What Is Western Civilization?

a political football in recent years in the struggle between the conservative forces of cultural homogeneity and the break-away forces of cultural pluralism. Lost in the struggle is any sense of what exactly constitutes Western Civilization. The major textbooks are no help; few if any attempt to define the temporal and spatial dimensions of the civilization they claim to study. R. R. Palmer, for example, in his History of the Modern seems to have conceived of a Western centered around the Mediterranean and beginning with the Greeks. Eventually, after expanding under the Roman Empire, it broke apart into three segments in the early Middle Ages. However, in effect, what Palmer calls the Modem World is simply what other historians call the Western which developed out of the Germanic segment. In contrast, Frank Roy Willis defines the West as civilization that developed in the continent of Europe and was carried to ... areas in other parts of the globe that were colonized people from Europe, a definition that may or may not include the Greeks and the Romans. Edward Burns, Robert Lerner and Standish Meacham are even more ambivalent. On the one hand, they write, among all peoples of the ancient world, the one whose culture most clearly exemplified the spirit of Western society was the Greek or Hellenic. On the other hand, the same writers note that by about 700 A.D., in place of a united Rome, there were