David Gress
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David Gress (born 29 January 1953), is a Danish-American historian, known for his 1998 survey From Plato to Nato on Western identity and grand narratives.
He was born in Copenhagen. He was an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, where he read classics. He was awarded a doctorate in medieval history from Bryn Mawr College in 1981. He was a Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution from 1982 to 1992. He has been a fellow of the Danish Institute of International Affairs and director of the Center for Studies on America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia. He was John M. Olin Professor of the History of Civilizations, Boston University in 2001/3. As of 2004 he is professor of classics at Aarhus University, columnist on the Danish daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten, and fellow of CEPOS.
From Plato to Nato was, amongst other things, an intervention in the campus culture wars, explaining that the narrative model of 'The West', in the general style of Will Durant, had become threadbare. His proposed replacement marked him as, in general terms, a Burkean conservative. He argued that 'The West' was in operative terms much more of a complex compound of elements he identified as 'Old West', of Roman and Germanic provenance, with modern Adam Smith economics, than a pure play on the Enlightenment philosophy. The book's development is complex and somewhat muddied by the wish also to be inclusive of other conservative views. Norman Davies, a Polish history specialist critical of incoherent definitions of Europe viewed from the Atlantic end, has lent some support to the outline thesis.
Gress has further identified the campus debates as a target, with an attack on Martin Bernal, and his 2003 book The Flickering Lamp.
[edit] Works
- "Demokrati eller?" (1978)
- "Gesta Innocentii III: Introduction, Text and Commentary" (1981) doctoral dissertation
- "Peace and Survival" (1985)
- "A History of West Germany" (1989) with Dennis L. Bark
- "From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents" (1998)
- "The Flickering Lamp: History, Education, and American Culture in the New Century" (2003)
