The study of the West in history is transforming. Recently, scholars have critically reexamined the powerful myths associated with the Western tradition. Naosie Mac Sweeney’s book The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives, among several others, showed how the West had different origins and development than we have assumed. My own research is doing the same thing for Westernization studies. My book, The Limits of Westernization: American and East Asian Intellectuals Create Modernity, challenged the widespread notion that the West shaped modern civilization in East Asia in the twentieth century. Instead, I demonstrated that East Asians drove their own march to modernity and selectively adopted certain Western traditions while rejecting others. Now, I am beginning another project called “The Six Myths of Westernization”, which critically analyzes Westerners' myths about modern development in the non-West. The third myth, which will be the basis for my paper, is that non-Western politics would mimic in their politics the development of popular democracies in the West in the twentieth century. The reality of politics in East Asia belies this assumption. American scholars such as John K. Fairbank and Harold Quigley argued that East Asians had little choice but to follow the Western path, or they would fail to modernize, even reverting to histories they had left behind. But Japanese intellectual Yoshino Sakuzō and other East Asians, while recognizing the virtues of Western political forms, understood that Western-style democracy did not fit their contexts and had to be adjusted or even rejected.

Authors:
Jon Davidann, Hawai'i Pacific University, United States

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Jon Davidann is Professor of History at Hawai'i Pacific University. His current interests include a book project on Harold Lasswell and The Rise of American Propaganda and a second book project called The Six Myths of Westernization.

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-davidann-ba117417/

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