The West: Its Past and Its Prospects

Edited by Kiron Skinner and Russell A. Berman

With this issue of Telos, we hope to open up a discussion about the prospects for the West, including both the cultural and political dimensions. In recent decades, during the post–Cold War period, U.S. foreign policy has lurched between the notional unilateralism of the Bush era (although it was never as unilateral as its adversaries insinuated) and the Obama administration’s commitment to the universalism of international law (although it has been prepared to break those rules when it deemed it necessary). A serious revisiting of the ‘West’ will hopefully generate new perspectives adequate to current foreign policy challenges, especially as the competition between East and West reemerges as the defining feature of world affairs. A broad discussion of the West, its past and its prospects, is urgently needed, and we hope that this issue of the journal will contribute to it.

Introduction
Russell A. Berman

The Multiple Meanings of "the West" and the Indispensability of the United States
Jeffrey Herf

The Rise and Fall of the West: An American Story
Michael C. Kimmage

What Was the West?
Charles Hill

The West as Rationality and Representation: Reading Habermas's Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere through Schmitt's Theory of the Partisan
David Pan

Reinhold Niebuhr and the Irony of American History in and after the Cold War
Luca G. Castellin

Commonwealth and Covenant: The West in a Neo-Medieval Era of International Affairs
Adrian Pabst

The Role of the Judeo-Christian Tradition in the Development and Continuing Evolution of the Western Synthesis
Mary Frances McKenna

What Makes the West the West?
Angelo M. Codevilla

Chinese Political Culture
Gerard Williams

Reviews

Thomas Sowell and the New Class
Russell A. Berman

From Brooklyn to the West: Daniel Fuchs
Russell A. Berman