d, or reconstructed by a Western imagination that was in turn an instrument of imperialism. Thus for example he quotes the words of Arthur James Balfour (he of the Balfour Declaration that established British policy in Palestine):
Western nations as soon as they emerge into history show the beginnings of those capacities for self-government... [but] never in all the revolutions of fate and fortune have you seen one of those [Oriental] nations of its own motion establish what we, from a Western point of view, call self- government (quoted in Said, 1998, pp. 32-33).
Such was the sort of assumed, or constructed, contrast made by Orientalism that was put to the service of imperial projects. Said does not assert that every Orientalist intellectual was a conscious agent of imperialism, but he argues that Orientalist studies were inevitably infused with imperial concerns, just as Soviet studies were infused with Cold War concerns.
A further note must be made, that Said is himself a Palestinian-American, and that the book was written at a time when Palestinian concerns were given far less public legitimacy in the United States than they are at present. As T.M. Greene notes in the Yale Review, "its author is a Palestinian Arab who has personally suffered from Western prejudice;" this reviewer goes on to suggest that Said's "anger inflames, sometimes blurs, his analysis" (1979). Peter Conrad, writing in the New Statesman, says that Said's work, "despite its polymathic brilliance, is pessimistically narrow, resentfully self-enclosed" (1979). Another reviewer, E.R. Hayford, writing in Library Journal, touches more delicately on the political undertones, writing that the author's conclusion, "that the Orientalists' distinction ... was part of Europe's effort to gain strength and identity is only partly convincing" (1978).
To all of these reviewers, Said's book is itself thus politically charged, in much the same wa...