What Is the West? A Conversation with Georgios Varouxakis

Welcome to A Single Tree Does Not Make a Forest. This English-language interview is the second episode in a series on ideas in political philosophy, produced in collaboration with Princeton University Press.

The guest is Georgios Varouxakis, Professor of the History of Political Thought at the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London and co-director of the Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought. A historian of political thought who has long worked on conceptual history, he has published several books on John Stuart Mill.

The subject of this conversation is his new book, The West: The History of an Idea, published in 2025. It is an in-depth investigation into the history of a concept: What does “the West” mean? Varouxakis argues that the West is not a civilizational community that has existed since antiquity, but a concept that gradually took shape in the early nineteenth century within a specific political context. In other words, the West was invented. It was a political language used to divide the world and organize alliances.

The conversation begins with the concept of the West as it emerged under the pressure created by Russia’s rise in nineteenth-century Europe. It then turns to why a country such as Germany, now situated so firmly at the West’s core, was for a long time not regarded as part of it. Does language describe reality, or does it create reality? Has the concept of the West itself shaped the way we divide the world today?

Varouxakis’s research also challenges mainstream understandings of the West at both popular and academic levels. Popularly, when we speak of the West today, we usually imagine it as something Americans claim to defend. Academically, the concept is often linked to Edward Said’s perspective in Orientalism. From the standpoint of intellectual history, Varouxakis regards both understandings as inaccurate.

The discussion also considers accusations that someone is siding with the so-called hostile forces of the West. In some non-Western contexts, people are often attacked for supposedly siding with hostile foreign forces from the West. But if the so-called West is itself internally contradictory, what is the point of such an accusation?

After Russia became the central “other,” Japan, Turkey, and Greece remained difficult to classify as Western, even though all three attempted to Westernize along their respective paths toward modernization. For countries located along the frontiers and borders of the West, what does the West mean?

The editors will upload the interview to Bilibili with Chinese subtitles. This may take around a month because the conversation mentions a great many numbers and proper nouns, all of which must be verified during editing and subtitling. Once the video has been uploaded, the podcast description will be updated.

Beginning next week, the podcast will take a break while the host is busy organizing events for two new books, The Human Condition and New Life, including an appearance in Beijing for Dreamland Readers’ Day. Listeners are asked not to pressure the host for new episodes over the next three months. After the summer break, more episodes produced in collaboration with Princeton University Press and Harvard University Press will follow.

Inventing the West

Although Varouxakis teaches in London, he is Greek. In dominant narratives of the West, at least in the United States, the story is often traced back to ancient Greece. Yet his book challenges that narrative, among many others.

In both China and America, people who talk about the West generally think they know what they mean. One chant heard on American campuses since the 1960s has been: “Western Civ, hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ’s gotta go.” More recently, following Donald Trump’s election, many universities and university campuses have seen a revival of “the West.” Academics, politicians, and state legislators have actively tried to revive whatever “the West” is through civic centers at American universities.

For the people trying to do that, China is seen as quintessentially non-Western. Some podcasters who discuss Western civilization, when asked what counts as non-Western, answer: China. In this narrative, China sometimes seems to be the only non-Western place.

Then there is the academic conception of the West that emerges from Edward Said’s theory. By tracing the West as a concept and an idea, Varouxakis’s book debunks almost all of these popular and academic narratives.

How did you come up with the idea for this book? It covers an amazing amount of material.

One thing leads to another, no doubt, and serendipity had a great deal to do with it. I had studied Auguste Comte and the British Comtists, the followers of Comte, the positivists, as part of my study of the context of nineteenth-century political thought, not least in relation to John Stuart Mill, on whom, as you said, I had already done a great deal of work.

I noticed a very strong emphasis on the West: definitions of the West, books, and articles. “The Western Republic” appeared at the top of every book, encyclical, or letter that Comte sent from 1848 until his death. His followers continued along the same path.

Then I read books, articles, and other literature on the history of the idea of the West which argued that the West was invented by imperialism at the very end of the nineteenth century in order to justify imperialism, both British imperialism and high imperialism more generally. That was when I thought: Wait a minute, surely that cannot be true.

Those accounts named one particular thinker, Benjamin Kidd, a social Darwinist who wrote a number of books on Western civilization in the 1890s and the early twentieth century. But Kidd was obsessed with Comte. He had read everything Comte had written, as had everybody else, of course. So I realized that the most crucial missing link in that story was undoubtedly Comte.

Once I began researching and writing the book, I realized that, of course, there was no parthenogenesis: Comte was not alone. There were other people in France who, from the early decades of the nineteenth century, especially after the Napoleonic Wars, began using l’Occident, the West, and occidental, Western, much, much more frequently than before. And this was deliberate. I noticed that they were worried about Russia and its importance in Europe.

So one of my first arguments in the book is that the West was not invented in opposition to Asia, in contradistinction to Islam, or against anything else of that kind, as people might assume. Rather, it was needed in order to differentiate Western and Central Europe from Russia.

Since you mentioned Edward Said, my story and his theory are at cross-purposes. On the exoticization of the East, whatever people meant by “the East,” Said was in general right, although many people have challenged particular details of his scholarship. That is not my task; I am not a literary historian anyway. He was right about that.

But where I come in is to say: Yes, they were perfectly happy to continue exoticizing and othering the East while calling themselves, for centuries, Christendom, or Europe from the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth. So why did they begin to need another term, “the West,” in the nineteenth century?

The answer is that some people in France and Germany began to feel the need to differentiate themselves from others who were also European and also Christian: the Russians.

One of your most interesting scholarly contributions in the opening part of the book is correcting the claim that the West emerged only at the end of the nineteenth century. You show that it emerged in the early nineteenth century. For a general reader, perhaps the greatest insight is how important Russia has been to the entire narrative of the West.

The West really is an othering concept, perhaps in Edward Said’s sense: it distinguishes you from whatever is not you, and whatever is not you is bad. But an educated reader would usually assume that the “other” is Asia or Islam. You put Russia at the center.

Russia also seems to have internalized that othering. Chinese readers will be familiar with the nineteenth-century Russian debate between the Slavophiles and the Westernizers. Yet even that debate internalized terminology used by non-Russian Europeans who called themselves “the West.” The pro-Westerners in Russia adopted that understanding as the name for whatever they wanted to imitate.

Before the rise of the West as a concept, the principal distinction within Europe had long been between Southerners and Northerners. The Southerners were the civilized peoples: the Greeks and Italians were civilized, while the Germans were uncivilized. We can see something of this in the way Mozart had to travel south to prove himself as a musical genius. How did that distinction become one between the civilized West and the uncivilized East?

It is fascinating. As I show in the book, during Madame de Staël’s ten years of exile in the second decade of the nineteenth century, she began to speak about Russia. She said that Russia was seen as a northern country, but that it was not northern; it was eastern.

She began using that terminology, but in her case it was not intended to diminish Russia. She admired the Slavs and the East. She was following Herder, the German thinker and philosopher, who had a positive view of the Slavs and believed in a kind of diversity and equality among cultures, in the value of every culture, and in diversity as something tremendously important. So in her case, the distinction was not yet axiological or normative.

But in the 1820s, some people began using Russia as [unclear]. The second surprise is that this continued, more or less, all the way to the present. Throughout the long period I examine, Russia is almost always seen as existing outside the West.

The only exception was a few years during the Second World War, when Russia had to join the Western democracies because Hitler invaded it and it became enormously important to victory. It lost, of course, millions of people. The prestige of the Soviet Union became so enormous that from 1942, when it was an ally, until 1947, when the Cold War began, people routinely spoke of Russia as having saved Western civilization and as being part of Western civilization, especially from 1945 to 1947.

In 1947, with the beginning of the Cold War, Russia once again became the enemy and the other. So there is only that brief exception.

But I would like to stress that I would not call this “Russophobia,” as many people do. It was literally fear of Russia, anxiety about Russia. Obviously, for some people it may have been more than that. But the general impression I receive from my sources is one of genuine fear: this is an enormous, monolithic country. It has one government. It has one army, while we are divided, and we will fall prey to it. It will conquer each of us, little by little. That was the anxiety.

A very small number of people had expressed it in the eighteenth century, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But in the nineteenth century, after the Napoleonic Wars, it became very, very widespread.

Let us briefly remind listeners what happened in the early eighteenth century. Peter the Great transformed Russia into an enormously powerful, modernized country, and he imposed Westernization upon it. He forced his people to shave and to behave as though they were Western. He built a capital on the Baltic Sea, in Europe, Saint Petersburg, at an almost [unclear].

At the center of Europe, the Russian emperor, Tsar Alexander I, dominated the Congress of Vienna and then created the Holy Alliance. More and more people in France and Germany began to worry: Wait a minute. The Russians are not merely part of Europe; now they dominate Europe.

That is why these people began to need a new identity and started referring to themselves as the West. This became completely explicit with Comte and his followers in the 1840s, when they said explicitly that “Europe” was a confusing term because it included Russia. That was why they needed to call it the Occident.

A century later, in 1918, when the first volume of Oswald Spengler’s famous book The Decline of the West, Untergang des Abendlandes, was published, there was a long footnote in the introduction. In it, Spengler said that the word “Europe” had to be struck out of history, politics, and historical thought. It was the word “Europe” that had confused people and made them think that Russia was part of “us.” Russia was not part of “us.” That was why “we” were the Occident, the West, rather than Europe.

So it is a long story. The other, most of the time, or at least the most significant other, creates this concept and gives it a reason to exist. That other is Russia. Europeans naturally regarded Asia, the Orient, and other cultures as different, but they did not feel the need to call themselves the West and create a new identity. They already had Christendom or Europe as their overarching identity.

China, Russia, and Comte’s Western republic

I have two follow-up questions. First, during the Enlightenment there was a period in which Europeans praised China without understanding it. They went to China to preach Christianity and brought back travel books and notes. By the time of Voltaire and Diderot, Enlightenment philosophers were praising the enlightened despotism of the Chinese mandarins. Voltaire wrote plays praising them, although this was obviously a falsification of what China was actually like.

China retained a positive image during the Enlightenment, but then that image became extremely negative. Montesquieu came along, and then Hegel in particular. China became synonymous with despotism. You see this in Tocqueville as well. Over the course of a century, China went from enlightened to despotic.

During the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, was Russia portrayed similarly, as a model Enlightenment philosophers could use against whatever they wanted to criticize in France?

My second question is more scholarly. Auguste Comte introduces a new valence into your history. Before Comte, the story was about fear of Russia: Russia was a threat, and people did not want it to threaten them. Then Comte introduced an anti-imperialist, normative, universalist concept of the West. Is there a shift in what the West became after Comte?

Those are very good and very important questions. Let me begin with the first. Yes, absolutely: China was praised and idealized. Voltaire notoriously praised China in normative terms. He used China, and began his universal histories with China, in order to expose and criticize the parochialism of Christian narratives of universal history, such as Bossuet’s. He wanted to attack the Christians and create a more secular history.

He always reminded people that the most ancient civilization was China. In the process, he probably did not know enough about it, but he clearly needed to praise China, as did the other narratives you mentioned.

Russia in the eighteenth century was different. Russia had a positive image for most of the eighteenth century, with very few exceptions. As I said, Rousseau explicitly stated in The Social Contract in 1762, although nobody notices it, because there is so much else to notice in that book, that we would all be devoured by the Russians, that they would conquer us, and that they would in turn be conquered by their neighbors, the Tartars.

Before Rousseau, there was Oliver Goldsmith, an Irish novelist, an extremely interesting novelist and, in many respects, a philosophical thinker. In a novel called The Citizen of the World, Goldsmith pretended to be a Chinese visitor to Europe, a device that Montesquieu had of course already used in Persian Letters. Goldsmith pretended to be a Chinese man writing letters about Europe. In the process, naturally, he found a way to criticize European societies, their hypocrisies, and their problems.

In that novel, he explicitly said that Russia was the greatest danger to the peoples of Western Europe. European peoples formed alliances with Russia and used Russia against one another, but they did not understand that Russia was the greatest danger and that Russia wanted to conquer them. That had always been its plan. He was saying this as early as 1760–61. But he was in the minority. Most people viewed Russia positively at that time.

That changed in the nineteenth century, when many people came to regard Russia as too dangerous. Russia then became extremely unpopular. People had worried about Alexander I because he was very charming and popular. He had many friends in Germany, and he flirted with Protestant spiritualism, various aristocratic ladies, and so on.

When he died and Nicholas I succeeded him, Russia became unpopular for another reason: it was extremely powerful, but it was now also extremely despotic. European liberals and radicals became anxious about Russia because of its despotism.

The suppression of the Polish rebellion, or insurrection, at the beginning of the 1830s led to another wave of unpopularity for Russia because of the way it abolished the autonomy of the portion of Poland that belonged to Russia. Crucially, Polish refugees who went to Paris, London, and the German states sustained this lobbying campaign against Russia, which had, of course, destroyed their country, or what remained of its autonomy.

These people were not simply migrants or refugees. They were Polish aristocrats, and the Polish aristocracy consisted of extremely well-connected people throughout Europe. Their voices were therefore important. I have many examples of them speaking to Palmerston. Adam Czartoryski, for example, was a major figure. Earlier, when he was younger, he had been foreign secretary, or foreign minister, to Tsar Alexander. These were not just any refugees; they were very well-connected European refugees from Poland. That also contributed to Russia’s growing unpopularity.

Your second question is absolutely crucial. You are absolutely right. Comte did not have a positive view of Russia, but only in the sense that he regarded Russia as backward. It was not yet ready to join the West as he defined it. But he was not Russophobic and did not wish to exclude the Russians permanently.

His project was universalist, as you very correctly said, and was intended eventually to include everyone. He simply believed that Western Europe, what he called the West, meaning Western Europe and its offshoots, its settler colonies in both Americas, not only North America but also South America and Latin America, as well as Australia and New Zealand, had grown together since the time of Charlemagne, as he saw it, in the eighth and ninth centuries.

These peoples had formed so many historical and cultural connections, and they were so technologically advanced, that they were now ready to accept his proposal for a completely new organization of society. If and when they accepted that proposal and reorganized themselves in the way he proposed, they would be in a position to admit everybody else, little by little. Comte had various plans regarding who would join first and who would join next.

Ultimately, however, the Western Republic he envisaged, whose capital would initially be Paris, would move its capital to Constantinople, what is now Istanbul, the city between Europe and Asia. That would symbolically unite the entire world, and Constantinople would become the capital of the Human Republic, the Republic of Humanity.

So the first surprise is exactly what you correctly identified: rather than the idea of the West being invented to justify imperialism, Comte’s West was intended to abolish imperialism immediately. He believed imperialism, conquest, and military force to be atavistic and anachronistic.

In the positivist future he imagined, they would be abolished, and everyone would become much more interested in industry, in advancing humanity’s well-being through industry. After all, he had been a Saint-Simonian. He had served as Saint-Simon’s secretary for seven years. He would not have called himself a Saint-Simonian afterward, because they fell out, but in terms of his desire for industrial growth, industrial development, and the exploitation of nature by human beings, rather than human beings exploiting one another, he belonged to the same mold as the utopian socialists and Saint-Simon.

Meanwhile, and this is crucial, the “other” of Comte’s West, the danger to the West, was the West itself. The danger lay in people’s selfishness and individualism, their complete neglect of the past and their ancestors, and their complete neglect of continuity between the past and future. He called all of this la maladie occidentale, the Western disease.

He believed that the revolutionary philosophy of the Enlightenment and then the French Revolution had been good things. In his view, they had to happen because the Ancien Régime had to disappear. The feudal Ancien Régime had run its course and had to go.

But in the nineteenth century, Europeans had still not developed a new dispensation, a new form of social organization. They continued to speak about rights, liberty, and individualism without thinking about responsibilities, duties, and society more generally. He believed this was catastrophic and could not continue. Individualism had done its work; now a new organization was needed. He therefore coined the term “altruism,” for example: vivre pour autrui, living for others.

He believed that the greatest danger was selfishness and individualism. He was therefore trying to create a new moral self-understanding for the most advanced part of the world, which he called the West. In that effort, he created the Religion of Humanity.

He did not believe in God. He believed that humanity no longer needed the theological God, the bearded God of the Old Testament. As people developed science and changed the world in different ways, they would no longer believe in that God. But we did not need to believe in a supernatural God, a God outside nature. We could replace that God with humanity as the object of adoration.

He therefore wanted to promote the idea that you should live for others, do good for humanity, respect your ancestors and humanity’s past benefactors, and do your best for humanity’s future. Instead of eternal life in paradise, as promised by the Abrahamic religions and so on, your consolation in the face of death would be the way you were remembered. If you were remembered as a benefactor of humanity, as someone who had done good for humanity, that would console you for your death.

He tried to expand this feeling of working for humanity and doing good. He created an entirely new calendar in which humanity’s benefactors would be honored. Some would receive an entire month, some a week, and some a day.

Interestingly, the people who served as equivalents of saints in other religions were not exclusively European, white, or Western. He included Confucius, the Buddha, Muhammad, and all kinds of people from around the world. So even in his religion, there was already an attempt at universality.

I do not want to take this too far. He naturally thought of progress in unilinear terms: progress had to move in one direction. There was only one path of progress, and Europe was the most advanced. The rest of the world would inevitably want to join it, and Europe should help the rest of the world to do so. That is Eurocentric. It is a nineteenth-century way of thinking. As you mentioned, Hegel thought this way, and so did Karl Marx: there was one path, one path to progress. That is obviously Eurocentric; it is a nineteenth-century idea.

Westernization at the frontiers

The narratives in the book are so contradictory that they may be harder to disseminate than Edward Said’s Orientalism, which offered a simple and unified narrative. You demonstrate convincingly that a duality was hidden at the very beginning of the idea of the West.

I come from a civilization understood as non-Western, and if you examine the history of any non-Western civilization, and you might count modern Greece as part of that, you find something similar. Consider the nineteenth-century Russian debate between Westernizers and Slavophiles; the Japanese Meiji Restoration, whose emperor’s advisers read Francis Bacon and wanted, so to speak, to bring Bacon into the Japanese Empire; or the people involved in China’s early-twentieth-century May Fourth Movement, who brought Mr. Democracy, Miss Liberty, and Mr. Science into ancient China.

They all had a concept of the West. The West was seen as representing not only progress and science, but also individualism. Almost everywhere, nationalists later attacked that idea of the West as selfish and non-altruistic. But you show that Comte was already criticizing that aspect of modernity. By coining terms such as “altruism,” he was proposing a cure for individualism.

That duality was embedded in the idea of the West from the beginning. People then took only half of it and tried to import that half into a non-Western civilization.

Even in Comte’s case, the vision was Eurocentric, but he nevertheless wanted to move the capital to Constantinople if everything worked out. Turkey seems to be one of those countries we sometimes regard as Western and sometimes do not. Its modernization resembles that of Japan, China, and Russia. Kemal Atatürk wanted to Westernize Turkey, but it was never fully Westernized. Do all these peripheral or non-Western countries follow a similar historical trajectory, in which modernization is equated with Westernization but the process is never completed?

Because you are Greek, Greece also forms part of that story. I do not often think of it that way because I am in America, where so many people include ancient Greece at the beginning of the Western narrative. You begin the book with “From Plato to NATO,” so you are clearly conscious of the way ancient Greece has been appropriated into the narrative of the West today.

Not only am I Greek, but when I was an undergraduate in Athens, I studied Turkish for four years because I was planning to do a doctorate in Ottoman history. I did not ultimately do that; I wrote a doctorate on Mill and France, but I retained my interest in Turkish history.

You are right: Kemal Atatürk and his reforms were, of course, an attempt at rapid, forced Westernization. They were inspired by Comte. One of the leading Young Turks was Ahmed Rıza, who lived in Paris. If you consult any volume of La Revue occidentale, the Western Review, the nineteenth-century journal of the Comtists, you will find an article by him in almost every issue. He was a leading member of the positivist circles in Paris.

When the Young Turk Revolution occurred in 1908, he went to Turkey and became president of the National Assembly. He was therefore a major Turkish politician. After the First World War, when the Turks under Kemal Atatürk defeated the Greeks and expelled them from Asia Minor, Greece sent its former prime minister, Venizelos, to negotiate with the Turks. Turkey sent Ahmed Rıza. That shows how senior he was.

Another major intellectual in the Turkish modernizing nationalist movement, known as Türkçülük, was Ziya Gökalp, who is quoted in the epigraph to my introductory chapter. He wrote endlessly about the need to join Western civilization.

He tried to explain that Turkey could retain Islam as its religion. Its culture could remain the national culture of the Turks. Civilization, however, was a supranational phenomenon, and a country could change civilizations. The Turkish nation could leave the Eastern civilization of the Ottomans and join Western civilization.

That was a modernizing project of progress similar to the earlier one associated with Fukuzawa Yukichi in Japan, to which you were undoubtedly alluding, and with Chinese thinkers such as Liang Qichao, at least initially, before the First World War. All of that is absolutely true.

My book shows that the West has meant many different things. If someone asks, “So what? If we are not historians obsessed with the past and its details, why should we care?” the answer is that particular people, political groups, and politicians use these terms while pretending that they mean only one thing. They say: In the name of this, you must follow me. In the name of this, we must save Western civilization; we must save America or save Europe.

My book shows that these are extremely complex legacies and traditions, within which you can find resources for precisely the opposite argument. In the present conjuncture, for example, the American government of Vice President Vance and others says that it is defending Western civilization, which is supposedly being endangered by the European Union and the Europeans.

The Europeans, of course, respond: You are the greatest danger to Western civilization because you are trying to equate it with whiteness and Christianity. Western civilization and Western societies have evolved. What you are describing belongs to a phase in the history of the West that ended long, long ago. The West is now a much more complex, open-minded, diverse, and tolerant place.

There is consequently a battle over the redefinition of the term. My book offers resources for that battle. It says: Do not surrender the meaning of the term to your rivals, because if you allow them to define the terms, you have already lost the debate. I make that argument very clearly in the conclusion. Many American commentators are engaged in precisely this debate among themselves.

In Chinese debates, if you say anything that goes against, for example, a nationalist narrative, you may be accused of being sponsored by Western forces. Virtually every Chinese intellectual has probably been accused at some point of being sponsored by Western forces. If you advocate an opinion regarded as non-Chinese, you are [unclear].

Throughout the book, you show how ideas and terms can be captured for political purposes. Is the simplest answer to “Why should we care?” that we live in a political world and words are politicized?

Yes, and thank you for saying that. In the conclusion, and indeed throughout the book, I insist that the term is important and will continue to be used precisely because it is very attractive, and different sides will want to use it for their own purposes. It is not going to disappear.

Therefore, it is better to define it through a historical genealogy, as I do, and to show what it has meant. By definition, that means it can be redefined in the future, either by reviving old layers of meaning or by creating new layers as historical development continues.

History and politics are messy affairs. They are not logic or mathematics. They are not straightforward, and they are full of surprises.

But you remind me that one of the arguments I make in the conclusion is against the use of terms such as “Western values.” Suppose people in the West tell Chinese, Indian, African, or any other people that democracy, liberal democracy, constitutionalism, freedom of speech, tolerance of different sexual orientations, tolerance of different religions, equality, socialism, social democracy, or whatever each of us may consider good, including justice, political justice, and meritocracy, are Western values.

The immediate implication is that the ancestors of the Westerners who say this were right. They won the battle of history, and the rest of the world must imitate them because they are superior.

Historically, that is problematic, because these matters are extremely complex and everybody borrows from everybody else. Which ideas prevailed in which places was an accident of history, not the result of anyone’s genetic or intellectual superiority.

In addition, calling them Western values is politically and strategically an own goal. It is a mistake. If I am a liberal and want people outside the West to adopt Western liberal constitutional institutions or values, but I tell them those institutions are Western, it is as though I am telling them they are foreign and must be imported. That immediately enables governments in various countries to say: You see, these are foreign ideas. They are being imposed upon us by neo-imperialists.

That is why I say in the book: Do not call them Western values. Call them by universal names. Call them liberal, egalitarian, utilitarian, or whatever you wish, but use those names rather than “Western.” Nobody owns these ideas.

That is also why I try to defend the ancient Greek classics in the conclusion. There is now a tendency among classicists in America and Britain to try to atone for the nineteenth-century complicity of classical scholarship in various imperial projects. In the process, they spend so much time apologizing for the classics that they forget the classics are extremely valuable texts.

Whatever happened to those texts through the uses and abuses to which various people subjected them, the classics belong to the world. They do not belong to the West or the East; they do not belong to the Greeks or Europeans. The classics belong to the world.

We all have both the right and the need to read them, reinterpret them, and make the most of them. That naturally includes the Chinese classics, Indian classics, Greek classics, Roman classics, and whatever other classics there may be.

Identifying past traditions with ownership labels can therefore be historically problematic, but it can also be politically very, very counterproductive. I oppose that approach. Ideas and institutions should be discussed in terms of whether they are better and what value they have, not in terms of who owns them.

It is particularly persuasive to hear a Greek say that Plato does not belong to us; he belongs to the world.

It is true. If you look at the greatest students of Plato or the classics, they do not generally come from modern Greece. There are some, but they began their work at Western European or American universities and became great scholars there. They did not become great simply by being in Greece.

Let us hope that one day Greece will produce great homegrown classicists, but this is not a matter of ownership. Obviously, Greeks are very fortunate because they speak the same language. The language has evolved, but it is the same language, and Greeks use the same alphabet. They therefore enjoy privileged access and, because it is easier for them, have an obligation to study those texts more. But that is all. It is not ownership. Those texts do not belong to Greece or Europe.

When I first met a Greek person, I recited the first line of the Odyssey to him and asked whether he understood it. He simply looked at me in complete confusion.

You had learned the Erasmian pronunciation, of course, whereas modern Greek pronunciation has been simplified. It is somewhat different.

I had a similar experience with a major politician on a train many years ago, but let us not go into that. We are in public. I will tell you another time, when we are not being recorded.

How America joined the West

It is important to bring America into the conversation. We have spent a great deal of time talking about Europe, but because America is the greatest power in the world, it has come to monopolize the meaning of the West.

Your book traces the history of when America entered the picture. One thing that may surprise readers is the enormous role Germany played in America’s narrative of the West. In my own case, my teachers’ teachers were Germans. They were all Germans driven out of Germany in the twentieth century who came to America and populated American universities.

You also show that in the early twentieth century, before Wilson, there were no doctoral programs in America. If Americans wanted to be intellectuals, they had to go to Heidelberg to earn doctorates.

Do not forget Göttingen, please.

Göttingen and Heidelberg. Basically, if you wanted to be an intellectual in America, you had to go to Germany.

Today, because America plays such an important role in defining the narrative of the West, both the West’s critics and its defenders are Americans. Since the Second World War, Americans have taken up the mantle of whatever the West is. But in tracing that takeover, you show something that people from Kissinger to today’s J. D. Vance may not want to admit: for a very long time, Europeans did not regard America as part of the West. There was an enormous debate in Europe about excluding America from it. How did that change?

You are a very, very astute, clever, intelligent, and subtle reader of my book. I am very fortunate.

For members of the audience who have not yet read the book as you have, it is a fascinating story. First, at the beginning of their existence, Americans wanted nothing to do with Europeans because they saw themselves as a new dispensation, a republic that should have nothing to do with aristocratic, semi-feudal, imperialistic European kingdoms. They were, of course, the first postcolonial nation: they had rebelled against the British Empire.

Initially, it would therefore have been anathema for them to enter an alliance or a civilizational unit with the other European [unclear].

As you say, it was only through educated Americans who finished at Harvard College and then went to Göttingen, Berlin, Heidelberg, Halle, and German universities more generally to earn their doctorates that Americans began using the language of the West to a limited degree.

German migrants such as Francis Lieber, who became a founder of American social science and political science, were obsessed with promoting the idea that America and Europe belonged to the same civilization and needed to find a name for it. Then more and more people adopted that terminology.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Americans had begun to call themselves Western, whereas previously that had been only a minority usage. Another reason was that “the West” had meant something completely different in America: it referred to the moving frontier and westward expansion.

Then, once America began to loom very large through the two world wars and came to dominate the West, more and more Europeans resented and feared the possibility that the extreme West was taking over and would dilute European civilization. They regarded European civilization as consisting of smaller countries, diversity, different cultures, and different languages.

They feared the United States’ enormous scale, its materialism, its preoccupation with money, and so on. Those were partly stereotypes, of course, though sometimes they were extreme versions of realities on the ground.

So it is a very, very checkered history, full of surprises. But as you correctly say, there was a West before America joined it. Among the countries regarded as Western today, the United States was the last to see itself as part of the West. Before reading my book, people would not necessarily expect that.

When people now ask me, as everyone in the press naturally does, whether the West is over, I reply: Not necessarily. One phase of the West began with the end of the Second World War, the creation of NATO, and the Cold War. It was a new phase of the West in which there was a hegemon, a dominant superpower, and smaller countries that depended upon it and were almost its satellites.

That phase of the West is probably over. Even if America behaves differently under a future administration, I think the Europeans have received the message that they cannot rely on America for their defense to the degree they previously did.

A new administration may come along and change everything, and America has, to some extent, different interests. But that does not necessarily mean the end of the West. It means the end of the particular phase that began in the 1940s.

That is one of the tensions I see in the civic-center movement and in what we might call the conservative turn on university campuses that began after Trump. On one hand, these people support pulling America away from Europe. They believe NATO is a drain on America, and they oppose universalization. On the other, within academia they oppose critical theory and neo-Marxist self-criticism of the West. They want to restore a positive idea of Western civilization.

I have attended many such conferences in America over the past several years. It seems like a bastard son of the West trying to separate itself from the culture it wishes to claim as its own while also claiming to be that culture’s sole defender in the contemporary era.

Perhaps your perspective is different because you are in England. But Brexit occurred around the same period. As you conduct the press tour for the book and speak with people who have different purposes, whether they want to defend the West or criticize it, do they all approach it from a politicized and therefore, I am almost tempted to say, intellectually erroneous perspective?

Thankfully, although I completed the final corrections and finishing touches to the book in October 2024, in Vienna, before Donald Trump’s reelection, and certainly long before he was inaugurated for the second time and began his current rhetoric and policies, I would not change a single word in the book, its conclusion, or its preface. I would keep it exactly as it is. I still subscribe to everything I said.

That means the book was written carefully, from the perspective of a historian with the distance necessary to make the argument I was making, rather than as a hurried piece written for immediate political consumption or as an ideological outlet for one’s current feelings. That is the first thing I am glad to be able to say with complete honesty.

Second, again in complete honesty, I agree with the people you are discussing to the extent that some criticism of the West in American universities, some critical commentary, became so extreme that it forgot why it had been possible to engage in that criticism in the first place.

As I put it in the book, those critics were in danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It is one thing to say that the West has made many mistakes, that Western governments do not live up to their principles, that a particular government is doing something wrong, or that a particular episode in our history is shameful, and there are many such episodes.

It is another thing to say that the West itself must be rejected because it is inherently criminal. I am in favor of dialogue and debate. But there was a certain exaggeration, and it was becoming hegemonic in universities.

I am not saying that I therefore agree with the American vice president and his rhetoric. I am saying that he and his president could be elected because they were able to use extreme examples of what the other side was saying and doing. The other side was making fundamental mistakes in how it conducted the debate.

Trump and Vance could therefore present themselves as the true patriots while portraying their opponents as people who were simply undermining everything American about America. Am I being clear, or am I being too careful?

I think I agree. Nuanced arguments are always, to use the German phrase, ja und nein: yes and no. They are never one-sided.

Exactly. The reason I am pleased with the way the book was formulated is that although I completed it with the excesses of the left, if you wish, or whatever we want to call it, as my main target, the book can now be used for precisely the opposite purpose.

In a way, I will obviously be unpopular with everyone, but I am glad about what the book does, because it is a proper history, a proper genealogy of the concept. It can provide resources to any serious, nuanced thinker who wants to reflect carefully on the West, its tradition, and its potential future, rather than merely using quick arguments to win an election.

History, myth, and political responsibility

The intellectual historian’s job is to loosen the soil. Ideas become ossified, are used reflexively, and ultimately are used by people who do not truly understand what they mean. When that happens, in the worst possible circumstances, language itself becomes completely inaccurate. In the worst case, you make grammatical mistakes without even knowing how correct grammar works.

At the highest level, intellectual historians are like earthworms loosening the soil and showing us where words originally came from. Because they do that, they are bound to be unpopular in two senses.

They are unpopular in the first sense because we cannot live our everyday lives while constantly hesitating and wondering. After reading Varouxakis’s book, one cannot feel comfortable simply throwing around the word “West,” knowing that it has such a complicated history and, in a sense, means nothing. But if one does that with every word, one cannot live. One loses the ability to speak like an ordinary human being.

Intellectual historians are also unpopular in a second sense: anyone who wants to politicize a word and capture it for an ideology will no longer be able to do so.

Unless they hire me to do it for them, in which case I will try to do it very convincingly. I am joking.

But you are very, very correct. You remind me of comments made by the French thinker Ernest Renan regarding the nation: good history undermines the nation’s myths, cohesion, and narratives.

Narratives are necessarily full of myths because myths create social glue, whereas good history reminds us that the story is always far more complex. I am not opposed to narratives or to certain myths, but some myths are conducive to better things, while others are conducive to bad things. Through good history, we can improve even our simplistic myths. That would be my hope.

Varouxakis’s book destroys myths. It shows that the West consists of a series of myths, and it does not merely discuss minor thinkers. By the chapter on Spengler and The Decline of the West, the reader encounters the footnote in which Spengler simply says that Europe should be abandoned altogether and “the West” used as the primary way of conceptualizing civilizations.

The ossification of ideas becomes visible. Ernest Renan’s “nation” is another concept that requires myth and ossification. Once dismantled, it produces disenchantment, in Max Weber’s sense of the word.

Yes. But that is why I said that I am also a citizen and a person living in the world. I am not simply a detached historian living on another planet. I also understand the need for myths. I understand the need for social cohesion and some form of glue.

That is why I said there are two levels on which you can do this. Historians, highly sophisticated political theorists, readers, and intellectuals can follow me all the way, read the book, and develop a very subtle understanding of the complexities.

But I am also perfectly willing to simplify the narrative in articles and interviews and say: According to this history, this is what the West could mean today.

I do not necessarily want to destroy every narrative completely. I want to improve the narratives. Through good history, I want to improve the myths by which people live. There are various layers or levels at which I would make the argument.

The problem is that you are too clever. I am dealing with someone who has read the book very carefully, and we are going through the entire story. In other interviews or articles, I might tell a more simplified version of the story.

I want to direct at you a criticism that has been directed at me, because I think you deserve it as well.

I am already beginning to feel flattered.

Other Chinese people, well-intentioned Chinese intellectuals who have experienced all the tribulations of the twentieth century, have said to me: Why do you have to destroy the ideal of America as a beacon of liberty? What good does that do?

The same could be said to someone living in England. We are under threat from barbaric forces, and you may agree that whatever backwardness and barbarism are, they are bad. We do not want them. We want to live in an open-minded society that upholds certain values. Unfortunately, those values are now called Western values, American values, or liberal values.

By criticizing them, you are providing ammunition to the evil forces that, we must admit, are currently threatening the integrity of our society. If you are truly an intellectual and want to accept a certain degree of responsibility, you must recognize that political responsibility exists alongside intellectual honesty.

That criticism has been directed at me with genuinely good intentions, and I have struggled to answer it. How would you answer it?

Thank you. It is a wonderful criticism. I try very hard not to do what it accuses me of doing.

That is why I said I do want to defend certain narratives. My answer would be that I am not trying to demolish the idea of America or the idea of the West. I am trying to improve it. I am trying to say that the truly American, or truly Western, thing is always to be critical of your culture while remaining ambitious for it.

That is why, although throughout the book I avoid taking sides and try instead to present other people’s definitions, repeatedly saying that my job is to study them historically, I could not avoid taking a position in the conclusion.

I have been mildly criticized for doing so, and I accept that criticism. In the end, I adopt a definition offered by Raymond Aron. That is what I am trying to do. I am not trying to demolish the West. I am trying to enrich it and make it better.

That is why one of the heroes of the book is Richard Wright, the African American novelist, who repeatedly said: I am Western. I like the West. I like freedom of speech. I like the separation of church and state. I like the freedom of science to develop and search for truth. I like artistic freedom.

His complaint was that Western governments very often failed to live up to the principles and ideals they themselves declared to be Western.

I also like the fact that I have managed to get you to admit that you are a fan of Raymond Aron.

Oh yes. I do not think that could be concealed by the tone in which I write about him.

You examine not merely defenders or simplistic critics of the West, but also extremely sophisticated thinkers. Arendt, Aron, and Strauss, all writing around the same period, were not simply politicizing the West. They began from the perspective of the postwar twentieth century and tried to think through what the West meant.

Having been in America and been taught by several Straussians, I can say that some of their students may have bastardized their ideas more than the original thinkers did. Nevertheless, although this book does a great deal of debunking and demystifying, it also crystallizes something. There was brilliance in the history of these ideas and in the ways the West was conceptualized.

Thank you. I have found the quotation. It is very brief. I said that we should, of course, substitute “person” for “man,” but other than that, Aron’s definition is:

The true Westerner is the man who accepts nothing unreservedly in our civilization, except the liberty it allows him to criticize it, and the chance it offers him to improve it.

If that is the definition, then I am defending that West. By definition, however, it is an open West, a West that is open to self-criticism and improvement. That is worth defending.

The true friends of the West, liberty, or America would therefore regard my project as an attempt to improve it, not as an attempt to denigrate or destroy it. I hope we can persuade your critics.

Raymond Aron and the freedom to criticize

The conversation ends with even more common ground than seemed apparent from reading the book alone. Many of the names that surfaced are music to the host’s ears, especially Ernest Renan and Raymond Aron.

For understandable political reasons, Aron’s book on intellectuals will probably not be translated into Mandarin. But his name deserves to be mentioned more often. Even within the American academy, one no longer encounters many readers of Raymond Aron.

It is unfortunate. In France, of course, he was very isolated. He was a man of immense courage at a time when virtually all intellectuals stood on one side politically.

By the end of his life, they honored him, and by the time he died he had received considerable recognition. But he had shown immense courage. He displayed that courage in a way that very few people who call themselves intellectuals and make pronouncements on far too many subjects ever do.

So you are definitely right. I try to remain neutral in the tone I use when discussing the thinkers in my book, but in certain cases my immense admiration is obvious, and Aron is certainly one of them.

The host closes with an anecdote about Aron, heard from an Americanist who taught at Boston College and had been a student of Bertrand de Jouvenel. Aron is believed to have died the day after appearing in court to defend Jouvenel against the false accusation that he had worked with the Nazis. Aron died defending his friend, an honorable way to die.

Yes, it was a passing befitting his stature.

If one reads what Aron says about Simone Weil, both in The Opium of the Intellectuals, which you mentioned, in the afterword he wrote for a later edition, and in his memoirs, it is extraordinary. It reveals great sensitivity.

Simone Weil had not been uncritical of him. She was his wife’s best friend, and when her friend first met him, she did not approve of him. But his admiration for that remarkable person says a great deal about his generosity and open-mindedness.

Thank you, Georgios. This conversation could continue for hours and range far beyond the subject of your book.

I was thinking the same thing. We should do this again.

We should. Even without writing another amazing book like this, you should come back, and we should speak more often.

Lovely. Yes, absolutely. Thank you.

The host thanks Varouxakis once more, and thanks Princeton University Press for organizing the conversation.