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Tuesday October 2nd
Western Civilization is on the ropes. Dr. Duchesne is a professor in the department of social science at the University of New Brunswick Saint John. He completed a BA in History at McGill University and Concordia University, Montreal.
In 1987 he obtained an MA at Concordia, where he wrote his thesis on the origins of the French Revolution under the supervision of George Rudé, one of the founders of “history from below”.
In 1994 he was awarded a doctorate in the renowned multidisciplinary program of Social & Political Thought at York University. His main fields of concentration were modern European history, political economy, and the philosophy of Hegel.
He studied with one of the foremost Hegelian scholars in the English language, H.S. Harris, and with Thomas T. Sekine, a Japanese economist considered to be one of the most important theorists on the field of Marx’s theory of value. His Dissertation, “All Contraries Confounded: Historical Materialism and the Transition-to-Capitalism Debate”, was awarded the “Doctoral Prize Award for Best Dissertation of the Year,” Faculty of Arts, 1995.
In 1995, Dr. Duchesne was appointed assistant professor in the department of social science at the University of New Brunswick, where he has remained since. Dr. Duchesne has published thirty-one articles and review essays.
His publications include one book, 36 refereed articles, one chapter, 13 encyclopedia entries, and 9 non-refereed articles. His book, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, a major work of 528 pages, was released in February 2011. Currently he is doing research on multiculturalism and the identity crisis of the West.
http://www.brill.com/uniqueness-western-civilization-0 His book can be purchased here.
Dr. Duchesne believes that the reading of great books, from cover-to-cover, is essential to a university education. The term ‘lecture’ was originally applied to the exercise of reading – and correcting – the language of handwritten texts. The task of the student was to follow the reading, and make the necessary corrections in the manuscripts. Since the texts were difficult, the teacher would concentrate on explaining and interpreting the manuscripts, line by line, word by word. ‘Resources’ such as handouts, power-points, and WebCT lectures promote the erroneous notion that knowledge comes ready-to-wear. Knowledge is actually produced through continual reading, note-taking, dialogue, and rewriting. Duchesne upholds the traditional spirit of broad learning for the BA degree with a multidisciplinary core curriculum taught by generalists with a strong grounding in the Western intellectual tradition.
Selected Publications
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The Faustian Impulse and European Exploration. Fortnightly Review (2012)
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The Uniqueness of Western Civilization. (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011).
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Review-Essay of Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat The Rest. (Reviews in History, No. 1225)
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Review-Essay of Why the West Rules – for Now: The Patterns of History and What they Reveal about the Future. Reviews in History (No. 1091). The Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London.
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Progressives are Running the Universities. University Affairs (December 20, 2010). Reprinted in National Post (January 3, 2011).
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Max Weber is the Measure of the West: a Futher Argument of Vries and Goldstone. World History Connected, (2006).
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Asia First? The Journal of the Historical Society (2006)
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Globalization, the Industrialization of Puerto Rico and the Limits of Dependency Theory. Journal Fur Entwicklungspolitik (2006).
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Christianity is a Hellenistic Religion, and Western Civilization in Christian. Historically Speaking (2006).
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Defending the rise of Western Culture against its Multicultural critics. The European Legacy (2005).
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Peer Vries, the Great Divergence, and the California School: Who’s in and Who’s Out. World History Connected (2005).
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The Way of Africa, “the Way I am”, and the Hermeneutic Circle. Historically Speaking (2004).
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On the Rise of West: Researching Kenneth Pomeranz’s Great Divergence. Review of Radical Political Economics (2004).
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Malthus and the Demographic Systems of Modern Europe and Imperial China. Review of Radical Political Economics (2003).
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Rodney Hilton’s Peasant Road to Capitalism. Journal of Peasant Studies (2003).
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The Post-Malthusian World Began in Western Europe in the Eighteenth Century: A Reply to Goldstone and Wong. Science and Society (2003).
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On the Origins of Capitalism. Rethinking Marxism (2002).
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Between Sinocentrism and Eurocentrism: Debating A. G. Frank’s ReORIENT. Science and Society (2001).
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Brenner on Political Accumulation and Transition to Capitalism. Review of Radical Political Economics (1999).
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The French Revolution as a Bourgeois Revolution: A Critique of the Revisionists. Science and Society (1990).
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Multicultural Madness: The Fall of British Vancouver and the Rise of Pacific Canada. The Salisbury Review, The Quarterly Journal of Conservative Thought (2012)
