The very title of Michael Kimmage’s work of intellectual history—“The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy”—comes with a shock of recognition. Why, yes, who in the realm of foreign policy now speaks of “the West”? It’s gone. Where did it go? Come to think of it, we more or less abandoned it, didn’t we?
Intellectual history is a tricky genre. In addition to describing what human beings have done, it attempts to discern what people have thought about what they were doing as they did it: how their conceptualization of the world around them shaped them. To try to make sense of this, historians examine what people have said. But there’s no escaping the problem of things that go without saying: the unspoken context of the times, often little understood by those operating within its confines.
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