Twentieth-century discourse still treated the civilizing West as descended from eastern barbarians

Evidence

You’d think it was straight from the eighteenth century. Having come from the shadowy East, the men who had been civilized continued the same westward march as Attila, Tamburlaine and so many other famous men. Any man who can be described as “civilized” was once a barbarian. They were, in other words, the bastard sons of the adventurers of the night, or those the enemy (the Romans, the Greeks) had corrupted. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 213

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Islamophobia field’s genealogy of how ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’ are historically constructed binaries — the same binary Orientalism later inverts. — connects to: The West-Rest discourse persists and still shapes modern sociology — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 688; Rising non-Western cultures relativized the Western episteme; The Rest was constitutive of the West’s identity and knowledge — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 686 (+3 more)

Related

• The West-Rest discourse persists and still shapes modern sociology (similarity 0.90)
• The West and the Rest is a constructed, contingent discourse (similarity 0.85)
• Rising non-Western cultures relativized the Western episteme (similarity 0.82)
• Modernization theory repackaged Orientalist racism in social-science guise (similarity 0.81)
• The West and the Rest is constituted as a discourse, not a geography (similarity 0.81)
• The West-and-Rest discourse became the dominant Western way of representing itself and others (similarity 0.81)
• The West required the Rest as a conceptual opposite to define itself. (similarity 0.81)
• The West concept classifies, represents, compares, and evaluates societies (similarity 0.81)
• The West’s entitlement to own the nonwhite world rests on defining it as subhuman (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalist discourse frames Westerners and Orientals as absolute binary opposites. (similarity 0.80)
• The West and the Rest are mutable historical and linguistic constructs, not fixed entities. (similarity 0.80)
• The idea of the West helped constitute the West itself (similarity 0.80)
• Western civilization discourse was built on a constructed binary of superiority and inferiority (similarity 0.79)
• A shared East-West binary grounds vast and diverse bodies of thought (similarity 0.79)
• Western civilization legitimizes dominance by narrating itself as temporal superiority (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Western civilization legitimizes dominance by narrating itself as temporal superiority #corroborates (0.88) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 281
• Orientalist discourse reduces human plurality to a few fixed collective abstractions #exemplifies (0.85)
• Orientalism presents Arabs as static types rather than historical agents #exemplifies (0.85)
• The Rest was constitutive of the West’s identity and knowledge #corroborates (0.75) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 686
• Rising non-Western cultures relativized the Western episteme #corroborates (0.72)