Although he is an intellectual of the stature of Remy Brague, Philippe Némo has remained almost totally unknown on this side of the Ocean (incidentally, the two are friends and have been colleagues over the years.)

To boast a little (be it said that the name similarity is totally serendipitous) I believe I was the first who in the late 1970s tried to bring his work to the attention of thinking intellectuals in America. I wrote a review article in the Stanford Literary Review about those who were then called “nouveaux philosophes.” Well, thirty years later, Jean-Marie Benoist, the most dynamic and most interesting among them, is, alas, prematurely deceased, Bernard-Henry Levy and Glucksmann are media stars and weekly columnists, and so on. Némo, who had become well-known in France by his “L’homme structural” (in which he argued that the ultimate “signified” can only be God Himself) continued a more “modest” academic career, wrote on Emmanuel Lévinas (a monograph and a dialog-book), several histories of political ideas (including one on liberalism) and particularly an outstanding volume on Job and the issue of evil.

While Roger Scruton’s more cavalier and aggressive work on the West as entity became a best-seller, Némo’s parallel book, translated in English by Duquesne University Press two years after its original 2004 publication in French, was largely ignored. This was a mistake and a marked loss for the audience. I hope that a return to it would therefore be beneficial.

Let me first summarize Némo’s thesis. He pursues a definition of the “West” as opposed to other forms of culture and civilization and he distinguishes five historical features which are indispensable in order to label some part of our globe as belonging to the “West.” According to Némo they are the following: 1) The invention of the “City” (polis) and of freedom under the law, along with the emergence of science and of an educational system in Ancient Greece; 2) the invention of a law system, of private property, of the “human person” and of humanism in republican Rome; 3) the ethical and eschatological revolution brought about by the Bible; the prevalence of charity over justice; the intensive increase of linear time by the acceptance of eschatology (i.e. the actual appearance of History); 4) the “Papal revolution” of the 11th-13th centuries founded on the tight synthesis of “Athens,” “Rome,” and “Jerusalem”; 5) The revolution in science, economy, and politics triggered in Holland, England, North America, France, and soon replicated elsewhere which was conducive to “modernization” and the avant-garde position of the geographical areas where all five features were present.

Now, it becomes quickly obvious, even after reading the chapters devoted to each of these historical characteristics, that qualifications and reserves are in order. Thus, for the first two chapters—the Greek and the Roman—one can point out that some of the features are to be encountered in other, early cultural spaces of the planet, non-Western, non-European ones: Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, the Indian subcontinent and others. At the same time it is probably true that that the “paideia,” a non-technical and non-professional, but rather comprehensive and “humanistic” education, arises in Greek culture and that the “persona” (a term that was likely coined by Cicero) and the “ego” are in a way consequences of the clear-cut legal definition of private property.