Ancient Philosophy - General & Miscellaneous, Political Science - History, European Philosophy - General & Miscellaneous, Political Philosophy, History of Philosophy, Civilization - General & Miscellaneous

From Plato to NATO

Name: From Plato to NATO
Author: David Gress
ISBN: 9780684827896

by David Gress

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Overview

An in-depth intellectual history of the Western idea and a passionate defense of its importance to America's future, From Plato to NATO is the first book to make sense of the legacy of the West at a time when it is facing its greatest challenges. Readers of Francis Fukuyama, John Gray, Samuel Huntington, and other analysts of the dilemmas of Western nations in the 21st century will find in David Gress' original account a fuller description of what the West really is and how, with the best of intentions, it has been misrepresented. Most important, they will encounter a new vision of Western identity and how it can be recovered.

Early in the 20th century, American educators put together a story of Western civilization, its origins, history, and promise that for the subsequent 50 years remained at the heart of American college education. The story they told was of a Western civilization that began with the Greeks and continued through 2,500 years of great books and great ideas, culminating in 20th-century progressive liberal democracy, science, and capitalist prosperity.

In the 1960s, this Grand Narrative of the West came under attack. Over the next 30 years, the critics turned this old story into its opposite: a series of anti-narratives about the evils, the failures, and the betrayals of justice that, so they said, constituted Western history.

The victory of Western values at the end of the cold war, the spread of democracy and capitalism, and the worldwide impact of American popular culture have not revived the Grand Narrative in the European and American heartlands of the West. David Gress explains this paradox, arguing that the Grand Narrative of the West was flawed from the beginning: that the West did not begin in Greece and that, in morality and religion, the Greeks were an alien civilization whose contribution was mediated through Rome and Christianity. Furthermore, in assuming a continuity from the Greeks to modern liberalism, we have mistakenly downplayed or rejected everything in between, focusing on the great ideas and the great books rather than on real history with all its ambiguities, conflicts, and contradictions.

The heart of Gress's case for the future of the West is that the New must remember its roots in the Old and seek a synthesis. For as the attacks have demonstrated, the New West cannot stand alone. Its very virtues -- liberty, reason, progress -- grew out of the Old West and cannot flourish when removed from that rich soil.

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Editorials

Anthony Gottlieb

An account of the evolution of the idea of the West. . . .Gress' defense. . .of rationality, science, technology, and liberalism is, on its own, worth the price of the book. —The New York Times Book Review

James Bowman

Though I liked this book very much, I sometimes wondered if its author quite realized what he was opposed to in writing it....He gives us capsule summaries of a huge range of historical, economic, sociological, religious, and philosophical thought....at times I wished he had arranged his book, as it is encylopedic in scope, in encyclopedic form.
— The New Criterion

Roger Kimball

Can the West survive -- and thrive -- in the third millennium? The answer depends in part on whether the 'chronological mypoia' and 'historical illiteracy' that Mr. Gress warns about worsen. No one has the answer to that question, but From Plato to NATO is a welcome sign that the battle has not been lost. -- National Review

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Conventional historians, asserts Gress in this original, sweeping study, see Western civilization as a progressive, linear sequence 'from Plato to NATO,' meaning that our modern ideals of freedom and democracy flowed directly from classical Greece. To the contrary, argues Gress, the notion of modern political liberty -- a set of practices and institutions -- took shape between the fifth and eighth centuries in a synthesis of classical, Christian and Germanic cultures. Gress' thesis that the Germanic tribes who invaded the former Roman Empire infused new energy and an ethos of heroic, aristocratic freedom was popular in the U.S. until the early 20th century, but, as he notes, it fell out of favor after two world wars and the experience of Nazism. The real strength of his scholarly inquiry lies in its fertile dialogue with Gibbon, Tocqueville, Goethe, Nietzsche, Marx, Montesquieu, T.S. Eliot, Joseph Campbell and numerous others as he wrestles with Western survival and the concept of Western identity. Arguing that the U.S. remains the bulwark and heartland of democratic liberal Western values, Gress mounts a withering attack on those he considers motley critics of modern capitalism and the West, including Sartre's slavish Stalinism, Toynbee's anti-Americanism, postmodernist nihilists (Jacques Derrida, Jean-Fran ois Lyotard), multiculturalists who assume that no single culture is preferable to any other and 'Singapore school' economists who divorce economic development from political liberty.

Library Journal

This is a must read for every serious student of Western civilization, not only for its argument that Western civilization does not begin with the Greeks but because it invites us to appreciate anew the West's historical faith in reason, democracy, science, capitalism, and the possibility of human progress. (LJ 6/15/98) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

An erudite examination of the history of the West and what this history has meant to both its proponents and opponents. The West is not, for Gress, a fellow at the Danish Institute of International Affairs, simply an idea. Presented as an unblemished history of progress from ancient Greece to the present, this idealized 'Grand Narrative' in its perfection was easy prey for those who would oppose the West; it couldn't possibly live up to its billing. This 'Grand Narrative' was bad history, and Gress attempts to present a better history. He finds that the modern West evolved not as an idea but as a series of practices and institutions, some quite accidental and fortuitous, some tragic. Specifically, he finds the West to be an amalgam of ancient Roman, Christian, and Germanic cultures (the 'Old West') mixed with the Enlightenment creations of liberty, reason, and economic freedom (the 'New West'). The scholarly detail with which the author presents this history is truly impressive. In the end, he concludes that the West of today, while not universal, not a destination at which all nations will or must arrive, is beyond question worth preserving and defending. He has, however, no patience whatsoever for those who would disparage the West. While his history is an intellectual marvel, his depiction of critics of the West consists of caricature and intellectual chicanery. Any criticism of the West is, for Gress, an attack on the whole tradition, so that the anti-Americanism of the Vietnam era simply became reformulated as anti-Westernism, so that "environmentalism" is nothing more than something invented by people to serve an authoritarian agenda. Thus does scholarship become reduced topolemic. Still, despite its flaws, this is a thought-provoking work, whether one is 'for' or 'against' the West.