Chapter 0 : What Is The Western Heritage?

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The western heritage emerges from an evolved and evolving story of human actions and interactions, peaceful and violent, that arose in the eastern Mediterranean, then spread across the western Mediterranean into northern Europe, and eventually to the American continents, and in their broadest impact, to the peoples of Africa and Asia as well.

The Western Heritage as a distinct portion of world history descends from the ancient Greeks, who saw their own political life based on open discussion of law and policy. The Greeks invented the concept of citizenship, defining it as engagement in some form of self-government. The Greeks also established their conviction that reason can shape and analyze physical nature, politics, and morality.

Rome spread its authority through military conquest across the Mediterranean world, embracing Greek literature and philosophy. Romans' conquest and imposition of law created the Western world as a vast empire stretching from Egypt and Syria in the east to Britain in the West. Although the Roman Republic, governed by Senate and popular political institutions (元老院与公众政治机构), gave way to the autocratic rule of Roman Empire, the idea of a free republic law and constitutional (宪法的) arrangements limiting political authority survived centuries of arbitrary (武断专制的、随心所欲的) rule by emperors.

Emperor Constantine reorganized the Roman Empire in two fundamental ways: First, he moved the capital from Rome to Constantinople. Thereafter (其后) large portions of the Western empire became subject to the rulers of Germanic tribes. In the confusion of these times, most of the texts embodying ancient philosophy, literature, and history became lost in the West, and for centuries Western Europeans became intellectually severed from that ancient heritage. Second, Constantine's recognition of Christianity as the official religion of the empire.

康斯坦丁将基督教作为帝国的官方宗教，由于基督教是单神论宗教，康斯坦丁对基督教的接纳导致了异端多神论宗教的消亡。此后，西方世界或多或少的都有与基督教相连，或者与承认罗马主教为首的基督教会相连。

随着皇权逐渐崩溃，主教变成了西欧许多区域的事实上的统治者，但是基督教会从未在未与世俗的统治者协商或者冲突的情况下加以统治，并且宗教法也没有取代世俗法，况且世俗的统治者也无法在忽略教会的影响下加以统治。Hence, from the fourth century C.E. to the present day, rival claims to political and moral authority between ecclesiastical and political officials have characterized the west.

In the seventh century, the rise of Islam, a new monotheistic religion, which spread rapidly through conquests across North Africa and eventually into Spain, confronted a new challenge to the Western World. Christians attempted to reclaim the Holy Land (圣地，亦即巴勒斯坦) from Muslim control in church-inspired military crusades (十字军东征) that still resonate negatively in the Islamic world.

However, while intellectual life languished in the West, most of the texts of ancient Greek and Latin learning survived and were studied in the Muslim world. By the fourteenth century, European thinkers redefined themselves and their intellectual ambitions by recovering the literature and science from the ancient world, reuniting Europe with its Graeco-Roman past.

From the twelfth through the eighteenth centuries, a new European political system arose based on centralized monarchies (中央集权的君主制) characterized by large armies, navies and bureaucracies loyal to the monarch (忠诚于皇帝的官僚体制), and by the capacity to raise revenues (提升税收). Most of these monarchies recognized both the political role of local or national assemblies drawn from the propertied elites (有产阶级精英) and the binding power of constitutional law on themselves. ** (宪法对于他们自己的约束力) The monarchies, their military, and their expanding commercial economies became the basis for the extension of European and Western influence around the globe.**

In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, two transforming events occurred. The first was the European discovery and the conquest of American continents, thus opening the Americas to Western institutions, religion, and economic exploitation. The labor shortage of Americas led to the forced migration of millions of Africans as slaves to the America. By the mid-seventeenth century the West consequently embraced the entire transatlantic world and its multiracial societies.

Second, shortly after the American encounter, a religious schism erupted within Latin Christianity. (基督教分裂) Reformers rejecting both many medieval Christian doctrines as unbiblical and the primacy of the Pope in Rome established Protestant churches across much of northern Europe. (宗教改革者不仅反对许多中世纪的基督教义，认为它们是不符合圣经的，还反对罗马天主教教皇的至高无上的地位，并且在北欧的大部分土地上建立了新教教堂) As a consequence, for almost two centuries religious warfare between Protestants and Roman Catholics overwhelmed the continent as monarchies chose to defend one side or the other. The religious turmoil meant that Europeans who conquered and settled the Americans carried with them particularly energized religious convictions, with **Roman Catholics dominating Latin America and English Protestants most of North America. **

By the late eighteenth century, the idea if the West denoted a culture increasingly dominated by two new forces. First, science arising from a new understanding of nature achieved during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries persuaded growing numbers of the educated elite that human beings can rationally master nature for ever-expanding productive purposes improving the health and well-being of humankind. From this era to the present, the West has been associated with advances in technology, medicine, and scientific research. Second, during the eighteenth century, a drive for economy improvement that vastly increased agricultural production and then industrial manufacturing transformed economic life, especially in Western Europe and later the United States. Both of these economic development went hand in hand with urbanization and the movement of industrial economy into cities where the new urban populations experienced major urban dislocation (社会失序).

During the last quarter of eighteenth century, political revolution erupted across the transatlantic world. The British colonies of North America revolted, and then revolution occurred in France and spread across much of Europe. The Wars of Independence liberated Latin America from its European conquerors. Those revolutions created bold new modes of political life, rooting the legitimacy of the state in some form of popular government and generally written constitutions. Thereafter, despite the presence of authoritarian governments on the European continent, the idea of West, now including the new republics of the United States and Latin America, became associated with liberal democratic governments. (这些革命创造了新的政治生活模式，将国家的合法性和某种形式的人民政府和成文宪法联系到了一起。自此之后，除了欧洲大陆某些独裁政府，西方的概念，变得与自由民主的政府联系到了一起。)

During the nineteenth century, most major European states came to identify themselves in terms of nationality - language, history, and ethnicity - rather than loyalty to a monarch. Nationalism eventually inflamed popular opinion and unloosed unprecedented political ambition by European governments.

These ambitions led to imperialism and the creation of new overseas European empires in the late nineteenth century. For people living in European-administered Asian and African colonies, the idea and reality of the West embodied foreign domination and often disadvantageous involvement in a world economy. Even after colonial peoples around the globe challenged European imperial authority and gained independence, these former colonial peoples often suspected the West of seeking to control them. Hence, anticolonialism like colonialism before it redefined definitions of the West far from its borders.

Late nineteenth-century nationalism and imperialism also unleashed with World War I in 1914 unprecedented military hostilities among European nations that spread around the globe, followed a quarter century later by an even greater world war. As one result of World War, revolution occurred in Russia with the establishment of the communist Soviet Union. During the interwar years, a Fascist Party seized power in Italy and a Nazi Party took control of Germany. In response to these new authoritarian regimes, West European powers and the United States identified themselves with liberal democratic constitutionalism, individual freedom, commercial capitalism, science and learning freely pursued, and religious liberty, all of which they defined as the Western Heritage. (将他们自己认为是自由民主立宪政府、拥有个人自由、商业资本主义、拥有追求知识和科学的自由、宗教信仰自由，他们将这些定义为 Western Heritage。)

During the Cold War , conceived of as an East-West, democratic versus communist struggle that concluded with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Western Powers led by the United States continued to embrace those values in conscious opposition to the Soviet government, which since 1945 had also dominated much of Eastern Europe.

Since 1991 the West has again become redefined in the minds of many people as a world political and economic order dominated by the United States. Europe clearly remains the West, but political leadership has moved to Northern America. That American domination and recent American foreign policy have led throughout the West and elsewhere to much criticism of United States.

Such self-criticism itself embodies one of the most important and persistent parts of the Western Heritage. From Hebrew prophets and Socrates to the critics of European imperialism, American foreign policy, social inequality, and environmental devastation, voices in the West have again and again been raised to criticize often in the most strident manner the policies of Western governments and the thought, values, social conditions, and the inequalities of Western societies.

Consequently, we study the Western Heritage not because the subject always or even primarily presents an admirable picture, but because the study of the Western Heritage like the study of all history calls us to an integrity of research, observation, and analysis that clarifies our minds and challenges our moral sensibilities. The challenge of history is the challenge of thinking, and it is to that challenge that this book invites its readers.