Tag: Western uniqueness

Francis Fukuyama heralded a return to a Western-centered universal conception of history — but one which sees universal liberalism as its endpoint.

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Part 7 of 7 (Part 1 here, Part 6 here)

We have no standards to judge what are “good” and “bad” forms of being a human, since there are no subjects existing outside the contingencies of historical time and power relationships. All we can do is engage in “discourse analysis” so as to uncover existing hierarchies by analyzing the fields of knowledge through which they are legitimated. We can engage in questioning how we came to be the “humans” we think we are, such as how we came to think that we have natural rights to life, liberty, and happiness, but such a questioning can only show us how our current way of being human is historically contingent and thus changeable. (more…)

Fernand Braudel, widely regarded as the greatest historian of the twentieth century.

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Part 6 of 7 (Part 1 here, Part 5 here, Part 7 here)

The “Grand Liberal Narrative” of the Twentieth Century

Despite a wide variety of historical schools, a centrist liberal historiography committed to the ideals of rationalism, meritocracy, and the global spread of human rights dominated the writing of history until about the 1980s — while subsequently integrating within its fold the more progressive schools of New Left, feminist, multicultural, and postmodernist historians via a “new liberalism” determined to ensure equal rights for everyone against the continuing racism, sexism, and ignorance of old liberals. (more…)

Anton von Werner, The Proclamation of the German Empire (1885). The rise of the German Empire coincided with the rise of German historicism. Both presented a new challenge to British and French world domination.

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Part 5 of 7 (Part 1 here, Part 4 here)

German Historicism: The Defeated Alternative to Liberal Progressivism

Peter Watson’s comprehensive book of over 900 pages, The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, The Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century (2010), demonstrates that from 1750 to the 1930s Germany was the dominant intellectual force in Western civilization. (more…)

A medieval depiction of the Emperor of China.

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Part 3 of 7 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 4 here)

The Stalled Development of Chinese and Islamic Historiography

Did the modern Chinese write better histories than ancient Europeans? Hegel said that “no other people has had a series of historical writers succeeding one another in such close continuity as the Chinese.” (more…)

Theodoros Pelecanos, Ouroboros (1478)

6,611 words

Part 1 of 7 (Part 2 here)

One of the most startling historical truths is that Europeans invented the writing of history as “a method of sorting out the true from the false,” as a conscious search for a rational explanation of the causes of events, while rendering the results of their investigations in sustained narratives of excellent prose. The other peoples of the world, including the Chinese who maintained for centuries a tradition of chronological writers, barely rose above annalistic forms of recording the deeds of rulers or the construction of genealogies devoid of reflections on historical causation. This would not have been judged a controversial view a few decades ago. (more…)

Lived with for millennia, first climbed in 1865: the Matterhorn

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“I was using the mountain to measure myself. The mountain is the means, the man is the end.” — Walter Bonatti (1930-2011)

People who climb mountains are like people who ride motorbikes or take illegal drugs. They tend to have a lot of friends who die young — or they die young themselves. (more…)

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Andrew Roberts is a renowned conservative, Visiting Fellow at Stanford University, and Visiting Professor at King’s College London, who believes that everyone in the world can be educated to love the democratic values of Western civilization. If only blacks and immigrants were taught to appreciate the immense value of Greek (more…)

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Kevin MacDonald introduces the ideas behind his latest book, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, in his talk at the recent Scandza Forum conference in Oslo. (more…)

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Conserving the white race – more specifically, the people who hail from Europe – should be the highest goal of conservatism, for without a strong white race, nothing else so-called conservatives want to conserve is even remotely possible.

Western civilization is synonymous with white civilization. The two are inextricably linked and inseparable. Grecian thought, Roman statecraft, German Idealism, English law – these pillars of humanity rest squarely on the shoulders of the European peoples. (more…)

Oil painting of Heraclitus by Etienne Parrocel (1696-1775)

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To understand why Europeans were the progenitors of the highest accomplishments in history – close to one hundred percent of the great ideas in philosophy, science, anthropology, sociology, economics, geography, geology, astronomy, mathematics, architecture, technology, dance, and music – you must understand the Presocratic self-conscious separation of the knowing “I” from the “not-I.” (more…)

Georg Friedrich Kersting, Faust in his Study

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Part 4 of 4 (Part 3 here)

Definition of “Axial thought”

The Axial Age idea is the most concerted effort to retain aspects of the idea of progress while disallowing Western civilization from claiming to be the most progressive in the sciences, technology, cultural creativity, and forms of state organization. This idea has historical merits. (more…)

The Mask of Agamemnon

4,700 words

Part 3 of 4 (Part 2 here, Part 4 here)

Rituals in simple mythic cultures

According to Bellah, humans express their highest values and cultural practices in those activities we define as “play” and “ritual,” because these activities are performed when humans are in a “relaxed” state away from evolutionary pressures. (more…)