The Lost History of Western Civilization is a new contribution to the large and venerable body of literature fighting an academic culture war over “Western civilization.” It offers a powerful refutation of the claim that the idea that there is such thing as a Western civilization was invented by powerful people for nefarious ends, and it is also a useful answer to the charge that studying the history of ideas and poring over texts written by people long dead is a waste of time.

We are amid a cultural moment in which a lot of influential people seem to want to jettison the ideas of the Enlightenment because, they say, those ideas have an unsavory provenance. Kurtz “debunks the debunkers” who claim to have shown that the notion of Western civilization was invented in the service of World War I propaganda efforts. The book caught my attention because of the apparent nihilism and arbitrariness of the “anti-civ” intellectual moment, in which a lot of prominent members of the educated clerisy seem to be offering little more than an exhortation to “burn it all down.” Apparently, we don’t all agree as much as I thought we did on the virtues of the Enlightenment.

An imperialist conspiracy?: Kurtz criticizes a fundamentally incoherent position: “The upshot appears to be that the West is evil; and besides, it doesn’t exist.” He points to three events that gave rise to the anti-civ movement. The first is the historian Gilbert Allardyce’s provocative argument that, in Kurtz’s words, “the very idea of Western civilization is a modern invention devised during World War I as a way of hoodwinking young American soldiers into fighting and dying in the trenches of Europe.” The second is the supposed debunking of Allan Bloom’s 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind. The third is the 1989 controversy over Stanford University’s “Western Civ” class requirement, which was axed in the wake of student protests featuring the infamous, “Hey-hey, ho-ho, Western Civ has got to go!”

Bloom, it turns out, has not been refuted. The Lost History of Western Civilization underscores the importance of Western civilization and restores it to its rightful place in the history of the American — and more broadly, Western — experiment in liberty and individual dignity.

Kurtz divides his analysis into an introduction and three parts, titled “Failed Disbelief,” “How the West Was Lost,” and “Accusation and Its Discontents.” A lot of the book is an exercise in “debunking the debunkers” who saw in the movement for Western Civ courses an imperialist, militarist conspiracy that justified, both retroactively and prospectively, replacing the practices and folkways of Rousseauian noble savages in the Americas and Africa with bourgeois European pseudo-civilization. The supposed “civilizing mission” of the West, critics are quick to argue, has been used to justify all sorts of horrible things, from wars to colonies to empires. However, any ideal can be used badly, as with someone hitting another person in the head with a bike lock or torching a car dealership in the name of “anti-racism” and “anti-fascism.”

Kurtz takes us through the history of studies of Western civilization at Harvard and Princeton, with an emphasis on the informal circulation of Montesquieu’s 1748 Spirit of the Laws and Adam Ferguson’s 1767 Essay on the History of Civil Society. Kurtz also explains how Thomas Jefferson had a related vision for the University of Virginia. Other important texts include William Robertson’s introduction to his biography of Charles V, titled A View of the Progress of Society and Europe, from the Subversion of the Roman Empire to the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century, which has largely been forgotten even though, during his career, Robertson was thought to be the equal of Edward Gibbon or David Hume. Kurtz cites research into circulation records showing that the works of Robertson, Ferguson, and Montesquieu were borrowed frequently from the Harvard library. Robertson had an influence on John Adams, and Montesquieu was added to Harvard’s formal curriculum “around 1783.” Another one of the texts Kurtz highlights, Francois Guizot’s The History of Civilization in Europe, influenced John Stuart Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Karl Marx.

Deconstructing the West: Kurtz takes apart multiculturalism and its modern variants and notes that it “functions less as a coherent philosophy than a system of contradictory intellectual taboos.” It seems to stem from the notion implicit in the Marx-derived “critical” tradition that everything is about power relations; that, pace Michel Foucault, “truth” is a mask for what entrenches and reinforces the powerful. Indeed, elsewhere Kurtz writes, “Culture now means whatever it has to mean in order to prevent a judgment of relative cultural merit from being made.”

The left’s long and distinguished tradition of obfuscating word games — redefining “anti-racism” so as to give it an idiosyncratic meaning that seems to do no more than signal that the speaker or writer reads the right books, journals, and magazines — is a complicating factor here because it produces so much that is dense and obscure. I am reminded of a Calvin and Hobbes strip in which Calvin says: “I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!” Hobbes reads the title of Calvin’s book report, “The Dynamics of Interbeing and Monological Imperatives in Dick and Jane: A Study in Psychic Transrelational Gender Modes.” Calvin finishes: “Academia, here I come!” Things do not seem to have gotten much better.

Kurtz writes:

It all depends on what you think is important. We used to believe that individual liberty, religious freedom, liberal democracy, free markets, constitutionalism, scientific rationality, and the rule of law were significant enough to justify a focus on the traditions that created them — traditions that originated in the biblical and classical worlds, then developed through the Christian Middle Ages and the Europe of the Enlightenment, and finally spread to America and beyond. This was the core idea of Western Civilization as it flourished in the mid-20th century. Deconstructionism is less a way of rebutting this idea than a strategy for ignoring it.

Or destroying it. I am all for detailed and serious inquiry into why the West has not always lived up to its ideals, and I think the important historical question — which economist/​historian Deirdre McCloskey and I try to answer in our new book Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich — is how the West developed these ideals to begin with. The deconstructionist project of multiculturalism, intersectionality, or the Foucaultian/​Marcusean idea that there is no truth, only power, seems to be to reject the idea that these are “ideals” in any meaningful sense. I’m sympathetic to the idea that we need to “decolonize the curriculum” and look at our ideas from different perspectives. My institution, for example, is experimenting with reading the Western canon through the eyes of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King Jr. Unfortunately, some people think that decolonizing the curriculum requires delegitimizing the West.

Progressive conspiracy theories of history do not, in my experience, prove to be persuasive. Kurtz is unmoved by Allardyce and others who contend that Western civilization is a conspiracy by the powerful against the powerless. Allardyce is, of course, aware of efforts like those of Archibald Cary Coolidge in his “great books” History I course at Harvard, but Kurtz notes that to Allardyce, this wasn’t a “real” Western civ class. Kurtz disagrees, noting that

Coolidge required students to master a spare, fact-based book of key dates and events precisely because he rejected more ambitious textbooks in favor of independent reading from primary sources and scholarly works.” “Rightly understood, therefore, Coolidge’s History I was every bit as much a direct ancestor to the mid-20th century efflorescence of Western Civ as Columbia’s Contemporary Civilization course. And it all began a quarter-century before World War I.

I am a lifetime member of the National Association of Scholars and was very intrigued when a colleague forwarded me essayist Mary Eberstadt’s review of The Lost History of Western Civilization in the Claremont Review of Books. It is a useful focusing point and a comforting read for people like me who believe that the history of the West is real, that it has something to recommend it, and that it is more than oppression, subjugation, and power relations all the way down.

I have come to the disconcerting realization that the fight over Western Civ is not a disagreement about facts or interpretation surrounding a bunch of things I thought everyone valued, such as liberty of conscience, long and healthy lives materially provisioned, literacy, and peace. Rather, it is a fight over whether at least some of those things should be valued. Kurtz helps us see how we have come to this disagreement — and how things can be set right again.