From Plato to NATO

Description

An in-depth intellectual history of the Western idea and a passionate defense of its importance to America's future, From Plato to NATO is the first book to make sense of the legacy of the West at a time when it is facing its greatest challenges. Readers of Francis Fukuyama, John Gray, Samuel Huntington, and other analysts of the dilemmas of Western nations in the twenty-first century will find in David Gress's original account a fuller description of what the West really is and how, with the best of intentions, it has been misrepresented. Most important, they will encounter a new vision of Western identity and how it can be recovered. The heart of Gress's case for the future of the West is that the New must remember its roots in the Old and seek a synthesis.

First Sentence

The first step to recovering the history of Western identity from the wreckage of the Grand Narrative is to understand that the narrative was not some revealed truth about Western civilization temporarily granted to American educators during the hegemony of the classical-assimilationist, meritocratic, and humanistic-version of American liberalism in culture and education, and then taken away again as that hegemony succumbed to political and cultural attack in the 1960s and following decades.

Subjects

Other Editions

• From Plato to NATO: the idea of the West and its opponentsFree Press1998-01-01
• From Plato to NATOPaperbackFree Press2004-05-19