| The Dawning of the West: On the Genesis of a Concept asks what is meant by "the West"? What kind of category is it, and when and how did it, and related formulations such as "Western civilization" and "the Western tradition," first become fundamental terms in both scholarly and public discourse? Despite the voluminous literatures on the clash of civilizations, Orientalism, and the American culture wars, the West has generally not been problematized but rather assumed to refer to something given. There is, however, a small but growing literature scrutinizing its epistemological and historical status, which the author labels "critical Occidentalism," to which this study is a contribution.; This study argues, first, that the West is best categorized as a political and social concept, employing the methodology of conceptual history most commonly associated with the work of Reinhart Koselleck. Secondly, it claims that the concept of the West did not appear until quite recently: while there are many geographical and poetic traditions concerning the direction of the west, the West has come to mean something quite different, and contemporary uses should not be read back into older texts. Thirdly, it proposes that, while the West emerged independently in a number of different national contexts, the most important was nineteenth-century Russia, whose intellectuals developed it to articulate the differences between their nation and Europe in the context of world history. Then, influenced by Russian ideas, the West crystallized in European thought as a category of sociological and historical inquiry after the First World War. This study focuses especially on the contributions of Max Weber and Oswald Spengler to its wider emergence.; The notion of Western civilization presupposes an autonomy of culture that its own history as a global concept belies. The question for future research is whether the concept of the West is so problematical that it should be abandoned, or whether it can be reconceptualized as a category of cultural analysis in ways that are less politically polarizing and more historically accurate.; Keywords. Occidentalism, Intellectual History, Geopolitical terminology, Western civilization... |
