The Western Legacy
To follow up on a theme that Ross and I are both fond of, here’s a passage from Alexander Woodside’s Lost Modernities:
Western political empires, in Asia and elsewhere, were decolonized after 1945. But the Western knowledge empire, which once accompanied the political empires, remains largely intact. It now globalizes what has been most innovative in Western thought in the past century. And postcolonial Asians have little trouble recognizing that this is management theory, not theory about liberal democracy, even if Western universities’ philosophy departments continue to remain in the dark about the point. In terms of global influence, if not quality of thought, F. W. Taylor, Henri Fayol, Norbert Weiner, Herbert Simon, and even Alvin Toffler and Lee Iacocca, outdistance Karl Popper or John Rawls or Isaiah Berlin.
