In an era where Western civilisation is simultaneously celebrated for its achievements and vilified for its perceived sins, Ricardo Duchesne's Greatness and Ruin: Self-Reflection and Universalism within European Civilization (Antelope Hill Publishing, 2025) emerges as a bold, scholarly beacon. Spanning nearly 700 pages, this magnum opus tackles the profound question of what has made the West uniquely innovative and dominant, yet perilously self-destructive. Duchesne, a historical sociologist and former professor at the University of New Brunswick, weaves an intricate narrative that traces the roots of Western individualism and universalism from the Indo-European steppes to the modern crisis of cultural nihilism. This review explores why Greatness and Ruin is a vital contribution to understanding the West's historical triumphs, its current decline, and the path toward renewal, making it essential reading for those seeking clarity in today's polarised discourse.
Duchesne's work stands out for its extraordinary breadth, covering disciplines from philosophy and mathematics to music and furniture design. He argues that the West's unparalleled advancements, 95% of the greatest philosophers, the scientific and industrial revolutions, and democratic institutions, stem from a unique cultural trait: a self-reflective individualism rooted in Indo-European aristocratic traditions. Unlike other civilisations, which often stagnated after initial breakthroughs, the West produced continuous, compounding innovations driven by a culture that valued personal excellence and ethical inquiry over kinship or authoritarianism.
The book begins with the Indo-Europeans (3300–2500 BC), whose warrior societies emphasised personal status through heroic deeds, setting them apart from collectivist hunter-gatherer cultures. Duchesne highlights their pastoral economy, enabled by horse-riding and the "secondary products" revolution (e.g., dairy consumption), which fostered a robust, masculine physiognomy and a competitive ethos. This early individualism, he argues, laid the foundation for the West's distinct trajectory, where free men could aspire to nobility as equals, not mere subjects of a divine ruler.
Duchesne's analysis of Homeric epics, particularly The Iliad and The Odyssey, is a highlight, reinterpreting these works as the first literary expressions of European selfhood. He posits that characters like Achilles and Odysseus exhibit nascent introspection, deliberating over choices and displaying psychological depth absent in earlier epics like Gilgamesh. This "second-order thinking" marked a critical leap toward philosophy, enabling the Greeks to articulate concepts of virtue, reason, and personal responsibility. By framing these epics as the origin of Western self-consciousness, Duchesne offers a fresh lens that transcends modern assumptions, making ancient texts resonate with profound relevance.
The book's central thesis is that the West's greatness, its wealth, cultural dominance, and scientific progress, stems from its individualistic ethos, but this same trait has led to its ruin. Duchesne argues that unchecked liberalism has atomised society, fostering nihilism, cultural incoherence, and a hostility toward the West's own history. The embrace of multiculturalism and mass immigration, particularly from non-Western regions, threatens to erode the ethnic and cultural cohesion that once underpinned Western vitality. He contends that the West's universalist principles, while enabling global leadership, have been weaponised to prioritise short-term economic gains over long-term survival.
This paradox is acutely relevant in 2025, as debates over identity, borders, and cultural heritage intensify. Duchesne's critique resonates with sentiments on X, where users like @dr_duchesne lament the West's "liberal path" toward self-destruction, advocating for a balance between individual creativity and collective cohesion. His call for historical self-consciousness, understanding the West's unique achievements, offers an antidote to the "doublethink" of mainstream narratives that simultaneously celebrate Canada as a multicultural mosaic and condemn its European roots as supremacist.
Greatness and Ruin excels in its meticulous scholarship, engaging with a vast array of sources, from Hegel and Nietzsche to world-system theorists like Andre Gunder Frank. Duchesne's linear historical approach avoids the disjointedness common in comparative histories, guiding readers through the evolution of Western thought from Mycenaean Greece to the Enlightenment and beyond. His engagement with Jean Piaget's cognitive developmental stages to argue that only Western adolescents reached "formal operational" thinking (hypothetical reasoning) is provocative yet grounded, offering a novel framework for understanding cultural divergence.
Unlike his earlier Canada in Decay (2017), which faced accusations of racism for its ethno-nationalist stance, Greatness and Ruin tempers its tone, giving credit to non-Western achievements while asserting the West's unique continuity of progress. This nuance strengthens its academic credibility, though critics may still bristle at Duchesne's unapologetic defence of European identity. His ability to anticipate and counter multiculturalist arguments, such as Kenneth Pomeranz's claim of a late "Great Divergence,' demonstrates intellectual rigour, making the book a formidable challenge to revisionist histories.
Published amid rising ethno-nationalist sentiments and mainstream conservatism's struggle for coherence, Greatness and Ruin is timely. Duchesne critiques both the liberal-Left's "hyper-individualism," which denies collective identity for Whites while championing it for minorities, and the liberal-Right's race-blind universalism, which ignores the cultural foundations of Western values. His work aligns with the nationalist Right's push to reclaim racial and cultural identity, yet he avoids simplistic polemics by advocating a synthesis of individualism and collectivism. This balanced perspective is a refreshing departure from the polarised rhetoric dominating today's political landscape.
The book's relevance extends beyond academia. It speaks to those disillusioned with multiculturalism's impact, as seen in Canada's shift from a European-founded nation to a "post-national" state under leaders like Justin Trudeau. Duchesne's historical lens exposes the contradictions in narratives that rewrite Canada as always diverse, echoing Orwellian "doublethink" and resonating with critics like Mathieu Bock-Côté, who warn of cultural erasure.
Duchesne's willingness to confront taboo topics, race, identity, and cultural decline, invites necessary debate, even if his conclusions provoke discomfort. His call for a "historical self-consciousness" to temper liberalism's excesses is a constructive proposal, not a mere lament, offering a path forward for a civilisation at a crossroads.
Greatness and Ruin is a monumental achievement, blending rigorous scholarship with a passionate defence of Western civilisation's unique legacy. Ricardo Duchesne has crafted a compelling narrative that traces the roots of European individualism, celebrates its contributions, and diagnoses its role in the West's current decline. By reframing Homeric epics as the genesis of selfhood and linking ancient virtues to modern crises, he provides a profound, self-reflective analysis that challenges mainstream dogmas. For nationalists, conservatives, and anyone grappling with the West's identity crisis, this book is an indispensable guide to understanding our past and reclaiming our future. It is a clarion call to balance individual creativity with collective cohesion, ensuring the West rises from its ruins to reclaim its greatness.
https://www.eurocanadians.ca/2025/06/ricardo-duchesnes-greatness-and-ruin
"How did we arrive where we are? What sets European civilization apart from all others with its countless discoveries, creations, and advancements in all fields of human activity? How have these great people fallen from such heights to the lowly and self-destructive state it finds itself in today? Ricardo Duchesne has provided a grand account of both the progression and regression of European man from his early days up to the present crossroads in his new monumental work Greatness and Ruin: Self-Reflection and Universalism Within European Civilization.
This book could not have been released at a more opportune time. With the current political discourse reaching new levels of incoherence amongst the mainstream conservatism that masquerades as counter-culture, Duchesne is provided with fertile ground to laid out in immense detail an entire history of development with regards to Western individualism and how it correlates to the collective achievements, and presently, the collective downfall of our people. We have in Greatness and Ruin a truly self-conscious, self-reflective, and holistic analysis of where our individualism arose from, how universal principles and truths were discovered and developed by our race throughout the centuries, how our collective efforts produced grand innovations, and yet here we have arrived on the verge of total catastrophe.
The subjects contained are numerous though they unfold within a common line of thought regarding universalism and individualism, which ironically are two of the more despised concepts amongst the nationalist right. What makes Duchesne's efforts here so valuable is his ability to express a well researched and unique insight which I believe adds a significant contribution to the dialogue around these potentially misunderstood and key aspects in the development of our race. What is seen now as our bane was once our strength, our discovery of universal principles and truths are what elevated us above other peoples in our levels of advancement, and our individualistic natures once coincided with these progressions in relative harmony and co-reliance. As this book spans nearly 700 pages and covers a historical timeline of thousands of years, I am ill equipped to give a coherent summary of its entirety. Rather I will emphasize and quote some of the intriguing aspects that I found to stand out, and then attempt to relate them to the current political landscape.
The Indo-Europeans And Early Individualism:
In the risking of life, man first discovers or reaches a consciousness of his human self, because it is through this act that man negates his 'objective-or-thingish-mode-of-existence', showing that he is not bound by any determinate existence. This is why 'Man' must fight, for it is only through action and the risk of life that consciousness of oneself as an independent being that is not merely dominated by the dictates of nature comes to light. In the willingness to fight it becomes clear that Man is not a 'given-thing', does not exist in a purely passive way, but is a being that creates himself by conscious action.
When considering the terminus to which individualism has led us in our current age, it is certainly of importance to assess the source of this individualism. This assessment, much like the assessment of all our modern cultural calamities, cannot be done effectively by looking at "mankind" as a whole but by looking at our own race as an entity in and of itself as it is our own people that have produced the failed multicultural and multiracial reality of the West. Who are we? Where did our people arise from, the common ancestors of the white, western and individualistic man? If our current proclivity for self-destructive hyper-universalism has arisen out of our obsession with the individual over the group, there has to have been an origin point when this individualism produced the advanced cultural reality that far surpassed our more primitive human counterparts.
One of Ricardo Duchesne's key achievements throughout this work is that he presents his arguments and critiques in a generally linear format. When covering a subject as broad as European civilization, jumping all over the historical timeline does not tend to guide the reader properly through the historical, philosophical and psychological developments that require a certain linkage and procession of continuity. By beginning early in the book with Indo-European roots of aristocratic war-bands, Duchesne does well to express a differentiation between the early concept of the self developed through personal achievement and status attained through warfare and contest, as opposed to a more primitive and collective mentality of the "hunter/gatherer" type peoples who largely operated and thought as parts of a sort of single organism lacking individual variation. Duchesne takes care not to over-generalize, to give credit where credit is due in regards to non-Western development, and to address the clear similarities seen through broader human development while highlighting specific factors that make the root of European individualism much more clear.
…in the individualizing chiefdoms created by Indo-Europeans in the Pontic Steppes and Yamanaya settlements (3300-2500 BC) in south-eastern Europe, there was greater emphasis on the personal status and prestige of ruling aristocracies, less communal and public construction, and highly mobile pastoral economy driven by wheeled vehicles, horse-riding, and animal husbandry… In these individualizing chiefdoms, the aristocratic chief with his retinue of warriors was the focus of economic activity, and the units of production were not communistic estates but freehold farmsteads.
Attention is given to the significance of the early Indo-European capacity for both expansion and the cultivation of livelihood through the maintenance of herd animals. As well as being the first peoples to engage in large scale herding made possible by horseback riding, they are also associated with the "secondary products" revolution which included consuming considerate amounts of meat and dairy as part of their diet, leading to a more masculine physiognomy than other peoples of the era living off of a less robust diet. Most relevant to aiding our understanding of an early individualism is Duchesne's arguments regarding the aristocratic nature of these early proto-Europeans. What set the aristocratic and heroic ethos of the Indo-Europeans apart from other cultures and races of same and surrounding eras, in Duchesne's measurement, was the ability of free men to prove their worth and honour in war, conquest and competition while not being seen as inferior to king or chieftain, but noble equals capable of self assertion.
Humans in general are capable of courage and great deeds, but the opportunity to achieve individual renown became increasingly difficult and rare as non-Western cultures moved towards centralized state governments, in which the King, the Pharaoh, the Emperor, or the Sultan came to be seen as the only decision making individuals, treating their societies as royal extensions… true warrior societies are those in which there is a class of men at arms who recognize the liberty and the nobility of each other even when there is a recognized leader.
Homer Through A New Lens:
When reading Homer I have always been struck by the heroic nature of the tales, by the whirling adventure of war and conquest, love and loss, victory and defeat, and most particularly the hero's journey home. The long sojourn of Odysseus stirs sentiments of admiration for the fortitude of our hero, his unwavering determination to bear his fate as it reveals itself and continue to strive towards his ultimate goal of reunion with his love and land. The characters of these epic and ancient stories are flawed and unique, relatable through the common experience of struggle and adversity that can equally afflict and uplift a man.
Perhaps it is easy for many of us in the modern world to view even the most ancient writings through a lens of modern assumptions. We read the stories, contemplate their meaning to the best of our abilities, rate the aesthetic appeal of the characters and presentation, and judge the work based on our own present perspectives. We project onto the past the assumptions of the present, intentionally or not. Ricardo Duchesne has presented in this book an entirely different angle for viewing the Iliad and The Odyssey, an angle that reveals the inherent differences in modern and ancient conceptions of the self, conceptions that I personally have taken entirely for granted, most likely due to my lack of formal education on the subject matter.
Speaking personally, as a historian and a sociologist, rather than a translator or a poet, what was most surprising about Homer's Iliad, in comparison to the major writings that preceded him, songs or recitations of various kinds, including the celebrated epic of Gilgamesh, from civilizations in Mesopotamia, from the 'eternal' Egyptian world of the Pharaohs, and from Asia generally, is the presence of vivid characters with identifiable personalities, capable of some degree of introspection and deliberation.
The glorious battles, the internal struggles, the quests of honour and righteous violence are just one lens through which to view and appreciate these great epics. Emphasizing an entirely different point of view, one which takes into account the psychological and philosophical development of our race, Duchesne presents these poems as the origin story of the very concept of the self. They express an individualism far removed from what we commonly attribute to that term. Individualism in its root form, at a time when the distinction of one man from another, one psyche from its counter, and man himself from the world around him was not yet formulated and scrutinized from a philosophical perspective. The individual faculties of each character express themselves as sovereign personalities for the first time, identifiable and contrasted to each other in actions and intentions.
The Iliad is the first literary expression of European selfhood. What we witness in the Iliad are characters who are relatively more conscious in exhibiting a slight degree of internal dialogue and responsibility, even if their interior selves are still heavily typified in acting according to wishes of gods without explicitly declaring 'Know thyself', as the Greeks would do during the sixth century BC, the age of the Presocratics.
Anyone who has read or heard any amount of commentary on Homer will have heard the declaration that the root of all Western philosophy is contained within the Iliad and the Odyssey. I have never understood exactly what that meant, outside of a vague assumption that it somehow related to the development of concepts of virtue and vice based on how the characters measured up against one another in their actions and their reactions to the world around them. Duchesne argues how in order for philosophy to even be possible, a people group must first cross the barrier from first order thinking (a bicameral mind) to second order thinking, or "thinking about thinking". Homer's characters, through their introspective self examination which begins in a lesser form in the Iliad and develops even more through Odysseus in the Odyssey, are the first examples of this second order thinking in its earliest stage. The characters weigh their options, they consider multiple choices of various paths forward in different situations and deliberate amongst each other on the correct course of action. They also vehemently disagree and antagonize, as seen notably through the interactions and tensions between Achilles and Agamemnon.
The Iliad is already critical of Achilles' lack of sober-mindedness, his inability to restrain his anger and control his thymos, admired though he was for being the greatest fighter. The Iliad also contains, in the portrayal of characters… introspective monologues and signs of selfhood. The society depicted in the Iliad was not, as Jaynes says, 'quite similar to the contemporary divinely ruled kingdoms of Mesopotamia.' The Iliad grew out of a prototypical Indo-European aristocratic society, Mycenae, in which the king was first among equals. Mycenaeans are the first people in history to have created a civilization, not just a chiefdom, in which 'some men' rather than only the kind were free to deliberate over major issues affecting the group and free to aspire for heroic greatness. The Iliad is packed with metaphors and analogies, and with identifiable personalities with differentiated psychological dispositions.
If the Iliad is the first to suggest the sovereign status of personhood and self, an interwoven devotion and reliance on the gods is still felt and presented as the cause of the various fortunes and calamities that befall the characters. There is a self conscious nature present, but one interacting more with divine forces and a concept of fate or destiny rather than a fully aware and distinct personality that lies within, not without. Duchesne makes his case, with the inclusion of much scholarly work and evidence, that in the Odyssey's Odysseus we see a whole new level reached in terms of personal autonomy and capacity for self-reflection and an internal standard of ethics. A first conception of the passions of the flesh arise, and with it a seed form understanding of the faculty of reason which can be utilized to override and temper the demands of the body to the benefit of a transcendent and meta-physical "good".
Whereas the characters in the Iliad are portrayed as if they are not responsible for their actions, or their actions are seen to be brought about through the intervention of gods from without, Odysseus' motives for action come from within. The Odyssey manifests a deeper understanding of psychology and personal morality, with characters conscious of how their own desires for food, wine, power, and sex are what drives them to act in a certain way, not alien forces, thus accepting 'responsibility' for their behaviour.
Our Modern Dichotomy of Individualism and Collectivism:
It is my opinion that Ricardo Duchesne has put forward this work at an opportune time. Our current political discourse and social conditions are both dominated with the clash and contrast between individualism and collectivism. One can observe a variety of mish-mash interpretations of the terms themselves as well as an equally variational approach when it comes to the application of these concepts in both theory and practice. A foundational breakdown is reaching its climax in this regard with the very concepts of appropriate grouping reflective of reality being called into question by all sides. In closing, it is worth looking briefly at the current political perspectives of these categories in order to better accentuate the insight and depth Duchesne contributed to this conversation in this vast scholarly work that goes far beyond the superficial.
The liberal-left of the modern Western political sphere produces a blend of extreme hyper-individualism in which every bond not freely chosen must be abolished, presenting a generalized race-less man as a blank slate upon which all varieties of grotesque absurdities can be projected. This same political faction paradoxically presents collectively grouping by race as an ultimate value provided that the White race is left out of this equation of morality and modelled as the ultimate form of evil and oppressive force. White men and women can fit into the paradigm of left wing liberalism provided their racial identity is discarded and some other identity is adopted, be it homosexual, subcultural, or perhaps the most destructive, interracial. Homosexuality is a moral and social cancer on any functional society but it can only remain prevalent through pervasive propaganda and public tolerance. Elevated levels of interracial breeding within a nation-state is the surest way to drive the nail in the coffin of any future collective recovery.
The liberal-right on the other hand views the individual in the highest regard, the only means by which any actions can be properly judged. The modern conservative generally embraces the concept of family, which extends to nation, but in a purely universalist sense. Race is not important but rather individual character, a presupposed moral standard alien to much of the non-White world is at the front of this ideology which imagines a fantasy land utopia of all the races of the world to be compatible if certain predetermined criteria are agreed upon. I would argue that a large percentage of the liberal-right have subconscious racial loyalties and the conservative support for mass deportations in the United States is a prime example. No matter what they profess due to ideological, race-blind programming, most White conservative Americans would prefer to live in a White conservative country, not a multi-racial conservative country, which cannot actually exist in practice. The conservative loves to argue for culture without ever addressing the reality that race is what produces said culture.
These two perspectives have been the norm of acceptable dialectics for some time, however the growing rise of the ethno-nationalist right is finally providing a real ideological opposition to the conservative obsession with the individual and leftist obsession with the destruction of the White race. As the pendulum has swung to the left and the liberal-right has conceded more ground with every passing year, the rising voice of nationalism continues to grow in volume calling out the lies and obvious falsities in both the extreme individualism and collective antagonism to the racial interests of our people.
However, with the blatant and destructive excesses of individualism in recent times, it can be easy to brush past the individualistic nature that so defines our people through history. It is a nature that should be celebrated and cultivated, but not to the extent that denies our greater racial and cultural body. It is the nationalist faction of the politically aware who will most benefit from the work that Ricardo Duchesne has put forward. Rather than setting individualism and collectivism against one another he has provided a vast historical record that details the origins of our innate individualistic nature that has set us apart from other peoples, often for better but undeniably for worse in the current day. It is not a toppling of one that will assure our survival, but an integration of both in harmony with nature, divine providence, and racial reality which will restore greatness out of the ruin."