The Golden Thread: A History of the Western TraditionVolume I: The Ancient World and ChristendomVolume II: The Modern and Contemporary WestJames HankinsEncounter BooksISBN: 9781641773997 (Vol.1)ISBN: 9781641774017 (Vol.2)
The role of history in culture wars
Is it possible to write a definitive history of Western Civilisation that is also a positive celebration of its achievements and value? The Golden Thread is a significant new two-volume book on the subject that is both massive (it spans over 2,000 pages and weighs six kilograms) and beautifully produced, containing hundreds of portraits, colour prints, maps and illustrations. Wisely, the authors Allen C. Guelzo and James Hankins do not claim that it is the only such history, but they nevertheless have a clear vision of what they wish to achieve in this impressive venture. While striving to be authoritative, it is also a profoundly political book on multiple levels, all of which make it of interest to academics and its intended student and popular audience.
The woke agenda is supposed to have captured elite higher education institutions (such as Harvard University), according to right-wing commentators and campaigners like Christopher Rufo and the late Charlie Kirk.
Hankins is a distinguished scholar and author of a prize-winning work on Renaissance political thought, formerly of Harvard and now a visiting Professor at the Hamilton School at the University of Florida. Guelzo is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute which is leading the rethinking of American Conservatism as a site of cultural politics. Its reputation goes back to Straussian scholars such as Harry V. Jaffa, and more recently it has been associated with the cultural and populist turn, championed by the Trump administration, against “woke” or progressive liberalism. Central to that project has been the defence of Western Civilisation against the progressive turn which challenges its values and achievements. The woke agenda is supposed to have captured elite higher education institutions (such as Harvard University), according to right-wing commentators and campaigners like Christopher Rufo and the late Charlie Kirk.
Defending the study of Western Civilisation
Hankins and Guelzo weigh into this debate to defend the concept and pedagogical value of studying Western Civilisation. For them, this tradition is composed of the interweaving of Ancient Greek culture, Hellenised Roman culture and the Christianised Greco-Roman culture of the high Middle Ages. The first volume sets out this tradition through an account of the art, philosophy, political ideas and literature of two millennia from the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE to the beginning of the Reformation in 1517. Of course, the story goes back further to include the Homeric tradition of Greek literature, which no such history could exclude.
This is not just a history of political ideas in the traditional Leo Strauss sense; but more so a list of great books from Greece to the present with a contextual narrative of development followed by one of decline and decadence which for conservatives are the characteristics of modernity. As such, it is a story of the philosophical and theological sources of our political world and the challenges they currently face. It is interesting that the point of departure in the Greek world is the defeat of Persia at Marathon: a civilisational contest that is supposed to have opened the peculiarly western alternative of liberty and political self-government, especially in the context of the US war in the Persian Gulf.
For Guelzo and Hankins, alternative histories have their place, but are a danger when they displace the study of Western Civilisation in the academy or perpetuate a critical climate that undermines the achievements of the West
The second volume begins with the birth of the modern nation state following the Reformation and concludes with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the final confrontation with another emerging civilisational confrontation with Islamism represented by Al-Qaeda and most especially the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The story of Western Civilisation is bookended by confrontation with Persia or Iran – and consciously opts for Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations (2002) model of contemporary Global politics as a renewed period of civilisation conflict over Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992) which was supposed to be the story of 1991 and the triumph of the US and liberal democracy over the USSR and communism.
Guelzo and Hankins celebrate and defend Western Civilisation against Peter Frankopan’s displacement of it in his influential The Silk Roads (2015), a global history which looks beyond the west. Frankopan argues that Western Civilisation is constituted by the engagement and impact of more ancient civilisational cultures such as Persia or China. For Guelzo and Hankins, these alternative histories have their place, but are a danger when they displace the study of Western Civilisation in the academy or perpetuate a critical climate that undermines the achievements of the West as an object of enquiry and especially as a political project.
Conservatism from Burke to Vance
The authors set out this conservative agenda in a manifesto style introduction and foreground it throughout the two volumes. They cite Edmund Burke (1729-1797), the first explicitly conservative political theorist, as an exemplar of the type of conservatism the books support. They call for a return to a Burkean ethos in face of the “woke” progressivism currently rupturing modernity with its ideal of modernism and the principle of permanent progress that seeks to undermine and relinquish the traditional values that underpin their view of the modern west.
Their civilisational story challeng[es] the increasingly dominant voice of inward-looking Christian Nationalism […] celebrating many of the features of classical liberal constitutional politics that the Christian Nationalists want to turn their backs on.
This overt political dimension to the narrative links the celebration of Western Civilisation to the attacks of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice-President J.D. Vance on what they see as a decadent Europe that is failing to defend itself from immigration and cultural dilution. Guelzo and Hankins’ history chimes with strands of new Conservatism, such as post-liberalism and some variants of Political-Catholicism. More subversively, their civilisational story contributes to the debate within new conservativism by challenging the increasingly dominant voice of inward-looking Christian Nationalism – which focuses on isolationism and patriarchal paternalist politics – and thus by celebrating many of the features of classical liberal constitutional politics that the Christian Nationalists want to turn their backs on. The book makes a partisan case in this struggle for a new conservatism.
The political purpose behind this otherwise traditional, even old-fashioned book is what gives it much of its interest to contemporary scholars of politics. The book is well written and researched, and in its own terms, no more controversial than any other such sweeping book although it downplays the dark side of the story such as slavery and colonialism. There are plenty of other narrative histories of the West as a geographic space, a cultural unit and philosophical and theological civilisation (like Josephine Quinn’s and Tom Holland’s, for instance), but The Golden Thread is worth reading if you have plenty of time (and very strong wrists!).
Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Paul Kelly is Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Government at LSE. His most recent books include Conflict, War and Revolution, LSE Press, 2022, and Against Post-liberalism: Why Faith, Family and Flag is a Dead end for the Left, Polity Books, 2025.
