David Gress, From Plato to Nato (New York: Free Press, 1998), 592 pp., $28.

Christopher Coker, Twilight of the West (Boulder, co: Westview Press, 1998), 203 pp., $28.

Is the West an idea? A civilization? Or a set of political
arrangements? Plainly it is all three and, as a result, difficult to
pin down between hard covers. For if we talk about the decline of the
West, we may be discussing the difficulties that NATO encounters in
formulating policy toward the Balkans, or the rise of ideologies such
as environmentalism that blame the problems of the world on Western
science and capitalism, or the debasement of Western (and other)
cultures by Hollywood's entertainment industry. Or ten other topics.

So both David Gress and Christopher Coker have set themselves a
formidable task when they attempt to chart the West's progress. And
though they are fairly near to each other on the political
spectrum--Mr. Gress being a judicious Danish neoconservative and Mr.
Coker a pessimistic English conservative--they have written very
different books. To oversimplify, Mr. Gress is inclined to stress the
concept of the West as an organic civilization--though one repeatedly
riven by civil and cultural wars--and therefore to believe that its
political structures are natural and likely to survive. Mr. Coker
tends to see the West as an idea in the minds of poets and
philosophers, and he therefore envisages its political links being
gradually eaten away by the intellectual acids of Europeanism,
multiculturalism and postmodern skepticism.

Yet it is Mr. Gress who opens his book on a note of strong skepticism
about the idea of the West--or, rather, that particular idea of the
West he calls "the Grand Narrative." This was the account,
promulgated in such forums as the contemporary civilization course at
Columbia and the "Great Books" program at the University of Chicago,
that depicted Western history as the progress of liberty from the
ancient Greeks to modern America. Mr. Gress concedes that these were
great educational enterprises in their day, but he skillfully
deconstructs their claim to be an adequate account of the actual
social and intellectual history of the West.

Their essential error was to treat liberty as a moral abstraction,
invented by the Greeks and passed on to the modern age, almost
outside of history, by a series of great thinkers and great books.
This involved a number of distortions. It blurred the serious
differences between the Greek concept of liberty as the right to
participate in government, and the Western idea of liberty as, in
Benjamin Constant's phrase, "the individual's right to his own
pursuits." It leapt nimbly over those lengthy historical interludes
that did not lend themselves to a buoyant account of liberty's
progress--i.e., the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages and indeed most of
the period from the Greeks to 1776. It downplayed crucial elements in
Western history, such as the specifically religious aspects of
Christianity, which had helped to form Western ideas of liberty but
which did not conform to the political sympathies of its liberal
authors, and such as the importance of the Germanic tribes in the
Dark Ages (because of possible confusion with a modern nation-state
of the same name). And it exaggerated the role that (admittedly
important) philosophers, such as Locke and Rousseau, had played in
making Western freedom a practical possibility. In other words the
"Grand Narrative" saw the whole of Western history "from Plato to
Nato" as a teleological process leading up to moral perfection in the
form of the modern American liberal circa 1955.

In the words of Private Eye: Shome misthtake, surely. Neither the
West nor any real-world civilization could possibly live up to this
idealized picture of inevitable progress punctuated by what Gress
calls "Magic Moments"--Magna Carta! The Copernican Revolution! 1776!
The Atlantic Charter! The actual history of the West has included
such unpleasant features as war, slavery, social oppression,
religious bigotry and torture, economic inequality and racial
arrogance. These evils were not confined to the West, of course, and
a case could easily be made that Western civilization has acted to
correct them sooner and more thoroughly than any other civilization.
But their mere existence undermined the "Grand Narrative." Western
civilization was more--and worse--than a history of liberty. It was
not even the story of liberty triumphing over these evils, since, in
greater or lesser form, they still exist. Might it not be, then, that
the West was the story of these evils triumphing over liberty--and
then hypocritically donning the red cap? Indeed, that was the
judgment of anti-Western radicals (themselves usually Western) in the
Sixties and, after the briefest possible resistance, the verdict
accepted by the very liberals whose story the "Grand Narrative" had
been.

Having demolished the authorized version, Gress sets down his own
account of how liberty actually developed--not as an isolated
abstraction but intertwined with slavery, war and oppression and
flourishing especially in the interstices of Western history. He
quotes Montesquieu to the effect that freedom and prosperity occur
"in societies where several govern", as when the clashes between the
Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy enabled not only kings but also
self-governing cities to demarcate some autonomy. And because liberty
produced prosperity when it was allowed to do so, intelligent rulers
often left its accidental occurrences alone or, more rarely,
deliberately instituted limited editions of it. "Liberty grew because
it served the interests of power", says Gress in the first sentence
of his book. As the West took on distinctive shape, however, Power
increasingly found that Liberty had either slipped from its control
or that its benefits were too valuable to risk losing.

But this is to summarize brutally what is a tour de force of
historical argument and criticism. In search of changing concepts of
the West, Gress guides us through the Roman Empire, late Antiquity,
the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the age of Liberalism and our own
century. He deals exhaustively with an extraordinary range of topics,
from the political institutions of the Germanic tribes to the
emergence of romantic love, that have helped shape a distinctive
Western identity. And he presents the theories of scholars from
Gibbon to Samuel Huntington on all of these matters as he goes along,
subjecting them to a judicious and generally persuasive criticism.

The Radical and Skeptical Traditions

What emerges from this large survey is that there are several
"Wests." Emperors, popes, kings and revolutionaries fought for
different international orders, and philosophers disputed over what
the outcomes of these struggles signified. "The West" is what
emerged, either victorious or persuasive, at any one time. And such
struggles continue in our own day.

Nonetheless, Gress selects two such "Wests" as sailing along--and by
their drift revealing--the main currents of Western civilization.
What he calls the "Old West" was the medieval synthesis, achieved
around 1000 a.d., of three powerful civilizational forces: Roman
imperial order (the memory of which inspired attempts to construct
international polities like the Holy Roman Empire); the "aristocratic
freedom" of the Germanic tribes (which evolved into consultative, if
not democratic, methods of government); and Christianity, or what
Gress calls "Christian ethnicity" (which provided otherwise different
peoples with a common underlying moral and psychological outlook).
Until the Reformation and the nation-state jointly overthrew it, this
medieval synthesis gave rise to a broad sense of Western identity in
certain classes across Europe. Paradoxically, the religious wars
confirmed this, for people on both sides shared a common view of what
was at stake.

If the wars of religion helped destroy the "Old West", what emerged
from them was what Gress calls the "New West" of science, democracy
and capitalism, which is essentially the same modern West that
recently won the Cold War. But was this New West an outgrowth of the
Old? Or was it, to coin a phrase, a novus ordo seculorum, a
historical caesura and something new under the sun? Gress argues
forcefully that it grew directly out of the Old West; that, for
instance, the green shoots of capitalism and democracy could be
detected beneath the melting snows of the late Middle Ages.

This is a crucial dispute; even the Enlightenment--which is in effect
the intellectual crystallization of the New West--expressed divided
opinions on this very point. The "radical Enlightenment" of Voltaire,
Rousseau and the French revolutionaries conceived modernity as
something to be achieved against the past. The philosophes, for
instance, saw institutional Christianity as an obstacle to political
and intellectual freedom, to be either overthrown or exiled from the
public square into private life by the secular power. The "skeptical
Enlightenment" of Hume, Locke and Montesquieu, on the other hand, saw
freedom as emerging, however imperfectly, from the practices,
traditions and institutions of the Old West, including the Christian
religion. "Superstition", said David Hume, "is an enemy to civil
liberty, and enthusiasm a friend to it." By which he meant that
evangelical Protestant sects had nurtured the kind of personality
that not only demonstrated economic enterprise but also thought for
itself--a truth still wreaking progress in Latin America. As David
Martin's Tongues of Fire reminds us, Wesleyism may be the most
profound, because the most personal, revolutionary force of the last
three hundred years. It is, however, a revolution within tradition
rather than against it.

From this point on, the battle lines were drawn between two
intellectual armies defending different versions of the New West. The
heirs of the skeptical Enlightenment--conservatives or classical
liberals, according to taste--defended the imperfect, partial and
compromised versions of democracy, science and capitalism as they
emerged from history. Their opponents--radical liberals or
socialists, again according to taste--demanded mint-fresh
institutions of freedom that would liberate man from historical
oppression (including the oppression of his own customary beliefs and
practices). And because they were asking for institutions untainted
by history, the latter inevitably became disenchanted with the actual
institutions that stood before them and refined their aim into a some
such triad as science, equality and planning. The first clash between
these two forces outside the printed page and the lecture room was
the French Revolution.

Who's In? Who's Out?

It is at this point that Coker appears on the scene, rather like
Pierre at the Battle of Borodino. For he opens his book with Goethe's
account of his experience at the Battle of Valmy, where a
professional Prussian army was soundly beaten in short order by
France's revolutionary peasants. Goethe's comment on this, given to
the soldiers on the evening of their defeat, was: "From this place
and this time forth commences a new era in world history and you can
all say that you were present at its birth." What this scene
signifies for our purposes is the change from the history of events
to the history of ideas.

For as well as the French Revolution, two events on either side of
1789 had raised questions about the proper limits of the West:
namely, the American War of Independence and Russia's full entry into
the European system (courtesy of Bonaparte). Were America and Russia
genuinely Western nations? Or were they peripheral to the main plot
of Western history? On top of that, the American democracy born in
1776 not only raised questions about the West's political character
but initially gave misleading answers about it as well. For the
American Revolution, though inspired and guided by the ideas of the
skeptical Enlightenment, was widely seen at first as precursor and
brother to the French Revolution, which was really the radical
Enlightenment in arms. It seems clear in retrospect that 1776 was the
universalization of Britain's liberal Glorious Revolution of 1688, to
which both 1789 and 1917 were radical counter-revolutionary
responses--with the liberal revolutions of 1989 deciding the contest,
at least for the moment, in favor of 1776. But history had not
clarified that in 1815. And there was one further entrant into the
ideology stakes. German reactions to the French Revolution included
the rise of a romantic cultural nationalism that tended to despise
both Enlightenments--Anglo-American Whiggery and the French
Revolution--as equally rootless and dehumanizing.

As a result, whereas the European sense of the Old West was largely
unconscious insofar as it existed at all, reactions to the French and
American Revolutions in Germany and elsewhere consisted inter alia of
highly self-conscious reflections on such questions as the meaning of
history, the world spirit, the distinction between a civilisation
(French, superficial) and a Kultur (German, profound), and the
legitimate boundaries and spiritual character of the West. In the 140
years after 1815, as Coker recounts it, the poets and philosophers of
Europe devoted much thought and imagination to what the West was and
what the West meant.

Clearly the West was more than Metternich's "geographical
expression." But agreement ended there. And when these debates moved
on to questions of power politics and cultural authenticity, these
were not always clearly distinguished. Was Germany a part of the
West, for instance? An influential school of German cultural
nationalists, including even Thomas Mann at the time of the First
World War, thought not; Germany was a community offering deeper
solace to its people than the bourgeois internationalism of either
the French or the Anglo-American variety. But other Germans no less
concerned with cultural values, notably Nietzsche, had seen Germany
as the West's central power, the one which, because of France's
spiritual exhaustion, would have to take the lead in resisting
czarist authoritarianism.

Was, then, Russia a part of the West? It was certainly threatening to
become so by virtue of its growing power. But as early as the 1850s,
the German philosopher Bruno Bauer, seeing Russia as a barrack-square
society bereft of ideas and Reason, was advocating a European
coalition to resist it. A century later, as we know, America was to
lead such a coalition.

But, then again, was America itself a part of the West? Goethe
believed so. Indeed, he thought it was the future of the West, in one
of his novels dispatching as emigrants to the United States those of
his characters who did not commit suicide. And slightly less
farsightedly, Hegel thought that America might eventually become a
decisive part of the West, but that for the foreseeable future it was
on the edge of history. Spengler, however, took the common view still
found among European elites that America was not a country but a mere
place, "a barren field and a population of trappers drifting from
town to town on the dollar hunt."

As is their wont, the Germans made a disproportionate contribution to
these lofty discussions. The Anglo-Americans were still living in a
splendid philosophical isolation: Americans following a destiny too
manifest to debate, and the British ignoring the world spirit in
their pursuit of world power. It was the French, on this occasion
given foresight by their fading power, who anticipated that the
United States would have to infuse cultural and political energy into
a declining Europe. Coker quotes Henri Martin as fearing in the 1870s
that a Russian-dominated Europe would leave America to preserve "all
the higher human elements of civilization", and Jules Michelet as
forecasting an "Atlantic Union" to prevent this melancholy outcome.
In the event, these debates were conclusively settled in Michelet's
favor by two world wars that dragged America willy-nilly into Europe,
and by the Cold War, which detained her there for another fifty
years. If any single moment was the West's rendezvous with destiny,
it was the signing of the Atlantic Charter by Churchill and FDR on a
British warship in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland in August 1941--as
both our authors agree.

Interpreting Atlanticism

Or do they? Both Gress and Coker attach great importance to the
Atlantic Charter, but they differ seriously on its significance. In
Coker's eyes, it initiated an essentially Anglo-American view of the
West, which began to decay in the Sixties with the growth of a
specifically continental Europeanism; in Gress' opinion, it was one
important episode in the long struggle between Western
traditionalists and "the children of the French Revolution"--a
struggle in which the traditionalists have recently scored a great
victory with the collapse of communism.

Because Coker's judgment is the more familiar one, I shall deal with
it more briskly than his shrewd and sardonic argument deserves. The
Atlantic Charter, in his view, was "a historical turning-point" and
"a change of consciousness", but mainly for the British, less so for
the Americans, and only briefly and pragmatically for the continental
Europeans. France, the most independent of the European wartime
allies holed up in London, did not even sign it until late in 1944.
The Soviet threat ensured that Atlanticism remained a military
necessity for Europe until recently. But as détente and Ostpolitik
took hold in the Sixties, the concept of Europeanism advanced in
tandem with them--fueled by a French intellectual tradition of
anti-Americanism, growing European economic integration and the
political reality that European social democracy never felt entirely
comfortable with American capitalism. By the late 1980s, as John
Laughland pointed out in The Tainted Source: The Undemocratic Origins
of the European Idea (1997), the rhetorical attacks of French
politicians on the "Anglo-Saxons" and their liberal system of trade
and capital movements bore a curious resemblance to what Vichy
politicians were saying in the early Forties.

It is a mystery why American statesmen were so slow to see the
Europeanist threat to Atlanticism, and Coker has some fun reversing
the usual finger-pointing. Instead of blaming the British for missing
the European bus, he argues that they accurately divined its
anti-American (or at least its Americo-skeptical) implications early
on. It was successive American leaders--including such respected
figures as George Ball--who rashly pooh-poohed these warnings in
their eagerness to shovel Britain into what is now the European
Union. (Only Henry Kissinger expressed serious public anxieties on
that score.) Their calculation was that British membership would
ensure that Europe became a more reliable U.S. ally; but at present
it looks more likely that Europe will make Britain a less reliable
U.S. ally.

That may not matter to Americans overmuch, Coker speculates, since
the United States itself is losing its eighteenth-century Western
identity as a result of mass immigration from Third World countries,
the spread of bilingualism and multiculturalism, and the failure or
refusal of America's elites to insist on assimilation. It is
therefore losing also the sense that its primary defense and
diplomatic commitment must be to Europe. Even the prospect of
European protectionism is dismissed as unimportant by Coker since
America has already forged strong trade links with the rest of the
world--though the "Asian contagion" may upset that particular
calculation. On this view America is becoming, or may have already
become, a different civilization from that of Europe--what James
Kurth in these pages has called "the post-West"--and so the two sides
of the Atlantic are increasingly likely to part company politically
too.

Mr. Gress has a very different, and original, interpretation of the
Atlantic Charter. He sees it as an amalgam: an expression of the
values of the New West as represented by the skeptical Enlightenment
and as influenced by the circumstances of 1939-41. It proclaimed
national self-determination, democracy, free trade and collective
security--the causes that the interwar years were thought to have
neglected or betrayed. And although the Charter was signed two months
after Hitler's invasion of Russia, this was also the political
program that the Western democracies had formulated in opposition to
both totalitarian dictatorships, united after 1939 by the Nazi-Soviet
pact. What would later be fully articulated as "anti-totalitarianism"
was implicit in the principles outlined at Placentia Bay. Moreover,
by bringing America into the contest, at least in spirit, the
Atlantic Charter was giving new energy to this traditional West,
since the Americans still had that confidence in freedom, democracy,
capitalism and the future that had begun to wither in Europe.

But once the alliance with the Soviet Union was entrenched, it
inevitably transformed the West's view of "what we are fighting for."
Christianity and capitalism, for instance, could hardly be the war
aims of an alliance that included the Soviet Union, and capitalism
was at least seen at the time as compatible with the genocidal West
represented by Hitler. Indeed, the very notion of the West was
compromised, because Hitler claimed to be fighting for it against our
new Soviet allies. So anti-totalitarianism was replaced by what Gress
calls "the anti-fascist mindset." In place of the now compromised
triad of science, democracy and capitalism, for instance, the Soviets
proclaimed science, equality and rational planning, a substitution
designed to delight the "children of the French Revolution" in
Europe. Indeed, as the "anti-fascist mindset" spread during the war,
it seemed to many that the true West must include the Soviets and
exclude capitalism and Christianity. A West that made the opposite
choices would be plainly tainted with fascism.

The result is described by Gress:

"The argument over Western identity was thus between those who
identified the West with America--the commercial republic with its
Christian foundations--and those whose idea of the West rejected
Christianity and capitalism and looked rather to the ideals of
progress and social transformation that they believed had been at
least partly realized in the Soviet Union."

Admittedly, there were socialist factions and individual
intellectuals--the Bevanite Labour Left, George Orwell--who urged an
early Third Way, arguing that either Britain or a new united Europe
should pioneer the combination of socialism and democracy as a
civilized alternative to totalitarian Scylla and capitalist
Charybdis. But even the Attlee government, which might theoretically
have favored it, saw this as a distraction from the urgent tasks of
rebuilding the postwar European economies and organizing resistance
to the Soviets. As the illusory nature of this Third Way became
clear, its supporters either gave their backing to the American-led
democracies, like Orwell, or became "neutralist" with a bias toward
the "socialist" world.

Thus began what might be called a cold civil war in the West, in
which anti-Americanism always enjoyed substantial support among West
European intellectuals. From 1941 to 1947 admiration for Soviet
wartime heroism ensured that the anti-fascist version of the West was
largely dominant. Between 1947 and 1968 fear of the Soviet Union
became a paramount factor in Western opinion, the concept of
anti-totalitarianism was dusted off, and the West united politically
and to an extent even intellectually under American leadership. Then,
the Vietnam War concentrated attention on America's flaws, and for
twenty years after 1968 there was a sustained campaign against
America, and later the West generally, represented as the enemies of
mankind politically, economically and ecologically.

Finally, without this campaign having abated even slightly, the
Soviet Union suddenly collapsed. This discredited for the moment the
economic and political claims of the radical Enlightenment, installed
America as a hegemonic power in both the West and the world, and gave
immense prestige to the New West ideals of democracy, science and
free markets. By any standards this was a world-historical
victory--yet one, as Gress concedes, that was curiously muted by the
West's own moral self-doubt, and in danger of being drowned out by
the unabated cries of environmentalists, multiculturalists and
fifty-seven varieties of anti-Western criticism.

These are very different analyses and they dictate very different
prescriptions. Coker, suspecting that the West is losing its internal
cultural coherence and is doomed to split politically into rival
continents, thinks that in this weakened condition it had better
reach some kind of multicultural bargain with other civilizations.
Gress sees America as the heartland of a New West with an irreducible
minimum of cultural identity that cannot and ought not be dissolved
into a vague multicultural universalism. And so he concludes that in
a world of clashing civilizations, it has an unavoidable interest in
maintaining the habits and structures of political cooperation.

Alternative Futures

Neither line of argument is entirely satisfactory. Coker claims that
none of the usual suspects--China and fundamentalist Islam, for
example--in the police line-up of anti-Western challenges is likely
to be sufficiently threatening to persuade the West to rediscover its
sense of common purpose. But the chapter discussing such vast
subjects is too sketchy to be persuasive, and Coker is forced to
leave extremely important questions hanging in the air. For instance:
"China may emerge as a fully modern state or dissolve into a vast
Third World country." True enough, but the West will hardly be
unaffected by which it is. If Coker seems unaffected himself, it is
because he thinks that the world has moved beyond old-fashioned power
politics, making a revived Western coalition an inappropriate, if not
unavailable, form of geopolitics. The West's next task is to engage
in a constructive dialogue with other civilizations in order to help
construct a new world culture.

It is hard to know what to make of this. To begin with, it is largely
unnecessary to instruct the West to act in the wider international
interest. Except in occasional articles and speeches by some
over-muscular neoconservatives, the West has not displayed any marked
civilizational egoism in recent years. At least as led by the United
States, it has sought in its policies on trade and international
economics to accommodate, and even advance, the legitimate interests
of other parts of the world. One large exception and one important
qualification must be attached to this general rule. The exception
has been Europe's Common Agricultural Policy; but that has ignored
the interests of the United States, Australia and New Zealand as much
as it has those of the Third World, and is therefore a factor in the
dissolution rather than the expansion of the West. The qualification
is that while the West may have accommodated other interests, it has
done so in the light of its own values--notably free trade and human
rights.

A new world culture would presumably correct that bias, would it not?
Again, however, what would such a culture look like? Cultures are
made up of such intractable components as language and religion.
Always a magpie civilization itself, the West has been happy to
appropriate religious styles, foreign words and all kinds of ambient
cultural bric-a-brac. But more than that is unlikely. It is hard
enough to interest many Westerners in their own religions, let alone
Asian or African ones, and with the rise of Christian and Muslim
"enthusiasm", religion is more likely to be a source of cultural
conflict than of accommodation. As for language, the tongue most
likely to be the basis of any world culture is English, which, even
granting such developments as the "post-colonial novel", implies the
opposite of a Western retreat. Is Coker, then, more concerned with
strictly political and economic values? If so, the problem becomes
still more perplexing. Strip political authoritarianism from "Asian
values" and what is left sounds suspiciously like the "Victorian
values"--hard work, law and order, good schools and a decent family
life--of no less Western a figure than Lady Thatcher.

But political authoritarianism, having just been defeated after a
long struggle within the West, is unlikely to be openly embraced by
even the most masochistic multiculturalist. Its inconsistency with
the liberty at the heart of the West is too blatant. What follows,
surely, is that any halfway realistic prescription for a world
culture must avoid the cultural fundamentals derived from the Old
West, and stick instead to the New West's outward signs of inward
grace--democracy, free markets and the scientific method--which can
be represented as the heritage of all mankind.

The resulting paradox we might call "Western universalism", and this
turns out to be one of the main targets against which Gress aims the
last rounds in his Maxim gun. And indeed he directs devastating fire
at a bewildering variety of targets in his final two chapters:
postmodernists, multiculturalists, environmentalists, communitarians,
post-materialists, transcendental humanists, Islamists, the Singapore
school and several others besides. Most of these schools of thought
come under the heading of anti-Western Westerners, the
great-grandchildren of the French Revolution, who have adopted the
intellectual methods of Marxism but abandoned social class for the
environment, race or gender as the grounds for attack on the West.
Gress demolishes their arguments with a fine painstaking zest. His
comprehensive diligence reminds me of the British Conservative
Party's Campaign Guide, which used to be issued to canvassers and
which contained full and complete answers to every possible question
that might be posed on the doorstep. But this comprehensiveness
sometimes risks obscuring the outlines of his main argument: a
critique of so-called Western universalism.

He argues that it is in the first instance a kind of hallucination. Other civilizations may seem to have adopted Westernization, but the likelihood is that unless they actually cease to be themselves, they have merely taken over the technical knowledge and procedural rules of Western culture. They may institute free-market capitalism, and do so successfully, but will they prove as capable of habitual innovation? They may have procedures for voting, but will that result in a routine transfer of power from government to opposition? He concludes that the world outside the West is likely to see the spread of capitalism but not of democracy, and that this process should therefore be called modernization rather than Westernization.

Even this limited adoption of Western institutions will make other civilizations richer and stronger. But as Samuel Huntington points out, that will have the perverse result of making them more anti-Western as well. They will certainly be more resistant to Western cultural hegemony. Already, many Muslims believe that they have learned to combine Western techniques with the greater spiritual and civilizational powers of Islam. Far from converging, therefore, civilizations will tend to grow apart, with the rest becoming "more modern and less Western", in Huntington's words. The end result will be a world of five or six major civilizations, all of which are rich and powerful in varying degrees, but which remain foreign, mysterious and even suspect to each other.

That being so, the West will have a strong incentive to retain some sort of organizational unity and to remain distinctively Western in spirit and culture. As Gress says exasperatedly at one point, in what might almost be a direct reply to Coker, "A multicultural West is a contradiction in terms; the only West that can be accommodating to other cultures is a West that knows itself and, on the strength of that understanding, encounters others."

What would such a West be like? It would recognize itself, in Gress' words, as "the obedient child of the Old West." Among other qualifies, it would have a place for religion, above all Christianity, in its self-image; it would understand that capitalism was not democracy's antagonist but that they were mutually dependent; and it would know that liberty was safest in pluralistic societies "where several govern." As at the signing of the Atlantic Charter, this unmistakably describes a West that includes - and indeed is led by - America, the strategic heartland where Christianity and capitalism still retain considerable, if reduced, self-confidence and popularity.

There could hardly be two more contrary conclusions. Coker thinks that the Western Brothers have quarreled so irrevocably that there is nothing for it but for them to divide the estate and go out to seek profitable alliances with their former retainers. Gress thinks that the hostility of those beyond the Pale will force the family to stick together under the slightly austere Uncle Sam, who, culturally if not fiscally speaking, has saved and invested more, and partied less, than his improvident relatives. And although both writers concede that the future is unknowable, that will not go far in reconciling their differences.