Rolf Petri,A Short History of Western Ideology: A Critical Account

Reviewed by: Willie Thompson, South Shields, UK

It could be suggested that a short history of Western ideology would be very short indeed since there is actually no such thing. Rather, what is loosely and conventionally known as ‘the West’ has been the theatre of fiercely (and frequently bloody) competing ideologies – monarchism, liberalism, socialism, fascism among them. The one ideology that could at first impression be said to be common to its disparate nations is nationalism, but that too was in the past bitterly contested by monarchists in multinational empires and in its modern form is scarcely confined to Europe and the Americas.

Short it may be, but this volume could not be said to be an easy read. Its syntax is congested, to the extent of obscuring the intended meaning in some paragraphs, and the reader is further annoyed to find that practically every paragraph contains at least one Harvard system reference and sometime several. Petri’s reference bibliography extends to no fewer than twenty-two and a half pages, and while that might be regarded as a tribute to the author’s thoroughness and exactitude it is also a trial to the reader’s patience in disentangling text and reference. The author acknowledges a strong debt of influence to John Gray – not the author of the notorious Men are from Mars… but a misanthropic commentator who is scarcely the sharpest knife in the intellectual cutlery drawer.

The text is not exempt from occasional factual errors, such as the reference to ‘Lord Gladstone’ (51). In what is certainly ‘a critical account’, what Petri means by ‘the West’ is never geographically defined with any precision, and any definition would be subject to objection, though it might be roughly assumed to constitute the European states west of the Oder–Neisse border between Germany and Poland, plus the USA and possibly the rest of the Americas, not to mention the UK’s Australasian ex-colonies. On the opening page of the volume he favourably quotes Gray’s assertion that if anything defines the West, ‘it is the pursuit of salvation in history, it is historical teleology – the belief that history has a built-in purpose or goal’; from the Puritan settlers in North America to the current certainties of global warming deniers, both secular and religious. History is predestined, according to rival adherents of teleology, either for scientific advance ad infinitum – possibly even colonizing the stars – or else divine intervention in a religious Apocalypse, but in any case Western ideology is permeated at its core with an ‘eschatological and apocalyptic vision of history’ (201).

The focus of Petri’s volume becomes Western imperialism, its ferocity covered for public consumption with a rhetorical patina of liberalism and benevolent civilizing intentions, whether religious or secular and in the current context ‘human rights’. On this he writes from an unwaveringly hostile viewpoint (one which the present reviewer entirely shares), citing many examples and instancing particularly the near-annihilation of the Amerindian peoples, proceeding as the rulers of the USA and its opinion-formers with genocidal hypocrisy, pursued their ruthless project of ‘manifest destiny’ (62–4; 108–9, etc.) Nowadays:

Crime and punishment in the field of human rights seems to concern weaker actors such as local dictators who transform from allies into brutal state leaders and mass murderers overnight. Democratic leaders of the west and the great powers in general are de facto enjoying a preemptive general amnesty, no matter what they might commit in terms of kidnapping, imprisonment, murder, torture, drone strikes, cluster bombing, or waging wars of aggression. (138)

There is, however, a basic flaw in Petri’s approach – the analysis is in philosophic terms almost wholly idealist, in the sense that abstract beliefs, prejudices and attitudes are seen as the propelling force behind events, though the material foundations for them are not addressed. The press of material circumstances gets very little consideration in Petri’s examination of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Neither ‘industry’ nor ‘industrial revolution’ appear in the index: ‘capitalism’ does, but only marginally and in relation to the twentieth century. Even in terms of Western ideology as a belief system separate from its material underpinning there are significant gaps. There is no mention of Deism, the religious outlook of most of the US founding fathers with their exterminatory and slaveholding practices, as well as many other eighteenth-century intellectuals, nor any reference to Thomas Malthus or Edmund Burke, two writers of great importance in the perceptions of nineteenth-century western elites.

To Petri’s credit his final chapter is entitled ‘Ecology and Apocalypse’, demonstrating his attention to the dominating issues in contemporary affairs and with the intention of examining how these might relate to Western ideology, but unfortunately this concluding text reads more like a series of disconnected and incidental observations rather than a coherent analysis of where we are at in these respects. This ‘short history’ leaves the impression of a valuable discussion struggling to get out of an inadequate cocoon. Perhaps the author should think of producing a successor volume with thoughtful attention to the problems indicated above.