Ricardo Duchesne

Ricardo Duchesne
Nationality	Canadian
Alma mater	York University
Scientific career
Fields	Historical sociologist
Institutions	University of New Brunswick

Ricardo Duchesne is a Canadian historical sociologist and professor at the University of New Brunswick. His main research interests are Western civilization and the rise of the West. In his 2011 main work The Uniqueness of Western Civilization he emphasizes the "continuous creativity" of Europeans from ancient Greek times to the present and criticises what he sees as the destructive effects of multiculturalism on modern Western culture.

Born in Puerto Rico, Duchesne studied History at McGill University and later at Concordia University, under the supervision of George Rudé. In 1994 he received a doctorate in Social & Political Thought at York University. 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. In 1995, Duchesne was appointed assistant professor in the department of social science at the University of New Brunswick, where he has remained since.

In his main work, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, Duchesne denounces the devaluation of Western culture by a revisionist multicultural ideology which has been sweeping the academic world since the 1960s, arguing for the continued validity of the traditional view of Europe as the one culture that produced the modern world, but adding that Europe has always been the most creative civilization since the Greek discovery of reason, prose writing, tragedy, comedy, dialectical reasoning, theoretical science, citizenship and democratic politics. Duchesne challenges World historians in their claim that there were surprising economic similarities between Europe and Asia as late as 1800. He questions the way in which the debate about the 'rise of the West' has been conceptualized merely in terms of the onset of the modern world, the Scientific Revolution, the creation of a world capitalist economy, and the changes brought about in Europe during the Industrial Revolution. Duchesne maintains throughout the book four main theses:

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