Occidentalism
by Ian Buruma, Avishai Margalit
CivilizationWestern influencesWestern CivilizationVijandbeeldInfluence occidentale
0.0
Open LibraryAbout this book
Twenty-five years ago, Edward Said's Orientalism spawned a generation of scholarship on the denigrating and dangerous mirage of "the East" in the Western colonial mind. But "the West" is the more dangerous mirage of our own time, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit argue, and the idea of "the West" in the minds of its self-proclaimed enemies remains largely unexamined and woefully misunderstood. Occidentalism is their groundbreaking investigation of the demonizing fantasies and stereotypes about the Western world that fuel such hatred in the hearts of others. We generally understand "radical Islam" as a purely Islamic phenomenon, but Buruma and Margalit show that while the Islamic part of radical Islam certainly is, the radical part owes a primary debt of inheritance to the West. Whatever else they are, al Qaeda and its ilk are revolutionary anti-Western political movements, and Buruma and Margalit show us that the bogeyman of the West who stalks their thinking is the same one who has haunted the thoughts of many other revolutionary groups, going back to the early nineteenth century. In this genealogy of the components of the anti-Western worldview, the same oppositions appear again and again: the heroic revolutionary versus the timid, soft bourgeois; the rootless, deracinated cosmopolitan living in the Western city, cut off from the roots of a spiritually healthy society; the sterile Western mind, all reason and no soul; the machine society, controlled from the center by a cabal of insiders—often Jews—pulling the hidden levers of power versus an organically knit-together on…
Themes & subjects
CivilizationWestern influencesWestern CivilizationVijandbeeldInfluence occidentaleBeeldvorming
Setting
Developing countries
About the authors
Avishai Margalit
22 March 1939
Avishai Margalit (Hebrew: אבישי מרגלית, b. 1939 in Afula, British Mandate for Palestine - today Israel) is an Israeli Professor Emeritus in philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. From 2006 to 2011, he served as the George F. Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. **Source**: [Avishai Margalit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avishai_Margalit) on Wikipedia
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