For both Hodgson and sense of the moral as well as cultural superiority of western Europe to the textualist position that civilization have essences, and that these essences are best seen in the Great Books they have produced. (Who decides what constitutes a Great Book, or what connection it might have to the lives lived by men and women in particular places and time is never satisfactorily explained.) The textualist position foreshortens history, annihilates change and levels difference, the better to represent an image of the past in dramatic form either as tragedy, as in the case of Islamic civilization, or as triumph, as in the case of the rise of the West. In either case, it is a story whose rhythms are guided by the ineluctable working out of civilizational essences encoded in foundation texts. Thus we get the history of the West as the story of freedom and rationality, or the history of the East (pick an East, any East) as the story of despotism and cultural stasis.