. Once a concept has entered intellectual history and influenced the civilization I inhabit today, I am not going to begin by considering moral questions. I will not make it my first priority to consider whether the person was thinking with benevolent intentions, whether that person deserves my understanding, or whether their influence was good or bad.”

I am not saying that moral questions or positions are unimportant. What I mean is that before anyone forms a moral judgment or takes a position, shouldn’t you first figure out what the thing actually is?

My primary responsibility is not to help other people form judgments. My position is that before anyone, including me, can form a sound judgment, you first need to know what the thing actually is. A lot of the time, when we say we support a person, a position, or a viewpoint, we don’t actually know what we are supporting. When we say that Western values are this or that, we assume we know what the West is. But the fact is that Westerners themselves do not know what the West is.

And I’m not your mother. I don’t want to be responsible for helping anyone form a judgment.

At this point, someone may say, “But you’re now a very influential intellectual, so you need to shoulder a public responsibility.” The public responsibility I want to shoulder, however, is the responsibility of tracing things back to their roots. For me, bearing even that responsibility is already very difficult. I don’t have room on my shoulders for so many things. A responsibility like guiding other people toward the correct values has nothing to do with me.

What I can do is trace things back to their roots like a vicious dog, loosening some of the hardened, taken-for-granted ground that everyone, especially intellectuals, may have grown accustomed to. Loosening that ground already takes all my energy. I cannot do anything beyond that. My public responsibility is to loosen the soil. Don’t come to me demanding that I shoulder some other public responsibility.

If you think that, in the process of loosening the soil, I have loosened something you firmly believed in, and you blame me by saying my position is wrong or that I am “handing a knife to the enemy,” all I can say is that this was not my intention. But I will not change.

That is my firm position. My moral position is that I will not prioritize moral positions. I will prioritize whether the intellectual arguments underlying those moral positions are sound.

So I also understand why so many knowledgeable people with opposing moral positions point at me and say that my own position is unclear. From their perspective, that is indeed the fact. Every criticism of me is correct at that particular level. It is simply that I genuinely do not approach intellectual questions first and foremost on the moral level.

A West without fixed boundaries

The intention behind my “Western Trilogy” is clear. I hope everyone can detach the concept of the West that became fixed around the 1980s, not only for Chinese people but also for Americans and people elsewhere in the world, from its historical context.

If we turn the clock back just a little, without even going back a full century, and return to the period from 1945 through the early 1950s, we discover that even then there was no unified West. During the 1940s, the boundaries of the West were extremely vague and even mutually contradictory.

Here we need to address the Soviet question: Was the Soviet Union part of the West? Even this simplest question had no clear answer at the time. Within what was then called the West, people debated whether the Soviet Union was part of the West. If even that question was under debate, we cannot say that the Cold War was the Eastern bloc fighting the Western bloc.

In 1946, for example, W. E. B. Du Bois could still say that the Russians had saved Western civilization. Du Bois was a very famous thinker, and what he expressed was not some fringe idea. In the context of 1945, immediately after the end of World War II, many clear-eyed people, not only Du Bois, would have acknowledged that without Soviet resistance and counteroffensives, Western Europe might already have fallen.

Nazi Germany was broken on the Eastern Front, not the Western Front. The Battles of Stalingrad and Kursk were the decisive turning points of World War II. The Soviet Union suffered the greatest casualties of the war. More than 80 percent of Germany’s military power was deployed on the Eastern Front. The Soviet Union stopped and destroyed the Nazi threat to European civilization. Taken literally, then, saying that the Russians saved Western civilization was not an exaggeration.

We can also look at another German thinker, Karl Jaspers. In the 1940s, Jaspers called the United States and the Soviet Union the two ultimate structures of Western civilization. In this context, the West was not an antagonistic political bloc. It was a civilizational space encompassing both the United States and the Soviet Union.

Of course, this understanding soon collapsed. All this was happening around 1946. By 1947, with negotiations over the German question breaking down and ideological antagonism intensifying, the Soviet Union rapidly changed from being part of the West into being the West’s enemy. The same country moved from inside the civilization to becoming a threat to that civilization in the space of just one year.

This demonstrates precisely that the boundaries of the West did not objectively exist. They were drawn by the political conflicts of the time.

That sentence should sound familiar to listeners who heard the previous two episodes on what the West is. The West is determined by the historical circumstances of the time. Whether it was the rise of Russia in the nineteenth century, World War I, or the German question after World War II, these developments in turn determined who counted as Western.

Even more radical views began to deny the very existence of the West. By 1947, the British poet Stephen Spender was writing bluntly that if we said the West possessed unity, we were deceiving ourselves. The West had no unity at all. The so-called West was nothing more than a loose collection cobbled together out of regions that differed enormously from one another. The West was not a concrete reality. It was a unity that was constantly being assumed.

That raises another question: How many versions of the West were there? And might these various versions have been competing with one another?

The Atlantic Community and Britain’s spiritual West

The first Cold War version of the West is the most famous American version. It came from Walter Lippmann, the most famous American commentator of the twentieth century and Xu Zhiyuan’s idol.

The columns Lippmann wrote back then had an enormous readership. As a public intellectual and commentator in twentieth-century America, whichever presidential candidate Lippmann endorsed in his column could directly affect whether that person became president of the United States. What did Lippmann represent? In my view, he represented the pinnacle of the modern man of letters and public intellectual. Lippmann represented public-intellectual influence reaching a level that makes public intellectuals like us today wet the bed with excitement just thinking about it.

Lippmann proposed a very famous concept called the “Atlantic Community.” His conception of the Atlantic Community constitutes a core case for understanding how the West was formed in the early Cold War. His theory emerged through a critique of another highly influential international-relations thinker of the time, George Kennan, “Mr. X,” and the containment strategy Kennan proposed.

I won’t explain Kennan’s Cold War strategy here. To sum it up in one sentence, Kennan’s containment strategy basically set the tone for the entire Cold War. Everyone who has studied the Cold War in an international-relations course knows that Kennan could be called the architect of America’s Cold War strategy.

Lippmann, acting as an American public intellectual, questioned Kennan. The core issue he raised was whether the Western world truly had the capacity to execute a global policy of containment.

In Lippmann’s view, democratic countries simply did not possess anything like the Soviet Union’s centralized capacity for efficient decision-making and resource mobilization. An even more fatal problem was that this policy would lead the United States toward the wrong alliance partners. Under Kennan’s strategy, the United States tried to build a defensive ring against the Soviet Union by supporting anti-Soviet forces in Greece, Turkey, the Middle East, and Asia. Not only were these countries weak, but they were also politically unstable. In the end, they would become burdens rather than sources of support. Such unnatural alliances were not only inefficient; they might also alienate America’s true natural allies.

Lippmann therefore proposed a fundamental alternative. The United States should abandon excessive commitments to peripheral regions and instead rely on a more stable community with closer internal ties. He called this community the Atlantic Community. Its core members were the countries of Western Europe and the Americas, especially Britain, France, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, and the United States itself.

In Lippmann’s view, these countries were not allies by accident. They constituted a natural alliance formed on the basis of their underlying structures of survival. This natural character manifested itself in three main ways.

First was the unity of their geographic and strategic structure. The Atlantic was not a boundary separating Europe from the Americas; it was a connecting space that integrated these countries into a shared strategic and economic system.

Second was continuity in their cultural and religious traditions. These countries jointly inherited Western Christian civilization, which provided a common source for their legal, political, and moral institutions.

Third was the similarity of their historical experiences. Whether in their paths of national development or the logic of their institutional evolution, they had all formed along similar historical trajectories.

Together, these factors constituted the foundation of the Atlantic Community, making it a political and civilizational union with internal cohesion.

Lippmann’s conception was not merely an adjustment in the choice of allies. More importantly, it transformed the West from a vague civilizational concept into a political community with boundaries, structures, and functions. In this imagining of the Atlantic Community, the West was not a historical inheritance; it became a strategic choice. The West was no longer synonymous with Europe. It became a transatlantic whole.

This conception itself also revealed the uncertainty of the West. Lippmann had to acknowledge that the boundaries of the Atlantic Community were not clear, especially with respect to Germany, the West Slavic regions, and colonial questions. Even in an attempt to establish clear boundaries for the West, many gray areas remained.

The formation of this community was also fundamentally premised on excluding the Soviet Union. In other words, Western unity did not emerge from internal agreement. It was reinforced through external confrontation.

This discussion contrasts with another intellectual current in the United States at the same time. More radical left-wing American intellectuals such as Du Bois pointed out in 1947 that the true threat to the United States came not from the Soviet Union but from America’s own injustices, such as its racial problems. From another angle, this criticism revealed the West’s internal contradictions. A community that claimed to represent freedom and civilization nevertheless contained such profound inequality. This tension meant that the moral legitimacy of the concept of the West was contested from the very beginning.

That was the first version: the view advanced by Lippmann and other American intellectuals that the West equaled the Atlantic Community.

There was also a second version, the British version. British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin advocated the spiritual unity of the West. The British conception sought to give the West another meaning. In the view of Bevin and the British Foreign Office, Western civilization was not merely a strategic alliance; it was also a spiritual community that Britain could lead.

British government documents repeatedly emphasized this spiritual dimension. Britain’s goal was not simply to attach itself to the United States, but to lead Western Europe in forming an intermediate force between the United States and the Soviet Union. In this vision, the West was part of the anti-communist camp, but it should also retain its independence and avoid becoming an American appendage.

The key to the British proposal lay in its double use of the word “West.” On the one hand, Britain used Western civilization to mobilize American support and induce the United States to invest economically and militarily in European reconstruction. On the other hand, Britain used the West to emphasize its own moral and cultural leadership, thereby establishing authority within Europe. For Britain, Western civilization was both a diplomatic instrument and a discourse of power. It could strengthen Atlantic cooperation, but it could also distinguish who possessed spiritual leadership.

There was a clear tension between these American and British versions of the West. Lippmann’s Atlantic Community, the conception of American intellectuals, emphasized transatlantic integration, while the British proposal attempted to establish a relatively independent Western European center of gravity. In the former, the United States was at the core. In the latter, the United States was both an ally and a potential threat.

British diplomats even grouped the United States and the Soviet Union together as culturally peripheral, semi-barbaric countries, emphasizing that Europe needed to maintain a balance between them. The United States was both part of the West and a threat to the West.

Europe between two barbaric forces

For Europeans and European thinkers, the Cold War was not the Western bloc confronting the Eastern bloc. It was an existential crisis in which Europe found itself caught between two barbaric forces. This was the West’s internal division.

The anxiety first manifested itself in the fact that European countries were wary not only of the Soviet Union but also of the United States. The British historian Arnold Toynbee argued that the postwar world presented a situation in which Europe was caught between Eastern barbarians and Western barbarians. The Eastern barbarians were the Soviet Union. Who do you think the Western barbarians were? The United States.

Among German Social Democrats, especially intellectuals who had previously lived in exile in Britain or the United States, a common idea emerged: the creation of a European federation as a third force between the United States and the Soviet Union. This idea in itself demonstrates that, in their view, the West was not synonymous with the United States. The United States could not lead the West, and Europe did not want simply to belong to either side.

This sentiment was especially strong in France. In postwar French intellectual circles, anti-American sentiment coexisted with pro-Soviet tendencies, leaving the United States almost entirely isolated in the intellectual world. Paris was called the capital of communist sympathizers.

If we look at twentieth-century French intellectuals, almost the only person among them who remained wary of communism was Raymond Aron. Look at all the French intellectuals whom young people now so fervently admire and worship: they were all communists, all fans of the great man of the East. Sartre and Beauvoir were French intellectuals who wanted to launch a Cultural Revolution in France.

Against this background, the West was not an appealing unified whole for French intellectuals, but a deeply controversial concept. French intellectual circles neither identified entirely with the Soviet Union nor wished to accept an American-led West.

This intellectual atmosphere was captured perfectly in a novel, The Twenty-Fifth Hour, published in 1949 and written by [name unclear]. After its publication, the novel rapidly became a sensation across Europe. Contemporary reviewers regarded The Twenty-Fifth Hour as a manifesto of the age. It accurately expressed the spiritual predicament Europeans faced at the time.

The novel’s central argument is that the Soviet Union was not an Eastern Other, but an extreme manifestation of Western technological civilization. Soviet communism was understood as the thorough realization of Western rationality and technological logic, not as their negation. The Cold War was therefore not a confrontation between two civilizations, nor a confrontation between an Eastern bloc and a Western bloc, but the West tearing itself apart from within.

The Twenty-Fifth Hour offered a fierce critique of Western civilization itself. It argued that Nazism, the Soviet Union, and the United States all embodied the same underlying logic: the oppression of human beings by modern technological society. Bureaucratic systems reduced people to categories. State machinery compressed individuals into functional units. Human uniqueness and freedom were systematically dissolved.

In this sense, the problem lay not in ideological differences but in a shared technological civilization. Humanity had become enslaved to machines, and this was the root of the contemporary crisis.

The novel also revealed a profound cultural rupture between Europeans and Americans. A European woman in the novel rejects a marriage proposal from an American officer because of the difference in their experience of time. She describes herself as having lived for thousands of years, thereby representing Europe’s profound historical tradition, while Americans are portrayed as a young civilization without a past. America lacked historical consciousness and a sense of tragedy, making it difficult for Americans to understand Europe’s complex experiences.

This suspicion of America further intensified Europe’s sense of crisis. The French thinker André Siegfried pointed out that postwar Western civilization was being de-Europeanized. Its center of gravity was shifting away from the Mediterranean and continental Europe toward the two vast spaces of the Soviet Union and the United States.

The problem was not only a geographic change, but also a transformation in the character of civilization. Scale, centralization, and mechanization were replacing the sense of proportion, diversity, and individuality found in the European tradition.

In other words, the greatest contradiction during the Cold War actually existed within the West itself: Who represented the true West, Europe or the United States?

European intellectuals were generally deeply suspicious of the United States. They saw it as a young civilization without history and, as The Twenty-Fifth Hour portrayed it, as mechanized, materialistic, and shallow. The gap between Americans and Europeans amounted to thousands of years of history.

So how did Americans respond?

Faced with European anti-American sentiment, the United States began actively manufacturing the West. One representative case was the international seminar program that Henry Kissinger began organizing at Harvard in the 1950s.

In a 1951 memorandum written for Harvard’s International Seminar, Kissinger clearly stated that America’s greatest disadvantage was not military or economic, but spiritual. Although young Europeans accepted American aid, such aid could only alleviate their suffering; it could not fill their spiritual emptiness. Communism, meanwhile, exerted a powerful attraction precisely because it could fill that spiritual void.

Kissinger’s goal was therefore not simply to promote the American model, but to make Europeans tilt spiritually toward the United States. His approach was not to promote America directly. It was to construct a shared European-American identity through the broader framework of Western civilization.

In designing the curriculum, Kissinger explicitly stated that it should take “Western” or “European civilization” as its theme and present the United States and Western Europe as two branches of the same tree. This could both avoid provoking resentment against American centrism and naturally demonstrate America’s advantages through comparison.

In sharp contrast to the optimistic construction undertaken by the American statesman Kissinger was the civilizational perspective advanced by the British historian Toynbee. Toynbee expressed profound concern about the future of the West.

In A Study of History, Toynbee emphasized that the rise and fall of civilizations was not determined by material power, but by their ability to respond to challenges. In the postwar context, he argued that the West was not the center of the world. The West was the aggressor in the modern world. He believed that over the preceding several centuries, the West had inflicted an enormous shock on the world. From a non-Western perspective, the West was not the representative of civilization but the source of oppression.

Toynbee believed that the Soviet Union’s advantage in the Cold War lay not in technology or military power, but in the spiritual realm. Although communism originated with the Western thinkers Marx and Engels, it had become the Soviet Union’s spiritual weapon against the West. It used the West’s own critical tradition to attack Western society for failing to realize the ideals it proclaimed.

This meant, Toynbee wrote, that the Cold War was not only a geopolitical confrontation but also a struggle between the West and itself. He offered a historical comparison. Just as ancient Rome, after conquering the world, was itself conquered by an Eastern religion, Christianity, the modern West might also be influenced or even transformed spiritually by the non-Western world. This prediction situated the future of the West within an open and uncertain historical process.

From Kissinger to Toynbee, then, we can see two entirely different paths. On the one hand, the United States sought to consolidate its leadership through the idea of Western civilization. On the other, European thinkers continually exposed Western civilization’s internal crisis.

Arendt and the West’s internal collapse

After all that groundwork, I’m going to rise to the philosophical level. The three thinkers who, in my view, addressed the twentieth-century question “What is the West?” most profoundly during the Cold War were Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, and Raymond Aron. The first two were German; the last was French.

I will discuss the works they published in the 1950s that, in my view, were the most profound works of the Cold War era and fully elevated the Western question from politics to the level of political philosophy: Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951; Strauss’s Natural Right and History, published in 1956; and Raymond Aron’s The Opium of the Intellectuals, published in 1955.

We can understand the significance of Arendt’s publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951 only in this context. Before 1951, no one knew who Arendt was. She was a nobody. I’m teaching The Origins of Totalitarianism next semester.

By tracing imperialist expansion and racial politics from the late nineteenth century onward, Arendt revealed how Europe gradually developed, in the course of its outward colonial expansion, the logic of totalitarianism that would later erupt within Europe itself. In other words, the technologies of power that Europe experimented with in its colonies ultimately turned back against Europe itself.

This analysis turned the decline of the West from an abstract historical proposition, as it was in Spengler’s The Decline of the West, into a process with a concrete historical path. In its colonial expansion, the West planted the seeds of its own destruction. That was the argument Arendt advanced in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Arendt’s analysis began with an explanation of Nazism. She explicitly opposed treating Nazism as a product of German exceptionalism. Arendt believed that this explanation obscured a deeper problem. In her view, Nazism was not an expression of the German nation’s unique character, but a product of the collapse of Europe’s entire political order.

After World War I, the traditional state system, class structure, and political authority all disintegrated, leaving an enormous vacuum of power and meaning. Totalitarianism was able to rise within this vacuum. Nazism was therefore not an exception but the extreme outcome of European historical development. For Arendt, the Western crisis was not an external shock but an internal collapse.

Arendt’s understanding of the West did not remain confined to Europe. As a thinker who lived in both Europe and the United States, she always paid attention to the relationship between them. Arendt agreed with Tocqueville’s judgment and saw America as a continuation of European history. America was one outcome of the Old World’s development. In this sense, America was not the West’s Other; it was part of the Western tradition.

After World War II, however, the historical connections between the United States and Europe were gradually forgotten. Arendt observed that among the European public and in European intellectual circles, Europeans increasingly viewed the United States as something unrelated to Europe. This sense of distance even exceeded their sense of distance from the Soviet Union, because many Europeans believed that Marxism had Europeanized the Soviet Union.

This phenomenon gave rise to a dangerous trend: anti-American sentiment in Europe was becoming a new European ideology and might even evolve into a form of pan-European nationalism. In Arendt’s view, this opposition was extremely risky. She warned that Americanism and Europeanism might form two opposing ideologies, and that this opposition would reproduce the logic of totalitarianism. Division within the West might once again develop into ideological confrontation, thereby intensifying the West’s decline.

The core of this problem was closely connected with modernity. It already involved a philosophical critique of modernity. Arendt pointed out that European criticisms of America, including anxieties about its technologization, mechanization, and mass society, were not groundless. But the attribution was wrong.

Modern technological society was not an American invention. It was the result of Europe’s own historical development. This process had been irreversible since the Industrial Revolution. Treating Americanization as a threat to Europe was therefore an attempt by Europeans to escape the consequences of their own history.

Arendt elevated this issue to the level of civilizational form. In her view, the central challenge of the modern world was how to organize mass society and how to control technological power. These were not merely European questions. They were questions for the entire West and, indeed, for all humanity.

The decline of the West was therefore not a local phenomenon but a universal crisis of modern civilization. When confronting totalitarianism, the greatest danger was not defeat, but becoming the mirror image of totalitarianism.

Strauss between Athens and Jerusalem

The second thinker is Leo Strauss, who published Natural Right and History in 1956, around the same period as Arendt. Among the many Cold War discussions of the West, Strauss offered the interpretation with the greatest philosophical depth.

Strauss believed that the West’s crisis was not merely a political or institutional crisis. It was a crisis of the spiritual foundations of the West. If the decline of the West became a popular proposition in the twentieth century, Strauss transformed that proposition into a serious question: Had modernity already eroded the fundamental principles upon which Western civilization depended?

Strauss first raised a fundamental challenge to the idea of progress. In fact, if we read Arendt carefully, we discover that the questions she raised about progress in The Human Condition were exactly the same as Strauss’s.

At this very moment, I am lecturing on my translation of The Human Condition on Kanlixiang. I have just reached the final section of Chapter Two, Section 17. Here Arendt says exactly the same thing as Strauss.

The totalitarianism, world wars, and mass violence that people witnessed in the twentieth century forced modern human beings to acknowledge that faith in historical progress was unreliable. The barbarization experienced by the modern world in the twentieth century was not an accident, but a result of Western civilization’s own development.

A distinctive kind of realism gradually became dominant in modern thought. People increasingly ceased to believe that moral principles possessed power in themselves and instead tried to replace moral judgment with institutions, economics, or historical trends. This shift changed the structure of modern language. “You are either progressive or reactionary” replaced good and evil.

But replacing good and evil with progress and reaction was disastrous. Once historical trends and historical development become the standard, and trends themselves are vague and indeterminate, all value judgments lose their foundation. We can no longer distinguish barbarism from civilization. We can even do the most barbaric things in the name of progress.

Against this background, Strauss asked a seemingly simple but extraordinarily difficult question: If modernity has led to the Western crisis, should we return? But return to what?

Strauss’s answer was that we should return to the question of the principles of Western civilization, to its complete premodern form. But this answer immediately encountered a fundamental difficulty that Strauss himself raised: Western civilization was not unified.

In Strauss’s view, Western civilization was founded upon two mutually conflicting sources, Athens and Jerusalem, meaning Greek philosophy and the biblical tradition. Throughout its history, the West had ostensibly been trying to reconcile these two traditions, but that reconciliation had never actually been achieved.

Greek philosophy emphasized a life of autonomous understanding, reaching the truth through rational inquiry. The Bible, by contrast, demanded a life of obedient love, submission to God, and faith. These two demands were fundamentally incompatible. The history of Western civilization was therefore not the unfolding of a unity, but an ongoing tension and conflict.

Strauss saw the vitality of Western civilization in this irresolvable conflict. He argued that the vigor of Western civilization originated precisely in the fundamental tension between Athens and Jerusalem. This meant that the Western crisis had not arisen because of internal conflict. On the contrary, it might have arisen from Westerners’ attempts to dissolve that conflict.

When philosophy and theology were artificially reconciled or unified within a single system, the West lost its central driving force. The real problem was therefore not how to eliminate the conflict, but how to revive it: the conflict between theology and philosophy.

In Natural Right and History, Strauss argued that although Germany had been defeated militarily, it had conquered the West in the intellectual realm. This conquest manifested itself in the expansion of historicism and relativism. Under their influence, the West gradually abandoned the idea of natural right. The West gradually ceased believing that some objective and universal standard of justice existed. In its place arose a form of value relativism in which all values were regarded as historical products and therefore lost their objectivity.

Taken as a whole, Strauss’s thought offered a philosophical path for explaining the crisis of Western civilization that differed from political analysis. He was not concerned with the comparative advantages of institutions or with strategic confrontation. He asked whether the foundations of Western thought still existed.

From Strauss’s perspective, returning to the principles of Western civilization did not mean restoring the past. It meant confronting once again the fundamental conflict between Athens and Jerusalem. Strauss’s caution toward a simple restoration of the past differs fundamentally from that of Strauss’s followers in China and the United States today.

Aron’s demythologized defense of the West

The final thinker is Raymond Aron. In the intellectual history of the Cold War, Aron may be the thinker who came closest to embodying Western self-consciousness. With Aron, the concept of the West acquired, for the first time, a relatively clear definition that was worth defending.

His contribution did not lie in supporting some Western bloc. Rather, Aron offered an extraordinarily restrained and profound answer to the question of why one should choose the West.

This French thinker had not only studied Marx in depth, but was also familiar with Comte, Tocqueville, German philosophy, and American social science. His analysis of industrial society was grounded in training across these multiple traditions. This broad scholarly training enabled Aron to maintain a rare clarity and restraint amid the ideological antagonisms of the Cold War.

Especially in the context of a twentieth-century French intellectual world generally inclined toward communism, Aron remained isolated for a long time. There was even a saying that it was better to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron. Amid this isolation, he insisted on advancing a rational judgment different from emotionalized and moralized positions.

Aron’s definition of the West was expressed most fully in his 1955 book The Opium of the Intellectuals. In it, he drew an extraordinarily important distinction. A true communist was someone who unconditionally accepted the Soviet system, while a true Westerner was someone who never accepted anything unconditionally within his own civilization, except the freedom that allowed him to criticize and improve it.

This definition meant that the West was not a specific institution or a fixed system of values. In Aron’s definition, the West was an institutional condition: a space that permitted self-negation and self-correction.

On this point, there was a certain resonance between Aron and Arendt. Both rejected defining the West as some reified civilization. For example, they rejected defining the West as Christian civilization. Aron explicitly pointed out that liberal democracy was not synonymous with Christian civilization. It merely happened to be born in Christian societies and was partly influenced by Christian values. He opposed using religion to fight communism during the Cold War, believing that this would corrupt both religion and politics.

Arendt was the same. She emphasized that a free society was worth defending not because it was sacred, but because it was open.

This point was further reflected in Aron’s understanding of the Cold War. Aron rejected two extremes. On the one hand, he opposed the view that treated the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union as a clash between two imperialist camps. On the other, he rejected the unconditional idealization of the West.

He acknowledged that American society had serious problems, including racial inequality and the vulgarity of commercial culture. He acknowledged that, in certain respects, the United States found it more difficult than the Soviet Union to realize the principles it itself proclaimed.

But the key was that these problems could be criticized and exposed within the West, whereas they could not be criticized or exposed within the Soviet system.

For Aron, the essence of the Cold War was not a confrontation between perfection and evil. It was a confrontation between an imperfect system and a closed system. The West’s advantage did not lie in having no problems, but in acknowledging that it had problems. It acknowledged its own divisions.

Aron wrote that the fundamental difference between the West and the Soviet Union was that the former acknowledged its own divisions, while the latter politicized the whole of existence. This division was precisely the condition of freedom.

At the strategic level, Aron’s position exhibited the same restraint. In the age of nuclear deterrence, war could not save civilization, but surrender could not solve the problem either. The only possible path was therefore to uphold the core values of one’s own system while avoiding total war.

This was a typical strategy of bounded rationality: neither seeking total victory nor accepting total defeat, but gradually establishing an advantage over the course of a prolonged confrontation.

Aron extended the same judgment to his analysis of why the West should decolonize. He believed that the West should free itself from the burden of its colonies. Once the West no longer possessed colonies, the problem of nationalism would no longer trouble only the West; it would also turn back and affect the Soviet bloc.

If we were to summarize Aron’s view of the West, we could say that he produced a demythologized defense of it. He rejected both romanticizing the West and relativism. What he defended was not the superiority of a particular culture, but an institutional possibility: a political form that allowed human beings continually to correct themselves amid imperfection.

In this sense, for Aron, a Westerner was not a particular identity, but an attitude—an attitude capable of criticizing itself while refusing to abandon itself. In his writing, this attitude meant that the West was no longer a Cold War bloc, but a historical practice that remained open.

It is precisely for this reason that we can call Aron a true Westerner, or at least a true Westerner according to his own definition. This was not because he unconditionally supported the West, but because he always insisted that the West was worth choosing precisely because it allowed people continually to question that choice itself.

Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, and Raymond Aron are, in my view, the three most profound thinkers of the twentieth century. They pulled the West away from being the slogan of a nonexistent and internally divided bloc and raised it to the level of philosophical reflection.

Arendt said that the West must confront its own crimes and the consequences of modernity. Strauss told us that the West must confront its own spiritual foundations anew. Aron told us that what the West must defend is not perfection, but the freedom to criticize itself.

The basic observation of this episode is that the Cold War had a definite enemy: that East, the Soviet Union. But it did not actually have a definite West. There simply was no single West.

So today, when someone asks whether you stand with the West, whether they are accusing you of standing with the West or accusing you of not standing with it, the question has no answer, because there is no single West.

Is it Lippmann’s Atlantic Community? Bevin’s spiritual alliance? The civilizational identity Kissinger sought to manufacture? The West that, in Toynbee’s eyes, was losing the spiritual initiative? Arendt’s West, wary of the consequences of totalitarianism? Strauss’s West between Athens and Jerusalem? Or Aron’s West, which allows you to criticize it and is worth defending precisely because it allows that criticism?

The West is not a solidified continent. It is a patch of soil that is continually being loosened.

So I think what I am doing is continuing to be that vicious dog that keeps digging at the ground, digging into the soil around the roots of concepts.

That’s all for today. See you next time. Bye-bye.