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Podcast: New Books in Western European Studies
Episode: Georgios Varouxakis, "The West: The History of an Idea" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Description: How did âthe Westâ come to be used as a collective self-designation signaling political and cultural commonality? When did âWesternersâ begin to refer to themselves in this way? Was the idea handed down from the ancient Greeks, or coined by nineteenth-century imperialists? Neither, writes Georgios Varouxakis in The West: The History of an Idea (Princeton UP, 2025), his ambitious and fascinating genealogy of the idea. âThe Westâ was not used by Plato, Cicero, Locke, Mill, or other canonized figures of what we today call the Western tradition. It was not first wielded by empire-builders. It gradually emerged as of the 1820s and was then...