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(Preface: Over the past decade or two, courses on “Western Civilization” have been taking a smaller and smaller role in the curricula of American colleges. Here I attempt to accelerate the trend by reducing “Western Civ” to approximately one hour. My justiVcation is the Nietzschean principle that big issues are like cold baths: one should get into and out of them as quickly as possible.) For more than two millennia, the peoples we call “Western” have been haunted by the specter of their own inner being: an apparition of human nature so avaricious and contentious that, unless it is somehow governed, it will reduce society to anarchy. The political science of the unruly animal has come for the most part in two contrasting and alternating forms: either hierarchy or equality, monarchial authority or republican equilibrium: either a system of domination that (ideally) restrains people’s natural self-interest by an external power; or a self-organizing system of free and equal powers whose opposition (ideally) reconciles their particular interests in the common interest. Beyond politics, this is a totalized metaphysics of order, for the same generic structure of an elemental anarchy resolved by hierarchy or equality is found in the organization of the universe as well as the city, and again in therapeutic concepts of the human body. I claim it is a speciVcally Western metaphysics, for it supposes an opposition between nature and culture that is distinctive to the West and contrastive with the many other peoples who think beasts are basically human rather than humans are basically beasts — for them there is no “nature,” let alone one that has to be overcome. Time permitting, I would oUer so many qualiVcations of these essentialisms that I could be taken for an adept of “the post modern cult of self-inWicted failure” (Zurburgg). As it is, I am rather in the position of J. S. Mill’s one-eyed philosopher, thinking to derive some universal truths from an obsession with a