ABSTRACT

BARRY HINDESS One of the less endearing features of Western political thought has been the ease with which it distinguishes between civilised parts of the world and others that are less civilised. The West’s ranking of peoples and the places they inhabit in terms of their general level of civilisation has been complicated by the existence of non-Western civilisations, each with their own, rather different opinions about these matters. However, these have usually been seen, at least in the modern period, as having never seriously approached the achievements of the West and, in any case, as now being well below the level of their former glory. The Western ranking of peoples and places has been complicated also by the belief that, even in the West itself, there are many people whose condition is far from being entirely civilised. Among the inhabitants of Britain, for example, those who have sometimes been viewed in this way are the Irish, Highland Scots and Romani peoples and much of the poor and uncultivated English majority. These complications have not seriously damaged the West’s belief in its own superiority, but they have left it with a somewhat untidy image of the world as made up of various more or less civilised regions and peoples, each of which is further divided into more or less civilised components.