What is the West?

Foreword

vii Foreword This is a remarkable and bracing short book—a powerful meditation, really, a terse 125 pages. I know of no one who has better and more succinctly put together the great contributory streams of the distinctive mind and heart of the West: not only the famous “Athens and Jerusalem” of so many writers, but also ancient Rome and the papal revolution of European Rome from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, together with the later centers of liberal politics and liberal economics, and then the universal sweep of Western ideas. Inhislastchapter,Nemoproposesanewfederation,orunion, orleagueofnationsboundbythedistinctiveideasandtraditions of the West, not as a new state or super-state, but rather as a permanent, sitting organization that could reach common decisions regarding the ideas that give borders and inner strength to the West, and a common strategy on spreading the global reach of human rights, the free and creative economy, and the habits and institutions of political liberty. Especially on the matter of human rights, greater clarity on the part of the participants in Western understandings might certainly be reached in such a federation more readily than in existing international organizations working in multicultural befuddlement . Philippe Nemo was born just after World War II and is one of the younger members of the New Philosophers, whose withering critique of the errors and positive evils of Marxism won them international acclaim and earned for them the journalistic sobriquet, “Solzhenitsyn’s children.” Among his friends of his early years in the university was Remi Brague, who has also won an international reputation , even wider than Nemo’s. Nemo’s own most famous book worldwide is his long dialogue/interview with Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, which is considered possibly the best introduction to the life work of the latter, and has been translated into 11 languages. Both volumes of Nemo’s Histoire des idées politiques have also won distinguished prizes. Nemo holds distinguished positions in the French university system and is one of the brave young champions of liberty in French intellectual life. He presents formidable arguments against the prevailing collectivism that characterizes the French elite. One hardly knows whether to admiremorehiserudition,thebrillianceofhisargumentation , or his intellectual courage in cutting through to his own intellectual path. He makes many bold judgments, acrossmanydisciplines. Readerswhodisagreewithhimon some such particulars will be struck, nonetheless, by the large and stimulating verisimilitude of his larger picture, however original it may be. Readers in America will owe gratitude to the Duquesne University Press for many years to come, for having been viii Foreword the first to bring Philippe Nemo’s work to the American public, as it has been doing for some years now. It is an honor to be permitted to introduce this important new work, which has already appeared to acclaim in a halfdozen languages in Europe. Michael Novak Washington, D.C. ix Foreword ...