Over the past 40 years, American universities have descended into a kind of academic Cubism, which can be defined as the “ability to make the familiar unrecognizable—without providing new insights.” Stanley Kurtz’s short, brilliant book, the Lost History of Western Civilization, is an account of a key chapter in the development of this institutionalized obfuscation: the deconstruction of the once enormously popular Western Civilization course at Stanford University. It was precisely its longstanding popularity, notes Kurtz, that initiated the attack on Western Civ in the 1980s, most notably by Gilbert Allardyce, a Stanford graduate and 1960s radical.
In 1982, Allardyce wrote an article for the prestigious American Historical Review entitled “The Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course.” He argued that “Western Civ” as an academic staple was invented at Columbia during World War I to explain to American troops why they were fighting in Europe. In the nineteenth century, argued Allardyce and later revisionists, Americans saw themselves as exceptional and rejected the thesis of continuity with European history. The “West,” as a cultural and intellectual entity of shared values and concerns, was a false construct.
Debunking Allaryce’s claims, Kurtz observes that “the 20th century Western Civilization course was essentially a condensation . . . of large tracts of the nineteenth century curriculum into a single course.” Radical historians borrowed from postmodernist theorist Michel Foucault’s claim to have uncovered “a regime of truth,” but these critics imposed an ahistorical ignorance on American academic life. Their deconstructionist playbook, which saw family, culture, and national identity as instruments of oppression, had no room for the likes of the great nineteenth-century French liberal intellectual and politician François Guizot, whose 1828 Histoire générale de la civilisation en Europe was widely read by American academics. Guizot’s defense of British liberties and condemnation of the excesses of Jean-Jacques Rousseau had an enormous influence on Alexis de Tocqueville—and it was Tocqueville who saw the centrality of American exceptionalism for a life of liberty.
In January 1987, Stanford students, accompanied by then-presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, kicked off the modern culture wars by chanting together “Hey, hey, ho ho/ Western Civ has got to go.” Go it did. In a suicidal thrust, one university after another eliminated the Western Civ course, along with a general interest in the humanities.
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