The two monographs by highly reputed intellectual historians under review here, Georgios Varouxakis’s The West: The History of an Idea and Anthony Pagden’s The Pursuit of Europe: A History, arrive amidst significant polemics and much uncertainty. Flattering self-images and sanitized historical narratives of “Europe” and “the West” have come under sustained scrutiny and repeated criticism also “from within” in recent years, yielding sharp contestation of their meanings. How will these two key concepts be understood in a world often described as “multipolar,” one in which Europe has in many ways been “provincialized,” and where efforts at “decentering” have become de rigueur in academic discussions? These are some of the larger stakes of Varouxakis’s and Pagden’s intellectual-historical explorations. Even as both authors consciously limit their horizons to the “West’s West” and to “Europeans’ Europe,” their instructive books have much to contribute by way of historicizing and nuancing our discussions. Notwithstanding important differences between them in terms of their main concerns, approaches, and key arguments, a central ambition of both books seems to be the development of empathic perspectives that may also serve as useful antidotes to staunchly critical ones and thereby help launch more open debates about the future.

Georgios Varouxakis is professor of the history of political thought at Queen Mary University of London and researches primarily nineteenth- and twentieth-century international political thought and the intellectual history of ideas of Europe and the West. His previous books were devoted to Victorian political thinkers and analyzed John Stuart Mill’s influential ideas. The West: The History of an Idea is his most wide-ranging and ambitious monograph to date. It endeavors no less than “to reconstruct the history of when, how, and why ‘the West’ emerged as a sociopolitical concept, to what uses it has been put in the two centuries since its emergence, how many different things it has meant, and what the implications and repercussions of each of the different meanings are” (p. xvii). The West thus promises a rather comprehensive intellectual history—and even has recommendations to offer.

The monograph traces the gradual emergence of “the West” in the nineteenth century, particularly in continental European languages and writings. Varouxakis is primarily interested in France, Britain, the German lands, and the US, though he also discusses at some length the new assertiveness of people from “marginalised groups” in the interwar period (199), the deeply tragic predicament that could help endow African Americans with a valuable “double vision,” and the often significant role of Central or Eastern European émigrés (though Russian or Greek thinkers, for instance, receive surprisingly cursory attention). He devotes a separate chapter to Britain, whose role he sees as less crucial than is often assumed, as well as to a fascinating transatlantic journey to the United States and back just when the idea of a “transatlantic and cultural West” was invented. He subsequently explores the meanings and uses of “the West” and “Western civilization” from the outbreak of the Great War to the first phase of analysis of its repercussions in 1919, a time when the prestige of “Western civilization” greatly suffered (though also a time when the decision of the US to get involved was justified as “the defense of Western civilization”). Moreover, the book elaborates on key thinkers and some of their most prominent ideas in the interwar period, during World War II, the Cold War and our contemporary post-Cold War decades, all before advancing in its conclusion an argument regarding “realistic ways of defending desirable principles, without the distortions caused by disputes over the ownership of such principles or values” (24). While interpreting numerous sophisticated arguments and making intriguing connections between them, Varouxakis also rehearses a number of familiar ideas and storylines, such as that the aftermath of the Great War saw discussions about the potential “end of Western civilization,” that the questions of how to “reform” and how to “save” the West were avidly debated after World War II, or that the post-Cold War years brought widely divergent prognoses about the future.

Notwithstanding his highly pluralistic coverage, Varouxakis is much invested in locating origins. The book first seeks to understand when, how, and why the term “the West”’ came to be used to refer not, or not merely, to a geographical or historical entity, but to a social or political one based on supposed cultural or civilizational commonality. The revisionist response Varouxakis articulates is that this highly consequential idea emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century. He argues, perhaps too starkly, that “decisive developments” occurred in the course of 1842 when French philosopher Auguste Comte presented a staunchly anti-imperialist theory and political program (xvii, 14). Comte and his followers’ “Western Republic” was meant to be a peaceful, altruistic federation, even as they propagated a Eurocentric and illiberal program of moral regeneration, the author usefully clarifies.

It was far from coincidental, Varouxakis points out, that French thinkers were the first to come up with federal solutions to Europe’s problems that would take the form of the resurrection of the “Western Empire.” The idea of the West could be particularly useful to them, he notes, as a notion which—unlike the idea of Europe in many of its mainstream understandings—did not place Germany at its center. By asserting the key role of Comte and his followers, Varouxakis’s monograph also substantially challenges the widely held belief that Britons invented “the West” to celebrate their preeminent liberal credentials and legitimize their empire; the book in fact explicitly argues that the earliest uses of “the West” and “Western” came to Britain from continental European languages and discourses, a process to which British Comtists made decisive contributions.

Through making this formidable, if perhaps too bounded, case about the origins of a crucial sociopolitical concept, The West challenges two widespread perspectives: the “classic” one that the history of the West, viewed as an ahistorical, indeed almost metahistorical, idea can be projected back millennia (an idea that can be said to be all around us even today), and the currently rather fashionable one that the idea of the West only emerged in the late nineteenth century as an ideological tool in the service of empire (such a connection to Western expansion and systems of racial domination is forcefully made, among others, in Naoíse Mac Sweeney’s recent longue durée analysis The West: A New History of an Old Idea). Various recent theories about the history of the modern idea of “the West” in the West have in fact “missed the most important link in the story” (67); Varouxakis declares, in striking fashion, that it was only when a differentiation was deemed necessary in opposition to “others” who could also be called Christian and part of Europe that the need for a novel concept of the West arose. In other words, it was primarily in opposition to Russia—the bear in the room, as he memorably phrases it—that “the West” emerged and gained new meaning (34, 42). This crucial assertion of the book indeed exposes the “missing link” between the medieval Europa occidens and the idea of a supra-European West which encompassed European settler colonies.

If this was a seminal intervention that deserves much further discussion, The West has surprisingly little to say about how those two alternative perspectives, which we might refer to as the ahistorical and the decolonial, arose and spread—which is all the more regrettable since Comte’s Western Republic was admittedly a road not taken. What becomes evident when reading these pages is that Varouxakis is far from impressed by contemporary criticisms of “grand narratives of Western civilization” that claim to break new ground against a purportedly dominant monolithic account. He emphasizes that many of the major figures who contributed to the development of ideas on “the West” over the past two centuries—and many of whom are analyzed at some length in these pages, of course—have already castigated “Eurocentrism,” “unilinear histories,” “historiographical biases,” and much more. He adds that narratives of “the West” and “Western civilization” that have long been considered most authoritative in fact argue that “it” began not in ancient times but rather in the eighth, ninth or tenth century CE. These are certainly valuable reminders. However, the author might have done more, I find, to discuss, perhaps as part of his conclusion, how exactly contemporary critical perspectives might be related to, or embedded in, the longer history of the “West’s West” – and what their true originality might consist of, even if many of their features have to be qualified as much less innovative than their proponents maintain.

The author launches his reflections about our moment by emphasizing, among other things, that we do not have a universally accepted label for the era we live in. There is a similar lack of agreement attached to the very meaning of key terms such as “the West,” he continues, to say nothing of evaluations of, or normative attitudes towards, that West, though explicit criticisms currently seem to be far more numerous than defenses (whereby Varouxakis is referencing intellectual discussions, I presume). His intellectual history can indeed be read not only as a broadly conceived genealogical study but also as a history of the present: “again today (or still today),” he argues in his conclusion, “‘the West’ is evoked and needed by people who want to distance themselves from Russia: a Russia which cannot, however, be wished away from being part of ‘Europe’” (331). In other words, The West offers an interpretation of nineteenth-century origins that points to a conundrum which looks conspicuously similar to the one “the West” appears to face today—even though this has to be qualified as at least partly coincidental since Varouxakis must have started his research well before Russia’s devastating invasion of Ukraine and all the consequent fallout.

More generally, Varouxakis’s book is based on a prodigious amount of reading that enables its author to interpret an unusually large number of mostly canonical thinkers. Chapter 8, to take just one conspicuous example, discusses thinkers from Arnold Toynbee and Hannah Arendt, through Raymond Aron and Henry Kissinger, all the way to James Baldwin and Milan Kundera—and runs to no fewer than sixty-three pages. While the individual parts of this mammoth chapter are well crafted and often illuminating, such a sprawling discussion also shows how limited the analytical value of presenting intellectual history by epochs can be, especially when the central idea under scrutiny has been conceptualized in such divergent ways—which in turn points to a more general methodological issue with this otherwise most impressive endeavor.

The book’s primary interest at first appears to be in the permutations of the idea of a social or political entity based on supposed cultural or civilizational commonality. However, across his chapters, Varouxakis touches upon a host of related ideas, such as those concerning a historical West, a rationalist West, a religious West, a Western civilization, a purportedly universal West, the (often unfulfilled) promise of the West, a destructive and/or suicidal West, a self-critical and hopefully also self-corrective West, and so on. All these may be based on broad notions of commonality, of course, but the book is less clear on when, and exactly how, the various authors under analysis actually referred to a “social or political entity”—and in which cases, conversely, they used notions that are not much more than they appear at first, i.e. religious, historical, intellectual, and so on. Varouxakis clearly recognizes that the modern social and political concept of the West is deeply intertwined with, and often substantially based on, such religious, historical, intellectual etc. notions and the related powerful narratives, many of which originated earlier. However, the systematic study of the history of such complex entanglements between his modern concept originating in and around 1842 and its manifold predecessors and accompaniments would deserve a further volume, I believe.

That is also to suggest that while Varouxakis’s intention to contribute to broader discussions is laudable, especially given the quality of much public argument concerning his subject, and while his conscious avoidance of “academese” is a quite understandable corollary of that intention, the absence of an explicit methodological agenda, let alone in-depth methodological reflections, remains a problematic aspect of his massive scholarly accomplishment. The West in fact seems to employ a mixed approach without being explicit about it. It is interested in the transformations of the semantics of a concept, which makes its agenda akin to Begriffsgeschichte. However, its approach is primarily focused on single authors and their often highly specific ideas and discourses. What Varouxakis manages to demonstrate through this mixed approach is not only that the meanings of “the West” have been multifaceted, contingent and contextual (which sound like familiar starting points for intellectual historians), but also that they do not neatly correspond to left–right divides, nor are they intrinsically a matter of “race,” “white supremacy,” “imperialism,” or “any of the other contentious issues with which at various historical junctures certain users of the term have identified it” (334). Realizing the latter may indeed be a crucial step towards “depolemicizing,” and creating space for, more complex historical understanding.

Varouxakis reminds his readers in this context that key terms such as “the West” cannot be abolished by the fiat of normative political philosophers or historians. Such attempts in fact only increase the danger that this crucial idea will be monopolized by those who reference so-called “Western values” and claim ownership of them on behalf of “Western people,” he usefully adds. Suggesting such a connection between values and their “original owners” has not only resulted in much bad history writing, he rightly complains, but—by making it seem as if they were asking their fellow group members to “betray their own essence and become another”—it also makes the constructive striving of many across the globe much more fraught. (To demonstrate historically why such claims to ownership are untenable is the aim of Amitav Acharya’s new The Once and Future World Order: Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West, an alternative to much bad history writing by a scholar of global international relations.)

If these points sounded eminently reasonable, The West also pleads for reclaiming a tradition that is ready to critique itself in terms of its own normative principles – and does not pretend to be universalistic at the same time. In other words, what Varouxakis’s book seems to suggest is that key Western principles, including the principles defining Western traditions of self-examination, may be historically specific rather than universal, but there is nothing uniquely Western about so-called Western values—a nuanced perspective indeed that wider public debates could benefit much from applying.

The author of The Pursuit of Europe, Anthony Pagden, is acting professor of political science and history at UCLA. He is a highly distinguished scholar whose career has spanned over half a century by now and has included the completion of reputed works on an unusual breadth of major subjects—on the languages of early modern political theory, on the Enlightenment, on Iberian and Spanish American intellectual history, on intercontinental perceptions and encounters, on the origins of comparative ethnology, on empires and wars, and, most recently, on global order, among other matters. His recent The Pursuit of Europe offers another of his characteristically wide-ranging and ambitious interpretations. It arrives at a time when ideas and projects of Europe have received extended attention from a variety of scholars, such as—perhaps most notably—Stella Ghervas, Kiran Klaus Patel, Mats Andrén, and Shane Weller.

The Pursuit of Europe is a monograph that emphasizes, more than Varouxakis’s The West, the ideological force of convictions. If Varouxakis’s book paints a colorful panorama with a focus on Comtean origins but otherwise appears to have no straight plotline or central character, Pagden’s book is interested in intellectual contributions that have come to matter politically in the history of European integration. It interprets, often in intriguing ways, a host of relevant writers, politicians, philosophers, and jurists, while rather seamlessly integrating recent theorizing and reflections on Europe’s and especially the EU’s current predicament too. In my reading, Pagden engages with philosopher and historian Carlo Cattaneo—a liberal republican and a “most powerful and convinced advocate of a federal Europe” (62) back in the nineteenth century, as Pagden refers to him, who claimed, as we read at the beginning of the concluding chapter, that “Europe had always possessed four unifying features: the power of the former imperial authority, the Roman Law, Christianity, and the Latin language” (264)—as a most significant interlocutor (even if Cattaneo could admittedly not foresee the new kind of post-sovereign international organization that, in the depiction of Pagden, the EU has become).

Through a wide-ranging and substantial introduction that revolves primarily around the ideas of Immanuel Kant and nine essentially chronological chapters consisting of numbered mini-essays, The Pursuit of Europe studies an ambition which is, as the book’s very first sentence ponders, also a dream and perhaps an illusion—and which is somewhere midway between nation and humanity and might thus be rather adequately captured, Pagden points out rather unexpectedly later on, by Carl Schmitt’s notion of Grossraum. In other words, his book is primarily interested in the origins and transformation of the objectives, aspirations, and ideals that have driven the EU’s “founders” and “midwives”—which is how he refers to the crucial role of Altiero Spinelli, whose proposals the contemporary EU closely reflects, Pagden argues, if admittedly in rather distorted form—and all their “successors.” Unlike Varouxakis’s episodic and discontinuous narrative, The Pursuit of Europe thus outlines a history that may lack an endpoint but has a recognizable direction. It is a history elaborated via clear theses; Pagden’s may indeed be categorized as intellectual history with political scientists also in mind. As the author writes in his conclusion,

The European Union is “undoubtedly the most sustained, most far-reaching, most successful attempt to unite the peoples of Europe there has ever been—with the possible exception of the Roman Empire” (263), he remarks in a rather celebratory passage which is bound, I believe, to strike many contemporary ears as rather discordant in an age of the hollowing out of democracies and deepening “polycrisis.”

A starting point for Pagden’s narrative is that by the late eighteenth century the sense that, despite almost perennial conflict, there existed “a common European territory, some kind of common European identity, and common European interests, and that ultimately the individual states of Europe could not survive without each other,” had become “something of a commonplace” (3). Attractive images of free states bound together by a single body of law and a common citizenship in which a large number of diverse cultures and systems of belief could flourish unhindered have been circulating ever since, The Pursuit of Europe shows in detail, even if the exact shape that their organization was to take has tended to remain underdefined, it cleverly adds. In the meantime, European integration and unification have managed to progress rather far via a series of interlocking treaties, the book elaborates, and have in effect created a system of European public law. This system “has been seen” as “the outcome of a process,” so goes one of the book’s main theses, that has given formal expression to “the European capacity for creating alliances between peoples, and as such has been a crucial aspect of the European civilizing process” (243, added emphasis).

Note how the complex construction Pagden uses here draws directly on some of the primary sources under scrutiny while cleverly expressing analytical distance through the verb I italicized—a duality which I perceive as rather characteristic of his manner of presenting actors’ perspectives while consistently gesturing at a meta level. This results in a book that is richly textured and includes numerous intriguing insights, but one where the narrator’s exact interpretation of what he has presented often remains rather brief or even somewhat implicit. If this amounted to a refined stylistic pattern which invites complex thinking processes, the main theses concerning modern and contemporary European history that The Pursuit of Europe proposes strike me as more conventional. In fact, I couldn’t help but think at times that this could well be the most erudite textbook I have ever read—one which, just like most other textbooks, intends to impart several constructive lessons to its readers.

European identity and the struggle for European unity have played out as a dual response to war and the resulting nationalism, Pagden tells us (23). The rejection of pretensions at a universal empire in the vein of Napoleon Bonaparte implied that peoples were ready to arm themselves against tyranny, which in turn laid the foundation of liberty in modern Europe, we read, this time via a quote from John Robert Seeley originally penned in 1886 (36). With national movements, a new project to unite the different peoples of Europe began too, the author explains, as there was now growing recognition not only that these peoples shared a common culture but also that their individual freedom and collective security were inextricably intertwined. Presented in a sophisticated and often illuminating manner in these pages, these remain well-rehearsed arguments, of course.

Somewhat ironically for a broad overview of intellectual ideas that have mattered politically, the reflections that The Pursuit of Europe offers on narrower subjects are often more nuanced and critical than the main theses that drive the narrative. In my assessment, Pagden presents especially valuable insights into the much-debated question of sovereignty and the conundrum arising from the fact that a guardian of the freedom of all national governments must enjoy a separate freedom of its own; into the shrewd, if frequently unsatisfying, combination of uncontentious language and unspoken assumptions in the EU; into how the prevalent interpretation of the principle of subsidiarity can unduly empower courts and limit the democratic potential of the union; and into how attachment to the union could only develop substantially through a more robust and compelling form of citizenship and far stronger participation.

If Varouxakis’s book finds a depolemicizing middle path, Anthony Pagden sounds like a liberal cosmopolitan in these pages who does not believe in abandoning the achievements of the nation-state. By drawing on Jürgen Habermas’s reflections in particular, he maintains that the EU is bound to reimagine the achievements of the European nation-state—which has been widely perceived by Europeans as the only form in which modern liberal democracy can thrive, he suggests in another fine example of the manner of writing discussed above—“beyond its frontiers in a new form” (56). He goes on to suggest, in a further instance of a rather well-rehearsed argument, that it is therefore all the more crucial to reject antiliberal temptations and what he presents (arguably too polemically) as the Hegelian and neo-Hegelian idea of the state as a self-sufficient spiritual entity that confers ethical being on its members rather than the other way round.

If Pagden’s cautious call to reimagine liberal democracy beyond the nation-state may well strike readers as reasonable enough, his discussion of modern European empires remains too restricted in scope and is at times also quite ambiguous in tone, I find. The Pursuit of Europe depicts those empires as another expression of the impulse to nation building that contributed to undermining liberal nationalism in modern Europe but also as projects of expansion that enhanced the sense of a collective European identity and fueled international law. As Ernest Renan memorably put it in 1871 (which the book quotes and which must remind us of Varouxakis’s notion of the West developed by Comte), Europe became a “confederation of states united by the common idea of civilization” (102). If these might be qualified as rather anodyne arguments about imperialism that lack a critical edge, in its preoccupation with habit, training, and upbringing, this idea of civilization also contrasted markedly, Pagden maintains, with plain racism that was always intended to justify conquest and appropriation (99). It is far from unreasonable for intellectual historians to distinguish between civilizational and racist discourses; however, such a stark contrasting of the two remains a rather poor guide to narrating the historical processes that Pagden’s book is supposed to analyze; those two kinds of discourse have too plainly strengthened each other for that, with well-known, massive consequences. In other words, not only is The Pursuit of Europe explicitly interested in an ambition somewhere between nation and humanity, but also the scale of its own intellectual ambition can be located somewhere between the two but ultimately closer to the former.

To conclude, Georgios Varouxakis’s The West and Anthony Pagden’s The Pursuit of Europe both study an impressive variety of thinkers across recent centuries. Intended as an intellectual-history book for a broader public, The West paints a colorful panorama to foreground the essential role of self-critique. The Pursuit of Europe may be described as an intellectual-history book with political scientists also in mind. It suggests, contrary to The West, a main storyline and articulates an affirmative stance towards its subject. However, even as Varouxakis illuminates the origins of a crucial modern concept while aiming to pluralize its understanding, while Pagden develops a narrative that could historically inform and intellectually refocus the debates surrounding Europe’s and the EU’s special path and current predicament, what they both show is just how much more substantial our contemporary polemics could become if their rich intellectual genealogies were reexamined critically but emphatically—rather than being rejected thoroughly or simply claimed.