Finding The ‘Golden Thread’ Of Western Civilization

[Kamaji]

Finding The ‘Golden Thread’ Of Western Civilization

By: Casey Chalk
January 05, 2026

James Hankins and Allen Guelzo’s new texbook, ‘The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition,’ is the thorough and thoughtful defense of Western Civilization students desperately need.

It’s not hard to determine what those at the helm of our nation’s leading intellectual and cultural institutions think of the idea of “western civilization.” The Trump administration’s attempts to restore beauty and proportion to our national capital’s architecture through a return to classical forms is routinely labeled racist. The administration’s complaints about the capitulation of the arts, including at the federally-funded Kennedy Center, to politicization and wokeness is dismissed as vain, self-worshipping posturing. Even conservative study and celebration of Greece and Rome — including the proliferation of classical schools — are accused of evincing a crypto-white-nationalist temperament.

It seems any effort to protect, let alone restore a celebration of western civilization to American institutions of learning and the arts will be an uphill battle. Yet for those eager to strengthen their own knowledge of western civilization — or inculcate the next generation in its verities — there is a new, excellent weapon in the fight. The two-volume The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, written by Ivy League scholars James Hankins and Allen Guelzo, offers an exemplary, accessible textbook worthy of every bookshelf that seeks to honor our glorious tradition.

Why Western Civilization Still Matters

A civilization, Guelzo and Hankins argue in their introduction, is a space, a place where “people may breathe,” creating “a public forum, a city square, in which they may do something other than tremble and labor for simple survival.” Civilization “allows people to erect monuments of art, literature, and thought alongside the everyday need to work, to produce, to exchange.” And civilization is essential, because “the human spirit cannot be captured simply by the way we earn bread or avoid massacre; there is a natural yearning after order, after beauty, after truth.” At least in the West, that civilization is a synthesis of several different traditions: the Greeks, the Hellenized Romans, and the Christianized Greco-Romans.”

Guelzo and Hankins know that their project comes at a time when many, if not most, scholars are moving in the opposite direction, seeking to decenter Western civilization and maligning even the idea of Western civilization as a unifying concept and reality. They write: “There has been a highly successful campaign to portray Western civilization as uniquely evil — uniquely disfigured by slavery, racism, genocide, militarism, economic exploitation, environmental devastation, monstrous levels of income inequality, and male oppression of women.”

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Source:  https://thefederalist.com/2026/01/05/finding-the-golden-thread-of-western-civilization/