Naoíse Mac Sweeney delivers an exploration of how "Western Civilization"—the concept of a single cultural inheritance extending from ancient Greece to modern times—is a figment of our collective imagination.
One by one she takes on hoary old myths... explodes them with panache, and leaves us instead with a richer, fuller understanding of epochs, worldviews and fascinating individuals from the past ... Though this argument again treads over familiar ground, Mac Sweeney’s gift for sparkling synthesis and gripping personal vignettes never flags. She’s especially alert to the many reinterpretations of Greco-Roman antiquity that accompanied every new fabrication of "western civilisation.
All this is presented in fluent and accessible prose, and Ms. Mac Sweeney skillfully blends analysis, erudition and anecdote. Inevitably, in a book of this scope, there are some misfires ... Oddly, Ms. Mac Sweeney doesn’t really address the emergence of the West as a political concept. Surprisingly, she says little about the importance of Athenian democracy or about the broad movement toward wider participation that created so much of what we now regard as characteristic of the West.
Despite its title, The West: A new history of an old idea has little to say about the history of the idea of "the West" ... She is distinctly hazy as to when and why an idea of "the West" and "western civilization" first emerged, and, more importantly, exactly how it differed from older cultural constructs ... A more serious problem with The West derives from Mac Sweeney’s choice to focus pretty much exclusively on the Greco-Roman strand in the founding mythology of the West. The paradoxical result is that she ends up reinforcing a very old-fashioned problematic of Western Civ ... This is a pity, because when Mac Sweeney gets down to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries... she has fascinating things to say about alternative ways of mapping the history of cultures.
