THE RISE OF THE WEST AFTER TWENTY-FIVE YEARS

Abstract

Historians approach their subject from the moving platform of their own times, with th result that the past changes shape continually. Anyone who lives to re-read his own work long after wards must therefore expect to recognize signs and hallmarks of the inevitable displacement that time brings to historical under standing. This truism was brought home to me by a seminar devoted to my magnum opus, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community, at Williams College, where I was visiting pro fessor in 1988. It was the first time I had read the book in twenty five years, and the experience of revisiting an old friend?and incubus1?was both humbling and elevating. The book was a sudden, surprising success when it came out in 1963. Lavish praise from Hugh Trevor-Roper in the New York Times Book Review and the onset of the Christmas season briefly lifted it to the best-seller list; the book has remained in print ever since. A cheap paperback ($1.25 for 828 pages!) sold out of an initial printing within a year, and cumulative sales of the full-sized book amount by now to more than 75,000. In retrospect it seems obvious that The Rise of the West should be seen as an expression of the postwar imperial mood in the

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