The West by Georgios Varouxakis

Mark Mazower reviewed The West by Georgios Varouxakis for the Financial Times.

“Oddly, however, most if not all of the ‘great minds’ who feature in the average Plato to Nato pantheon possessed zero consciousness of belonging to ‘the west’. Aristotle would have been mystified by the idea; so would Aquinas or John Locke. For all of them, the west was merely a point on the compass. When did the term move beyond geography to encompass the kinds of ambitious cultural, spiritual and political claims that are now attached to it?

It is this question that Georgios Varouxakis, a historian of political thought at Queen Mary University of London, sets out to answer. What emerges in his hands is a surprisingly recent story of ideological and intellectual complexity that unfolds over some two centuries.”

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