THE WEST AND THE REST
Globalization and the Terrorist Threat
By Roger Scruton
List Item No. 324
ISBN: 1-882926-81-1 (cloth)
200 pages
List Price: $19.95
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Scruton shows how the different religious and philosophical roots of Western and Islamic societies have resulted in those societies' profoundly divergent beliefs about the nature of political order. For one thing, the idea of the social contract, crucial to the self-conception of Western nations, is entirely absent in Islamic societies. Similarly, Scruton explains why the notions of territorial jurisdiction, citizenship, and the independent legitimacy of secular authority and law are both specifically Western and fundamentally antipathetic to Islamic thought.
And yet, says Scruton, for its adherents Islam provides amply for one of the most fundamental of human needs: the need for membership. In contrast, the decay of the West's own political vision, and its concomitant preoccupation with individual choice, has finally led to a "culture of repudiation" in which that need goes increasingly unfulfilled, principally because the sources of its fulfillment—patriotism, religious belief, traditional ways of life—are routinely mocked.
Globalization has made these facts an explosive mixture. Migration, modern communications, and the media have inexorably brought the formerly remote inhabitants of Islamic nations into constant contact with the images, products, and peoples of secular, liberal democracies. Scruton warns that in light of this new reality, certain Western assumptions—about consumption and prosperity, about borders and travel, about free trade and multinational corporations, and about multiculturalism—need to be thoroughly re-evaluated.
Sure to generate debate, The West and the Rest is a major contribution to the West's public discourse about terrorism, civil society, and liberal democracy.
What They're Saying...
"In one of the most cogent books on Islamic-Western relations, Scruton argues that the war on terrorism is based in a misunderstanding of Islamic identity that reflects invidious Western prejudices about immigration, multiculturalism, free trade, and religion."
—Booklist, Editors' Choice for 2002
"Although the author, probably Britain's best-known conservative intellectual, was clearly impelled to write by the events of that ghastly September morning, The West and the Rest is both better written and more ambitious than other works 'inspired' by that day. [T]his is a richly rewarding work, filled with profundity and felicitous phraseology, with occasional dips into near-poetry…."
—Chronicles
"[W]ell worth reading."
—Campus Report
"If books, like whiskey, were rated according to strength, The West and the Rest would weigh in above 100 proof. It is a brief book, but concentrated. I do not mean that it is abstruse or hard to understand: on the contrary, Scruton writes with seductive clarity."
—The New Criterion
"[T]his book-length essay is a thoroughly engaging major contribution to the intellectual defense of one of Western civilization's greatest creations, the liberal-democratic nation-state."
—National Review
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