Not the least important insight of David Gress’s frequently important and always useful book is that the cultural vandals who have been taking their little hatchets to the idea of “Western Civilization” for the past thirty years or so have been powerfully aided by the overweening of that idea’s advocates and champions. Influenced by America’s civic religion and the tradition of the mythologizing of the Founding Fathers, they invented what Mr. Gress calls the “Grand Narrative” of Western civilization based on a “Magic Moment” theory of historiography. The first and paradigmatic Magic Moment for these theorists was the discovery (as they imagined it) by the ancient Greeks of the abstract principles of democracy and individual liberty. History since then can be summed up as the loss and rediscovery of these principles in further Magic Moments, such as the Enlightenment or the founding of the American Republic, and also in a series of “Great Books” wrenched from their historical contexts.
Educators had to make up reasons why it was for the public good that they continued to do what they had always done.
This simpleminded compendium of history, ironically summarized in Mr. Gress’s title, was created to meet the twin demands of Cold War propaganda and the postwar democratization of American higher education. But it was always going to be an easy mark for unruly students—or, nowadays, unruly professors—flushed with the shocking and permanently disillusioning discovery that, say, both the Greeks and the Founding Fathers owned slaves. Moreover,
