Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Europe: A Civilization On The Edge, Peter O'Brien

Political Science Faculty Research

Our European culture is one that has staked its all on the universal and the danger menacing it is that of perishing by the universal.

Jean Baudrillard¹

Rémi Brague rejects common charges of Eurocentrisim leveled against Western civilization. He prefers to characterize the West as "eccentric," meaning off center. He equates Western civilization with Europe and understands it as that civilization which grew out of the western half of the Roman Empire and with time differentiated itself from Byzantine and Islamic civilizations (themselves successors to the Roman heritage). He labels Europe eccentric because it stands (physically and figuratively) on …