Ricardo Duchesne's Review of Niall Ferguson's Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat the Rest?

Prof. Ricardo Duchesne's Review

Ricardo Duchesne has an intriguing review of Niall Ferguson's book on the success of the West, i.e., Civilization: The West and the Rest, except that there appears to be some confusion as to this book's title. Duchesne's review calls it Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat the Rest. I've not found that title at Amazon, but I did find this: Civilization: The Six Killer Apps of Western Power. These three titles seem to indicate the same book. Perhaps it has three differently titled editions? There are at least two editions, the US (West and Rest) and the UK (Six Killer Apps).

However that is to be resolved, Duchesne's review is titled "Dr Ricardo Duchesne, review of Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat the Rest, (review no. 1225)," Reviews in History, and after some positive remarks, Duchesne finds the book wanting:

Ferguson reduces the uniqueness of the West to the question: 'how it came to dominate the Rest?' According to him, the West rose above the Rest through the development of six 'killer apps': i) a more fragmented political setting that worked to encourage competition and innovation both between and within states; ii) a predilection for open inquiry and a scientific attitude towards nature; iii) property rights and the representation of property-owners in elected assemblies; iv) modern medicine, v) an industrial revolution based on both a supply of sustained innovations and a demand for mass consumer goods; and vi) a work ethic that included more productive labor with higher savings and capital accumulation. Ferguson does not claim originality here, but credit is due for his command of the subject and his ability to engage a wide audience of lay readers and students alike with ease, intelligence, good judgment, and a keen command of comparative history.

Regrettably, Ferguson's idea of the West is devoid of any pre-modern past. Less historically literate readers will wrongly think that the West came into existence sometime in the 1600s with the arrival of these apps. He writes early on that the West is merely 'a set of norms, behaviors, and institutions with borders that are blurred in the extreme' (p. 15). This idea is consistent with his neoconservative universalism. Westerners are no more than individuals who have managed to download successfully the killer apps -- regardless of location, religion, ethnicity, and historical background. The world, after all, has been converging with the West, or so he argues, with only a few bothersome radical Muslims standing in the way.

Duchesne, by contrast, argues that the West has a longer tradition, one stretching back even earlier than the ancient Greeks, all the way back to the Indo-Europeans, as we have seen before. And it has a cultural identity, Duchesne argues, an identity that other groups will not necessarily feel akin to even if they do emigrate to the West and adopt some of what Ferguson calls "killer apps," as Duchesne points out:

[Ferguson] is clearly worried by the lack of assimilation of Muslims in Europe, and the key role being played at universities and elsewhere by Islamic centres. He tabulates that if the current Muslim population of the UK continues to grow at the current rate, its share of the total population would pass 50 per cent in 2050 (p. 290). So, it looks like the West needs to show resolve on Muslim immigration and assimilation . . . by teaching kids Western liberal arts? I doubt a population built on mass migration from non-Western lands would be enthusiastic about Elizabethan England, Homer, Chaucer, Aquinas, or even Shakespeare.

Duchesne has a point. Will immigrants from other civilizations, especially Islamic Civilization, identify with a deeper tradition of the West? Given the recent beheading of British soldier by two radical Islamists on a busy London street, the throat-stabbing of a French soldier by an apparent Islamist in Paris, and the week-long nightly riots by Muslim youth burning cars and destroying property in Stockholm, a positive answer would seem to be in grave doubt.

Some of us will live long enough to learn the answer . . .

Q. Edward Wang on Duchesne's Uniqueness of Western Civilization

H-Soz-u-Kult
Institute of History
Humboldt University of Berlin

A little over one year ago, Q. Edward Wang, of Rowan University, wrote a "Rezension zu: Duchesne, Ricardo: The Uniqueness of Western Civilization. Leiden 2011" -- which means Professor Wang reviewed Duchesne's book -- for H-Soz-u-Kult (April 27, 2012), and he asked, "[W]hat was the uniqueness of Western/European civilization?":

Duchesne devotes five chapters to discussing it in the . . . book. These chapters, as one now can well expect, cover such topics as the "creativity" among the Europeans, the advances of "reason and freedom" in Europe, the "restlessness" of the Western spirit, the entrenched tradition of "egalitarianism" and the strong notion of "self" in European culture. In discussing these subjects, he relies on and rehearses the points made by major European thinkers in the past, ranging from Malthus and Hegel to Max Weber and, more recently, Jürgen Habermas and Francis Fukuyama. He then draws on his own conclusion, often in a sweeping manner and a highly subjective language. In extolling Europeans' "creativity," for instance, Duchesne hypothesizes that "The West, I believe, has always embodied a reflective sense of self-doubt about what it knows and what remains to be known, a kind of restlessness that has been both destructive and productive of new literary style, musical trends, visual motifs, and novel ideas. By contrast, the intellectual and artistic order of China has remained relatively stable throughout its history" (p. 194). In other words, though he agrees that China and India had achieved economic successes in their past, the Chinese and Indians remained no match for the Europeans in terms of cultural and intellectual creativity. To his credit, he does cite some of the works by scholars of Asia in making comparison. With regard to artistic creativity in China, for instance, Duchesne quotes Jacques Gernet, a renowned French China scholar, that Chinese cultural life between 1650 and 1800 was not characterized by "conformism" but by "an openness of mind and intellectual curiosity." He then quickly dismisses Gernet's observation and states that the Chinese cultural accomplishment in the period was eclipsed by what the Europeans did, for the latter's achievement showed, citing Thomas Kuhn, "fundamental novelties" (pp. 194-195). Needless to say, this kind of remarks piqued one's interest, wanting to see more elaboration from him. But Duchesne simply stops here. Perhaps to him, this has been a foregone conclusion, rather a point of departure for further research.

I think that Wang intended to say "rather than a point of departure for further research." He clearly thinks that Duchesne fails to follow through on the main point, never providing a demonstration that Europeans were more fundamentally creative than Chinese.

Wang does not comment on the Indo-European hypothesis, but the review is a short one, and he is understandably more interested in Duchesne's remarks on China.

Martin Hewson's Review of Ricardo Duchesne's Uniqueness of Western Civilization

Martin Hewson
University of Regina

In my continuing search for reviews on Ricardo Duchesne's Uniqueness of Western Civilization, I have now come across one of the most informative, Martin Hewson's "Multicultural vs. Post-Multicultural World History: A Review Essay" (Cliodynamics (2012), Vol 3, Iss 2), which very clearly summarizes Duchesne's Indo-European thesis:

Chapter seven inquires into the origins of the West. Duchesne argues that Western culture should be traced back beyond the usual starting point of classical antiquity deep into prehistory to the Indo-Europeans. The Indo-Europeans, a Bronze Age people living about 5000 years ago, must have been unique in some way. Their tongue, the vernacular of a small pastoral tribe probably from the Pontic steppe, spawned offspring spoken from Ireland to Bengal. What lay behind this amazing linguistic expansion? The proximate cause was a combination of conquests and migrations. But why were they so successful for so long in conquest and migration? Duchesne attributes it to horse riding, cattle rearing, a healthy diet of meat and dairy, and a more aggressive, individualistic, aristocratic temperament.

In particular, it was the aristocratic culture of the Indo-Europeans that was the original dynamic of the West, argues Duchesne. By 'aristocratic' he means (1) a state in which the ruler is not an autocrat but first among equals in the elite; (2) a culture that is vigorous, free, and joyful; (3) a culture that is individualistic; and (4) an expansive, martial society made up of fraternal war bands. All these were features of the Indo-Europeans, and all subsequently were transmitted to European culture. The Indo-Europeans who expanded eastwards into Anatolia or India lost these characteristics. They were absorbed into an older social order.

It is noteworthy that Duchesne thinks individualism is not a modern invention. The modernist view has it that individualism arose from the breakup of premodern communal society. But, for Duchesne, individualism is a primordial characteristic of the West. One question mark hanging over this Indo-European thesis is that it is not clear how unusual the Indo-Europeans were. Were they one of the many nomadic arid-zone peoples who, like Turks, or Arabs, or Mongols, managed to conquer adjacent sedentary peoples? Or were they different? In his history of central Eurasia, Beckwith (2009), like Duchesne, maintains that the key institution of the steppe was the war band or comitatus bound together by oaths of loyalty and fraternity. But unlike Duchesne, Beckwith holds that there was a common central Eurasian culture, encompassing all the steppe peoples. In effect, Duchesne has given a unique twist to the established and convincing idea that the encounter between steppe and sown, nomad and sedentary, strongly shaped Eurasian history.

One significant piece of evidence for early aristocratic individualism in the West is that Duchesne finds a significant contrast between the heroic narratives of Greece and Northern Europe (the Iliad, Beowulf) and the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh. Personal heroism is the main theme of the former but not the latter. "Unlike the Iliad, which consists of battle scenes constructed largely out of individual encounters designed to enhance the specific deeds of singular heroes, there are no individuals with identifiable biographies in Gilgamesh" (413). Gilgamesh himself is an autocrat.

The final chapter (the eighth) attributes the accomplishments of Greece, Rome, and medieval Christendom to what might be called the spirit of agon, that is the restless, competitive, aristocratic ethos. Inspired by Nietzsche, Duchesne seeks to rehabilitate the idea of an aristocratic culture from the condescension of modernity. Beginning with interpretations of Hegel, Fukuyama, and Nietzsche, Duchesne proceeds to tackle the issue of how the violent culture of the Indo-Europeans was transformed into first the Greek then later stages of Western culture. In Greece, the aristocratic ethos was behind the free-for-all competition of philosophers and artists with their driving desire for fame and originality. Likewise the agonistic spirit was ingrained in the Olympic games, the wars, and the competitive politics of the city-states. The aristocratic ethos in Rome found expression in republicanism with its emblem of liberty (libertas). European feudalism was an aristocratic form of rule. The principle of sovereignty by consent, a hallmark of feudalism, was an aristocratic principle. Aristocratic privileges were the original inspiration for the idea of bourgeois rights and liberties. The main message is that "the creativity of the West was rooted in a culture of free aristocrats" (484). (pages 314-315)

One might infer that only this thesis interests me in Duchesne's book, but that's not the case. Rather, because this Indo-European hypothesis is the most controversial of his ideas, I'm focusing on it for my better understanding.

Read Hewson's entire review -- it's greatly informative.

Eric Jones: Review of Ricardo Duchesne's Uniqueness of Western Civilization

Indo-European Expansion
Wikipedia

In the Australian-based journal Policy Magazine (Vol. 27, No. 4, Summer 2011-12) is a review by economic historian Eric Jones of "The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, By Ricardo Duchesne." Let us again focus upon the Indo-European thesis:

Historians and philosophers tend to trace Europe's political singularity from Christianity to ancient Greece. As Duchesne fruitfully observes, they tend to park the matter there, as if Greece were sui generis. He probes into this, displaying prodigious learning in historical anthropology (informed throughout by Hegelianism). To collapse many, many pages of debate, his argument is that Europe’s essence lay in aristocratic competitiveness, contrasting with a 'serene and deferential East' -- an aspect, however, that Duchesne explores sparingly. Europe's individualism, aggressiveness and so on reached the continent, he insists, as the baggage of invading, prestige hungry Indo-European steppe nomads. These qualities, let alone their transmission to society as a whole, are rather imprecise and I was on the brink of dismissing them as too speculative when I found myself rather extensively cited. There must be something in the topic after all! But these hoary, contentious themes are really several orders of magnitude more speculative than the tracts of early modern history where Duchesne fences with the most fashionable of the revisionists.

It is a problem to exhume the history of thought and social structure in ancient Greece, but at least reams of scholarship exist on the subject. For centuries, higher learning in Europe dwelt on little else, except the slightly less faded history of Rome. Duchesne shows himself a master of the subject, especially in its anthropological guise. He shows himself, too, as a master of the archaeologically based sagas of the Indo-Europeans. He faces down anyone who would frighten us off the subject because of the Nazi's Aryan perversions, after which everything Indo-European was amputated and sanitised into mere linguistic studies. The task of taking the Indo-European legacy forward and connecting it with the priceless individualism and liberty of modern European peoples is of an even taller order. This section of the book -- or books -- is relatively diffuse. (pages 62c-63a)

Jones is good-humored about this thesis, but skeptical due to its speculative character and perhaps even wary of the the topic because of its earlier misappropriation by the National Socialists of Germany in their genocidal actions during the 1930s and early 1940s. In my own Google searches I have noticed a few racialist sites popping up among the many websites with reviews by the book's admirers, but so far as I can judge from reviews, Duchesne is making a cultural argument, not a racial one. And an argument explaining the West's success over East Asia in modernizing first has to be based on cultural reasons and not, for instance, on such things as intelligence quotient scores since East Asians outscore Caucasians.

Such are issues to be aware of in reading the book's argument . . .

Professor Andrei Znamenski Reviews Ricardo Duchesne's Uniqueness of Western Civilization

Andrei Znamenski
Department of History
University of Memphis

Professor Andrei Znamenski, historian at the University of Memphis, is yet another scholar who has reviewed Ricardo Duchesne's book, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization: "The 'European Miracle': Warrior Aristocrats, Spirit of Liberty, and Competition as a Discovery Process" (The Independent Review: A Journal of Political Economy, v. 16, n. 4, Spring 2012, pp. 599-610). Here follows Znamenski's summary of Duchesne's argument on the ethos of the ancient Indo-Europeans and its contribution to European uniqueness:

Duchesne takes the discussion of the European Miracle to a new historical and philosophical level by viewing such issues as Europe's modern economic advancement and its political decentralization as fractions of a bigger question: What are the general sources of the rise of European creativity? Digging deep into ancient history, he comes up with a provocative argument: the cultural roots of what later evolved into the European Miracle should be traced back to the social ethos of the Indo-European warrior aristocracy, which he considers an "unusual class with a strong libertarian spirit" (p. 406). He does not dismiss the geographical, social, and economic factors, but at the same time he stresses that the spark that ignited the whole process was this particular cultural group and its ethical code.

The bands of Indo-Europeans who laid a foundation for modern German, Slavic, Roman, and Greek languages had originally resided north of the Black Sea at the Ukrainian steppes, whence they moved to central and western Europe, the Near East, and India. They migrated in several waves separated by long time periods between 4,000 BCE and 1,000 BCE. One of the last migrations was that of the notorious Germanic "barbarians" who dislodged the crumbling western Roman Empire. Duchesne informs us that a peculiar democratic ethos of the Indo-European warrior aristocrats became a sort of "big bang" that initiated the whole chain of historical events that together molded "Western spirit" with its individualism and autonomous institutions: "The primordial roots of Western uniqueness must be traced back to the aristocratic warlike culture of the Indo-European speakers who spread throughout Europe during the 4th and 3rd millennium" (p. 344).

Daredevil free spirits always ready to fight and prove themselves, intolerant of any imposition on their personal status, and well nourished by their meat diet, these "Indo-European speakers" were physically strong warriors, who, on top of everything, became extremely mobile by being the first in history to domesticate horses . . . . [T]hese Indo-European nomads and their descendants were not exactly nice people. From Scandinavian sagas, we learn that they were essentially a bunch of self-centered brutes obsessed with a megalomaniacal quest for prestige and status, constantly seeking to prove themselves in the eyes of their peers either by fighting each other or by throwing feasts.

Duchesne's point here is that out of this unattractive, individualized "military democracy" a strong sense of personal autonomy gradually grew, which these noble aristocrats later sought to codify and safeguard in such documents as the famous Magna Carta. Later, new groups of "aristocrats" (towns, universities, members of guilds, farmers, and, eventually in modern times, workers' unions) began to claim their personal autonomy, extracting from lords and governments their own "charters of liberty". To secure their liberties, all of these people eventually connected themselves with each other by a web of contractual relations. Thus, in the course of time what had originally emerged as the selfish ethos of Indo-European warrior aristocrats opened doors to the full expression of individual potential, which was channeled into various economic, scientific, creative, and political pursuits. Duchesne describes this process by using the Kantian expression "unsocial sociability." Of course, many writers and philosophers had already noted a long time ago the beneficial presence of this "unsocial sociability" in the Western tradition. The most well-known examples are Leviathan (1651) by Thomas Hobbs and Adam Smith's famous economic dictum in 1776 about the invisible hand of the free market, when people working for themselves indirectly benefit the entire society.

This European libertarian ethos contrasted drastically with what existed in many contemporary non-Western societies, where individual initiative was suffocated and people were ruled, to borrow Ludwig von Mises's expression, by "virtue of command and subordination or hegemony" (1949, 196). At the same time, we know that the Indo-European bands migrated not only to western Europe, but also to the Near East and India. Why, though, did their allegedly libertarian ethos never materialize in these areas? Duchesne explains that in India and the Near East the Indo-Europeans represented a minority that was assimilated into local indigenous cultures that were heavily imbued with group-oriented ethics and in this way lost their individualized tradition of military democracy.

There is much overlap with previous reviews, but the usefulness of this summary lies partly in its accounting for why the Indo-Europeans had little influence on the development of individualism in India and the Near East.

I'll have to look into the expression "unsocial sociability," yet another paradoxical concept in this unfamiliar intellectual terrain . . .

Ricardo Duchesne Reply to Professor Mark Elvin's Review

Canadian Journal of Sociology

Ricardo Duchesne was not especially happy with Professor Mark Elvin's review of his book, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, and he writes a "Reply To Mark Elvin" (Canadian Journal of Sociology, Vol 36, No 4 (2011), 378-387), though he opens by saying that he "was quite pleased to learn that a respected scholar of Chinese history, Mark Elvin, had written a review essay of . . . The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (2011)." Within a few lines, however, he adds, "Having read and cited some of Elvin's work, I would say that his intellectual frame is socialistic, materialistic, secular, and multiculturalist," but he then graciously adds, "All of us have cultural biases, so let me concede that I prefer the West to any other civilization." I don't think that there was any doubt about that, so I wasn't surprised to discover that this was a take-no-prisoners counter-review. I won't quote the entire review, of course, just Duchesne's reply to Elvin's critical remarks about his Indo-European thesis:

Elvin calls "original" my thesis on the aristocratic Indo-European roots of Western creativity but "suspects many readers will find it outrageous." This thesis is detailed in Chapter 7 and most of Chapter 8, covering about 150 pages and backed by hundreds of sources. Elvin cites . . . a line from the Preface, and then dismisses the argument with a few lines of his own. I am confident that well-educated readers will find the thesis rather persuasive, or this is the sense I am getting from what I know, thus far, about five upcoming review essays. Elvin wonders about India's Indo-European background. If he had read the respective chapters he might have noted that I tackled this question in two sections, "The Distinctive Indo-Europeanization of the West," and "Impact of Indo-Europeans of the Civilizations of the East." Elvin wonders as well about other warlike peoples from the steppes such as the Mongols and Turks. I mentioned non-Indo-European groups from the steppes but indicated this would be a matter of future research. Recently, I read Christopher Beckwith's book, Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present, which came out in 2009 as I was writing my book. It brings up some pertinent issues, including an emphasis on the crucial institution called comitatus, a war band of aristocratic warriors driven by heroic ideals. Beckwith sees these war bands throughout the steppes, rather than exclusively among Indo-European speakers. Yet, all in all, what he says solidifies my thesis. He agrees that the comitatus "goes all the way back to the Proto-Indo-European times"; and shows that the Ural-Altaic steppe peoples evolved, as I suggested, in a direction much more influenced by the Asian peripheral civilizations. This has been further corroborated by my readings of Carter Findley's The Turks (2005), and David Morgan's The Mongols (1984). It should not be forgotten, moreover, that it was the Proto-Indo-Europeans who originated and developed the steppe toolkit, horse riding, wheel vehicles, chariots, and the "secondary-products revolution." My book avoids a teleological reading of the aristocratic culture of Indo-Europeans by showing that their contributions were only "the beginning" of multiple cultural developments in varying geographical and cultural settings. (pages 384-385)

Duchesne writes with a tone of annoyance, probably because he believes that Elvin hasn't read all of Uniqueness, or not very carefully. I won't weigh in on this issue, for I've not read Duchesne either . . . not yet, anyway.

But I will. All of this is just prep work . . .

Professor Mark Elvin's Critical Review of Ricardo Duchesne's Uniqueness of the West

Mark Elvin
ANU

Continuing my posting of block quotes from reviews of Ricardo Duchesne's Uniqueness of the West, I today quote from a review by Mark Elvin, Professor Emeritus of Chinese History at the Australian National University, "Confused Alarms: Duchesne on the Uniqueness of the West," Canadian Journal of Sociology, 36 (4), 2011:

Uniqueness is, to use old-fashioned examiner's terminology, an alpha-delta book -- with some very good and some unnervingly bad components. It is also all but impossible to review fairly, at least in a brief compass. I will therefore proceed mostly by responding to the five main points that he helpfully lays out in his preface. These are as follows: (1) a great deal of often shoddy recent historiography and social science have devalued the intrinsic quality of Western civilization; (2) recent "revisionist" historical writing has seriously underestimated Western achievements between approximately 1500 and the present day; (3) for at least during the two-and-a-half millennia since classical antiquity, and probably far longer, the culture of the "West" has always been "in a state of variance from the world"; (4) a virtually unique "liberal-democratic culture" was crucial to the rise of the modern West; (5) the West's restless creativity ultimately derives from the war-like "aristocratic egalitarianism" of the early Indo-Europeans. Space being limited, I will express myself in response to these ideas as bluntly as he summarizes them. Needless to say, both our full positions are more nuanced. (pages 363-364)

By "alpha-delta," I presume Elvin is grading Duchesne with an A for some parts and and a D for other parts and is thus more critical than previously cited reviews. The five points above are simply sketchy summaries, so readers interested in Elvin's deeper analysis will need to go to the review itself, but he here is a sample of his remarks on "aristocratic egalitarianism" of the early Indo-Europeans:

The fifth thesis is original and Nietzschean in flavour; and I suspect many readers will find it outrageous. But it can provoke one into thinking hard, which is no bad thing. It is that the West's "creativity and libertarian spirit" originated in "the aristocratic warlike culture of Indo-European speakers," who were "governed by a spirit of aristocratic egalitarianism." The "primordial basis for Western uniqueness," Duchesne tells us, "lay in the ethos of individualism and strife" (p. x). The highest ideal in life was "the attainment of honorable prestige through the performance of heroic deeds." One's first reaction to this is to ask why, if this was so, were the invigorating effects not equally in evidence in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent, where speakers of one of the oldest great Indo-European tongues, namely Sanskrit, arrived and settled? Arjuna's troubled heart and sense of duty as he faces battle in the Bhagavad-Gîtâ are hardly those of Beowulf! (371-372)

Elvin is therefore a critic worth Duchesne's attention, for not only is he skeptical of the most original of Duchesne's five theses, as well as of the other four -- and thus of the West's uniqueness in some respects -- he is also a critical thinker who is both highly intelligent and well educated in the fields where Duchesne has trod.

Again, interested readers should go to Elvin's review.

Dr. Laina Farhat-Holzman on Duchesne's Uniqueness of Western Civilization

Dr. Laina Farhat-Holzman
The Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies

Retired historian Dr. Laina Farhat-Holzman has a very brief piece in Comparative Civilizations Review (Number 67, Fall 2012, pp. 130-132) that summarizes Ricardo Duchesne's book, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, and she offers Duchesne's five objectives in writing this book:

First, to trace the ideological sources behind the multicultural effort to "provincialize" the history of Western civilization (anthropological relativism, critical theory, dependency theory, evolutionary materialism, post-modernism, feminism, and identity politics).

Second: to assess the empirical adequacy of a highly influential set of revisionist works published in the last two decades dedicated to the pursuit of dismantling the "Eurocentric" consensus on the "rise of the West." Duchesne demonstrates that the entire revisionist school was founded on precarious and doubtful claims in an attempt to rewrite history.

Third, the traditional Eurocentric historiography on the rise of the West still holds much significance despite the unrelenting attacks on it. There are numerous additional sources from historians of Europe who have written about Western achievement from the ancient Greeks to the present. The West has always existed in a state of variance from the rest of the world's cultures, as can be shown in the "Greek miracle," the Roman invention of the legal persona, the Papal revolution, the Portuguese voyages of discovery, the Gutenberg press, the cartographic revolution, the Protestant reformation, and the "industrial enlightenment." Not one of the other major civilizations had such experience in their histories.

Fourth, Duchesne insists that the development of a liberal democratic culture was an indispensable component of the rise of the West. Western culture is more than just scientific or industrial; the ideals of freedom and the reasoned pursuit of truth were cultivated and realized only in the development of the West.

Fifth and finally, Duchesne argues that the roots of the West's "restless" creativity and libertarian spirit should be traced back to the aristocratic warlike culture of Indo-European speakers. The primordial basis for Western uniqueness lay in the ethos of individualism and strife. This is an extremely original position, and one that I had never considered before. What Duchesne writes about this particularly prickly nature of the Indo-European culture I recognize from my own work on the ancient Persian psyche, before they got carried away with the autocracy of the Semitic world which surrounded and outnumbered them.

All of this sounds interesting and worth looking into, for I've long wondered -- aside from the issue of the West's possible uniqueness -- about what, if anything, characterizes the West as "Western" throughout its lengthy history.

Individualism and strife, she says he says . . .

Marshall Poe on Ricardo Duchesne's Uniqueness of Western Civilization

Prof. Marshall T. Poe
University of Iowa

Google Images

In checking out more reviews of Ricardo Duchesne's Uniqueness of Western Civilization, I found historian Marshall Poe's brief summary, with access to an audio interview over an hour in length, so of course, I didn't have time to listen to the entire exchange of views, but I did learn that Duchesne was born in Puerto Rico and moved to Canada as a teenager, attending college in Montreal though never losing his Spanish accent. Here's Poe's summary of Duchesne's views, along with some prefatory remarks:

One of the standard assumptions of modern Western social science (history included) is that material conditions drive historical development. All of the "Great Transitions" in world history -- the origins of agriculture, the birth of cities, the rise of high culture, the industrial revolution -- can, so most Western social scientists claim, be associated with some condition that compelled otherwise conservative humans to act in new ways. This premise is of course most closely linked to Marx, but it is found throughout post-Marxist big picture scholarship (including my own humble contribution to that literature).

Ricardo Duchesne argues in his new The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (Brill, 2011) that we have it all wrong. History, he claims, is driven by creative people and their ideas, not by the conditions they find themselves in. If you see a bit of Hegel and Nietzsche here, you are not wrong: Duchesne embraces them both (and throws in a considerable amount of Weber to boot). But he goes much further. He tries to demonstrate, using the best literature available on a wide variety of topics, that the Hegelian-Nietzschean view of historical development is correct. This is not a book of theory alone; it's an attempt to empirically demonstrate a theory. Even more radically, Duchesne uses the Hegelian-Nietzschean view to argue that since the invasion of the Indo-Europeans, a pastoral people who were imbued with unique aristocratic-warrior ethos, the West has been more creative than other world historical civilizations, and that this creativity explains in large measure the "Great Divergence" that we have seen in modern time.

I'm coming to have a clearer sense of Duchesne's argument, and assuming he's right, we should be reading Beowulf more deeply than we've been doing if we want to really understand the root of Western success, which he argues grows from the "aristocratic egalitarianism of Indo-Europeans," which sounds like a rather paradoxical concept, since "aristocratic" ordinarily refers to a type of elitism, but "egalitarianism" to an ethos of equality.

I'll have to look into this some more . . .

Ricardo Duchesne on "The Faustian impulse and European exploration"

Ricardo Duchesne
University of New Brunswick: Saint John Campus

In an article, "The Faustian impulse and European exploration" (Fortnightly Review, June 5, 2012), Ricardo Duchesne summarizes the theme of his book, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, and I find these two paragraphs especially useful in coming to understand his thesis:

In my book, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, I trace the West's Faustian creativity and libertarian spirit back to the aristocratic warlike culture of Indo-European speakers who began to migrate into Europe roughly after 3500 BC, combining with and subordinating the 'ranked' Neolithic cultures of this region. Indo-European speakers originated in the Pontic-Caspian steppes. They initiated the most mobile way of life in prehistoric times, starting with the riding of horses and the invention of wheeled vehicles in the fourth millennium BC, together with the efficient exploitation of the "secondary products" of domestic animals (dairy goods, textiles, large-scale herding), and the invention of chariots in the second millennium. The novelty of Indo-European culture was that it was led by an aristocratic elite that was egalitarian within the group rather than by a single despotic ruler. Indo-Europeans prized heroic warriors striving for individual fame and recognition, often with a "berserker" style of warfare. In the more advanced and populated civilizations of the Near East, Iran, and India, local populations absorbed this conquering group. In Neolithic Europe, the Indo-Europeans imposed themselves as the dominant group, and displaced the native languages but not the natives.

I maintain that the history of European explorations stands as an excellent subject matter for the elucidation of this Faustian restlessness. An overwhelming number of the explorers in history have been European. The Concise Encyclopedia of Explorers lists a total of 274 explorers, of which only 15 are non-European, with none [of these non-Europeans] listed after the mid-fifteenth century. In the urge to explore new regions of the earth and map the nameless, we can detect, in a crystallized way, the "prime-symbol" of Western restlessness. We can also detect the Western mind's desire -- if I may borrow the language of Hegel -- to expand its cognitive horizon, to "subdue the outer world to its ends with an energy which has ensured for it the mastery of the world."

This approach could too easily devolve into a triumphalist account of Western achievements even if Duchesne is correct about the Western quest for adventure as inspired by a restless desire for self-glorification that derives from the aristocratic spirit of Indo-European elites stemming from Central Asia.

I wonder how he 'gets at' that spirit of some 6,000 years ago . . .