Prof. James Hankins: The return of Western civilisation

Summary

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UnHerd with Freddie Sayers

Episode: Prof. James Hankins – The Return of Western Civilisation

Date: December 26, 2025
Guest: Prof. James Hankins (Professor of History and Western Culture, Harvard University)

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Episode Overview

For this Christmas special, host Freddie Sayers unpacks the sweeping story of Western civilization with Prof. James Hankins—seasoned Harvard historian and soon-to-be faculty member at the Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. Rather than debate a hot-button issue, the conversation zooms out to a 2,500-year panorama: origins, defining ideas, crises, rebirths, and the present-day struggles of Western tradition in education and society.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining Western Civilization (03:29)

• Hankins prefers “Western tradition” over “Western civilization.” He follows Samuel Huntington’s notion of four interconnected “civilizations” within the Western tradition: Greek, Roman, Christendom (Medieval Christian empire), and Modern Europe/America.
• Quote:

  “What is remarkable really about the west in Western history is the degree to which the earlier civilizations have been folded into Western civilizations...when a country is conquered by an empire that its culture will be preserved is unusual.”
  — Prof. James Hankins (03:40)

2. Greek Foundations (05:22)

• Language & Political Innovation: Greek language shapes modern languages; the Greeks “invented citizenship” and devised power-sharing government structures—democracy, aristocracy, oligarchy—requiring persuasion and reason.
• Memorable Point:

  “The Greeks did not have a monarch, so they made reason their monarch.”
  — Prof. James Hankins (citing Ger Lloyd, 07:15)

3. Roman Contributions: Rule of Law (09:04)

• Romans institutionalize the concept that law is above politics, drawing on Stoic thought and the idea of natural law.
• Cicero’s vision: tyranny is violating civil law, which should represent the collective will and tradition.
• Quote:

  “The law should be above politics and it should be impervious to political influence and also the influence of wealth and power.”
  — Prof. James Hankins (10:07)

4. Internal Contradictions and Decline of the Republic (13:16)

• Even as Rome maintained the language of republicanism, it became an imperial monarchy. The ideal of legal equality was undermined by class distinctions in late Empire.

5. Rise of Christianity and Its Innovations (19:06)

• The Edict of Milan (310 AD) marked Christian toleration; eventually, the imperial cult became Christian, although the transition was gradual.
• Christianity brought new moral sensibilities: abolishing gladiatorial games, reforming sexual morals (outlawing the abuse of female slaves, protecting the weak regardless of status).
• Quote:

  “This is the beginning of the idea of...innate human dignity. And it comes out of Christianity, also comes out of Rome, that there are people whose autonomy should not be violated, especially sexually.”
  — Prof. James Hankins (21:06)

6. Endurance and High Point of Christian Civilization (25:22)

• The high point is arguably the 16th–17th century: church influence is at its peak, culture and the arts flourish, and the Christianization of populations expands.
• Post-Reformation, relentless religious conflict (e.g., over doctrines like transubstantiation vs. consubstantiation) sows seeds of secularization.

7. Enlightenment and Modernity: Seeds of Disruption (29:14, 30:45)

• The Enlightenment emerges partly from disgust at Christian tyranny (e.g., persecution post-Edict of Nantes), birthing demands for freedom of thought and religion.
• Modernity is marked by a new faith in science, secular innovation, and the bracketing of tradition.
• Memorable Critique:

  “What’s driving the modern world off the cliff rather rapidly is forgetting about its tradition and embracing innovation, embracing creative destruction with far too much joy...and far too little attention to what’s being destroyed.”
  — Prof. James Hankins (33:48)

8. Loss of Shared Cultural Foundation in Education (36:29)

• Hankins describes seeing a steady, then accelerating, decline of Western Civ in elite university curricula, replaced by narrower, more present-minded content.
• Quote:

  “Their world begins in 2010… There’s no common foundation that values the tradition.”
  — Prof. James Hankins (34:41)

9. The Renaissance and Possibility of Revival (41:25, 47:56)

• Despite leaving Harvard for Florida's Hamilton School, Hankins believes in “Renaissance”—that civilizational revivals are possible and central to Western history.
• Western tradition, though repeatedly near loss (e.g., Aristotle’s works, Roman law), has recovered in past crises.
• Quote:

  “Western tradition has the resources to revive things. Sometimes it's been very, very close to destruction... But somehow it became the basis of Western legal tradition in the 12th century.”
  — Prof. James Hankins (47:56)

10. Current "Backlash" and Politicization of Tradition (42:44)

• Hankins worries that the effort to revive Western Civ is being branded as right-wing. He points out the irony that both liberal and left-wing ideas originally stem from the Western tradition itself.
• He draws historical parallels: all major university reforms in America have been political, but hopes the study of Western Civ won’t remain a partisan cause.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On the Greek Invention of Self-Government:

  “Reason is what the Greeks worshipped, in a sense.”
  (07:15)

• On Modern Innovation:

  “In America, there’s absolute worship of the word ‘innovation’, which before modern times means revolution... But since the 17th century, innovation has had a positive sense. Curiosity, which in pre-modern times was a vice of being too interested in things that don’t concern you, becomes a virtue...”
  (33:01)

• On Declining Knowledge of the Tradition:

  “I have smartest students in the world supposedly at Harvard, and I cannot communicate with a great number of them because their world begins in 2010.”
  (34:41)

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Key Timestamps

• 03:29 – What is Western civilization? Four traditions.
• 05:22 – Greek civilization's enduring ideas.
• 09:04 – Roman innovation: law above politics.
• 13:16 – Republic’s decline and transformation into Empire.
• 19:06 – Christianity’s rise and moral changes.
• 25:22 – High point of Christian civilization.
• 29:14 – Reformation, religious wars, and the Enlightenment.
• 30:45 – Modernity: break and continuity.
• 33:01 – Rise of innovation as a societal virtue.
• 36:29 – Declining role of tradition at Harvard/universities.
• 41:25 – Hankins’ move from Harvard to Florida.
• 42:44 – Politicization of the Western Civ revival.
• 47:56 – Is a new Renaissance possible?

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Conclusion & Final Thoughts

The conversation ends with Hankins' cautious optimism: history shows the Western tradition is resilient, able to survive near-total collapse and produce new Renaissances. But that requires active cultivation, not complacency.

“Culture is not self-perpetuating. We have to make sure that we cultivate our civilization and learn about it.”
— Prof. James Hankins (50:25)

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Summary prepared for listeners seeking a sweeping yet concrete understanding of the trajectory, crisis, and possible renewal of Western civilization as narrated by a lifelong scholar at the intersection of history, education, and current cultural debate.

Transcript

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[Interviewer (Unherd host)]

Hello and welcome to Unherd for this Christmas special. Because it is Christmas week, we thought instead of arguing about a particular niche political controversy, we should zoom out and think about some bigger ideas. Well, you can't zoom out further than the expanse of time we are planning to talk about today, which is roughly 2,500 years. The scope, in fact, of Western civilization. Professor James Hankins is a long standing, in fact four decades standing professor of history and Western culture at Harvard. He is going to join a new school attached to the University of Florida called the Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education. He's part, in fact, of a bit of A renaissance of the idea that the renaissance is worth studying. He joins us down the line from Harvard to talk all things Western civilization, where it started and is it ending. And welcome to the show.

[Professor James Hankins]

Thank you very much. I'm a pleasure to talk to you. I'm a great admirer of Unherd. As you know.

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[Interviewer (Unherd host)]

Professor I'm going to start with a impossibly broad question. What is Western civilization and when and where did it start?

[Professor James Hankins]

Well, I prefer to talk about the Western tradition. I take the view of Sam Huntington that modern Western civilization is a fourth order civilization that comes after the Greeks, the Romans, Christendom, the medieval Christian empire and modern Europe. I think there are four civilizations that are connected by this thread of tradition. What is remarkable really about the west in Western history is the degree to which the earlier civilizations have been folded into Western civilizations. The Western tradition, I prefer to call it, because it's not assured that when a country is conquered by an empire that its culture will be preserved. Preserved. It's normally the case, in fact, that the conquering empire destroys the culture of whatever it conquers. So when the Greeks were conquered by the Romans, the Greeks were regarded by the Romans as so advanced scientifically, philosophically and culturally that they understood that they wanted to have Greek culture as part of the Roman Empire. And the Greeks that they were thinking of, which really begins the tradition was the Homer to the Hellenistic period.

[Interviewer (Unherd host)]

So just to be clear, the four periods then it's, it's Greek, succeeded by Roman, succeeded by the Christian empire, which as you describe it, and finally modern Europe and America, is that right? Yes, Modernity, yes.

[Professor James Hankins]

Which begins in the 12th century, according to me. So.

[Interviewer (Unherd host)]

Well, I really want to get into that. But I just want to do a bit of a chronology for our listeners so they can get their head around this scope. The Greek civilization, you consider that the first thing that can be called a part of the Western tradition. Why is that? What are the founding ideas in the Greek civilization that you think persist to this day?

[Professor James Hankins]

First of all, language. The Greek language is still part of our language today. I think the fundamental, the strongest thread, let's say in the golden thread, is the language of Greece and Rome, which are still very much part of English and most modern European languages. But there's also things like citizenship. The Greeks invented citizenship. No other part of the world had citizenship until the 19th century. And then under Western influence, the Greeks invented the various forms of government that we talk about today. If you go outside of the west, you don't find much discussion of pluralistic governments, of power sharing arrangements like democracy or aristocracy or oligarchy. And there's a discussion of tyranny versus kingship. But that's basically what you get in political theory outside of the West. So the Chinese never had any form of government aside from monarchy, but we have a much more rich tradition of political forms and discussions about how you can, how you can govern yourself.

[Interviewer (Unherd host)]

So that innovation then in Greek culture is that power and the way we govern society doesn't just stem from a single individual who is ruling. There is some kind of structure. In some cases it was democracy for some periods and I guess there were others. But there were structures of power sharing which were sort of organized to disperse power. That's a Greek idea, is it?

[Professor James Hankins]

Yes. And it requires persuasion and reason. That's the thing if you're in a monarchy. The king, if he's a good king, will take counsel from good people. He will decide ultimately, one decision maker, taking counsel from many experts and also from the people. He can take counsel from the people, but he will make the decisions. And that can be very good form of government if you're lucky and you have a good king. But other times it won't be good. The Greeks were more worried about tyranny and that's why they were so insistent on self government. But self government is an entirely different proposition from the way that monarchs make decisions. Because you have to persuade people, right? You have to have eloquence, you have to have reasoning. You know, there's a famous historian of science, Ger Lloyd, very famous historian of ancient Greek science, who said that the Greeks did not have a monarch, so they made reason their monarch. The way you solve problems, the way you settle issues what you do in front of a jury court involves persuasion and reason. And that's terribly important in the history of the West. Not just for politics, but for everything. Right, because reason is what the Greeks worshiped in a sense.

[Interviewer (Unherd host)]

The idea is almost really that power needs to be earned and kept rather than only inherited. And it's still talked about today. I mean, this is a current political argument, isn't it? The degree to which the ruler can accumulate power to his or her person is still. I mean, it's a 2025 problem or will be a 2026 question just as much as it was 500 BC.

[Professor James Hankins]

The idea that a ruler has to be restrained by law is really more a Roman idea than a Greek idea. The Greek idea is that you restrain people who have gained disproportionate power by popular action. Aristotle's politics is all about balancing the wealthy with, with the less wealthy, with elite and non elite citizens. But when you get to the Romans, you have the idea of constitutional monarchy or constitutional forms that restrain power.

[Interviewer (Unherd host)]

Right, so we're now on to the Romans. We're in chapter two of our ultra speedy tour through Western civilization. But it's, it's interesting to see it at this pace because you see, you're kind of forced to think about the key ideas that are being injected. So the Romans, you would say, then add this idea of a constitution or rule by law rather than just by whimsy or negotiation. Tell us a little bit more about that.

[Professor James Hankins]

Well, the idea of the rule of law really appears in Roman civilization in the late second century B.C. and it's, I think, elevated into the tradition ultimately by Cicero. So Cicero's living in a time of lawlessness. There are courts, but they're under the control of political powers. You can gain a certain amount through persuasion and reason, as the Greeks do. Romans could not really rely on their courts to bring justice because they were so politicized. It's like the US right now. You will know which way the justices are going to rule based on which president chose them. So Cicero had this idea that. Well, he's getting this from the Stoic tradition and from the Roman tradition, which has been in position about 50 years, that the law should be above politics. That's the fundamental idea of the rule of law. The law is above politics and it should be impervious to political influence and also the influence of wealth and power. And in the Roman case, they root this in natural law via the Stoic, because Cicero knows all these Greek philosophical schools very well. So they have an idea that the natural law is the basis of the law of peoples, the jus gentium, and then the law of peoples is the basis of the Roman civil law. So Cicero's definition of tyranny, which he applies to Caesar, is someone who breaks the civil law, which is a compact between past and present. Sounds very Burkian. And which represents the will of the collect will of Roman tradition and Roman people.

[Interviewer (Unherd host)]

Can it be seen as another sort of break on power? Just as this idea of persuasion and negotiation and dispersal of power was already introduced by the Greeks, the idea of a law that is above politics is. It's a defensive mechanism, isn't it, against individual people who want to grab too much power for themselves?

[Professor James Hankins]

Yes, indeed. And this is what both the populists of the Roman Empire, Caesar and his senatorial opponents were saying all the time, that the power needed to be strained to the other side, and they were appealing to law to do it. So when Augustus gets control of the Roman Empire, he tries to do everything in as legal a fashion, or apparently legal fashion as possible. He claims in his famous autobiography, the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, that everything he did was constitutional, it had precedence. He calls himself the Princeps, but so did Scipio Africanus. He has Tribunician power, but. But so did other people before him. So he tries to turn Roman republican tradition into something that will allow him to operate as a quasi monarch. And this is a feature of Roman monarchical rule, Roman imperial rule, that the Roman emperor, no matter how much power he has, he always presents himself as subject to the laws.

[Interviewer (Unherd host)]

In a way, you've kind of brought us to the crux of the Roman conundrum, because in theory it was supposed to be this beautiful republic governed by very careful constitutional ideas of consuls and separations of powers. But in fact, it led to effectively a monarchy with the Caesars. And even though they used the language of the republic, it was back to some kind of tyranny, Is that right? I mean, so the lesson from Rome is maybe that the rule of law is not enough, because that can also just be hijacked.

[Professor James Hankins]

Well, the Romans continued to call themselves a republic throughout the empire. And for that period, the republic really meant putting the common good ahead of any private good. And it meant the rule of law, that everyone was equal under the law. It wasn't in fact the case because the Romans developed in the late Empire a distinction between honestiores and humiliores. Right, that you treat people who are honorable differently from the people who are the lower classes basically and powerless. So the Roman superiors, the Roman upper classes, could not be subjected to certain punishments and they would be tried in different courts where they would be tried and the humiliaries wouldn't be tried at all. They'd be subject to the power of magistrates. So they did develop a class system within Roman law, which is unfortunate, but the ideal of the Roman law is that everybody gets treated equally, that being powerful is no prophylactic against the power of the state and its laws. And being poor does not mean that you're ignored. When the Christians come onto the scene in the 4th century, the Christians, you know, they had been illegal underground in the Roman Empire. They were not allowed to practice the religion openly. They were persecuted at various times, especially in the 10 years before the conversion of Constantine. They hated the Roman Empire. You just have to read the Book of Revelation to see what they thought of the Roman Empire. So suddenly they find themselves in charge of the Roman Empire when Constantine the Great converts in the first decade of the fourth century. And Constantine, of course, is intelligent enough to realize that he cannot impose his Christian religion on the entire empire, but he does make it the imperial cult. So if you want to rise in the empire, if you want to rise in office as a magistrate, it's to your advantage to become a Christian.

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[Interviewer (Unherd host)]

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[Interviewer (Unherd host)]

You brilliantly moved us on to the Christian era there, which was exactly what I was about to do. So give us what you consider the beginning and end dates of the Christian civilization. Or are we still living in it? I mean, if the first decade of the fourth century is maybe the official start of it, when do you see the end of it?

[Professor James Hankins]

The date 310, which is the Edict of Milan, which grants toleration to Christians and other religions, is often seen as the opening salvo in the Christianization of the Empire. It's not fully Christianized it's not a confessional empire. That is an empire with one official religion until the end of the 4th century. And I agree with Holland that we are still Christian in very fundamental ways. Just look at the things that the Christians did when they got into power. One of the first things they did is to try to get rid of gladiatorial games and beast fights. Which isn't surprising since the Christians themselves were on the menu during the beast fights of the late Diocletianic period. They hated the beast fights, but they also had a sensibility that they just didn't like killing 10,000 animals in a couple of days. And they didn't like gladiatorial games. So it took them a long time, but they finally got rid of the gladiatorial games. They changed all sorts of. Well, they fought against the sensibility of Roman slavery again. It took a long time to do anything about slavery in the Christian era. They were deeply hostile to the sexual mores of the Roman Empire. And they particularly didn't like the idea that masters could abuse their female slaves for sex, that they were basically sex slaves as well as anything else. And they outlawed that eventually. Theodosius in the Theodosian code of the fifth century says, if you are a master, you are not allowed to sexually abuse your slaves. If you're a father, you're not allowed to sexually abuse your daughter or sell your daughter. It has been argued by a number of ancient historians that this is the beginning of the idea of human innate human dignity. And it comes out of Christianity, also comes out of Rome, that there are people whose autonomy should not be violated, especially sexually.

[Interviewer (Unherd host)]

If we're thinking of this kind of 30,000ft view, the big new idea that appeared in Christian civilization then, as distinct from the Roman and Greek, Greek civilizations before it was this idea that the meek should be protected or that I suppose because the Jesus, the figure of Jesus Christ himself was meek in that sense. There is this. This Christian sensibility of protecting the weak, whether they are women or slaves or the poor. That's new, isn't it? That's not a feature of Roman or Greek culture.

[Professor James Hankins]

No, but it is a feature of Jewish culture, which is where the Christians get it. You just have to read the Psalms or read anything in the Old Testament to realize how much God presents himself as on the side of the weak and the powerless and the sick and the poor, and that he excoriates the Jewish authorities if they do not take care of those people. But it is true that the Romans and Greeks, they didn't have any social services, right? They didn't have anything. If you were sick, if you were poor, if you were weak or old or in some way incapacitated, you didn't get much sympathy from the Greek or Roman state. You might get sympathy from families, but you wouldn't get sympathy from the state. And there were no social services for those people. When the Christians come along, they actually have made their mark on Rome in the previous half century during the great plagues and all of the pagan cults collapsed financially. The Roman Empire was wracked with all sorts of plagues and the Christians kind of made a reputation for people who would take care of the sick, people who take care of plague victims and actually handle their bodies and try to relieve their sufferings. And they had social organizations in the Christian Church which are then taken over by Constantine and other Roman emperors and turned into. They used the church basically as public relief. And eventually you get civic state institutions to take care of the poor and the sick. This really starts with Christianity in the 4th century.

[Interviewer (Unherd host)]

And do you feel like that big new idea, protecting the weak and vulnerable, having a Christian idea of virtue even among the powerful that are governing some kind of sexual codes of conduct, those kind of central Christian ideas, do you think they do persist all the way into the Renaissance and to modern European Christian kings? Do you see that upheld throughout the Christian era?

[Professor James Hankins]

Most of the Western European states and North American states have been Christian really to quite recently. We live in the secular age now, but that's quite recent. I think Even the last 50 years have become much more unchristian. At least I guess I'm speaking from an American perspective since Christianity didn't start to decline in this country until the 1960s and there are signs now that it's taking off again, particularly Catholic Christianity are being revived again. I've heard that also about Britain. Britain also has got some kind of religious revival going on. Christianity shouldn't be written off too soon. Christianity is. One thing I talk about in the book is the ability of Christians to convert persons outside the state. In other words, when the Roman Empire took on Christianity as a state religion, Christianity was well beyond the borders of the Roman Empire. Christianity is a missionary religion and its pattern is usually to convert on the margins of the state, even before the state gets power. And Ireland's a great example of that. Ireland was converted to Christianity before there was any Christian state.

[Interviewer (Unherd host)]

Where would you situate the high point of Christian civilization? What kind of era do you think we should be talking about? Because whether of Course, people disagree about whether it's finished or not or whether we're still in it. But. But what do you think the high point of Christian civilization was?

[Professor James Hankins]

I think if you look at the strength of Christian institutions, you would probably be somewhere in the early modern period, because in the medieval period, the papacy is constantly at war with the Holy Roman Empire. Even though all the states are officially Christian, including the Holy Empire, there isn't one religious authority over them all. The Pope tries to establish his supremacy, but he never can quite do it. And thanks to the struggle between the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy, which reaches its peak in the 13th century, both institutions become weak and discredited. So what happens in the 14th century is that Christianity tries to come up with different basis for society than the papacy and the empire. But I think there are studies that have been done about the number of people who are effectively Christians in Europe. And the usual high point is somewhere in the 16th and 17th century in terms of people who are actually able to understand Christianity and embrace it in a doctrinal sense. In the 13th century, the Christian authorities are trying to convert the laity because the population is booming, the cities are multiplying, getting larger, and more and more cities, churches behind in trying to Christianize the people. Up through the early Middle Ages, the church really meant the monasteries and the cathedral schools, the cathedrals and the clergy. And they really don't try to seriously Christianize the people, the common people, until the 12th and 13th centuries.

[Interviewer (Unherd host)]

So do you see that period, the 16th, 17th century, as the zenith, that period in the later Renaissance when Christian ideas were being fused with ancient ideas and there was all this innovation and artistic flourishing, do you think that was the high point of the era of Christian civilization?

[Professor James Hankins]

Yes, I would say the 15th and 16th century. But in terms of the number of people who are Christian and the level of devotion to Christianity, you know, all the great high Renaissance artists like, like Raphael, Michelangelo, even Leonardo da Vinci, but he's more secular. But most of the great artists are doing Christian art most of the time. I think there's something like 90% of all the art of the Renaissance is religious art. But what happens, of course, in the 16th century is that the religious divisions ultimately bring people to a different form of Christianity, let's say, than prevailed in the pre Reformation period. And that is, I think most people would say that the religious wars of the 16th and 17th century and the spectacle of Christians killing each other for very minor doctrinal differences, you know, whether you've, whether you have transubstantiation or some kind of symbolic. The Eucharist is transubstantiation or consubstantiation. Lutherans believe in consubstantiation, Roman Catholics believe in transubstantiation. And you have people killing themselves over these crazy issues.

[Interviewer (Unherd host)]

So does that mean you see the beginning of the decline starting after that period, then the Reformation and the wars that followed it, is the, the beginnings of the downward slope?

[Professor James Hankins]

Yeah, I think that's ultimately the ground of the Enlightenment. And there's a Catholic Enlightenment as well as other enlightenments. But in 1685 is the date I like to use for the beginning of the Enlightenment because it's the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Right. Which tolerated Protestants and Catholics together in France had been going on for a century, but Louis XIV ended it. And so they started persecuting Protestants, many of whom went to were Huguenots and went to England and became great literary figures. That was such so manifestly unjust what was being done that it gave a lot of impetus to the Enlightenment movement and the need for intellectual freedom and openness. One of the basic principles of the Enlightenment is that if you persecute people into believing, if you try to force people, force consciences, as they would have said back then, you will make atheists. I think that the fundamental root of the Enlightenment, which is about freedom of thought, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, comes out of this period when Christianity had become tyrannical.

[Interviewer (Unherd host)]

Does that then take us into the fourth of the civilizations you described at the top of this conversation then? Do you see the Enlightenment as the beginning of modernity?

[Professor James Hankins]

Well, modernity is something new, but it overlaps with the inherited civilizations of Greece and Rome and Christianity in Europe. It grows out of those. And it's a long philosophical discussion whether modernity would have been possible without Christianity, without the Greeks. I don't think so myself. I think modernity is deeply indebted to both the Greeks and the Romans too, and the Europeans and Christians. This has been said for a long time by philosophers. It's not an original point with me, but there is something new going on. And I think it starts really with Machiavelli, because Machiavelli is the first author to say that the science of human behavior is not the same as morality. So in the traditional Greco Roman view is that nature's directions for the correct operation of the human being is virtues. And if you practice the virtues, you will be happy. And the same goes for states. A virtuous state is one that makes its people better. According to both Plato and Aristotle. So there's this connection between goodness, virtue, happiness, that's absolutely basic to the Greek tradition. So Machiavelli comes along and says, no, I don't think that's the case. He says that the rules of politics are different from the rules of morality. So that's, I think, one of the intellectual roots. However, the real basis of modernity is belief in science, right? That's what ultimately replaces the belief in God. And it starts in the 17th century with people like Bacon and Hobbes who believe that science should be free of religion. Right. That's one of the postulates of 17th century science, which is an international project conducted between persons of different religions. So what the 17th century scientists are doing is trying to find a more adequate basis for Christian society than they inherited from the medieval. They decide to bracket the divine as a form of causation and a form of morality as a source of science and a source of morality. And they try to build a civilization which is ultimately humanistic, based on science. It's also oriented towards the future in a way that no past civilization has ever been. I know you have this in Britain too, but in America there's absolute worship of the word innovation, which before modern times means revolution. Res novi in Latin means revolution. But since the 17th century, innovation has had a positive sense. Curiosity, which in pre modern times was a vice of being too interested in things that don't concern you, becomes a virtue in the 17th century. I think what's driving the modern world off the cliff rather rapidly is forgetting about its tradition and embracing innovation, embracing creative destruction with far too much joy in the destruction and far too little attention to what's being destroyed.

[Interviewer (Unherd host)]

Would you put yourself among those who see within the Enlightenment, within liberalism, as it developed, the seeds of the destruction of Western civilization. But many people say that because of that obsession with innovation and disruption, because there is a kind of virtue attached to challenging the structures of tradition. Somehow machinery was set in motion way back then that is playing out even today that the society will kind of destroy its own foundations. Is that how you see it?

[Professor James Hankins]

Well, I think yes, up until quite recently, there has been a very strong balance between tradition and innovation. You had scientists who were educated in the Western tradition. They valued reason, free speech, free religion, all those things because they were brought up in it. They were trained in Western Civ. Western Civ is simply a name for the way most people were educated for the last 500 years, which is in the Greco Roman Classics and in religion and in science. But at some point, the tradition started to be distrusted. The innovators were allowed to trample all over the past. They were not restrained anymore by religious convictions or by civilizational convictions that are deeply rooted in our civilization. About, especially ones about government, I think have been, you know, we're all talking about democracy, but nobody knows what democracy means. One of the reasons why we have so many cultural disagreements is because we don't have anything in common culturally, which we used to have. You know, I have smartest students in the world supposedly at Harvard, and I cannot communicate with a great number of them because their world begins in 2010. And some of them are well educated and I can talk about Shakespeare and Milton in the Bible and I can talk about Homer, but others know nothing about these. So there's no common foundation that you can that that values the tradition. You don't hear an outcry when terrible architectural disasters are imposed on, on, on center cities because people don't understand what beautiful architecture looks like.

[Interviewer (Unherd host)]

And at some point, did you see that a kind of skepticism about tradition and a kind of fashionable tendency to attack it became dominant within universities like Harvard. Is that something you've witnessed over the decades, that the kind of anti traditionalists won over?

[Professor James Hankins]

No, I think that that's true. Especially at Harvard. I've seen this go on. There's always been people who are strongly in favor of, of innovation in Harvard since the late 19th century, Harvard's always been one of the main champions of Darwinian evolution. For example, it's one of the first and most fierce defenders of Darwinian evolution. But they also had Christians here who were in the majority until the 1960s. They had people who valued our tradition. And we had faculties, humanities faculties that had built their curricula around the traditions of the west, valued those things. But at a certain point in the 19, in the first decade of the 21st century, as I think, when people ceased to think that was important, that we could do away with Western civ requirements, we could start bringing in young adult authors and comic books into the curriculum of the English department. That you got this unwillingness to distinguish between what was genuinely good on some kind of universal plane and things that were just phenomena of culture that professors could talk cleverly about.

[Paige from Giggly Squad]

Right.

[Professor James Hankins]

That's one of the main things I notice about modern elite, quote unquote culture, is that there are no qualitative distinctions.

[Interviewer (Unherd host)]

And so did you find yourself almost a kind of odd one out, an embattled minority at Harvard during those recent decades? I mean, were you the eccentric conservative professor who actually cared about the canon.

[Professor James Hankins]

Well, I wasn't eccentric when I got there in 1985. I've become increasingly eccentric. I think that the first decade in the 2000s is when people started getting more and more politicized and more and more present minded. I did a study of all the sessions at the American historical association in 1992 and 2022, and one of the very observable changes was that history teaching was much shallower chronologically. The vast majority of courses were 20th century, 21st century, and the number of pre modern courses had basically disappeared. And that's where you come across the Western tradition and understand the origins of Christianity and the Greeks and Romans and all those things that's just disappeared from most university history instruction.

[Interviewer (Unherd host)]

So you've taken the decision now to leave Harvard. You are moving to this new institute in the University of Florida which is dedicated to classical and Western canonical history and tradition. Are you giving up on Harvard? Do you feel like it's gone too far and is now unsavable? Is that why you're leaving?

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[Professor James Hankins]

No, I have no such conclusion. I'm a Renaissance scholar. I believe in the possibility of Renaissance. Renaissance is absolutely central to the Western tradition, something we didn't get to. But the Western tradition is a history of Renaissances. So I don't give up on Harvard, but I just think I can do more good in Florida right now. I've been at Harvard for 40 years and I have students that I'm very sorry to leave because most of the more conservative students take my courses. And I'm sorry about that, but I think I can do much more good in Florida. Florida is really serious about reviving Western tradition. Now, we haven't hired a senior professor in modern Western history in my department since 2007 and we've lost eight. But in Florida, we've hired 24 Western historians in three years. So if you're going to revive Western civilization, as I hope to do the study of Western civilization, I mean, which implies reviving Western Civ. Also, the chances of doing this in a place in Florida where you have strong political support for this, for this institute and where you have many young scholars, the faculty at Hamilton School are all very young. I'm the oldest guy there.

[Interviewer (Unherd host)]

Are you worried at all that the apparent backlash or the kind of counterculture against all of this ignoring and trashing of history and the Western tradition has taken quite a political flavor. It feels like new institutes like the Hamilton School. You mentioned that it has a lot of political backing. There are senior Republicans, obviously from the governor downwards, who are very actively engaged in trying to repurpose higher education, trying to bring back these kinds of ideas. Are you worried about how political this new counter movement has become?

[Professor James Hankins]

Well, I'm worried that Western civilization will be regarded as a right wing project, which is absurd on the face of it because most of the liberal and left wing ideas come out of the Western tradition. It may be happening in some places. There's a move at Harvard, I know right now to establish a undergraduate program in civics which will bring a more conservative voice into Harvard or at least a more traditional. I wouldn't say conservative, but let's say traditional voice into Harvard and defend some of the things that have been lost. There's a political division about Western civilization, but that's been true of all university reforms in American history. There was a great period of university reform from the 1890s to the 1920s when all these state colleges were founded and all the state universities, and there was a wave upon wave of university foundings, hundreds of universities, and that was led by the progressive movement. It was very political and was resisted by mostly traditionalists who wanted to preserve Latin and Greek education and they wanted to preserve or teaching of Christianity, or at least non sectarian Christianity. So maybe it's the case that any type of educational reform needs a certain amount of political impetus behind it. But I hope that it doesn't become a permanent feature of the study of Western Civ. I think that we're trying to revive the book that we've written, this enormous tome. Show you.

[Interviewer (Unherd host)]

Well, we'll put a link in it attached to the podcast so people can go and buy it.

[Professor James Hankins]

It's a very goodness, right, seven pounds of Western goodness and a little bit of badness, too. We're going to be teaching this and we're going to try to spread the study of Western civilization among the more liberal arts programs that are more traditional. What we call classical education in America, which I don't think has yet hit Britain.

[Interviewer (Unherd host)]

We started this conversation talking about the ancient Greeks and their big innovation to guard against tyranny of requiring persuasion and bringing in systems to disperse power. The current administration in the US Is often accused of taking things in the opposite direction, accumulating power to itself and kind of of riding roughshod over classical liberal ideas of the separation of power, independence of universities and so on. And it's kind of an irony, isn't it, that an administration that seems almost at odds with some of those values of Western tradition that you've been telling us about is the one that is ushering in new institutes like the Hamilton School, which are designed to teach the Western canon. I mean, can you help us unpick that paradox?

[Professor James Hankins]

I don't think Trump is necessarily helping people who want to reform Western culture, Western civilization. It's a blunt instrument that he's using and I think it's created more at Harvard. Certainly it's been more destructive than constructive. The movement to stabilize America and its traditional values and traditional political beliefs is not co extensive with maga. Right. It's not. Doesn't all proceed from the head of Donald Trump, thank God. I don't think that's what is driving the classical education movement, which predated Trump. The classical education movement goes back to the 1990s, and it got a huge bump up with COVID Panic and with the George Floyd panic. So it's expanding rapidly and it represents a lot of people who are dissatisfied, satisfied with what they're being taught in public schools and in universities. But I think you have to distinguish between. Certainly Trump himself is not setting a good example for a movement which is trying to re establish virtue, but he's changing the political landscape very rapidly. And I think it might give an opening to genuine reform movements, even if the administration is not necessarily being helpful in all of its moves.

[Interviewer (Unherd host)]

Do you feel then that you are living through a new renaissance of these classical and Western traditional ideas? Do you feel that is happening at a scale where it could be significant and where it may outlast this administration for decades to come?

[Professor James Hankins]

It's possible. When the Italian Renaissance got started in the middle of the 14th century, it was just Petrarch and his followers, and they eventually transformed the educational culture of Renaissance Italy. So by the time you get to 1470, 1480, pretty much every crowned head, every prince, every, every member of the Republican elites had had a classical education. So they were successful in that sense. And any movement that's successful will also. I hate to use the cliche, the seeds of its own destruction, but I think, I think that any educational is more successful something gets. And the more followers it gets, the more you have people peeling off and doing things that are destructive rather than constructive. Yes, I think it's possible. As I said, Western civilization, civilizations, plural, the Western tradition has the resources to revive things. And sometimes it's been very, very close to destruction. You know, the works of Aristotle were down to a single box of scrolls in the first century bc and they later became the basis of Western university education in the 12th century. The Roman art of jurisprudence was down to a single manuscript of the digest in the 11th century. But somehow it became the basis of Western legal tradition in the 12th century. So. So things can get pretty bad and they can somehow be resurrected. The 14th century looked like a terrible century. It was about to collapse. The Holy Roman Empire was powerless. The papacy was discredited, they lost Crusades, there's a famine, there's business collapse, then there's the Black Death. And it looked like Europe is about to collapse and be conquered by the Ottoman Turks. But then somehow it recovers. We don't know exactly how, but by the middle of the 15th century, we're in the heart of the Italian Renaissance.

[Interviewer (Unherd host)]

Well, we very often have people on this show who take really a very pessimistic view that the civilization we're living in is kind of in terminal decline. So I'm going to take that slightly more optimistic conclusion as a good note to end this conversation. Professor James Hankins, it seems like you have some maybe not conviction, but a hope that another renaissance could be possible.

[Professor James Hankins]

I do. But culture is not self perpetuating. We have to make sure that we cultivate our civilization and learn about it.

[Interviewer (Unherd host)]

And that's what you've been helping us do today. Thank you for a fascinating conversation and we'll be following your life down in Florida with much interest. Professor JAMES Hankins thank you, Freddie.

[Professor James Hankins]

Appreciate the opportunity to talk to your audience.

[Interviewer (Unherd host)]

That was Professor James Hankins still technically at the University of Harvard, but come next year we'll be at the University of Florida, part of the new Hamilton School. So what he was talking us through there at lightning pace was the past 2,500 years, but culminating in the most recent decades which he's experienced at Harvard and how the relationship to that long tradition has just been changed and degraded and how he is part of a some kind of resistance movement which seems to be gathering momentum to bring it back. Thanks to you, Professor Hankins, and thanks to you for joining. This was unheard.

[Professor James Hankins]

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[Interviewer (Unherd host)]

You see the headlines every day but do they actually tell you what's going on? We don't just look at the front pages. We look at what's moving beneath the surface on both sides of the Atlantic. That's undercurrents the new daily newsletter from Unherd. It lands in your inbox every morning at 8am EST or 1pm GMT.

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[Interviewer (Unherd host)]

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