Rethinking Civilizational Analysis (SAGE Studies in International Sociology)

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Author: Said Arjomand | Edward A Tiryakian

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Rethinking Civilizational Analysis

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SAGE STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL SOCIOLOGY Editor Julia Evetts, University of Nottingham, UK

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Edited by Saïd Amir Arjomand and Edward A. Tiryakian

SAGE Studies in International Sociology 52 Sponsored by the International Sociological Association/ISA

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Introduction and editorial arrangement © Saïd Amir Arjomand and Edward A. Tiryakian 2004 Chapter 1 © Bruce Mazlish 2001; Chapter 2 © Marcel Mauss and Diane Barthel-Bouchier 2004; Chapter 3 © Edward A. Tiryakian 2004; Chapter 4 © Shmuel N. Eisenstadt 2001; Chapter 5 © Donald N. Levine 2004; Chapter 6 © Wolf Shäfer 2001; Chapter 7 © Arpad Szakolczai 2001; Chapter 8 © Johann P. Arnason 2001; Chapter 9 © Donald A. Nielsen 2001; Chapter 10 © Randall Collins 2001; Chapter 11 © ChoYun Hsu 2001; Chapter 12 © Saïd Amir Arjomand 2001; Chapter 13 © T.N. Madan 2001; Chapter 14 © John A. Hall 2001; Chapter 15 © John Rundell 2004; Chapter 16 © Daniel Chirot 2001; Chapter 17 © Gregory Melleuish 2001; Chapter 18 © Hamid Dabashi 2001 This edition first published 2004 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP SAGE Publications Ltd 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B-42, Panchsheel Enclave Post Box 4109 New Delhi 110 017 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 1 4129 0183 9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2004100213 Typeset by Type Study, Scarborough, North Yorkshire Printed in Great Britain by Athenaeum Press, Gateshead

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Contents

Preface

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Contributors

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Introduction Saïd Amir Arjomand and Edward A. Tiryakian

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I. The Intellectual Background 1 Civilization in a Historical and Global Perspective Bruce Mazlish 2 Civilizational Forms Marcel Mauss Diane Barthel-Bouchier, ed. & tr. II. Theoretical Essays 3 Civilizational Analysis Edward A. Tiryakian

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4 The Civilizational Dimension of Modernity Shmuel N. Eisenstadt

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5 Note on the Concept of an Axial Turning in Human History Donald N. Levine

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6 Global Civilization and Local Cultures Wolf Schäfer

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7 Civilization and its Sources Arpad Szakolczai

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8 Civilizational Patterns and Civilizing Processes Johann P. Arnason 9 Rationalization, Transformations of Consciousness and Intercivilizational Encounters Donald A. Nielsen

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10 Civilizations as Zones of Prestige and Social Contact Randall Collins

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III. Historical and Comparative Essays 11 Chinese Encounters with Other Civilizations Cho-Yun Hsu

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12 Perso-Indian Statecraft, Greek Political Science and the Muslim Idea of Government Saïd Amir Arjomand

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13 The Comparison of Civilizations T.N. Madan

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14 Confessions of a Eurocentric John A. Hall

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IV. Critical Essays 15 From Indigenous Civilization to Indigenous Modernities John Rundell

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16 A Clash of Civilizations or of Paradigms? Daniel Chirot

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17 The Clash of Civilizations Gregory Melleuish

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18 For the Last Time Hamid Dabashi

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Index

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Preface One very pleasant day in July 1998 during the meeting of the World Congress of Sociology in Montreal, Canada, we met in a Chinese restaurant in Montreal to discuss having a special issue of International Sociology devoted to the rethinking of civilizational analysis. Tiryakian had just reviewed Samuel Huntington’s controversial Clash of Civilizations. Our very persons as first and second generation immigrants to the United States, our meeting place in the Chinatown of the major center of the FrenchCanadian civilizational enclave in North America, and our convention of professional colleagues from all over the world seemed to belie Huntington’s notion of insular and mutually antagonistic civilizations and suggested what in his term could only be a single deeply and multiply ‘cleft civilization’. We knew that Huntington was not the only one who had been thinking in terms of civilizations in the 1990s. In fact, a line of thought opposite to the dyspeptic reflections of the Harvard professor, on Islam as the enemy civilization, was being developed in the turbulent ambience of revolutionary Iran. In a 1991 lecture on ‘Our Revolution and the Future of Islam’, Sayyed Mohammad Khatami, then Iran’s Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance, saw a great challenge in what he considered the crisis of contemporary Western civilization. He argued that the Islamic revolution in Iran could become the source of a renewed Islamic civilization only if it fully engaged with Western civilization and absorbed its positive aspects. The fact that such divergent views of civilizations could arise simultaneously in very different parts of the world demonstrated the salience of the idea in the global age and indicated the timeliness of our idea. Active planning for the volume in the following year coincided with the adoption by the General Assembly of the United Nations of a proposal by Khatami (now President of the Islamic Republic of Iran) to call 2001 the Year of Dialogue of Civilizations. It seemed all the more important to push for the appropriation by social sciences of the concept of civilization as a heuristic unit of comparative analysis akin to ‘nation’, ‘state’, and ‘religion’, while enhancing the pluralistic awareness of the global encounter of civilizations in the spirit of the United Nations’ designation of that year. The first printed copies of the special double issue of International Sociology, 16 (3), bearing the fateful date of September 2001, reached the editorial office at the State University of New York at Stony Brook on or about September 11. In July 2002 we held a symposium on the issue’s theme at the next World Congress of Sociology in Brisbane, Australia, and are now publishing it as a book with four additional essays, its relevance for our contemporary world situation made even more striking in the past two years.

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It is appropriate that International Sociology and its publisher seek to bring to the public what we see as a pioneering work in a global field of studies. Nearly 15 years ago Martin Albrow and Elizabeth King culled from various pieces appearing in International Sociology a volume entitled Globalization, Knowledge and Society (Sage, 1990) at a time when the theme of ‘globalization’ was barely discussed. We trust that Rethinking Civilizational Analysis will provide a similar multidisciplinary stimulus. Saïd Amir Arjomand Edward A. Tiryakian

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Contributors

Saïd Amir Arjomand (PhD, University of Chicago, 1980) is Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and was Editor of International Sociology, the journal of the International Sociological Association, from 1998 to 2003. He was also Founder and President of the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies (1996–2002). His books include The Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam: Religion, Political Organization and Societal Change in Shi’ite Iran from the Beginning to 1890 (1984) and The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran (1988). He has edited a special double issue of International Sociology (March 2003: 18(1)) on ‘Constitutionalism and Political Reconstruction’, and is currently working on a constitutional history of the Islamic Middle East. Johann P. Arnason is Professor of Sociology at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. He has also been a coordinating editor of the journal Thesis Eleven. His publications include Social Theory and Japanese Experience (1997) and Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions (2003). Together with S.N. Eisenstadt and Bjorn Wittrock he is editing a collection of papers on Axial civilizations. Diane Barthel-Bouchier is Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Her publications include Amana: From Pietist Sect to American Community (1984), Putting on Appearances: Gender and Advertising (1988), and Historic Preservation: Collective Memory and Historical Identity (1996). Her research interests are primarily within the sociology of culture and focus on heritage preservation and symbolic identities. Daniel Chirot is Professor of Sociology and International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of Modern Tyrants (1996), How Societies Change (1994) and the co-editor of Ethnopolitical Warfare (2001). He is currently finishing a book on genocide, and does consulting work on ethnic conflict mitigation in Africa. Randall Collins is Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his BA at Harvard (1963), MA at Stanford (1964) and PhD at the University of California, Berkeley (1969). His books include Conflict Sociology (1975), The Credential Society (1979), Weberian Sociological Theory (1986), The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of

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Intellectual Change (1998), and most recently, Macro-History: Essays in Sociology of the Long Run (1999). Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies, the chair of the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures, and the director of Graduate Studies at the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University in New York. Among his publications is Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundation of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1993). Shmuel N. Eisenstadt was born in Warsaw, Poland. He is Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is also Visiting Professor at numerous universities, member of many scientific academies, recipient of honorary doctoral degrees from the Universities of Tel Aviv, Helsinki and Harvard, recipient of International Balzan Prize, McIver Award of the American Sociological Association, Israel Prize, Rothschild Prize in Social Sciences, Max Planck Research Award, Amalfi Prize for Sociology and Social Sciences. He has published extensively. John A. Hall is the Dean of Arts at McGill University in Montreal. His books include Powers and Liberties (1985), Liberalism (1987), and Coercion and Consent (1994). He is currently completing a biography of Ernest Gellner. Cho-Yun Hsu is a University Professor Emeritus, University of Pittsburgh. He was educated at the National Taiwan University and University of Chicago. He has published many books and some two hundred articles in Chinese and English, among which are Ancient China in Transition (1965), The Han Agriculture (1980), and The Western Zhou Civilization (1986). He received an Honorary Doctorate of Humanities at the Hong Kong University of Sciences and Technology in 2000, and was awarded for Distinguished Contribution by the American Association for Asian Studies in 2004. Donald N. Levine is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. He has been editor of the Heritage of Sociology series since 1988 and was chair of the ASA Theory Section in 1996–97. His recent publications include Visions of the Sociological Tradition (1995), a revised edition of Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of a Multiethnic Society (2000), and Powers of the Mind: The Reinvention of Liberal Learning (in press). T.N. Madan is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Economic Growth, University of Delhi. He is the author/editor of many books including Modern Myths, Locked Minds: Secularism and Fundamentalism in India (1997) and India’s Religions: A Book of Readings (forthcoming, 2004). Bruce Mazlish is Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Among his books are The Uncertain Sciences (1998) and A

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New Science: The Breakdown of Connections and the Birth of Sociology (1989). Gregory Melleuish is Associate Professor and Head of the School of History and Politics at the University of Wollongong. He currently teaches a subject entitled Empires, Colonies and the Clash of Civilizations that focuses on Spain and the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century. His major publications include Cultural Liberalism in Australia (1995) and John West’s Union Among the Colonies (2001). Donald A. Nielsen is Professor and Chair of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. He has published a book on the social philosophy of Emile Durkheim, Three Faces of God: Society, Religion and the Categories of Totality in the Philosophy of Emile Durkheim (1999) as well as other essays on Durkheim and his school. He is also the author of various essays in civilizational analysis and social theory. John Rundell is Director of The Ashworth Program in Social Theory at The University of Melbourne, Australia. He is an editor of the journals Thesis Eleven and Critical Horizons, and his recent works include Classical Readings in Culture and Civilization (1998), with Stephen Mennell, and Blurred Boundaries: Migration, Ethnicity, Citizenship (1998), with Rainer Baubock. Wolf Schäfer is Professor of History and founding Director of the Center for Global History at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. He has taught in Germany and the United States, where he has published books and articles on labor history, the history of science and technology, and new global history. He is currently completing a book of essays on global history. Arpad Szakolczai is Professor of Sociology and Head of Department at University College, Cork, Ireland. He studied at the University of Budapest and has a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. His recent publications include Max Weber and Michel Foucault: Parallel Life-Works (1998), Reflexive Historical Sociology (2000), and The Genesis of Modernity (2003), as well as articles and essays in Social Research, the American Journal of Sociology, Theory, Culture and Society, the European Journal of Social Theory, and the European Sociological Review. He was a Research Fellow of the Institute of Sociology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences and has taught at the European University Institute in Florence. Edward A. Tiryakian is Professor of Sociology at Duke University, where he has served as Director of International Studies. He has published extensively in the fields of theory, religion, and international studies. In 2002–2003 he was the Distinguished Scholar Leader for a Fulbright New Century Scholars Program on the theme of ‘Addressing Sectarian, Ethnic and Cultural Conflict within and Across National Borders’.

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Introduction Saïd Amir Arjomand and Edward A. Tiryakian

The objective of the present volume is to recapture the analytical and empirical significance on the contemporary scene of civilizations and their dynamics globally and within major regions. It seems only a short while ago that ‘civilizations’ were relegated to the dustbin of the history of social thought as ‘globalization’ and ‘world system’ came into prominence. But changing world demographic, economic and political reality has called for an urgent reconsideration of civilizational analysis. In the economic sphere, the rapid emergence of East Asian ‘dragons’ as global economic powers has led to considering their civilizational base, their deep toolkit of cultural values, as critical factors. In the demographic sphere, large-scale immigration into Western industrial societies of a population having a different religio-cultural background, whether Islam, Buddhism or other nonWestern faith communities, has given rise to ‘multiculturalism’ as a new feature of the sometime uneasy commingling of civilizations in what had been seen as a homogeneous Western civilization. In the political sphere, the events and martial consequences of September 11 revived the shibboleth of ‘civilized’ versus ‘barbarians’, while the actions and weaponries used against ‘the other’ by the ‘so-called civilized’, to use Balandier’s apt phrase, demonstrates that technological hypermodernity is no guarantee of acting civilized (Balandier, 2003). The first two essays of this volume provide a temporal orientation on the historical use of the idea of civilization and its sociological relevance. The other essays fall into theoretical, historical-comparative and critical parts, which are interrelated and necessarily overlapping.

I Intellectual historian Bruce Mazlish opens up the historical seedbed of civilization in his essay (Chapter 1) by noting that ‘civilization’ appears in the 18th century at a critical juncture point when Western reflexivity became obsessed with its secular perfectibility. The ‘invention’ of the term civilization is put to use in viewing ‘connections’ linking people together – and also in separating them, that is, in separating ‘non-civilized’ from ‘civilized’.

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Mazlish looks further in comparative-historical fashion by discussing, on the one hand, how the ‘modern’ Westerners of the 18th and 19th century related to previous civilizations via ‘archaeology’ as a new science of mankind, and on the other, how value-laden ‘civilization’ and its derivative ‘civilized’ became when used to relate to other contemporaries, and, as illustrated by the case of Japan, how others ‘outside’ the West appropriated the concept. Marcel Mauss, the nephew, first student and successor of Emile Durkheim in between the two World Wars, had, on the eve of World War I, collaborated with his uncle on a methodological note regarding ‘civilization’. Their starting point was civilization as ‘a sort of moral milieu in which are found a number of nations and in which every national culture is only a particular form’ (Durkheim and Mauss, 1969: 453). In their brief note they pointed to the comparative analysis of civilizations as a sociological ingress to ‘international life’ – a sort of superior kind of social life which sociology must study. The selection from Mauss in this volume (Chapter 2), prepared with an introduction by Diane Barthel-Bouchier, is an extension of the methodological note, which Mauss developed first in 1929 in a multidisciplinary conference on civilization. It is his most extensive treatment of the subject and an important marker of the period.1 Mauss may be seen as sharing an important ‘modern’ outlook on the theme of civilizational analysis. With all the painful experiences of World War I behind him (and unaware of the still more painful one of World War II that would again make problematic European ‘civilization’), Mauss saw a world civilization advancing technologically, for example, in the spread of the cinema, albeit this would not mean the homogenization of cultures. But material progress and the superiority of Western civilization in technology did not confer, he also noted, moral superiority (Mauss, 1969: 481). Unfortunately, Mauss left us only with fragments of a sociological civilizational analysis, but they are an important legacy.

II How can sociology appropriate, or reappropriate, the concept of civilization? The first obvious step is the renovation of the sociological tradition of civilizational analysis as advocated by Edward Tiryakian in Chapter 3. He argues that civilization has been a contested term since its inception in the 18th century. It was much in use in the following century, often unreflectively as shorthand for Western triumphalism. Notwithstanding the pioneering sociological studies of Weber and Durkheim and Mauss, civilizational analysis languished in the mainstream of the social sciences after World War I. After tracing the development of the idea by two ‘generations’ of social scientists that followed the classical period: Sorokin, Elias, and Nelson, as an interim group, followed by the more recent conceptualizations of Huntington and Eisenstadt, Tiryakian draws on the latter two

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for a reflection on civilization and modernity in light of the post-September 11 world and concludes with suggestions for a renovated conceptual approach to civilizational analysis. In his chapter S.N. Eisenstadt offers an analytical summary of his thesis on modernity as a distinct new type of civilization, with emphasis on the primacy of its cultural and political dimensions.2 Even though this civilization is unprecedented in its openness, reflexivity and uncertainty, it can be understood by the same mode of analysis developed in his application to the ‘Axial Age Civilizations’ that grew around the world religions and the rise of philosophy – that is, in terms of the crystallization of a distinct picture of the world and an ‘ontological vision’, combined with a specific cultural program embodied in a distinctive institutional formation. It can thus be considered the civilization of the Second Axial Age. Although this civilization originated in Western Europe, it has become a global civilization with the continual development, constitution and reconstitution of a multiplicity of cultural programs of modernity and modern institutional patterns. It is thus a civilization of multiple modernities, both in the sense of containing totalistic and pluralistic cultural and political appropriations of the program of modernity, which stand in constant mutual tension, and in the sense of culturally specific adaptations to modernity of different countries and civilizational regions. As a valuable postscript to Eisenstadt, Donald Levine provides an important background check on the metaphor of ‘axial age’, tracing its genealogy in German thought from Jaspers back to earlier sources, in particular Scheler and Simmel. In Chapter 6, Wolf Schäfer extends the analysis introduced by Mazlish, first by an extensive discussion of the linkage of ‘civilization’ and ‘culture’ in anthropology and in German thought’s antithesis between Kultur and Zivilisation, a contrast that was articulated by Kant with culture having the connotation of ‘higher goals of moral cultivation’ and civilization with ‘mere good behavior’. Schäfer traces the later semantic history of culture and civilization, with a combative use of culture as superior to civilization, or civilization being morally superior to culture, put to rest by the early analysis of Robert Merton. What is in place, he argues, is an emerging global civilization ‘with lengthening networks of technoscience’ in ‘the pluriverse of local cultures’. Such a technoscientific civilization claims no particular territory, and has no center but, as typified by the Internet, knows no state barriers. It is interesting to note that Alfred Weber (1998[1921]: 200–203), whose distinction between, on the one hand, the civilizational process as cumulative and universal, and on the other, cultural emanations and religion as noncumulative and particular, sharply diverged from Max Weber, not only in underscoring the antithetical character of the distinction but also in denying altogether the dynamic properties of the world religions. By dropping the emphasis on this opposition, Schäfer’s central theme of an emergent technoscientific civilization can be closely tied with the theme of ‘civilization of modernity’ found in the essays by Tiryakian and Eisenstadt.

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We need to be more specific about how civilization can be conceptualized as a heuristic unit of comparative analysis akin to ‘nation’, ‘state’ and, ‘religion’. Three features of civilization as a macro-level unit of analysis stand out. First, civilizations are not fixed in time and space. They are historical entities that change across successive generations and spread to different societies and polities. Kroeber’s (1963) definition of civilization as an assemblage of cultural styles and patterns that develop and have specific growth profiles highlights the need to conceptualize the direction of change (‘flow and reconstitution’) distinctive for each of them. Historicizing distinctive civilizational processes is thus a major theoretical challenge. Second, not only does it transcend units such as ‘society’ and ‘nationstate’ in terms of social space, but it has the quality of not being time-bound. This latter quality makes civilizations – or more strictly speaking, elements thereof – capable of inter-epochal transposition as well as inter-societal transmission. Both features stem from the universality or universalizability of value-ideas and generality or generalizability of symbolic systems, discourse, and institutions that comprise a civilization (Nelson, 1981: 90–92). Third, ‘civilizational complexes’, to use Nelson’s felicitous phrase, are highly differentiated but nevertheless culturally and historically integrated.3 Institutions and ideas that constitute these complexes can be transplanted singly or selectively. The integrated whole is, however, also capable of assuming an identity, of being reified, hence having boundaries. This can occur vis-à-vis ‘the other’ – which is why every civilization has its barbarians. It should be noted, however, that the reification of a civilization is not exclusively or primarily a phenomenon of self-congratulation and arrogance of power. The holistic conception and reification of a civilization typically occurs in civilizational encounters. Those who reject the importation of institutions and ideas typically see them as incapable of detachment from the alien mother civilization as a whole – as did the traditionalists who rejected Greek philosophy in medieval Islam. But the same holistic conception of a foreign civilization as superior to one’s own can be offered by the enthusiasts for its importation, as by converts to other world religions. Such a reification was certainly the basis of the advocacy of Westernization as the wholesale importation of the Western civilization by the Russian elite since Peter the Great, and by the elites of the Ottoman Empire, Iran and Japan in the 19th century. A similarly holistic image of the West as the home and sponsor of the free market and democracy has been at work in post-Soviet countries since 1989. The holistic conception of civilization entails its ‘de-differentiation’ (Tiryakian, 1985) and the highlighting of its perceived fundamentals as the focal point of transformative or oppositional social action, and tends to ignore its complexity and possibilities for selective adaptation. The improbable phenomenon of Hindu fundamentalism can best be understood as a prime example of such civilizational contraction (Frykenberg, 1993), as can Islamic fundamentalism. While Nelson’s idea of ‘civilizational encounters’ (1981) emphasizes complexity, differentiation and therefore selective

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adaptation, Huntington’s notion of ‘clash of civilizations’ (1996) presumes the holistic conception. Both the fact of complexity of civilization and the temptation to its holistic reification play a part in the dynamics of the case of inter-epochal and inter-societal encounters between the Islamic civilization and the Greek and Indian ones covered by Arjomand in Chapter 12. In his chapter, Johann Arnason highlights the tension between the unitary and pluralistic meanings of the notion of civilization, both of which have been important for the development of the social sciences. Is there one civilization, opposed to barbarism, or are there many civilizations with contrasting features? It is the idea of civilization in the singular that lends itself most easily to the justification of imperial domination and is therefore most hotly contested. The pluralistic notion, though open to criticism on the grounds of reification, projection and ‘othering’, is of ambiguous instrumental value and not so evidently contestable. If Max Weber’s idea of rationalization can be considered an extension of the pluralistic conception of civilization, Elias’s idea of the civilizing process presumes the unitary notion of civilization. Suggesting the greater theoretical utility of the pluralistic conception, Arnason advances a provisional model for linking civilizational patterns and the civilizing processes such as rationalization. Elsewhere (Arnason, 1990: 224–25), he also points out that ‘civilizational complexes are very important sources of identity that can be ‘reinforced and reoriented by the global context’. Like the nation and the nation-state, they can thus be the focus of ‘sub- or counter-globalization’. The present volume testifies to the thrust of Nelson’s civilizational analysis, to his valorization of different paths to modernity taken by different civilizations and their coming together at important juncture points. In Chapter 9, Donald Nielsen, one of Nelson’s students at the New School, provides the reader with an extensive discussion of Nelson’s conceptual framework that framed the emergent sociology of civilizations (note the plural), while in Chapter 10, Randall Collins provides vindication for a focus on intercivilizational encounters in laying out an ecology of civilizational prestige. His empirical materials on intercivilizational attraction in the case of Muslim Spain point to several religious components interactive with one another. He finds similar patterns in Asia, for example in the case of Indian Buddhists who went north to China and were well received as ‘propagators of highly respected wisdom’. Inter-civilizational contacts and patterns of interaction are thus reasonably well covered in this volume. By contrast, the equally important issue that does not receive sufficient attention in this volume is intra-civilizational historical/developmental patterns and their dynamics. Max Weber put forward the idea of rationalization as the most important developmental process in human history, but only explicated it systematically in the last year of his life.4 Norbert Elias’s ‘civilizing process’ consists of the broad socio-cultural implications of the process of state-formation in terms of the concentration of the legitimate use of violence according to Weber’s famous definition of the modern state. Elias derived this from an analysis of that

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developmental pattern in Western civilization. It can, however, be generalized thematically and cross-culturally. In Chapter 7 of this volume, Arpad Szakolczai amplifies Elias’s civilizing process of restraining and eventually eliminating violence from human relations by boldly relating it to Weber’s perspective on charisma and prophecy. Eiko Ikegami (1995) has successfully traced the parallel Japanese intra-civilizational process of ‘the taming of the Samurai’ through the progressive sublimation of violence in their culture of honor as a result of the distinct developmental pattern of the Japanese polity. Replacing a unitary notion sense of civilization by a pluralistic conception more adequate for theoretical analysis, ‘the civilizing process’ (editors’ emphasis) of Elias must give way to ‘civilizational processes’, which can capture the distinctive direction of change in major elements within each civilization. This is a matter of considerable importance in civilizational analysis, especially in the global contexts where intra-civilizational processes intermingle with inter-civilizational ones and the development of the civilization of modernity. The ‘social anthropology of civilizations’ as developed by Robert Redfield and Milton Singer provides a model for a correlative definition of these two types of civilizational processes. Each civilization has a Great Tradition at the center and many local Little Traditions in the periphery. ‘The social organization of tradition’ (Redfield, 1989[1956]: 40–59) links the two through priests, literati and intellectuals as ‘cultural brokers’. The Great Tradition, as seen by Redfield and Singer: becomes the core culture of an indigenous civilization and a source, consciously examined, for defining its moral, legal esthetic and other cultural norms. A Great Tradition describes a way of life and as such is a vehicle and a standard for those who share it to identify with one another as members of a common civilization. (Singer, 1972: 7)

The dynamic aspect of the model consists in the mutual approximation of the two traditions. Furthermore, a distinction is made between this ‘orthogenetic’ process and the ‘heterogenetic’ process of borrowing from other cultures/civilizations. In rethinking civilizational analysis, we can call the first an ‘intra-civilizational’ and the latter an ‘inter-civilizational’ process. This perspective also complements Eisenstadt’s forward linkage of civilization and modernity by linking the latter backward to tradition. Tradition is not static but changing: ‘the learned literati [are] an institutionalized agency for changing tradition, so long as they regard the change as primarily preservative of the tradition’s essentials’ (Singer, 1972: 42). This reconceptualization of tradition paves the way for Eisenstadt’s multiple modernities. To make sure this model is not forgotten as an abstraction, let us consider two important contemporary instances of the intra-civilizational process: Sanskritization and Islamicization. In his classic study of Sanskritization, M.N. Srinivas (1956) aptly contrasted it to Westernization rather than modernization. He defined Sanskritization as a process of cultural mobility among the lower caste, which resulted in the enhancement of the central Hindu values as expressed in the Sanskrit texts – notably vegetarianism,

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teetotalism and subjugation of women, and the greater integration of Hindu society around them. Srivinas was struck by the paradox that while many members of the Indian elite from the Brahmin caste were the cultural brokers of Westernization, the lower castes were eagerly imitating the Brahmin’s way of life and were thus the primary agents of Sanskritization. Sanskritization and Westernization were the two concurrent processes of social change in contemporary India which sometimes reinforced each other but often moved in opposite direction. The contradictory direction of the two processes puzzled Srinivas who wondered if the former would, in the long run, turn out to be the prelude to the latter. Singer (1972: 389) solved the puzzle, but without taking the full credit for doing so, by pushing his argument to its logical end. The conceptual solution is that Sanskritization is an intra-civilizational and Westernization is an inter-civilizational process. The intermingling of the two can in principle be analytically mapped out and their respective relative weight would then be an empirical rather than a conceptual question. Two parallel processes of Islamicization and Westernization have similarly been concurrent in the Islamic civilization. As the ideas of development and modernization were ushered in by the United Nations in place of Westernization, as the civilization of modernity has struck firm roots during the half century since the publication of Srinivas’s article, we may here speak of Islamicization as our intra-civilizational process, and modernization as our inter-civilizational process. Arjomand (2003) has identified a historical pattern of geographical expansion and intensive societal penetration of Islam as a world religion that accounts for the expansion of Islam as the fast growing contemporary world religion, and for the Islamic reformist and fundamentalist movements which seek to make their respective societies more Islamic. This Islamic intra-civilization process is accelerated by many key processes of modernization such as urbanization, spread of literacy, expansion of higher education, growth of the media of mass and electronic communication and national political integration. The two processes intermingle in the global context. The increasing global integration of the Muslim world has induced many Muslims to emphasize their unique identity within the frame of reference of their own culture, which can be said to be at once universal and local or sub-global. There can be no doubt that global integration has made many Muslims seek to appropriate universalist institutions by what might be called Islamic cloning. We thus hear more and more about ‘Islamic science’, ‘Islamic Human Rights’, ‘Islamic international system’, and a variety of organizations modeled after the United Nations and its offshoots. Most notable is the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which was founded in 1969 and has 57 countries as its members. The cloning is unmistakable. Despite its intent, the assimilative character of defensive counter-globalization or counter-universalism is quite pronounced. It has already resulted in the assimilation of universal organizational forms, and, albeit restrictively, of universal ideas such as human rights and rights of women (Arjomand,

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2004b). It is difficult to escape the conclusion that, despite its intent, defensive counter-universalism is inevitably a step toward the modernization of the Islamic tradition. It is thus a part of the global civilization of multiple modernities.

III Part III focuses on the historical developments within, and comparisons among, the Chinese, Islamic, Indian, and Western civilizations. In Chapter 11, Cho-Yun Hsu considers differential outcomes in inter-civilizational encounters within a single setting, namely China. He considers the factors that made for the receptivity and institutionalization of Buddhism, on the one hand, and on the other, despite efforts by Jesuit missionaries, the abortive attempt at introducing Christianity. He proposes several factors that produced different outcomes, including the level of participation of intellectuals and the level of popular support in the general populace. A third ‘empirical’ essay that relates to Nelson is Said Arjomand’s (Chapter 12) comparative study of medieval Islam and its civilizational interaction (or encounter) with Perso-Indian and Greek political ideas. Why, asks Arjomand, was there a differential reception of Greek philosophy, as exemplified by acceptance and diffusion of Aristotle’s Ethics, but not his equally available Politics? This puzzle opens up a broad vista for the sociology of civilizational analysis for it suggests that not all parts or values of a given civilization are readily assimilated unto another, even if the encounter is not violent or involuntary. Aristotle’s Politics, in this instance, must have been less compatible with the political premises of medieval Islam than Perso-Indian statecraft. T.N. Madan’s condensed essay (Chapter 13) is a testimony to the penetrating analysis of the central Indian ‘value-idea’ of ‘hierarchy’ by the late Louis Dumont, which has its grounding in Durkheim and Mauss. As Madan makes clear, India’s caste system must be taken seriously as an authentic civilizational scheme and not as a product of ‘social degeneracy’. The caste system is a complement to its opposite ideology, Western individualism. Madan is careful to note that, on the one hand, there is significant regional variation within India, and on the other, that western capitalist societies, though their ‘value-idea’ is that of equality and individualism, are characterized by ‘class divisions and socio-economic inequalities’. It is tempting, one might infer, to view ‘homo hierarchicus’ and ‘homo equalis’ as Weberian ideal types, heuristic in the comparative study of civilizations. In Chapter 14, John Hall gives us an ultimate look at Weber’s core concern: what accounts for the rise of the West? Hall’s ‘Eurocentric confession’ gives weight to the breakthroughs of the West, not in the moral/ideational sphere usually associated with Weber, but with structural factors, socioeconomic processes and even luck (in access to material resources). Hall grants the economic dynamism of the West, but leaves with

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a paradox: ‘the West caused a jump in social evolution most of all because of its relative failure as a civilization’.

IV John Rundell applies a new perspective on the clash of civilizations to the Australian context in Chapter 15. The British made use of a conception of ‘civilization’ that made the civilization of indigenous life invisible and legitimated the sovereignty of the colonial state. Rundell draws both on contemporary archaeological/anthropological research and on Durkheim and Mauss for a contrasting interpretation of indigenous civilization as a dynamic process. The civilizing process is a creative one for the social membership, one of continuous tensions between the sacred and the profane. Following Durkheim, civilizations as sets of symbolic representations, which are ‘culturally instituted understandings of social creation’, are not contained in discrete territorial units, but extend in time and beyond frontiers. Aboriginal ‘inscriptive practices’ in story-telling, song and art cut across the sacred and the profane, the present and the past. They were ignored, rendered invisible or ploughed under British colonial-settler civilization. Rundell then looks at civilizational encounters and the changing Aboriginal modernities. For the settlers, the modernities went from the initial interpretive view of ‘empty lands’, to viewing the Aborigines as an absolute outsider (the ‘bestiarium’ who needed conversion), to the development of ‘civilized’ welfare paternalism. But inside the Australian indigenous civilization, their Aboriginality has been a living form creatively responding to the challenges of the civilization of colonial domination. Huntington’s basic thesis of the replacement of the clash of ideologies during the Cold War by the clash of civilizations around their geo-cultural ‘fault lines’ had an immediate and enormous political impact. However it also generated a critical literature that became a sizeable academic industry. Although the terrorist attacks of September 11 were taken by the American press and public, and by many in Europe, as proof of the validity of Huntington’s thesis, the flood of scholarly criticisms continued unabated and some international gatherings, notably the Joint Forum of Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) and of the European Union (EU) in Istanbul in February 2002, sought to distance themselves from Huntington’s views. It therefore does seem appropriate to examine September 11 more closely from a civilizational-analytic point of view. Huntington’s thesis had already enjoyed enormous popularity with Islamic fundamentalists in the 1990s. A few days after the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington, a Turkish daily sympathetic to Islamic fundamentalists quoted a professor as saying ‘We have not as yet witnessed a full clash of civilizations in the concrete, though the events of September 11

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constitute the beginnings of such a concretization’ (Zaman, 18 September 2001). What is more important, bin Laden and Al Qaeda militants tacitly endorse the thesis of Huntington. The instructions found in the luggage of the September 11 highjackers refer to ‘the admirers of Western civilization’ who are besotted in their love of it as ‘the followers of Satan’. Referring to their astounding success, bin Laden declared: ‘these events have divided the world into two camps, the camp of the believers and the camp of the infidels’ (New York Times, 8 October 2001). Huntington himself, however, was at first much more cautious. In an interview with the New York Times (20 October 2001), he implicitly acknowledged many criticisms of his thesis. He maintained that Islam’s borders are bloody because there are so many of them and with every other civilization, that it is not Islam but demography (large number of males in the 16–30 age bracket) that accounts for militancy and terrorism, that there are as many intra- as inter-civilizational conflicts. He claimed to have made the point with reference to Islam and suggested that it is bin Laden who wants a clash of civilizations (not himself). Above all, he denied the presumption that civilizations are unified blocks, which had been taken as a basic premise for their inevitable clash, highlighting the lack of cohesion as the main problem with contemporary Islam.5 Newsweek started the year 2002 with an article on ‘The Age of Muslim Wars’ which, according to its author, Samuel Huntington, ‘began as the cold war was winding down in the 1980s’. Here, Huntington recognizes the rise of Islamic fundamentalism as a response to modernization and globalization. Furthermore, he acknowledged the causal relevance of the Israeli government’s ‘provoking the second intifada with its settlements and ongoing military presence in the West Bank and Gaza,’ and concludes that ‘the resentment and hostility of Muslims toward the West could be reduced by changes in US policies toward Israel.’ In fact, much of his analysis seems unobjectionable, except for the use of the terms ‘Muslim wars’, and ‘Muslim violence’ to refer to the incidence of violence ‘involving Muslims’ without necessarily having a religious cause. (Where religious causation can be established, as with ‘Muslim terrorism’, the term is not objectionable, even though we consider ‘Islamic terrorism’ more accurate.) But the problem with the argument remains the unbridged gap between Islamic terrorism and Islam. This gap makes the clash of Western and Islamic civilizations meaningless. Yet, another metaphor of Huntington’s can throw some light on the subject: the idea of ‘cleft countries’ such as the United States that replicate the hypothesized ‘fault lines’ within them (Huntington, 1996: 209). It would be more accurate to speak of one cleft, global civilization of modernity, in which both dialogue and clash among different elements of civilizational complexes is inevitable. From the perspective of this new global civilization and its discontents, the September 11 tragedy shows the alarming new possibilities for revolutionary violence by clandestine groups as an expression of such discontents. From the critical literature on the clash of civilizations, we have chosen

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an analytical rather than political critique by Gregory Melleuish. In Chapter 17, he argues against Huntington’s assumption that civilizations are rigidly unified political and cultural entities – hard, impenetrable, resistant to change and clashing. Melleuish contends that civilizations are, on the contrary, entities capable of developing in a variety of directions. They interact through the goods, ideas and people who move from one to another, in cooperative activities as well as in warfare: ‘Civilizations are not closed systems like billiard balls but porous and open to outside influences.’ Dan Chirot’s essay, Chapter 16, combines critical and constructive purposes, providing a balance in relating the ‘clash of civilizations’ to ‘uneven modernization’. He is as critical of multiculturalists who reject Westernization altogether, as of ‘Huntingtonians’, who reject that ‘the rest’ can evolve with the West in a ‘single modern type of social structure with a broadly common modern culture’. Thus, Chirot converges with Eisenstadt in a broad modernization perspective that opts for an emergent civilization of modernity. In the final chapter, Hamid Dabashi critically examines the noted cultural historian Jacques Barzun, who views civilization as having reached its pinnacle in the West and is now at the stage of decadence. Dabashi sees this as a conservative stance, a defensive strategy, shared by various intellectuals in the face of changing global material conditions with ‘the moral correspondence to it as yet to come.’ Dabashi explores the evolving context of the idea of Western Civilization as it replaced Christendom in providing legitimacy to ruling regimes. He proposes that ‘civilizational thinking’ during the Enlightenment phase of modernity provided ‘a universal frame of collective identity’ to the triumphant bourgeoisie, which established national cultures. From whence the twin inventions of ‘national cultures’ and ‘civilizational constructs’ were deployed in hegemonic domination of the vast colonial empires. Yet, Dabashi does not end the story there: first he notes that the colonially constructed sites, such as ‘Islamic’, ‘African’, and other such, turned the tables on the cultural intruders by becoming sites of colonial resistance, and not the passive, inert entities constructed by ‘Orientalists’. Second, he points to growing demographic cracks in the West and to the demise of national economies in the face of the new configuration of global capital and labor, generating its own culture ‘which is at once post-national and as a result post-civilizational.’6 Taken together, the pieces have provided an historical overview of the concept of civilization, which we offer in the post 9/11 world situation as a more critical unit of sociological analysis than the nation-state or the worldsystem. The volume as a whole should be seen by readers as a collaborative endeavor to stimulate a new research agenda for sociology in the 21st century, one that will increasingly be structured by inter- and intracivilizational encounters, both amicable and conflictual. Ultimately, this is a work in progress, like our world situation.

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Notes 1. Victor Karady has put together a variety of other pieces of Mauss dealing with civilization (Mauss, 1969: Chapters 5 and 6). 2. For a full exposition, see Eisenstadt (2003). For Eisenstadt’s place in the third generation of the sociological tradition of civilizational analysis, see Chapter 3. 3. Recall that Sorokin, an early sociological pioneer in this field, viewed a ‘civilization’ as ‘a unified meaningful-causal system’ (Sorokin, 1947: 639). 4. Alfred Weber was wrong in considering religio-cultural movements as non-cumulative. Max Weber, on the other hand, correctly considered them cumulative and developmental, but in his general statements tended to misconceive their character as a rationalization process of the instrumental and formal kind. In fact, the type of rationality at work here is architectonic rather than instrumental. Many sociologists, notably Habermas and Schluchter, have treated rationalization as a universal rather than a culturally/civilizationally specific process. Arjomand (2004a) has argued against the widely accepted presumption that the major long-term developmental processes consist in universal instrumental and formal rationalization. He proposes a contrasting notion of value-rationalization as a developmental process on the basis of the assumption of pluralism and diversity of normative orders as building blocks for the institution and modification of society by collective judgment through constitutive struggles. 5. In truth, bin Laden’s terrorism has as many roots in the modern political tradition of revolutionary terrorism, begun with the Jacobins during the French revolution and developed by Russian revolutionary groups in the 19th and early 20th centuries, as it does in the Islamic tradition. Like the fascist movements in the inter-War Europe, radical political Islam represents ‘the Jacobin dimension of modernity’ (Eisenstadt, 1999) in the contemporary Muslim world. It is thus a phenomenon of the global interpenetration of civilizations which has created a distinctive civilization of modernity. 6. Dabashi’s analysis converges with that of Leslie Sklair (1995) who proposes that the culture-ideology of the global system is provided by consumerism.

References Arjomand, S.A. (2003) ‘Islam’, in M. Juergensmeyer (ed.) Global Religion. An Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Arjomand, S.A. (2004a) ‘Rationalization, the Constitution of Meaning and Institutional Development’, in C. Camic & H. Joas (eds) The Diagonal Turn. New Roles for Sociology in the Postdisciplinary Age. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 247–74. Arjomand, S.A. (2004b) ‘Islam, Political Change and Globalization’, Thesis Eleven 76: 5–24. Arnason, J.P. (1990) ‘Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity’, Theory, Culture & Society 7: 207–36. Balandier, G. (2003) Civilisés, Dit-On. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Durkheim, E. and Mauss, M. (1969[1913]) ‘Note sur la notion de civilisation’, in Marcel Mauss (edited with introduction by V. Karady) Œuvres Vol. 2. Représentations Collectives et Diversité des Civilisations. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. Eisenstadt, S.N. (1999) Fundamentalism, Sectarianism, and Revolution. The Jacobin Dimension of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eisenstadt, S.N. (2003) Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities, 2 vols, Leiden: Brill. Frykenberg, R.E. (1993) ‘Hindu Fundamentalism and the Structural Stability of India’, in M. Marty and R.S. Appleby (eds) Fundamentalisms and the State. Remaking Polities, Economies, and Militance. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Huntington, S.P. (1996) Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster.

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Ikegami, E. (1995) The Taming of the Samurai. Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kroeber, A.L. (1963) ‘Flow and Reconstitution within Civilizations’, in An Anthropologist Looks at History. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Mauss, Marcel (1969) Œuvres Vol. 2. Représentations Collectives et Diversité des Civilisations, edited with an introduction by Victor Karady. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. Nelson, B. (1981) On the Roads to Modernity. Conscience, Science and Civilizations, edited by T.E. Huff. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield. Redfield, R. (1989[1956]) Peasant Society and Culture. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, Midway Reprint. Singer, M. (1972) When a Great Tradition Modernizes. An Anthropological Approach to Indian Civilization. New York: Praeger Publishers. Sklair, L. 1995 Sociology of the Global System, 2nd edn. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Sorokin, Pitirim A. (1947) Society, Culture, and Personality. Their Structure and Dynamics. New York & London: Harper & Brothers. Srinivas, M.N. (1956) ‘A Note on Sanskritization and Westernization’, The Far Eastern Quarterly 15(4): 481–96. Tiryakian, E.A. (1985) ‘On the significance of de-differentiation’, in S.N. Eisenstadt and H.J. Helle (eds) Macrosociological Theory. London & Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Studies in International Sociology, Vol. 33. Weber, A. (1998[1921]) ‘Civilisation and Culture – a Synthesis: Fundamentals of CultureSociology: Social Processes and Culture-Civilizational Processes and Culture-Movement’ in J. Rundell and S. Mennell (eds) Classical Readings in Culture and Civilization. London and New York: Routledge.

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I. THE INTELLECTUAL BACKGROUND 1 Civilization in a Historical and Global Perspective Bruce Mazlish

The term ‘civilization’ was invented and conceptualized only in the second half of the 18th century, in France. In L’Ami des hommes: Traité de la population (1756), Mirabeau the elder (father of the famous orator of the French Revolution) used the modern term ‘civilization’ to designate a society in which civil law had replaced military law; that is, a juridical notion already present in the previous century. He also used it to describe a group of people who were polished, refined and mannered, as well as virtuous in their social existence. Let me hazard an initial short list of characteristics; in fact we can grasp the concept of civilization and thus the challenge it represents only in terms of historical development. Police is one. It is essential to the notion of civilization, as noted by Mirabeau in his stress on civil law. It entails the subjugation of force and violence to public legality. This development is a precondition of expanding trade and commerce, which requires a stable government and the protection of property rights. Cities, too, are essential for sustained commerce. In these cities, the cultivation of manners – civility – is facilitated. Norbert Elias (1978) has shown us one example of how the civilizing process occurred in early modern Europe, moving from the courts to the cities, and from the nobility to the bourgeoisie. In the civilizing process, women play an increasingly important role, and one measure of civilization is alleged by some thinkers, such as James Mill, to be the position and treatment of women in the society. And lastly there is, in the original formulation by Mirabeau, an assertion that religion was ‘the principal source’ of civilization, because of its softening of manners (Starobinski, 1993: 3). Clearly, much has still been left out. The fact is that civilization is a deed, a movement, a process. It is necessarily always changing (sometimes regressing). Human consciousness, as I am arguing, became fully aware of

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its past in this regard only in the 18th century, mainly in Western Europe, and especially in France; thus the concept of civilization was formulated for the first time. Quickly after its introduction in 1756, the term’s usage spread, though unevenly. And almost as quickly the problem arose of civilization being viewed as a universal, substantive form of secular perfectibility, based on the growth of reason (and thus on the European model, obviously thereby embodying a normative judgment), as the goal of all societies, or of its being recognized as a plural – civilizations – as a condition achieved by many different societies in different ways. The word ‘civilization’ comes forth at roughly the same time as most of the other terms in social science make their appearance (in fact, the term ‘social science’ itself was first used around 1789). The idea arises in an efflorescence of modern, western reflection on the bonds that hold peoples together – or apart. For as the pace of change increases, just before the French and Industrial Revolutions, accompanied by an increasing consciousness, reflection on the different forms and stages of ‘connections’ linking humans together – or fraying and breaking – becomes obsessive (Mazlish, 1989). In short, the emergence of the concept ‘civilization’ is overdetermined. For example, civilization is preceded by the concept of ‘society’, which itself emerges in the late 17th century. At that time, western man and woman realize that their society is not unique, but is only one among many, and will itself change shape over time (by the 19th century, Carlyle will coin the term ‘industrial society’ as the successor to ‘feudal society’). Moreover, the new awareness carries with it the realization that society is created by humans, not gods, and that it can be consciously changed by human reason (although others see it as changed by unconscious, organic forces). By the 18th century, the notions of civil society, the public sphere, and public opinion join that of society and take center stage. Earlier notions of civility melt into the notion of sociability and this is attached to the idea of democracy. Work in biology, with Buffon and culminating in Lamarck, provides an ‘evolutionary’ context (though pre-Darwinian) to the notion of secular perfectibility. Progress, whether by reform or revolution, is a keyword of the period. And lastly, I would argue, the concept should be seen as part of the battle of the ancients and the moderns, with even the Greeks now seen as ‘savage’, lacking in both the material and moral aspects of ‘civilization’. Now, we must note that the modern concept ‘culture’ arises a short while later in reaction to ‘civilization’. Specifically, civilization comes to mean for many people the cold, calculating, mechanical, and universalizing way of thinking embodied, supposedly, in the Enlightenment and in revolutionary France. Culture, on the other hand, as enunciated by the German philosopher Herder, in the 1780s, is seen as rooted in the blood, land, and unique history of a particular people: the Volk. Between Volk and humankind a gulf is opened up, made specific with the invasion of the German states by the French revolutionary armies. On this account, civilization is merely material, while culture is mainly mental and moral, and as much about the

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individual’s development as that of his or her society’s. Though, in practice, often used as synonyms, the two concepts are just as often freighted with different meanings. After the term ‘civilization’ is invented, when and under what conditions did it get adopted in other, non-western societies? Or even in other parts of the West? This process was clearly facilitated by western civilization seeking to define itself by excavating other civilizations and recognizing them as earlier counterparts (though generally seen as inferior). Thus, diggings in Egypt and the discovery and translation of the Rosetta Stone in the 1790s uncovered a flourishing predecessor, whose ruins reminded the Europeans of the fleeting nature of power and civility. Here was found a whole civilization, manifesting itself in a distinctive art, religion, structure of authority, and social system. Here, too, was found what we now recognize as the first alphabetic writing, dating to between 1900 and 1800 BC, one of the foundations of civilization itself. Other ancient civilizations – the term now being used in the plural – came to stand beside the Egyptian. Mesopotamian, Babylonian, and Assyrian, along with the Chinese and Indian, and then the Mayan and Aztec, took their place in the storyline of humanity’s ascent to civilization in the singular. Although the term ‘archaeology’ was not coined until 1856, its practice was already widespread; it embodies a European/imperialist exploration and excavation of ‘others’ in the effort to understand Europe’s own self-image. What about the European application of the term ‘civilization’ to earlier parts of western and non-western history itself? For example, Gibbon wrote about the ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’, not ‘Roman Civilization’; when does that terminology, later enshrined in courses on Roman civilization, arise and become widespread? It is clear that by the early and mid-19th century in the West, the term had come into general use. James Mill, utilitarian philosopher and statesman, wrote of a ‘particular stage of civilization’ among the Chinese as early as 1809, and spoke of the ‘true state of the Hindus in the scale of civilization’ in his History of British India (Mill, 1806–16). His son John Stuart Mill commented on the topic of civilization in the 1830s. The Frenchman Guizot lectured and published his Histoire de la civilisation en Europe in 1828. Numerous other examples could be cited. What they all show is that other civilizations were to be measured (and found wanting) on the scale of the ‘advanced’ western example, and that ‘civilization’ was frequently juxtaposed with what was considered an inferior ‘culture’. What was the situation in these ‘inferior’ societies? Outside the West, the term ‘civilization’ was quickly adopted by nations wishing to ‘modernize’. Thus, shortly after Perry’s ships opened up Japan to western commerce and ideas, the word bunmei appeared. It has persisted, and, in the form of hikaku bunmeiron (the comparative theory of civilization), occupies Japanese scholars till this day. Thus, a major panel at the 1991 conference in Japan of the Social and Economic History Society devoted itself entirely

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to trying to define Japan as a civilization. Haunting the discussion, we are told, was ‘a desire to escape from the Eurocentric worldview which has dominated the study of history since the 18th century’. The reason why this effort is so important is that, as one ethnologist informs us, ‘if there is one concept that has a privileged place in the ethnocentric images through which Western peoples see themselves in relation to others, it is the concept of civilization’ (Morris-Suzuki, 1993: 527–8, 531). Civilization, in short, is not a neutral term, but comes bearing value-laden meanings. It also comes bearing a challenge. How do other cultures and societies, with their own claims to being ‘civilized’, respond? In what manner do they adapt, adopt, or reject? Again, the example of Japan is especially illuminating. Different elements in the society, of course, responded differently to Perry’s ships in 1853. Some wished to close the doors, both materially and spiritually. Others recognized that material rejection was impossible, if Japan wished to survive as an independent nation. Consequently, there emerged the juxtaposition of ‘Eastern morality and Western technology’, as one conservative put it: claiming that while the West might be superior in science and technology, the East excels in its ethical teachings (Takeo, 1983: 134). Still others saw that a spiritual, or cultural, revolution was as necessary as a scientific one. Thus, in the Meiji period, some of the key figures in the government went to Europe to learn and returned home imbued with the idea that the only way Japan could keep its independence and take its rightful role in history was fully to embrace western civilization. Theirs was a reverse ‘missionary’ expedition. They undertook their task in the name of keimo, or Enlightenment. In their own terms, I would argue, they sought to repeat the early experience of European modernity, waging the same battle for a rejection of the binding authority of tradition and taking as their definition of civilization the Kantian notion of critique; as one scholar, Fukuzawa Yukichi, put it, ‘Doubts generated from within oneself.’ In more positive terms, they believed that by reason they could change the structure of society itself (Daikichi, 1985: 59, 61; see also Blacker, 1964). Repudiating their past as ‘barbaric’, they also sought to locate their own place in a larger pattern of history: the history of civilization. In doing so, they emphasized educational reforms, the abolition of feudal society and its ranks, and the need to involve all strata of society in the leap to ‘civilization’. To a large extent, the result of their efforts was that a small island, with a limited population, was launched on a path that would bring it in the 20th century to a position of being the world’s second or third most powerful entity, certainly in economic terms. It is noteworthy that one contemporary Japanese scholar remarks about Guizot that ‘what he calls the “natural” meaning of “world” civilization is thus nothing “natural” but is constructed in his discursive act of excluding Asia from the category of civilization’. In the end, the particular way in which the Japanese achieved what I would like to call their ‘ascivilization’ appears unique, though characterized by ubiquitous features. (The prefix

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‘as’, incidentally, is related to the Latin ‘ac’ and ‘ad’, signifying ‘toward’ or ‘goal of an implied action’.) Only in the light of a ‘comparative theory of civilization’, to use the words of another present-day Japanese scholar, can we tell exactly how unique that process has been.1 Meanwhile, if we return to the western usage, we should note that the concept of civilization takes on special features, or exaggerations of existing ones, as the 19th century wears on. It is the thesis of Michael Adas that while the emphasis on spiritual, or religious, superiority in the western usage continues, it is gradually overtaken by an emphasis on scientific and technological supremacy. His book title reflects the change: Machines as the Measure of Men (Adas, 1989). Now one is civilized not only in terms of the elder Mirabeau’s original definition, but according to the level of one’s material and techno-economic strength. The West’s primacy in this regard is made manifest in its imperialistic reach to the far corners of the globe. What is especially interesting to note is that while externally western civilization is conquering everywhere, internally it is itself undergoing a crisis of doubt. Such doubt had been manifested at the very birth of the concept of civilization in the 18th century. At that time, Rousseau (who is himself anticipated by Montaigne) had attacked the moral underpinnings of the notion from within, condemning what he saw as the artifi- ciality and corruption of supposedly civilized French society. He did so in the name of an alternate morality, extolling the primitive. In a reversal of values, he accused Mirabeau’s vaunted civilization of being, in fact, a new form of barbarism. A decade or so later, Charles Fourier advanced similar criticisms. The proponents of civilization, however, pushed such views to the margins in the course of the next half-century and more. Nevertheless, these views lingered on, to emerge in new form at the end of the 19th century. As the 19th century ends, Sigmund Freud descends into the underground caverns of the mind, showing how thin is the veneer of civilization covering the human being’s vaunted rationality. It is in this same late 19th century that civilization’s twin term, ‘culture’, takes on a new life. It moves in two directions. One is toward ‘higher culture’, the lofty life of the mind advocated by Matthew Arnold. The other is toward the anthropologist’s conception: Edward B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture is published in 1871. This latter conception (though Tylor himself uses culture and civilization as synonyms) tends to view things holistically – it characterizes the whole of ‘simple’ societies, supposedly unified around a core of common values and rituals – and is contrasted with the complexity and complications of modern society – fragmented, disorienting and alienating. To understand the latter, the discipline of sociology comes into play, exemplified at first by works such as Tonnies’ Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887), positing a sharp divide between the organic and the mechanical, the traditional and the modern. Aside from simply alluding to the developments sketched in the preceding paragraphs, I say nothing more about them here. Much scholarship has been expended on them; but for our purposes, we need only note the

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existence of these developments, as necessary background for our own further exploration in rethinking civilizational analysis. As can readily be seen, the latter topic – civilizational analysis – itself is an enormous one that can, and must, fly off into many directions. Civilization is a capacious term, covering many social attributes and referring at the same time to a very complicated form of social bonding. Our effort is, therefore, at this time only to project a map on which a few lines leading to further research and analysis can be shown. We need, in the end, to be aware that civilization is only one concept among many to express the way humans seek social connections. Unlike, for example, a comparable term, ‘nation-state’, civilization is not represented in international institutions, does not, for example, send up rockets, and is not to be construed in terms of world systems (this statement is true even if we think of civilization in the plural – civilizations). It is nations, not civilizations, that have votes in the UN, and act or interact daily with other nations, maintain armies and arrange cultural exchanges. This is not to underestimate the extreme importance of civilization as a concept. As I have tried to show, it has a universal aspect, in the sense that all peoples, more or less, have regarded themselves as more ‘civilized’ than the ‘barbarians’ outside the city wall. Centuries had to elapse before human consciousness rose to the concept itself, a major effort of self-reflectivity that embodied many centuries, in many places, and only came to fruition a few hundred years ago. At that time, it claimed a different sort of universality – as being the latest stage in historical development, parochially identified with the European – but then immediately to be challenged by a relativism born from within its own civilization. Once in place, the concept can then be extended anachronistically back in time and to other places, leaving us with a research project as to how this actually occurred. And carrying with it the task for all peoples, including the western ones, of what I have called ‘ascivilization’. I am aware that all of the assertions made above are debatable. A dialogue is, indeed, called for. In discussing these matters, we must remember that the term ‘civilization’, with its modern connotations, was coined as noted in the late 18th century, along with most of the other terms used in contemporary social science. All of these terms, though especially ‘civilization’ and ‘culture’, need to be re-examined both for their suitability to non-western parts of the globe (and also to the West itself), and for their continued usefulness in regard to a world undergoing a process of globalization in a new, global epoch.

Note 1. The quotation about Guizot is from Rumi Sakamoto (1996: 117); the second quote is from Morris-Suzuki (1993: 529). In coining the term ‘ascivilization’, I am aware that, while it resounds with the notion of assimilation, it differs from acculturation, which carries with it the

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notion of process in its ending ‘tion’. The same is not true, unfortunately, for ‘ascivilization’, which already has the ‘tion’ as part of itself originally and thus may not imply process.

References Adas, Michael (1989) Machines as the Measure of Men. Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Blacker, Carmen (1964) The Japanese Enlightenment: A Study of the Writings of Fukuzawa Yukichi. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Daikichi, Irokawa (1985) The Culture of the Meiji Period. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Elias, Norbert (1978) The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, Vol. 1. New York: Pantheon Books. Mazlish, Bruce (1989) A New Science: The Breakdown of Connections and the Birth of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press. Morris-Suzuki, Tessa (1993) ‘Rewriting History: Civilization Theory in Contemporary Japan’, Positions 1(2): 527–8, 529, 531. Sakamoto, Rumi (1996) ‘Japan, Hybridity and the Creation of Colonialist Discourse’, Theory, Culture & Society 13(3): 117. Starobinski, Jean (1993) Blessings in Disguise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Takeo, Kuwabara (1983) Japan and Western Civilization: Essays on Comparative Culture. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press.

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2 Civilizational Forms Marcel Mauss

Translator’s Introduction Diane Barthel-Bouchier Marcel Mauss is best known internationally for his work on the gift relationship, which presents a Durkheimian perspective on social exchange, and which contrasts sharply with the egoistic tradition of Homans, Blau, and Rational Choice Theory. But Mauss’s interests encompassed a wide range of topics. Among the most significant was civilizational analysis. Throughout his long career, Mauss sought to provide the systems of classification and categorization so essential to the development of the social sciences. Rather than devoting himself to in-depth fieldwork on one or several societies, Mauss preferred to draw on the reports of others to form a more synthetic analysis. These ‘others’ included not simply the close-knit Parisian community of anthropologists and sociologists, but also European and American researchers. Mauss followed carefully the work of Franz Boas, among others, and was very close personally and professionally to Radcliffe-Brown, whom he considered the leading exponent of French sociology in England. The selection that follows originally appeared in a 1930 volume by Lucien Febvre, Emile Tonnelat, Marcel Mauss, Alfredo Niceforo, and Louis Weber entitled Civilization: The Word and the Idea. We see Mauss the classifier at work, using two key concepts, ‘area’ and ‘trait’, to provide an analytical approach to the study of civilizations. He also emphasizes the arbitrary quality to the original emergence of cultural traits within a given society, an arbitrariness that, nonetheless, conditions the further acceptance or rejection of other cultural traits. Mauss believed we should be interested in the lack of assimilation of traits, insofar as refusals as well as acceptances provide evidence as to the relative power of one civilization over another. Along with Mauss the classifier, this selection reveals Mauss the critic. He has sharp words for each of two opposing schools of thought. The first, identified by the German name of Kulturkreise, emphasized physical geography and extent over culture; the second, Kulturgeschichte, associated

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with the work of Frobenius and Spengler, errs in the opposite direction. For Mauss, only an inclusive approach emphasizing both physical geography and the development of cultural traits would be adequate to the task. Not surprisingly, he points to the work of his great friend and colleague, Henri Hubert, as being exemplary in its combination of intellectual approaches yielding a more complete civilizational analysis (Mauss, 1930: 99–100). Finally, it is worth asking to what extent Mauss reflected the biases of his contemporary France, still engaged in her ‘mission civilisatrice’ throughout her colonies. In an intellectual exchange that forms the conclusion of the above-mentioned volume, Mauss recognizes that Western civilization contains globalizing forces working toward uniformity. Taking the movies as his example, he nonetheless argues that responses are culture specific: ‘The Japanese laugh while viewing a show that makes us cry, and vice versa’ (Mauss, 1930). At the same time he resists any concept of civilizational rankings. He accuses European civilization of being too proud, of failing to recognize the grandeur of earlier innovations or of Asian civilizations. Ultimately, ‘civilization’ as an abstract idea, rather than specific civilizations, must refer to ‘everything that humanity has achieved’ and Mauss cautions: ‘we must take care not to define it only in relationship to ourselves.’

Reference Mauss, M. (1930) ‘Les Civilisations. Éléments et formes’, in Lucien Febvre, Emile Tonnelat, Marcel Mauss, Alfredo Niceforo, and Louis Weber (eds) Civilisation. Le Mot et l’Idée. Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, pp. 81–106.

Civilizations, like the elements that compose them, have their own individuality, their fixed forms, and their mutual oppositions. This is what characterizes civilizations: these borrowings, these communities, these commonalities, and also the limits to these contacts and these commonalities, including the refusal to maintain contact with other civilizations. We can therefore propose the following definition of a civilization: namely a combination of phenomena that is sufficiently large, sufficiently numerous, and sufficiently important as much through their quantity as through their quality. A civilization is a combination of societies sufficiently vast in number that present these phenomena; in other words, a combination that is sufficiently large and distinctive that it can signify and bring to mind a family of societies. Moreover, this family derives one reason for its existence from certain facts: both current facts and those that are historical, linguistic, archaeological, and anthropological. These facts create the belief that these societies have been in prolonged contact and are related to each other. A collection of facts and of the expressions of these

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facts that corresponds to a combination of societies, in a word, a sort of hypersocial system of social systems: now this is what we can call a civilization. Therefore, we can speak of civilizations that are more or less extensive and of civilizations that are more or less restricted. We can further distinguish levels of civilizations, their concentric circles, and so on. Thus on the one hand we have long taught that it is possible to believe in the existence of a very ancient civilization encompassing all the shores and all the islands of the Pacific: from within this very extensive civilization one can and undoubtedly should distinguish, however obscured, a civilization of the south and central Pacific. And, within this civilization, one clearly perceives a Malayo-Polynesian civilization, a Polynesian civilization, Melanesian, and Micronesian civilizations. One would also be perfectly justified in building up all kinds of constructions based on the filiation of these four civilizations, on the relationships among them, and even on their relationships with Australian-Polynesian, Austro-Asian, and/or Pan-Asian civilizations. In fact, within this immense realm there are many similarities and numerous variations among civilizations. These encourage some people to believe in the original unity of civilizations, even when there is at least a partial diversity of races: for example, black Melanesian and light yellow Polynesian. Inversely, they believe in diversity when there is, for example, a relative unity of language, Melanesian-Polynesian (we are taking out the Papuan element). The limits of the betel and of the kava, of the bow and the saber, those of the breastplate and the stockade, of the house on pilotis and so on, allow us to classify civilizations and even to make hypotheses regarding their geneology, to the extent that the dialectical logic of their divergences and convergences represents one of the best means for establishing the existence of families of people. The result of all this is that every civilization is at the same time a physical area and a social form. Indeed, every civilization has its boundaries, its center and its periphery. The definition and description of its physical spaces is a major task for history and therefore for the social sciences. But we only perceive the extent of a civilization’s space because we have the impression that the phenomena that form this or that civilization are of a type that is unique to themselves and to the particular civilization. Thus the definition of this form is essential and the two terms of the definition are mutually allied. Every civilization has a physical extent because it has a form, and we can only perceive this form because it is spread across a particular space and found nowhere else. While a civilization may be a phenomenon of a second order, derived from simpler forms, a civilization, like any society, has its boundaries and its distinctive spirit. The definition of the physical area of a civilization is thus accomplished by means of its form, and conversely, the definition of a form is done by the extent of its area. So let us define these two terms. The form of a civilization is the total (the summa) of the special aspects revealed through the ideas, practices, and products which are held in common or more-or-less in common by a certain

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number of given societies, the inventors and carriers of this civilization. We can also say that the form of a civilization is all that gives a special aspect to the societies that form this civilization, making them unlike any other. A physical area of a civilization is the geographical extent of the distribution of the total phenomena held in common (more or less complete in each society within the area) and which are considered as characteristic or as typical of this civilization. It is also the totality of the ground surface of the societies having the representations, practices, and products that form the shared patrimony of this civilization. In order to keep to the constraints of a short presentation on the styles of ethnological science and contemporary historical geography, we will not consider the idea of layers of civilizations, important though it may be. This idea refers to what historians label, however imprecisely, ‘style’, ‘period’, ‘epoch’, and so on. But I will offer a provisional definition. One can call layers of civilization the given form taken by a civilization of a given area within a given period of time. Such are the principal divisions of the facts and of the problem at hand. *

*

*

Through a certain exaggeration of their underlying principles, these ideas about forms and areas have served the purposes of two opposing schools of German ethnologists. One school uses the concept of the area of a civilization in order to trace their common histories; the other uses the forms of civilization to pursue the same goal. In reviewing their work we will see the mistake they are both making in their approaches. The first group, including Foy, Graebner, Schmidt and his school, starts from the notion of the area of civilization (Kulturkreise) and of layers of civilization (Kulturschichten). Defining each civilization by a dominant trait, they study almost exclusively the geographical extent and, on occasion, the chronology. They speak of Bogenkultur, of Zweiklassenkultur, of Freivaterrechtliche Kultur: that is, of the culture of the bow, of the culture of two classes (societies divided into two by matrimonial halves), of civilizations with masculine descendance without exogamy. And then they finish off their arguments with absurdities, including verbal absurdities, such as ‘the totemic axe’. But this doesn’t prevent these authors from having found plausible and interesting relationships pertaining to a number of points of detail, points that are worth recording. But what may be a good method for studying the distribution of physical objects easily becomes inexact when the matter at hand is the definition of civilizations and the contact between civilizations. The cartographic method is excellent when what is required is to describe the history of each instrument, of each type of instrument, or art, and so on. This method is especially useful for physical objects, when what is required is their classification for museum display and reference. When so used, we totally approve of this method. We would, for example, have a lot to say

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about the greased pole at fun-fairs as a cultural object. Our much-missed Robert Hertz wrote a fine piece on kites in Polynesian societies. But it is one thing to trace the spread of an art or an institution, and quite another to define a whole culture. When this method is applied to the latter, two dangers are immediately evident. First of all there’s the problem of the choice of the dominant trait. The biological sciences suffer readily enough from this notion of the principal trait, a notion that we consider totally arbitrary. The sociological sciences suffer from it even more. The criteria used to determine this principal trait are often nonexistent. For example, the idea that has become identified as ‘Two class culture’ (Zweiklassenkultur) represents a serious error. The idea that certain Australian and Melanesian societies are divided into only ‘two exogamous classes’ (Graebner and Schmidt) or into two ‘halves’ (according to the terminology used by Rivers) is a pure fabrication. First of all, with regard to these halves: we deny the demarcation established between them and the clans. These halves are, in our opinion, former primary clans. Furthermore, in all the Australian and Melanesian societies that are considered representative of this civilization, one finds something other than these halves: one also observes the clans within them, which is normal in what we call ‘phratries’. It is therefore only through erroneous reasoning and a begging of the question that the social fact of ‘classes’ is distinguished from the social fact of ‘clan’. In addition, the relationship between the dominant characteristic and all the other characteristics of a civilization is never self-evident. It is not proven that some characteristics necessarily entail the others, and that where one finds the bow, for example, one has a good chance of finding inheritance through the mother or inheritance through the father (the principle invoked varies according to the author). The assumption of inevitability in the simultaneous distribution of the concurrent elements of a civilization is anything but proven. A similar fixing of the boundaries of a layer or area of civilization often leads to other absurdities. Menghin, for example, goes so far as to speak of a ‘uterine culture’ in regard to the Paleolithic Congolese society. How truly admirable it is to be able to conceive the legal structure of an unknown population purely on the basis of a few pebbles! All of this is but fiction and hypotheses. A civilization is defined not by one but by a certain number of characteristics, and usually a rather substantial number at that. It is defined even more by the respective levels of these characteristics. For example, among the maritime Malaysians and Polynesians, navigation holds, naturally enough, a different place than it does among the other continental Australasians. Let us conclude, then, that the Kulturkreise method based on civilizational areas is badly handled, and that this is largely because it is used in isolation from the method I am about to discuss. *

*

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This other method carries the unremarkable name of ‘cultural morphology’. It is known largely through the names of two authors who are as problematic as they are popular: Frobenius and Spengler. According to Leo Frobenius, with regard to Africa and thanks to maps showing the distribution of all kinds of things, one can see the diverse cultures and even the diverse cultural stocks of which African civilizations are composed. These present-day African civilizations are virtually all mixed together. But from within the culture mixtures and historical layerings of actual societies, Frobenius knows how to detect the pure cultures whose the material usefulness, moral value, and historical grandeur can be appreciated by the morphologist. Thus in sub-Saharan West Africa one sees five or six civilizations layered on top of each other, civilizations about which Frobenius is very knowledgeable: the Aegean, the Syrian, the South Eritrean, and the Telluristic Ethiopian, and naturally, Atlantis with its ‘Primitive Eros’. All that this school of thought has managed to produce that is worth taking seriously are files, which appear to be conscientiously done and therefore useful to researchers. These files form the beginning of an African Atlas of which certain parts are good. The Morphology of Civilization by Oswald Spengler is also, in our opinion, a work of essentially literary interest. Its moral classifications of civilizations and nations divided into the tough and the tender, into the organic versus the loosely organized: this whole philosophy of history and these colossal speculations are of interest only to the general public. This book, lacking as it does any form of precision whatsoever, represents a step back to such out-of-date formulas as ‘cultural destinies’, ‘historical missions’, and a return to all the jargon of an unscientific sociology encompassing popular historical narratives and even the so-called ‘social science’ created in the service of political parties. Indeed, sociology as a discipline could find better ideas and sounder facts in the work of Guizot. We will wait for the promised Historical Atlas of Civilization to judge the heuristic value of a work of which the practical usefulness is incontestable. However, we have certain qualms about the publication of this work. If, once again, cultural morphology is separated from the simple charting of cultural areas and levels of the distribution of objects, etc., if the work is guided a priori by the idea of the culture or by a priori ideas of ‘this or that culture’, then it will be full of question-begging and unchallenged assumptions. Fundamentally, then, we see that these methods and these notions are only legitimate when they are all used together. To conclude this discussion of ethnological procedures, it must be said that we don’t in any way believe that these procedures result in a high degree of certitude. While they are useful to the researcher, they are rarely sufficient. To retrace the history of a people who supposedly don’t have a history by means of a hypothetical history of their civilization is a very daring enterprise indeed. We will be quite frank in saying that, as pertains to the history of a people, ethnographic and sociological notions are less solid than linguistic and archaeological methods, which have a certain

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precision. But when they are used concurrently with these other methods, they can lead to noteworthy results. Let us consider for a moment the work of American social anthropologists. The hypotheses of Franz Boas about the mythology widespread throughout the northern Pacific basin are more than likely, they are almost conclusive; those of Wissler on the Asian form of North American Indian clothing are plain and clear; much like the earlier hypotheses of Bruno Adler about the North-Asian arrow found in America. But the proof was made definite only by the linguistic discoveries of Edward Sapir, which reconnected the considerably large groups of North American languages to a source which is proto-sinotibeto-burmese. *

*

*

The lack of historical certitude, in specific cases, however, should not discourage research insofar as broad areas of agreement remain. We can be certain that civilizations exist that are, on the one hand, characterized by families of people, by layers of humanity or, indeed, by both at the same time. On the other hand, it is equally well-established that each civilization has its particular aspect, and that its products have their own style, their distinctive appearance that one can analyze. This analysis should be done not by means of one dominant characteristic but rather by considering all characteristics. These characteristics share one trait that makes us take them into consideration: they constitute the arbitrary, delineated, and singular form that we call a particular type. Under these conditions, it is by drawing up the charts of strikingly singular similarities, by retracing the pathways of penetration and the means through which customs and institutions are propagated, that we can indeed define civilizations, locate their centers of diffusion, and perhaps even identify their points of origin. Finally, one can locate the landmarks, the limits, the borders, and the historical periods, especially when one is guided, aided, and supported by archaeology and history. This general fact derives from the very nature of civilization, from its mode of historical propagation. It doesn’t follow just any path, rather its destinies can be explained scientifically. We can perceive the lines of least resistance and the levels of authority that they followed. On top of this we can erect a scaffolding of hypotheses that share a certain degree of historical probability. If this is a legitimate endeavor, it is not because social imitation is law, as Tarde believed. It is rather precisely because, as Durkheim believed, the borrowing of a certain thing, of a certain type, is by itself a relatively singular fact. This cultural borrowing can only be explained by the relatively low level of resistance of the borrower society to the authority of the other society that is the source of the trait. This approach assumes definite historical connections between societies and social facts. We can therefore separate out these connections analytically and, in doing so, further the work of a general history.

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And this propagation of traits is in turn related to the very nature of civilization, as I shall show. *

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There are two reasons why a certain number of elements of social life, which are not strictly political, moral, or national, should be so limited to a certain number of people bound together through history and through their distribution across the surface of the globe. These same reasons explain why civilizations have boundaries, much like nations, and have a certain permanence over time: a birth, a life, and a death just like the nations they encompass. These limitations of time and space correspond to a quality shared by all social phenomena. They assume a marked form even in those characteristics that are not exclusive to any one society, but are shared by several or even many societies and over a long period of time. Indeed, all social phenomena have one essential attribute: be it a symbol, a word, an instrument, or an institution. It might even be the language, or a very carefully constructed knowledge system. It could be the best adapted instrument possible to serve the best and most numerous ends. In short, even if this distinguishing characteristic is the most rational thing possible, and the most human, it is still fundamentally arbitrary in nature. All social phenomena are, to some degree, the work of the collective will. To speak of human will is to imply choice among different possible options. Once one thing is selected, be it a word, a story, a method of working the soil, the interior or exterior structure of a home, a form of pottery, a tool, then everything has a type and a manner. In addition to its intrinsic nature and form, in many cases it also has a distinctive mode of utilization. The realm of the social is the realm of modalities. Even human gestures, such as how you knot your tie, wear a collar or how the collar determines your neck posture; your distinctive walk, and how your feet require shoes, and how shoes are made to fit your feet – to speak of things which are familiar to us – everything has a form that is at the same time common to a great number of people and chosen by them from among an array of possible forms. And this particular form is found only here or there, and this moment or another. Customs and folkways, when we understand these things within their time, are quite simply a system of modalities. Henri Hubert wrote exceptionally well about the ‘appearance of a civilization’, while others have described how the ‘long fields’ of the Gauls have persisted up to our time and under successive forms of ownership. These forms are not simply forced into existence, as some would have it, by geographical causes. So from all of Tarde’s work I will agree to accept and retain only his discerning remarks of a moralist on ‘philoneism’ and ‘misoneism’ (the love of innovation and the fear of innovation). It follows logically from the nature of representations and collective practices that their geographical extent, insofar as humanity does not form one

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unique society, is necessarily finite and relatively fixed. This is because neither these societies themselves, nor the products that give them material form, can travel where one could and would like to carry them, from where one could and would like to borrow them (eliminating from the discussion the concept of historical periods). This arbitrary choice of products is, naturally enough, shared only by societies of the same root-stock, or that share in a family of languages, or that are attached to each other through prolonged contacts of either a friendly or a hostile nature (because war is necessarily a great source of cultural borrowings). The boundaries of a civilization are therefore found where these constant borrowings end, whereas the co-evolution of societies within a civilization occurs more or less simultaneously or spontaneously, but always in a parallel manner. It operates without too great a separation from the original civilizational rootstock. For example, we can perhaps still talk about Latin civilization, with its Italian and French variations, among others. This limit, this sudden end of one civilization and the beginning of another is often as arbitrary as a boundary of a recognized society, or even of what we call a state. One serious lacunae in our studies of collective history, ethnological or otherwise, is that these studies are too much carried away with the observance of similarities. You might end up thinking that only positive phenomena have occurred throughout history. But we should also study non-borrowings because such refusals to borrow can be useful. This research is as fascinating as that pertaining to cultural borrowings. This is because in many cases non-borrowings explain the limits of a civilization, as they do the limits of societies. Israel loathes Moab, who cooks lamb in its mother’s milk, and that is why we still don’t eat meat on Fridays. The Touareg nourishes himself only with camel’s milk and finds cow’s milk repugnant, while we refuse to drink mare’s milk. The Arctic Indians neither wanted nor knew how to make a kayak or an Eskimo umiak, which are truly admirably constructed boats. Conversely, Eskimos have accepted the use of snowshoes only on rare occasions. And, in my own case, I never learned to ski, but this is now something that all my young compatriots in the Vosges learn to do. I have seen gestures fashioned by the use of a particular tool or by habit that prevent us French from using English and German spades with handles and, conversely, that prevent the English from using our longhandled shovels. We can read in Sseu-Ma-Tsien the history of debates held in the Chinese court about the art of mounting a horse as practiced by the Huns and read how the Chinese finally accepted this method into their culture, and so on. We can see therefore how cultures are circumscribed by their capacity for cultural borrowings and expansion, but also by the resistance exercised by the societies that compose them. This is how a sociologist conceives his work, beginning with the preexisting historical and pre-historical studies, the historical comparison of civilizations, the history of civilization in general, and that of peoples, which takes on the aspect of ethnography.

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II. THEORETICAL ESSAYS 3 Civilizational Analysis Renovating the Sociological Tradition Edward A. Tiryakian

Civilization means something more than energy and will and creative power. How can I define it? Well . . . a sense of permanence. . . By the year 1000 . . . the long dominance of the barbarian wanderers were over, and Western Europe was prepared for its first great age of civilization. Kenneth Clark, Civilization (1969) [In] the present world . . . the crucial question is no longer whether a particular nation-state begins or ends, but where a particular region of culture or civilization begins or end. Václav Havel, New York Review of Books, 10 June, 1999 Civilization, civilization, and pride of Europeans and charnel-house of innocents . . . you have built your kingdom on corpses. Whatever you wish, whatever you do move in lies . . . You are not a torch, you are a conflagration. You devour whatever you touch. René Maran, Batouala (1922)

I. ‘Civilization’ as Discourse Introduced into English by Boswell (Brinkman, 1942: 526), Samuel Johnson’s biographer, the concept of civilization has close ties to modernity and the ideology of modernity. For succeeding generations of most of the 19th and 20th centuries, it was a sort of evolutionary benchmark of modernity that could be used to evaluate the distance travelled in the inexorable march of progress of mankind – a distance from one’s ancestors as well as one’s less developed contemporaries. It has also been previously, and is presently, a contested concept when used in an evolutionary sense of civilization as a higher stage of human development from a lower stage, usually ‘barbarism’ but also ‘culture’.1 This is indicated in the three citations shown at the start of this paper.

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Each author is dealing explicitly with civilization and implicitly with its antipode barbarism. But how the contrast is established is worth drawing out. Kenneth Clark, a master art historian, depicted the achievements of Western civilization through art and architecture, relating creative genius to changes in society; there are blips to the story when a given societal level is beset by crisis and lack of confidence in itself, but for the past thousand years, the story goes on. Note, however, that Civilization was published in 1969, a period of deep cultural crisis in the West, when the baby boomer generation coming of age in the turbulent 1960s was challenging not only the authority of the state, but also the cultural authority that undergirded it. In terms of aesthetics and civility, it was tantamount to a rejection of what had been taken as objective features of Western civilization. And this context is made patently clear in the blurb of the book jacket of Clark’s book, which reads: ‘Kenneth Clark’s purpose goes beyond historical synthesis, however stimulating. Civilization has been imperiled in other ages; he sees it as again in jeopardy, threatened by a new upsurge of barbarism. He has here distilled the essence of all that is precious in our heritage’. Havel’s remarks, made 30 years after Clark, were prompted by another crisis of civilization – namely the ferocious ethnic conflict in the Balkans as a by-product of the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Havel, whose Czech Republic resolved differences with its kindred republic Slovakia in a ‘velvet divorce’ in 1993, expressed horror at the power of states to whip up nationalism to curb ethnic minorities. His message (delivered in Canada) was that the power of nation-states to inflict punishment internally must be curbed, even if this means the end to the state doctrine of non-interference. The new century will see most states ‘begin to change from cult like entities charged with emotion into far simpler and more civilized entities’ (1999: 4). Havel looked forward in the coming century to a world where larger entities would be cooperative and interactive, provided that ‘each individual entity and sphere of culture and civilization must be clearly aware of its own identity . . . and accept that its difference is not a handicap but merely a highly specific contribution to the richness and variety of the global community’ (1999: 4). Maran presents a more startling perspective on civilization. It is the perspective of the colonized periphery of ‘subaltern studies’ before the term was used. Like Frantz Fanon a generation later, Maran was born in the French West Indies and assimilated to French culture. As a French civil servant he became an administrator in West Africa. He saw at first hand how French colonists behaved and the abuses of the colonial system that was extolling the virtues of ‘civilization’ over ‘barbarism’ in the secular legacy of the Enlightenment and trumpeting the moral conquest of the West.2 Part of the legitimation of colonization was achieved via a vast colonial literature, which imparted to Western readers a sense of the worth of Western civilization. Maran, constrained in his criticisms by virtue of being a civil servant, engaged in a literary resistance in writing Batouala which he termed ‘a real Negro novel’ (‘un véritable roman nègre’), making the protagonist of the novel an everyday African with his ‘significant

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others’. Not only was making colonial subjects (rather than European colonials) the central rather than landscape figures a bold step, it was the preface to the novel which created a sensation in Paris for turning upside down the table on civilization and ‘barbarism’.3 In the name of civilization, Europeans had murdered each other by the hundreds of thousands in World War I and had devastated and exploited ruthlessly colonial subjects in Africa. Maran’s novel may be seen as the progenitor of a vast francophone literature that broadly speaking was an integral part of the cultural movement of ‘Négritude’, which in various forms was highly critical of the claims to superiority of Western civilization. If today Western civilization as a subject matter has become so contested in the academic world, it is in part due to cultural, including ‘postcolonial’ and ‘subaltern’, studies of former colonial peoples (see Guha and Spivak, 1988; Spivak, 1999), which rejected the superiority of Western literature, art, and philosophy as standards for modernity. Batouala’s cry is thus, borrowing from Habermas: ‘the reverse side of a civilization of victors, namely, the suffering of its marginalized victims’ (Habermas, 1998: 198). However, these three snippets are only meant to introduce the theme of civilization as a contested field. It is the goal of the present volume to reclaim for sociology the heuristics of comparative civilizational analysis as a lever for macro sociology in the new century. ‘World-system analysis’ and ‘globalization analysis’ have provided important models of trans-societal processes, but each has its limitation, if only by the presupposition that transcending the nation-state there is a determining material whole – the world as a totality, the ultimate determinant of societal parts. Civilizational analysis, however, takes as presupposition that the macro sociocultural reality of the world we live in has least common denominators greater than nation-states and lesser than a global unitary socioeconomic totality. To provide a new or a renovated conceptual framework for macro sociology deploying civilization analysis, it is important to delve further into the emergence of the concept, the meanings and use it has been put to, and the coral structure, so to speak, that has grown around it. As Mazlish has noted (Chapter 1) civilization appears in the 18th century at a critical juncture point when Western reflexivity became enthused with its secular perfectibility. The ‘invention’ of the term civilization was put to use in viewing ‘connections’ linking people together – and also in separating them, that is, in separating ‘non-civilized’ from ‘civilized’. It might be useful as a baseline to consider in some general reference works how the concept of civilization has been used at different intervals in modern times. Essentially, while the concept provides a very general and very familiar frame of reference, it has been much more of a domain field for the humanities than for the social sciences. One hundred years ago, following in the footsteps of Guizot’s 19th century best-seller stressing general improvements in the material and intellectual conditions of man,4 the entry for ‘civilization’ in La Grande Encyclopédie (the worthy descendant of the Enlightenment’s Encyclopédie) used

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it to trace a broad historical sweep of humankind. Resulting from organized social life, civilization is what assured mankind of its dominance over other species and over nature. While Asia and Africa had early starts in the development of civilization, it is European civilization that has shown to be more lasting and progressive. In the crucial interaction between nature and man, in Europe the tendency has been for nature to be subordinate, while outside Europe, it is the inverse. Hence, the article pursued, the comparative study of civilizations has a complementary task: outside Europe one must study the external environment actions on men, while in Europe the ‘determining causes’ are industry and intellectual activity.5 The evolutionary and evaluative use of the concept was clearly shown in this differentiation of ‘the West and the rest’. Four decades later, in the midst of World War II (which Maran would have recognized as another ‘charnel house’), the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences gave explicit reference to the Enlightenment origin of the concept and its characteristic tie-in to the progress of society and mankind. The article noted that its use in America and Western Europe, as if civilization and progress were uniform, was rejected by Germans and Slavs (Brinkman, 1942: 526) – just as a generation later this would be rejected by intellectuals from Africa and Asia. Brinkman’s article introduced as a critique of the previous canon, stated that the restricted use of ‘civilization’ qua part of the march of Western progress is antithetical to the anthropological and ethnological phenomena of so-called primitive people. Albeit the article did not explicitly propose a comparative study of civilizations, it ended with the wise caution that mankind and civilizations are many (Brinkman, 1942: 529). Ten years later, and perhaps as stemming from the global aspect of World War II and a new awareness of the world’s people as a totality,6 a greater awareness of the anthropological significance of the cultural and material achievements of the non-West became felt. This was shown in a new bilingual journal, Civilisations, the review of the International Institute of Political and Social Sciences Concerning Countries of Differing Civilizations. It began publication in Belgium in January 1951. The editorial preface is worth citing regarding the approach of the journal and its focus on the scientific study of the problems arising in certain countries from the encounter between different civilizations: The International Institute . . . will thus serve as a coordinating center between free nations in the defense of their respective civilizations . . . In a domain so subject to controversy as is the one of the differences between civilizations, and of their agreements in an effort to achieve concord and peace, the freedom of ideas and of their expressions must be ensured. This is the only engagement that the Institute can enter into. (Civilisations, 1951)

During the Cold War era, the most important reference work was The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1968). Like its predecessor, it was published during a deep cultural crisis in various societies, from the United States and Mexico in North America to France, Germany and as far east in Europe as Czechoslovakia and Poland. The crisis was in part

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a conflict of generations, centered around the university; it was a crisis that entailed challenges to all forms of authority but also to various forms of civility. In some respects, the rising generation seemed to be challenging the major premises of Western civilization. However, the International Encyclopedia did not make ‘civilization’ an autonomous entry; instead an article conceptualized it under the broader rubric of ‘urban revolution’ (Armillas, 1968). The author gave it a broad evolutionary perspective tied to the dynamic role of cities, as formulated by anthropologists Childe and Redfield (Armillas, 1968: 221). After the 1968 Encyclopedia, ‘civilization’ seemed to have lost visibility in major sociological reference works. Smelser’s widely acclaimed Handbook of Sociology (1989) has no mention of ‘civilization’ and neither does another major work published in English in the same year, the English edition of the imposing Critical Dictionary of Sociology by the eminent French sociologists Boudon and Bourricaud (1989).7 Nor does the cumulative index of the Annual Review of Sociology contain entries for ‘civilization’ or its derivatives. What may be gleaned from this cursory overview is that ‘civilization’ and ‘civilizational analysis’ have not been incorporated in mainstream sociology, remaining almost invisible in the periphery of macro sociology. However, this evaluation needs to be tempered by a consideration of some important pioneering efforts, as will be seen in the next section.

II. Recovering the Sociological Tradition of Civilizational Analysis The First Generation: Weber, Durkheim and Mauss In the ‘classic’ age of sociology, and bequeathing a legacy of immense weight to this day, is the comparative civilizational analysis of Max Weber. Ultimately, Weber’s writings constitute the terminus ad quo of much of the challenging issues of civilizational analysis (and run implicitly and explicitly through several of this volume’s papers). Weber implicitly dealt with Western civilization as a dynamic, interactive ‘total phenomenon’, and not a static entity: economy, polity, and culture (the latter particularly but not exclusively the religious life), in various combinatorial forms, were motor forces that had provided and would continue to provide the West with its peculiar rationalist and expansionist capitalist ethos. If the ‘objectivity’ which is so cardinal in his methodological approach (Weber, 1949) guided him in unpacking Western civilization, it falters when he considered other civilizations. Weber was ‘human, all-too-human’ in being Western-centric, as disclosed at the very start of his ‘Author’s Introduction’ to his comparative essays in the sociology of religion: A product of modern European civilization, studying any problem of universal history, is bound to ask himself to what combination of circumstances the fact

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should be attributed that in Western civilization only, cultural phenomena have appeared which . . . lie in a line of development having universal significance and value. Only in the West does science exist at a stage of development which we recognize today as valid. (1958a: 13)8

It may be drawn from this that in effect Weber saw in the development of the West the essential features of the development of a civilization of modernity (whose major features will be discussed in a later section). In that respect, Weber voices a latter-day echo of the Enlightenment, though with less of the optimism in the goodness of mankind and the virtues of reason that the encyclopédistes held. Weber’s comparative studies of ‘axial age’ religions (as surrogates for civilization) as alternative centers of modernity has an evolutionary dimension. The image that comes to mind is that of a tree, with lower branches being the civilizations of China, India, and Ancient Judaism, and the tree top that of modern Western civilization. In fact, his comparative studies of the non-West, however appreciated by some Weberian pundits and a few sociologists of religion like Robert Bellah (Tokugawa Religion, 1957), stood largely ignored by social scientists for more than half a century. They regained visibility in the past quarter century from several sources. First, Edward Said’s seminal critique, Orientalism (1978), pointed an accusing finger at Weber’s studies of non-rational aspects of non-Western civilizations as another justification for cultural imperialism. Second, the unexpected economic vitality of East Asia (and its several ‘dragons’) on the world scene led some to rethink the role of ‘sinitic’ civilization and its values in promoting rather than hindering economic development, and more generally, a new cultural pride in ‘Confucian values’ led to a critical reappraisal of Weber’s work on the religion of China (Hofheinz and Calder, 1982; Tu Wei-ming, 1996; de Bary and Tu Wei-ming, 1998). Yet another stimulus for the discovery of Weber’s comparative analyses has come from the voluminous efforts of S.N. Eisenstadt with the elaboration of a comparative research program of civilizations and their multiple modernities, drawing from cues in Weber regarding the role of ‘heterodoxies’ and ‘antinomies’ as sources of tension with the mainstream ‘center’ of a civilization (Eisenstadt, 2000a, 2000b, and his contribution to the present volume).9 Weber’s comparative studies of civilization are the realization of a project he formulated as a teenager, not surprisingly, an ambitious project of understanding ‘the entire history of civilized nations and [seeking] to clarify “the laws governing their development” ’ (Marianne Weber, 1975: 46). For the 16-year old Wunderkind, his essay differentiated between Orient and Occident, East and West, and the fundamental antipathy between two main branches of the ‘Caucasian race’: the Semitic and the Indo-European, an antipathy reflected in fluctuating historical struggles down to the Middle Ages. Perhaps drawing from Nietzsche, the young Weber saw in ‘Semiticization’ the defeat of Aryan culture; his stark political conclusion was that ‘the Indo-Europeans could bear neither an intellectual intermixture nor the

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“despotic” forms of government peculiar to the Semites’ – only a constitutional government would do (Marianne Weber, 1975: 47). I draw attention to this little known background of Weber only because in its own formulation it foreshadows one of the pivotal reorientations of civilizational analysis in the 1990s, namely, the ‘clash of civilizations’ theme (more on this further in the essay). If Weber is the rightful mainstay of civilizational analysis in ‘classical’ sociology, there is an overlooked Gallic contribution stemming from Durkheim and Mauss, and especially Mauss (Durkheim, 1975a, 1975b; Durkheim and Mauss, 1998; Mauss, 1969; Mauss, Chapter 2). In the course of a conference in 1929, Mauss even provided explicit attention to conceptualizing civilizational phenomena as being social but not bounded by a given society, e.g. language, food, religion (Mauss, 1969: 458), and in that sense being a recognizable ‘hyper social system of social systems’. Civilizational phenomena, he proposed, are essentially international and extranational, common to several societies more or less related by extended contact and by permanent networks. Civilizations occur in a physical area and at the same time have a distinctive form (what Durkheim had earlier seen as a tonality sui generis10). What is noteworthy for their time in the Durkheimian perspective on civilizations, even if that was not a central topic of inquiry, was an acceptance of a plurality of civilizations to be studied comparatively without assuming the superiority of one type – the Western – as inherently superior to others. Although his theorizing did not progress beyond programmatic formulation, Mauss grasped the potentiality of civilizational analysis in holding that the study of civilizational facts facilitates hypotheses and hypothesis testing of comparative-historical aspects of human development (Mauss, 1969: 461). Mauss saw, contrary to the superficial analyses of civilizations in vogue before and after World War I based on conjectures, philosophies of history, single traits, and the like, that a rigorous civilizational analysis needed careful demarcation of historical, linguistic, archaeological, sociological, and ethnographic data. As an exemplar of the sort of civilizational study he advocated, the monumental study by another student of Durkheim and close collaborator of Mauss, Henri Hubert on the Celts stood out (1934). The Second Generation: The Dynamics of Civilization The brutal rupture of World War I from the ‘halcyon’ Victorian Age and the economic and political morass of the 1930s did much to unsettle the image of Western civilization as an evolutionary or Olympian pinnacle of mankind that had entered some sort of steady state needing just fine-tuning to maintain itself. The manifest debacle of Western Europe made it impossible to maintain an intrinsic cultural superiority of its civilization and its values over those of the ‘others’. Paradoxically, this led to a greater sociological reflexivity regarding Western civilization. Three sociological

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approaches in roughly the period from the mid-1930s to the 1980s provide what may be termed a ‘second generation’ of sociological analysis of civilizations. Though operating from different cultural and epistemological perspectives, each underscored civilization as a dynamic entity, really as a process of actualization or becoming from basic presuppositions or core values rather than as a finished entity suitable to be admired as a museum piece. Pitirim Sorokin prepared a monumental empirical study of the dynamics of civilization using Western civilization as a vast case study of the ‘infrastructure’ of Western institutions (Sorokin, 1937–41). Perhaps it was that his American sociological audience could not swallow his ‘integralist’ epistemology which did not privilege the truth of rationality over the truth of faith and intuition.11 Perhaps it was that the unit of analysis, civilization, may have appeared too unwieldy for those accustomed to the contemporary nation-state as the empirical referent of ‘society’. Perhaps, too, the basic American optimism fueled by pragmatism (Joas, 1993) did not resonate with Sorokin’s evaluation of late modernity being in a decaying ‘sensate’ phase.12 For whatever reasons, Sorokin’s civilizational analysis, with its ‘principle of limits’ and the ‘principle of imminent change’ (Tiryakian, 1968) gathered no followers seeking to apply them to other civilizations.13 Of greater import, yet less tangible, is the resurgence of religion in the public sphere, often as a critical factor of contention (involving debates over abortion, gay rights, ethnic conflicts), but also very much including dialogues between eminent scientists and theologians (with important backings from major foundations), and in peace and reconciliation processes in Northern Ireland, South Africa, and elsewhere.14 Sorokin did anticipate that after a sensate value-matrix would become exhausted in extremes of hedonism and violence, a new ‘ideational’ or ‘idealistic’ infrastructure would replace it. Another sociological study of the dynamics of civilization that received scant attention when it first appeared (1939) at another sad moment of Western civilization was the masterful study of Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (2000). Like another pre-war non-bestseller, Parsons’s Structure of Social Action (1949[1937]), it later emerged as a foundational sociological analysis. Elias provided rich historical materials to study how the civilizing of conduct took place in the West over the course of centuries, and in the process, how the distancing of children from adults psychically and behaviorally not only meant that children had to be civilized anew in every generation, but also facilitated treating ‘others’ (such as women and colonial subjects) in terms of being ‘childlike’. For Elias, changes in social structure in the underlying curbing of violence as intrinsic to the process of civilization had functional significance in status and power relations. There is a good deal in the analysis of Elias which anticipates later cultural explorations of Bourdieu and Foucault, but to treat this would take us well beyond the scope of this paper. The third contributor to civilizational analysis in that ‘second generation’

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was Benjamin Nelson. He drew upon his wide-ranging knowledge of the sociological classics, European history, comparative religious studies, psychoanalysis, and science to examine variations in time and space of ‘civilizatonal complexes’. Unlike Sorokin and Elias, Nelson had a certain success in institutionalizing the study of civilizations in the United States, for in 1970 he became the first American president of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations,15 which has continued meeting since and publishes the Comparative Civilizations Review. Although Nelson was not a systemic analyst of civilizations, he did produce some seminal essays having as a focus critical contacts between civilizations, which he termed ‘intercivilizational encounters’. And it was the creative encounters between the sciences and intellectuals of great societies – notably China and the West – which fascinated him in particular (Nelson, 1981: 164–98), as well as encounters within a civilization, for example in 12th- and 13th-century Iberian Europe, in encounters (dialogues in many instances) of Christians, Muslims, and Jews. As readers will note, the present volume testifies to the thrust of Nelson’s civilizational analysis, to his valorization of different paths to modernity taken by different civilizations (Eisenstadt) and their coming together at important juncture points (Nielsen, Collins, Hsu, Arjomand). The Third Generation: Eisenstadt and Huntington In the past decade marked by the unanticipated implosion of the Soviet system (which in due time may come to be seen as an aborted socialist civilization), S.N. Eisenstadt and Samuel Huntington have had a significant impact on civilizational analysis. Together with collaborators from several disciplines, Eisenstadt’s comparative studies of the multiple paths of modernity undertaken by various civilizations extend the original trail laid by Weber and Nelson (Sachsenmaier, Riedel and Eisenstadt, 2002). Rejecting an earlier simplistic dichotomy of ‘modernity’ associated with the West and ‘tradition’ with the non-West, Eisenstadt finds the dynamics of modernity within ‘Axial Age civilizations’ by examining the tensions between ‘orthodox’ and ‘heterodox’ orientations and their followers (Eisenstadt, 1986). The tensions and struggles are never resolved once and for all; there is a continuous ‘development of multiple modernities’, multiple interpretations of modernity. The clashes may be violent (think of the Chinese Cultural Revolution) but they are also creative, and in any case, they assure that there is no ‘end of history’.16 The work that has clearly generated the greatest attention to civilization analysis is the conceptualization of Samuel Huntington that the new world order, the post-Cold War world order, is one fated to be characterized by a ‘clash of civilizations’ replacing conflicts between ideologies and nationstates (Huntington, 1993, 1996). At one level, it may seem innocuous for a political scientist of distinction to propose that the superpowers of tomorrow will be civilizations operating in a zero-sum game of competition

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for scarce world resources. At another level, Huntington has touched a raw nerve in a world that strives to be ecumenical. His analysis is strongly contested, either directly or indirectly, by several papers in this volume and numerous other critics. This does not necessarily dispose of Huntington’s jarring thesis. Just as Chernobyl in April 1986 gave an unexpected boost to just then published Ulrich Beck’s contention that modernization brings new risks to modernity (Beck, 1992), so the unforeseen ‘September 11’ and its aftermath immensely accentuated the plausibility of an inherent clash of the world of (militant or radical) Islam and that of the West. The war declared by the American administration (initially stated as a ‘crusade’) on the borderless Islamic organization al-Qa’idah (or al-Qaeda), denounced as responsible for the attacks, seemed to some like a modern echo of the Crusades of the 13th century, despite reassurance that the targets were not all Muslims, only those who ‘misinterpreted’ Quranic texts. Even before 9/11, aspects of the post-Cold War setting seemed to provide some support for what was taken as the Huntington thesis, although the theaters of the ‘clashes’ were not in strict correspondence with his analysis. Chechnya, Indonesia, Mindanao, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia in exYugoslavia, and the Sudan, Kashmir, and the Taliban in Afghanistan (the latter’s destruction of Buddhist statues well in advance of the American war against the Taliban) all come to mind as sites of physical, social, and cultural violence involving Muslim populations against non-Muslims, however great the ethnic variability. So do the posters of most wanted criminals in a US Post Office, which even before 9/11 have had a majority of Arab/Islamic persons wanted for ‘international terrorism’. These images have had an unfortunate consequence of reinforcing in the public perception the reactionary view of ‘barbarians at the gate’. Notwithstanding the fact that Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the United States, with a 25 percent increase in mosques in the past six years taking place without conflict against other religious communities,17 Muslims and particularly ArabAmerican Muslims since 9/11 have felt under suspicion of not being ‘real Americans’, but more the carriers of an alien, dangerous, and threatening civilization. If not placed in detention camps as were Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor, after the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, the Muslim population, particularly those coming from the Middle East, has been subject to close surveillance under the USA Patriot Act (2001) as if they were potential enemy agents.

III. Civilization of Modernity and Modernity of Civilizations Very much in the vein opened up by Eisenstadt in Chapter 4, the emergent global reality of the coming decades may well be an even more encompassing civilization of modernity.18 What are some of its material and normative characteristics? As an ideal type in the Weberian sense and going

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beyond Braudel’s impressive historical analysis of its capitalist basis in ‘world-economy’ (Braudel, 1992), it is a material, urban (even ‘megaurban’) civilization19 that is marked by high technologies that compress time and distance in communication, production, and consumption patterns;20 a civilization that can alleviate traditional diseases of mankind (but also spread them in rapid time, as in the case of AIDS), and that can with increasing efficiency harness resources (non-human and human ones) on a global basis. Socially, it is a civilization which allows for a wide variety of life styles and patterns of individuation (albeit the very permissiveness and tolerance for alternative life styles generates in traditionalist quarters a bitter rejection of this civilization). It is a civilization which is decentered in terms of ‘zones of prestige’ and which facilitates extensive contacts and interactions, virtual and physical, between and within regions. The encouragement of diversity, at the individual and collective level, and the accessibility of ‘other voices’ to institutional centers from which they had been previously excluded (such as women and racial and ethnic minorities) tends to make for ‘multiple modernities’ within a broad technological and ideational frame. What is harder to discern are the values that will anchor this civilization. Undoubtedly, important frames for such a civilization will be maximum inclusion of previously disenfranchised actors as well as commitment to human rights. From its chrysalis in the three-dimensional 18th century setting of the secular Enlightenment, the industrial revolution and the emergence of modern science,21 the civilization of modernity has permeated the wider world we live in, albeit with cultural variations nationally and regionally. That means that ‘civilization’ is no longer the exclusive domain of the West, and no longer is Western civilization per se the ‘standard’ of admission to international society (Gong, 1984). Yet, in one sense, the West has triumphed because so much, but not all, of its civilization – particularly the values of science and technology as opening the doors of abundance and human physical betterment, the values of secular, rational education obtained in institutions of higher learning, and the evolving value of an enlarged citizenry as the ultimate arbiter of political authority – has evolved beyond its original geographical venue into a civilization of modernity. A certain contradiction may be noted in this respect. As the bearer of the civilization of modernity, the West justified its hegemonic domination of the non-West in the new colonialism of the 19th century by proclaiming that its tutelage would provide the moral and intellectual uplift of peoples that were in some state of ‘backwardness’ or ‘decadence’ as the case might be. It was willing to share its secular/religious22 and even its social capital in training a small number of elites drawn from local populations. And this ‘sharing’ has continued in the post-Cold War era with Western countries, the United States in the lead, encouraging the newly independent countries and others to join the bandwagon of modernity in the form of free elections and the free market system, as the twin hallmark of democracy.

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The basic contradiction lies in the question of sharing technology, more specifically military and nuclear technology. A limit of the civilization of modernity, however much globalization as transnational flows of capital, peoples, and information is a feature of it, is the uneven access to technology via barriers like intellectual property rights. In this vein, there seems to be extreme reluctance, if not outright resistance utilizing force if necessary, to enlarge the group of nations that have nuclear capability. In the now famous ‘axis of evil’ presidential state of the union address in January 2002, the three countries singled out – Iraq, Iran, and North Korea – were taken as threats against the United States (and humanity) precisely because of their desire and potential to acquire ‘weapons of mass destruction’, i.e. to seek technological parity with the rarified group having capability of waging biological and especially nuclear warfare. That countries other than the United States, some Western, some non-Western, have managed to enter ‘the club’ is immaterial, at least for the United States as the self-appointed gatekeeper and for the perception of the United States today of being a nuclear menace rather than a guardian angel.23 Besides nuclear technology, the United States is also the largest military purveyor of the world and nowhere more than in the technology which has provided it with undisputed air supremacy in all the combats of the last fifteen years. It shares that technology in the form of military equipment sales but sells this year’s goods next year. In any event, if we can speak of the ‘triumph’ of the West in advancing its civilizational model as one to be adapted to (but not copied) elsewhere – even where there are still large pockets of resistance to certain premises of modernity, premises such as the inclusion of all in the body politic, irrespective of ethnicity and gender – this implies among other things that Western societies and their leaders are to be judged by the same normative standards as they have in the past judged ‘others’. Massive new weapons of environmental and human destruction, used to minimize the loss of one’s troops at the expense of ‘the other’ are no less instances of ‘barbarism’. And when a ‘civilized’ country attacks with an armada the site of an ancient civilization charging it as a haven for ‘barbarism’, while harassing and incarcerating suspects incommunicado without recourse to due process, it might seem as if Batouala’s perspective is unfortunately as pertinent in the 21st century as when it was evoked 80 years ago. Whatever our judgment, the civilization of modernity cannot be viewed as only luminous, creative, world-enhancing propensity, but as having an equally dark, demonic, destructive side, perhaps because it is a civilization which is so powerful in harnessing the energies of humankind. There is a dialectical process that needs to be noted. It is that the civilization of modernity entails the modernity of civilizations. In our emergent world of the 21st century – as we may well be entering ‘the global age’ (Albrow, 1997) – all civilizations may have representatives who accept the value of modernity, however differently this may be expressed. Ultimately, perhaps, the most common value is that of being heard or seen by others, without fear of oppression or, for that matter, without fear of being

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ridiculed. This may best come out by being a contributing agent of something larger than one’s self and one’s group. It is not only the representatives of familiar civilizations but also representatives of civilizations thought to have disappeared long ago, like various Native Americans, Mayans, Celts, and others. The interaction of these with high technology (computers, cell phones, etc.) and with other contemporary civilizations, facilitated by processes of globalization, is a new chapter in the social evolution of humankind. It is the possibility of a new ‘coming out’ into modernity of ancient cultures and civilizations that had been marginalized or that had been framed and frozen as relics and vestiges of the dim past, like replicas of dinosaurs in museums of natural history. A striking but not unique example is the transformation of the didjeridu, used traditionally in sacred texts of the Yolngu people of Australia’s northeast Arnhem Land, to an Australian icon in pop/rock songs, popular music, and modern schools in far-flung sites of modernity, such as contemporary British music festivals (Neuenfeldt, 1997). About one hundred years ago, they were part of the ethnographic materials collected by Spencer and Gillin and utilized by Durkheim in seeking the ‘elementary forms’ of religion in the most ‘primitive’ civilization then known. Today, the use of the didjeridu by nontraditional users and players contributes to a growing sense of pan-Aboriginality, a new sense of solidarity and national identity. It is, I propose, an illustration of the intersection of the modernity of a civilization and the civilization of modernity. What adds to the poignancy of the contemporary period is that on the one hand, the traditional environments of many regions of the world that have produced so many civilizations are being transformed, commodified, degraded by global capitalism, yet on the other, the populations in the most remote areas, and lacking the vast capital resources of transnational corporations, can step into the world arena making their presence, their philosophies, and their technologies known globally on the internet. And it is not only in virtual space that ‘ancient’ and previously defined ‘primitive’ civilizations can make their presence felt. It is also in real space. International migration of peoples, particularly from low income countries with surplus populations to high income countries with labor shortages due to declining birth rates, is conducive to the growing heterogeneity of civilizations in given areas, which had heretofore been seen as relatively homogeneous. If migrant populations are bearers of civilizations other than that of the host country, their adaptation – especially in succeeding generations growing up in the host setting – entails mutual modifications in the cultural aspects of both migrant and host civilization. What is an important characteristic of our contemporary world, at least in most Western countries (and here I recognize this may be a distorted echo of John Hall’s ‘Confessions of a Eurocentric’, Chapter 14), is the acceptance of diversity, of lifestyles, cultures, and therefore civilizations, allowing their intermingling and commingling rather than a forced assimilation of others to one standard model. In this respect, the locus of modernity posed by Havel in his citation at

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the beginning of this paper has an obverse side: the crucial question is where does the civilization of modernity begin and end, not where do particular civilizations begin or end (in time and space). The civilizational perspective we seek to develop as apposite for the 21st century not only, in the vein of Weber, Mauss, and Sorokin, takes ‘civilization’ as a proper macro sociocultural unit of analysis, more encompassing than the nation-state but less sweeping than a ‘world system’. It also distances itself from a more traditional view of a civilization grounded in one physical area, a perspective which still infuses the challenging thesis of Huntington. Newer technologies of globalization and flows of population facilitated by various means of transportation facilitate the decentering of civilizations and increasing their encounters (both enriching and negative, conflictual), and thereby contribute to the decentering of modernity. To develop the conceptual and methodological framework to do justice to this emergent global reality – the distant progeny of the Enlightenment with its project of greater inclusion in new rational networks of a global civil society and yet also with its dark, non-rational ‘wertrational’ Jacobin side (Eisenstadt, 1999) – is the challenge for the renovated sociology of civilization. Notes 1. For the ‘sociogenesis’ of the distinction between ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ in modern Western thought, see especially Elias (2000, vol. 1, Part 1). Elias argues that, at least in the German 18th-century context, ‘culture’ was the status domain of the established nobility while ‘civilization’ became the milieu of the rising industrial middle class (Elias, 1998[1989]). 2. Moral conquest meant via secular education, not religion (Hardy, 1917). 3. For his audacity Maran, winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt, became subject to sanctions and subsequent editions omitted the offensive preface from which the citation is taken. The French medical doctor René Trautmann, claiming that he had as much insight into the ‘black soul’ as the assmilated Maran, published an extensive rejoinder intended as a more balanced account of colonial life in the Congo, which while imperfect, was in his view, not ‘an existence of laziness, debauchery and degradation’ (1922: 243). 4. Its author an influential political figure in the Orleans monarchy, François Guizot’s History of Civilization in Europe from the Fall of the Roman Empire to the French Revolution (1885) first came out in 1836 and went through numerous editions in French and English for most the century. Viewing civilization as ‘the grand emporium of a people, in which all its wealth . . . all the powers of its existence are stored up’ (1885: 10), it has an echo in Fernand Braudel’s equally bold history of capitalism as the matrix of the development of modern civilization (Braudel, 1992). 5. ‘Ce qui caractérise la civilisation Européenne, c’est l’influence décroissante des lois physiques et l’influence croissante des lois mentales’ (La Grande Encyclopédie: 514). 6. Recall Wendell Willkie’s prophetic One World (1943). 7. Their earlier French edition also contains no entry for ‘civilisation’. 8. Readers of Parsons’s translation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber, 1958a) may not be immediately aware that Weber’s ‘Introduction’ was written in 1920, well after his ‘Protestant Ethic’ essay, and intended as an introduction to the whole corpus of Weber’s Religionsoziologie, which included far-ranging essays on Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism. 9. In a complementary fashion, Eisenstadt has earlier encouraged renewed attention to

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Weber’s famous ‘Protestant ethic thesis’ as a catalyst for the modernization process, and not just in the West (Eisenstadt, 1968). 10. ‘. . . il y a dans chaque civilisation une sorte de tonalité sui generis qui se retrouve dans tous les détails de la vie collective’ (Durkheim, 1975a: 54). 11. Husserl’s phenomenological method and its Wesenschau met a similar reception in mainstream American philosophical circles. (See ‘Phenomenology’, Encyclopaedia Brittanica from Encyclopaedia Online http://search.eb.com/b/article?eu=115435 [accessed 22 January 2004]). 12. On the contemporary scene, Sorokin’s analysis of late modernity bears resemblance with that of Bauman (1991), although Sorokin saw a redemptory aspect beyond the sensate period. 13. If mainstream American sociology did not pick up the Sorokin trail to civilizational analysis, there are signs that this may yet happen, in view of recent evaluations and testimonies of his monumental contributions (Johnston, 1995; Ford, Richard and Talbutt, 1996). As aspects of these ‘signs’, the Kondratiev Institute organized an international symposium, ‘Pitirim Sorokin and Sociocultural Tendencies of Our Times’, Moscow and St Petersburg, 4–6 February, 1999. 14. The one major area where religion seems to be markedly on the wane in exiting the public sphere is Western Europe (Davie, 2002; Hervieu-Léger, 2003). 15. The Society had been founded ten years earlier in Salzburg; interestingly, Sorokin was its first president. 16. In a perspective congruent with Eisenstadt, I have proposed that the dynamics of Western civilization feature the interaction, sometime symbiotic, sometime antagonistic, of three ‘metacultures of modernity’: Christian, Gnostic, and Chthonic (Tiryakian, 1996). 17. According to the report ‘The Mosque in America: A National Portrait’, one-third of mosque worshippers are South Asians, 30 percent African-Americans, and 25 percent ArabAmericans (New York Times, 27 April, 2001, A12). Islam, it may be noted, is both a civilization and an umbrella of civilizations. 18. I use the qualifier ‘even more’ because the roots of this civilization go back at least as far as the Greco-Roman period, in terms of institutional and technological innovations in administration. Another leg in the development of that civilization was the 13th century, in terms of material development (Abu-Lughod, 1989) and political ones (the free city discussed by Weber), which were not confined to the West. From the 16th century until fairly late in the 20th century this civilization has a proactive center in a handful of Western countries, which turn advances in science and technology to its advantage in stamping the rest of the world with a controlled modernity. However, the moral and normative aspects of the civilization of modernity, transmuted into the ideas of nationalism, autonomy, and even, most radical, equality of citizenship, are attendant byproducts which, in the words of the Martinique militant Aimé Césaire, become ‘miraculous weapons’ that effectively mobilize colonized populations. I see this contested aspect of the civilization of modernity as having today the cognate of antiglobalization movements being an aspect of globalization (Houtart & Polet, 2001; Held & McGrew, 2002). 19. Max Weber, who laid down so much of the elements of the civilization of modernity, had indicated that the free city appearing in (northern) Europe in the 13th century was politically and economically significant as a habitat of modernity. The urban milieu has, of course, been an important focus of sociological attention, and more recently, in relating the ‘megaurban’ milieu to globalization (King, 1990; Sassen, 2001, 2002). 20. The internet and the cell phones, barely ten years old, are now globally ubiquitous. 21. To be sure, elements of the civilization of modernity are to be found well before the 18th century, for example, in the free city that Weber had noted (1958b), emancipated from clerical or seigneurial authority; features of the ideology of the Enlightenment are to be found in earlier heretical sects, etc. But it is only in the latter part of the 18th century when all, or at least most, of the features of the civilization of modernity seem to come together, including the political upheavals on both sides of the Atlantic. 22. I combine the two because the secular ideologies of the Enlightenment, while they held

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sway in various guises in Europe, were not monopolies in colonial administration, since colonial administration found that allowing missionary bodies to practice and organize the indigenous population relieved costs of operations, for example, in providing education and medical assistance. In Europe cultural wars between secular and religious factions were the norm; in the colonies, they were (uneasy) collaborators in the common colonial enterprise. 23. On 6 August, 2003, at the ceremonies in Hiroshima marking the 58th anniversary of the city’s nuclear bombing by the United States, and its death toll of over 230,000 victims, the city’s mayor Tadatoshi Akiba denounced the current American regime for jeopardizing the global Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and openly declaring for a possible pre-emptive nuclear strike (http://commondreams.org/headlines03/0806-10.htm).

References Abu-Lughod, J. (1989) Before European Hegemony: The World-System A.D. 1250–1350. New York: Oxford University Press. Albrow, Martin (1997) The Global Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Armillas, Pedro (1968) ‘The Concept of Civilization’, International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences 16: 218–21. Balandier, Georges (2003) Civilisés, Dit-On. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Bauman, Zygmunt (1991) Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society. Towards a New Modernity. Newbury Park, CA and London: Sage Publications. Bellah, Robert N. (1957) Tokugawa Religion: the Values of Pre-industrial Japan. New York: Free Press. Boudon, R. and Bourricaud, F. (1989) A Critical Dictionary of Sociology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Braudel, Fernand (1992[1979]) Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brinkman, Carl (1942) ‘Civilization’, Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. 3. New York: Macmillan, pp. 525–29. Civilizations 1(1) (1951): 5. Clark, Kenneth (1969) Civilization. New York: Harper and Row. Davie, Grace (2002) Europe, the exceptional case: Parameters of Faith in the Modern World. London: Darton Longman & Todd. De Bary, Wm. T. and Tu, W. (1998) Confucianism and Human Rights. New York: Columbia University Press. Durkheim, Emile (1975a[1902]) ‘Civilisation en Général et Types de Civilisations’, in Textes. Vol. 1. Eléments d’une théorie sociale. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Durkheim, Emile (1975b) Textes. Vol. 3. Fonctions Sociales et Institutions. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Durkheim, Emile and Mauss, M. (1998[1913]) ‘Note on the Notion of Civilization’, in John Rundell and Stephen Mennell (eds) Classical Readings in Culture and Civilization. London and New York: Routledge. Eisenstadt, S.N. (ed.) (1968) The Protestant Ethic and Modernization. A Comparative View. New York: Basic Books. Eisenstadt, S.N. (1986) A Sociological Approach to Comparative Civilizations. The Development of a Research Program. Jerusalem: The Truman Research Institute, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Eisenstadt, S.N. (1999) Fundamentalism, Sectarianism and Revolution: The Jacobin Dimension of Modernity. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Eisenstadt, S.N. (2000a) ‘Multiple Modernities’, Dædalus 199(1) (Winter): 1–29. Eisenstadt, S.N. (2000b) ‘The Civilizational Dimension in Sociological Analysis’, Thesis Eleven 62 (August): 1–21.

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Eisenstadt, S.N. (2002) ‘Some Observations on Multiple Modernities’, in D. Sachsenmaier, J. Reidel and S.N. Eisenstadt, Reflections on Multiple Modernities. Leiden: Brill, pp. 27–41. Elias, Norbert (1998[1989]) ‘Civilization, Culture, Identity,’ in Rundell and Mennell (eds) Classical Readings in Culture and Civilization. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 225–40. Elias, Norbert (2000 [1939]) The Civilizing Process. Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell. Ford, J.B., Richard, M.P. and Talbutt, P.C. (eds) (1996) Sorokin and Civilization. A Centennial Assessment. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Freud, Sigmund (1998 [1932]) ‘Civilization’s Streit. Why War?’, in John Rundell and Stephen Mennell (eds) Classical Readings in Culture and Civilization. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 139–47. Gong, Gerritt W. (1984) The Standard of ‘Civilization’ in International Society. Oxford: Clarendon Press. La Grande Encyclopédie (ca. 1900) ‘Civilisation’, Vol. 11: 513–16. Paris: Larousse. Guha, R. and Spivak, G.C. (eds). (1988) Selected Subaltern Studies. New York: Oxford University Press. Guizot, F. (1885) History of Civilization in Europe from the Fall of the Roman Empire to the French Revolution. New York: John B. Alden. Habermas, Jürgen (1998) The Inclusion of the Other. Studies in Political Theory, Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff (eds). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hardy, Georges (1917) Une Conquête Morale. L’Enseignement en A.O.F. Paris: Armand Colin. Havel, V. (1999) ‘Kosovo and the End of the Nation-State’, New York Review of Books 46(10) (June, 1999). Held, David and McGrew, A. (2002) Globalization/anti-globalization. Cambridge: Polity and Malden, MA: Blackwell. Hervieu-Léger, Danièle (2003) Catholicisme, la fin d’un monde. Paris: Bayard. Hofheinz, Roy and Calder, K.E. (1982) The Eastasia Edge. New York: Basic Books. Houtart, François and Polet, F. (eds) (2001) The Other Davos: the Globalization of Resistance to the World Economic System. London and New York: Zed Books (US distributor Palgrave). Hubert, Henri (1934) The Greatness and Decline of the Celts, Marcel Mauss, R. Lantier and J. Marx (eds) translated by M.R. Dobie. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner. Huntington, Samuel P. (1993) ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs 72 (Summer): 22–49. Huntington, Samuel P. (1996) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, David L. Sills (ed.) (1968) 17 Vols. New York: Macmillan and Free Press. Joas, Hans (1993) Pragmatism and Social Theory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Johnston, Barry V. (1995) Pitirim A. Sorokin: an Intellectual Biography. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Kavolis, Vytautas (1982) ‘Social Movements and Civilizational Processes’, Comparative Civilizations Review 8 (Spring): 31–58. King, Anthony D. (1990) Global Cities: Post-Imperialism and the Internationalization of London. London and New York: Routledge. Maran, R. (1922) Batouala. A Negro Novel. London: Cape. Mauss, Marcel (1969) Oeuvres, Vol. 2: Représentations collectives et diversité des civilisations, Chapter 5, ‘théorie des civilisations’, Victor Karady (ed.) Paris: Editions de Minuit, pp. 451–523. Mauss, Marcel (2004) ‘Civilizations: Elements and Forms. Part 2: Civilizational Forms.’ Translated with an Introduction by Diane Barthel-Bouchier, this volume. Nelson, Benjamin (1981) On the Roads to Modernity. Conscience, Science, and Civilizations, Toby E. Huff (ed.). Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield. Neuenfeldt, Karl (ed.) (1997) The Didjeridu: from Arnhem Land to Internet. Sydney, Aus: John Libbey & Company/Perfect Beat Publications.

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Parsons, T. (1949[1937]) The Structure of Social Action. New York: Free Press. Rundell, John and Mennell, Stephen (eds) (1998) Classical Readings in Culture and Civilization. London and New York: Routledge. Sachsenmaier, Dominic, Riedel, Jens and Eisenstadt, S.N. (eds) (2002) Reflections on Multiple Modernities. European, Chinese and Other Interpretations. Leiden: Brill. Said, Edward W. (1978) Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Sassen, Saskia (2001) The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sassen, Saskia (ed.) (2002) Global Networks, Linked Cities. New York: Routledge. Sklair, Leslie (1995) Sociology of the Global System, 2nd edn. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Smelser, N.J. (ed.) (1989) Handbook of Sociology. Newbury Park, CA and London: Sage Publications. Sorokin, Pitirim A. (1937–41) Social and Cultural Dynamics. 4 Vols. New York: American Book. Spivak, Gayatri C. (1999) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Swidler, Ann (1986) ‘Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,’ American Sociological Review 51 (April): 273–86. Tiryakian, E.A. (1968) ‘Sorokin, Pitirim A.’, International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. 15. New York: Macmillan and Free Press, pp. 61–64. Tiryakian, E.A. (1996) ‘Three Metacultures of Modernity: Christian, Gnostic, Chthonic’, Theory, Culture & Society 13 (February): 99–118. Troutmann, René (1922) Au Pays de ‘Batouala’. Noirs et Blancs en Afrique. Paris: Payot. Tu, Wei-ming (ed.) (1996) Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weber, Marianne (1975[1926]) Max Weber: A Biography, translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Wiley Interscience. Weber, Max (1949) The Methodology of Social Sciences, translated and edited by E.A. Shils and H.A. Finch. New York: Free Press. Weber, Max (1958a) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Talcott Parsons. New York: Charles Scribner’s. Weber, Max (1958b) The City, translated and edited by Don Martindale and Gertrud Neuwirth. New York: Free Press. Willkie, Wendell L. (1943) One World. New York: Simon & Schuster.

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4 The Civilizational Dimension of Modernity Modernity as a Distinct Civilization Shmuel N. Eisenstadt

I In this article I would like to analyse modernity from a civilizational perspective – as a distinct type of civilization (Eisenstadt, 2000a). The view of modernity as a distinct civilization implies that modernity has to be seen as a new type of civilization – not unlike the formation and expansion of the Great Religions. According to this view, the core of modernity is the crystallization and development of mode or modes of interpretation of the world, or, to follow Cornelius Castoriadis’s terminology, of a distinct social imaginaire, indeed of the ontological vision, of a distinct cultural programme, combined with the development of a set or sets of new institutional formations – the central core of both being, as we see later in greater detail, an unprecedented ‘openness’ and uncertainty. Modernity, the modern cultural and political programme, developed in one of the Great Axial Civilizations – the Christian-European one (Eisenstadt, 1982, 1986). It crystallized as a transformation of the heterodox visions with strong gnostic components which sought to bring the Kingdom of God to earth and which were often promulgated in medieval and early modern European Christianity by different heterodox sects. The transformation of these visions as it took place above all in the Enlightenment and in the Great Revolutions, in the English Civil War and especially the American and French Revolutions and their aftermaths, entailed the transposition of these visions from relatively marginal sectors of society to the central political arena. The Great Revolutions constitute the concretization of the sectarian heterodox potentialities which developed in the Axial Civilizations – especially in those in which the political arena was seen as at least one of the arenas of implementation of their transcendental vision. These revolutions constitute the first or at least the most dramatic, and possibly the most successful attempt in the history of humankind to implement on a

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macro-societal scale the utopian vision with strong gnostic components. It was in these revolutions that such sectarian activities were taken out from marginal or segregated sectors of society and became interwoven not only with rebellions, popular uprisings and movements of protest but also with the political struggle at the centre. They were transposed into the general political movements and the centres thereof, and themes and symbols of protest became a basic component of the central social and political symbolism. It was this transposition that can be designated as the Second Axial Age, in which a distinct, cultural, political and institutional programme crystallized and expanded throughout most of the world encompassing all the ‘classical’ Axial Civilizations, as well as preand non-Axial ones. This civilization, the distinct cultural programme with its institutional implications, crystallized first in Western Europe and then expanded to other parts of Europe, to the Americas and later on throughout the world. This gave rise to continually changing cultural and institutional patterns which constituted, as it were, different responses to the challenges and possibilities inherent in the core characteristics of the distinct civilizational premises of modernity.

II The modern project, the cultural and political programme of modernity as it developed first in the West, in Western and Central Europe, entailed distinct ideological as well as institutional premises. It entailed some very distinct shifts in the conception of human agency, of its autonomy, and of its place in the flow of time. It entailed a conception of the future in which various possibilities which can be realized by autonomous human agency – or by the march of history – are open. The core of this programme has been that the premises and legitimation of the social, ontological and political order were no longer taken for granted; there developed a very intensive reflexivity around the basic ontological premises as well as around the bases of social and political order of authority of society – a reflexivity which was shared even by the most radical critics of this programme, who in principle denied the legitimacy of such reflexivity. The central core of this cultural programme has been possibly most successfully formulated by Weber. To follow James D. Faubion’s exposition of Weber’s conception of modernity: ‘Weber finds the existential threshold of modernity in a certain deconstruction: of what he speaks of as the “ethical postulate that the world is a God-ordained, and hence somehow meaningfully and ethically oriented cosmos” ’. What he asserts – what in any event might be extrapolated from his assertions – is that the threshold of modernity has its epiphany precisely as the legitimacy of the postulate of a divinely preordained and fated cosmos has its decline; that modernity emerges, that one or another modernity can

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emerge, only as the legitimacy of the postulated cosmos ceases to be taken for granted and beyond reproach. Countermoderns reject that reproach, believe in spite of it: One can extract two theses: Whatever else they may be, modernities in all their variety are responses to the same existential problematic. The second: whatever else they may be, modernities in all their variety are precisely those responses that leave the problematic in question intact, that formulate visions of life and practice neither beyond nor in denial of it but rather within it, even in deference to it. (Faubion, 1993: 113–15)

It is because of the fact that all such responses leave the problematic intact, the reflexivity which developed in the programme of modernity went beyond that which crystallized in the Axial Civilizations. The reflexivity that developed in the modern programme focused not only on the possibility of different interpretations of the transcendental visions and basic ontological conceptions prevalent in a society or societies, but came to question the very givenness of such visions and of the institutional patterns related to them. It gave rise to the awareness of the existence of a multiplicity of such visions and patterns and of the possibility that such visions and conceptions can indeed be contested (Eisenstadt, 1982, 1986). Such awareness was closely connected with two central components of the modern project, emphasized in the early studies of modernization by Dan Lerner and later by Alex Inkeles. The first such component is the recognition, among those becoming and being modernized – as illustrated by the famous story in Lerner’s book about the grocer and the shepherd – of the possibility of undertaking a great variety of roles beyond any fixed or ascriptive ones, and the concomitant receptivity to different communication messages which promulgate such open possibilities and visions. Second, there is the recognition of the possibility of belonging to wider translocal, possibly also changing, communities (Lerner, 1958; Inkeles and Smith, 1974). Concomitantly, closely related to such awareness and central to this cultural programme were the emphasis on the autonomy of humankind: his or hers – but in the initial formulation of this programme certainly ‘his’ – emancipation from the fetters of traditional political and cultural authority and the continuous expansion of the realm of personal and institutional freedom and activity, and of human ones. Such autonomy entailed several dimensions: first, reflexivity and exploration; and second, active construction, domination of nature, possibly including human nature, and of society. In parallel, this programme entailed a very strong emphasis on autonomous participation of members of society in the constitution of social and political order and its constitution; on autonomous access, indeed of all members of the society to these orders and their centres. Out of the conjunctions of these conceptions there developed the belief in the possibility of active formation of society by conscious human activity. Two basic complementary but also potentially contradictory tendencies about the best ways in which such construction could take place developed within this programme. The first was that the programme as it crystallized

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above all in the Great Revolutions gave rise, perhaps for the first time in the history of humanity, to the belief in the possibility of bridging the gap between the transcendental and mundane orders, of realizing through conscious human actions in the mundane orders, in social life, some of the utopian, eschatological visions. The second such tendency was rooted in the growing recognition of the legitimacy of multiple individual Eisenstadt The Civilizational Dimension of Modernity 323 and group goals and interests and of multiple interpretations of the common good (Eistenstadt, 1992: 385–401; 1985: 315–88; 1981: 155–81; Voegelin, 1975; Seligman, 1989).

III The modern programme entailed also a radical transformation of the conceptions and premises of the political order, of the constitution of the political arena, and in the characteristics of the political process. The core of the new conceptions was the breakdown of traditional legitimation of the political order, the concomitant opening up of different possibilities of construction of such order, and the consequent contestation about the ways in which political order was to be constructed by human actors. It combined orientations of rebellion and intellectual antinomianism, together with strong orientations to centre-formation and institutionbuilding, giving rise to social movements, movements of protest as a continual component of the political process. These conceptions were closely connected with the transformation of the basic characteristics of the modern political arena and processes. The most important of these characteristics was first the openness of this arena and of the political process; second a strong emphasis on at least potential active participation of the periphery, of ‘society’, of all its members in the political arena. Third were the strong tendencies to permeation of the peripheries by the centres and of the impingement of the peripheries on the centres, of the concomitant blurring of the distinctions between centre and periphery. Fourth was the combination of the charismatization of the centre or centres with the incorporation of themes and symbols of protest which became components of the modern transcendental visions as basic and legitimate components of the premises of these centres. Themes and symbols of protest – equality and freedom, justice and autonomy, solidarity and identity – became central components of the modern project of emancipation of humankind. It was indeed the incorporation of such themes of protest into the centre which heralded the radical transformation of various sectarian utopian visions into central components of the political and cultural programme. Out of the combination of the ideology and premises of the political programme of modernity and the core characteristics of the modern political institutions, there emerged three central aspects of the modern political process – namely, first the strong tendency to the politicization of the

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demands of various sectors of the society and of conflicts between them, and second, the continual struggle about the definition of the realm of the political. Such drawing of the boundaries of the political has in itself constituted – unlike in most other political regimes in the history of humankind – one of the major foci of open political contestation and struggle. Third, and in close connection with the two preceding characteristics, the continuous restructuring of centre–periphery relations has become the central focus of political process and dynamics in modern societies (Ackerman, 1991).

IV This programme entailed also a very distinctive mode of construction of the boundaries of collectivities and collective identities. There developed new concrete definitions of the basic components of collective identities – the civil, primordial and universalistic and transcendental ‘sacred’ ones; and of the modes of their institutionalization. There developed, first, a strong tendency to their absolutization in ideological terms; second, the growing importance of the civil components thereof; third, a very strong connection between the construction of political boundaries and those of the cultural collectivities; and fourth, the closely related strong emphasis on territorial boundaries of such collectivities and a continual tension between the territorial and/or particularistic components of these collectivities and broader, potential universalistic ones. At the same time, the most distinct characteristic of the construction of collectivities, very much in line with the general core characteristics of modernity, was that such construction was continually problematized in reflexive ways. In some even if certainly not total contrast to the situation in the Axial Civilizations, collective identities were not taken as given or as preordained by some transcendental vision and authority, or by perennial customs. They constituted foci of contestations and struggles, often couched in highly ideological terms (Eisenstadt and Giesen, 1995; Shils, 1975). A very central component in the construction of collective identities was the self-perception of a society as ‘modern’, as bearer of the distinct cultural and political programme, and its relations from this point of view to other societies – be it those societies which claim to be, or are seen as, bearers of this programme, and various ‘others’.

V The civilization of modernity as it developed first in the West was from its very beginning beset by internal antinomies and contradictions which constituted a radical transformation of those inherent in Axial Civilizations. This gave rise to continual critical discourse and political contestations

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which focused on the relations, tensions and contradictions between its premises and between these premises and the institutional developments in modern societies. The tension which was perhaps the most critical, both in ideological and political terms, has been that between totalizing and pluralistic visions – between the view which accepts the existence of different values and rationalities as against the view which conflates such different values and above all different rationalities in a totalistic way. This tension developed above all with respect to the very conception of reason and its place in the constitution of human society. It was manifest for instance, as Stephen Toulmin (1990) has shown, even if in a rather exaggerated way, in the difference between the more pluralistic conceptions of Montaigne or Erasmus, which entailed also the recognition and legitimizing of other cultural characteristics of human experience, and the totalizing vision of reason promulgated by Descartes. Among the most important, such con- flations of different rationalities has been the one – which was often identified as the major message of the Enlightenment – of sovereignty of reason, which subsumed value-rationality (Wertrationalität) or substantive rationality under instrumental rationality (Zweckrationalität) in its technocratic mode or under a totalizing moralistic utopian vision. In some cases, as for instance in the Communist ideology, there may develop some combination of both the technocratic and the moralistic utopian visions under one totalistic canopy. Concomitant tension between totalizing, absolutizing, as against more pluralistic tendencies developed also in the definition of other dimensions of human experience – especially the emotional ones. Cutting across these tensions, there developed within the cultural and political programme of modernity continual – even if changing in their concrete manifestations – contradictions between the basic premises of the cultural and political programmes of modernity and the major institutional developments of modern societies. Among these contradictions of special importance have been those so strongly emphasized by Weber, those between the creative dimension inherent in the visions which led to the crystallization of modernity and the flattening of these visions, the ‘disenchantment’ of the world inherent in the growing routinization and bureaucratization; between an overreaching vision through which the modern world becomes meaningful and the fragmentation of such meaning generated by the growing autonomous development of the different institutional arenas – the economic, the political and the cultural. Closely related has been the tension between, on the one hand, the emphasis on human autonomy, the autonomy of the human person, and, on the other hand, the strong, restrictive control dimensions inherent in the institutional realization of modern life, depicted even if in different ways among others by Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault – or in Peter Wagner’s formulation between freedom and control (Wagner, 1991).

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VI Closely related were the tensions which crystallized within the modern political discourse, the most important among which has been the relation between, on the one hand, the legitimacy of plurality of discrete individual and group interests and of different conceptions of the common good and of moral order, and, on the other hand, of totalizing ideologies which denied the legitimacy of such pluralities. One form of such totalistic ideology emphasized the primacy of collectivities perceived as distinct ontological entities based on common primordial and/or spiritual attributes – above all a national collectivity. The other such totalistic ideology has been the Jacobin one, the historical roots of which go back to medieval eschatological sources, the essence of which was the belief in the primacy of politics and in the ability of politics to reconstitute society, and in the possibility of transforming society through totalistic, mobilized participatory political action. Whatever the differences between these collectivistic ideologies, they all shared deep suspicion of the open political process and institutions, especially the representative and those of public discussion, as well as strong autocratic tendencies.

VII It was the combination of the awareness of the existence of different ideological and institutional possibilities with the tensions and contradictions inherent in the cultural and political programme of modernity that constituted the core of modernity as the Second Global Axial Age. This combination gave rise – through the activities of multiple cultural and political activists, who promulgated and attempted to implement different visions of modernity in their interactions with broader strata of society, and through continual contestations between them – to the crystallization of different patterns of modernity, of multiple modernities. Of special importance among these activists were social movements, movements of protest, such as the liberal, then the socialist and communist; the national ones and the fascist and ‘national’-socialist ones. These movements constituted the transformation, in the modern setting, of some of the major heterodoxies of the Axial Civilizations – especially of those heterodoxies which sought to bring about by political action and the reconstruction of the centre the realization of utopian visions to bring the Kingdom of God to earth, to the Kingdom of Man. These movements were international even if their bases or roots were in specific countries and they constituted continual mutual reference points. These activities have not been confined to the limits or frameworks of any ‘single’ society or state, even if it was such societies or states that constitute the major arenas of the implementation of the programmes and goals promulgated by such activities. It has been in the very nature of the visions of modernity and of its institutional dynamics that

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they have been international in their scopes and orientations from the very beginning of the modern era. Such multiple modernities developed not only in different national states. The more successful among such movements have continually crystallized in distinct ideological and institutional patterns which became often identified, as was the case for instance first with revolutionary France and later with Soviet Russia, with specific countries but whose reach went far beyond them.1 Communist and fascist movements, each of which was indeed, even if in different ways, international, constituted distinct variant patterns of modernity.

VIII The cultural programme of modernity was rooted in the transformations of the late medieval European civilizations and polities, and it crystallized in tandem in Europe especially after the revolutions in early modern western, military, economic, technological and ideological expansion throughout the world – first to Eastern Christianity especially to Russia, to Islam and the great Asian Axial Civilizations – the Confucian, the Hinduist and Buddhist ones; then to the only major non-Axial civilization from within which there crystallized the first successful non-western modernity – namely Japan – and to Africa. Such expansion can be seen as the first wave of modern globalization, which had by the end of the 20th century reached unprecedented dimensions. This worldwide expansion raised, almost from the beginning of modernity, certainly from the second half of the 20th century, the question of whether the world, the modern world which crystallized under the impact of such expansion of the process of globalization, would be a uniform homogeneous world in which one transformed Axial Civilization would become hegemonic. This was the view which was promulgated by many of the ‘classical’ theories of modernization and of convergence of industrial societies of the 1950s, indeed against the views of the classical sociological analyses of Marx, Durkheim and to a large extent even of Weber (1968, 1978) – or at least in one reading of him, which assumed, even if only implicitly, that the basic institutional constellations which came together in modern Europe, and the cultural programme of modernity as it developed there, will ‘naturally’ as it were be ultimately taken over in all modernizing and modern societies; that they will, with the expansion of modernity, prevail throughout the world. The reality that emerged already from the beginning of modernity, but especially after the Second World War, has not borne out the assumptions of any of these approaches. The actual developments in modern or – as they were then designated – modernizing societies have gone far beyond the homogenizing and hegemonic assumptions of the original European or western programme of modernity. A general trend to structural differentiation of various institutional

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arenas – economic, the political, that of family, to urbanization, extension of education and modern means of communication, and tendencies to individualistic orientations – developed in most of these societies. Yet the ways in which these arenas were defined and organized varied among them in different periods of their development, even if not in endless ways, giving rise to multiple institutional and ideological patterns. But these patterns did not constitute simple continuations in the modern era of the respective traditions of these societies. They were distinctively modern even if their dynamics were greatly influenced by their cultural premises, traditions and historical experiences. Within all of them developed distinct modern dynamics, distinctive ways of interpretation of modernity, for which the original western project constituted indeed the crucial starting and continual – usually ambivalent – reference point. Of special importance in this context was the fact that the social and political movements which developed in the non-western societies, even while they often promulgated strong anti-western or even anti-modern themes, were distinctively modern. This was true not only of the various nationalist and traditionalistic movements which developed in all these societies from about the middle of the 19th century up to after the Second World War, but also of the contemporary fundamentalist ones. In the discourse of modernity, several themes developed. One such theme was the continual confrontation between more ‘traditional’ sectors of society and the modern centres or sectors that developed within them; between on the one hand the culture of modernity, the modern ‘rational’ model of the Enlightenment as promulgated within these centres, which emerged as hegemonic in different periods and places; and on the other hand the continually construed more ‘authentic’ cultural traditions of these societies. Second, there developed among the bearers of the traditional authenticity and among the more traditional sectors of these societies, continual ambivalence to these modern centres and their presumed yet also exclusivist premises and symbols; a continual oscillation between on the one hand denial of these premises and on the other hand a strong attraction to them and to the centres in which they were promulgated and efforts to appropriate them and reinterpret them. These themes developed first within Europe and continued albeit already in a different vein with the expansion to the Americas, especially with the expansion of modernity beyond Europe – to Asian and African countries.

IX The attraction of many of the themes and institutional settings of the modern programme of the core modern institutions for many groups in these societies was due first to the fact of European, later western hegemony, in the global system that developed through western economic, technological and military expansion and which has undermined the

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cultural premises and the institutional cores of these societies. Second, it was due to the fact that the appropriation of these themes and institutions permitted many groups in non-European nations – especially elites and intellectuals – to participate actively in the new modern (i.e. initially western) universal tradition, together with the selective rejection of many of its aspects and of western ‘control’ and hegemony. The appropriation of these themes made it possible for these elites and broader strata of many non- European societies to incorporate some of the universalistic elements of modernity in the construction of their new collective identities, without necessarily giving up either specific components of their traditional identities, often also couched in universalistic, especially religious terms or their negative attitude towards the West. Third, the attraction of these themes was also intensified by the fact that their appropriation in these societies entailed the transposition to the international scene of the struggle between hierarchy and equality. Such transposition of these themes from the Western European to Central and Eastern Europe and to non-European settings was reinforced by the combination, in the programmes of modernity, of orientations of protest with institution-building and centreformation. Although initially couched in western terms, it could find resonances in the political traditions of many of these societies, especially in the tension which developed in their respective Axial premises.

X The appropriation of different themes and institutional patterns of the original western modern civilization in non-Western European societies did not, however, entail their acceptance in their original form. Rather, it entailed the continuous selection, reinterpretation and reformulation of such themes, giving rise to a continual crystallization of new cultural and political programmes of modernity, and the continual reconstruction of new institutional patterns. In all these societies, there crystallized continually different modern ideological and institutional constellations. The cultural and institutional programmes that have been continuing to develop in these societies entailed different emphases on different components of the cultural and political programme of modernity, its different tensions and antinomies thereof; the constitution of their conceptions of themselves as part of the modern world with ambivalent attitudes to modernity in general and to the West in particular constituting a basic component of these conceptions. Concomitantly, in all these societies there took place far-reaching transformations which were shaped in each society by the combined impact of the historical tradition of these societies and the different modes of their incorporation in the new modern world system, of the major institutional formations adopted by them and of the conceptions underpinning them. The conceptions of authority, and its accountability; relations between state

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and civil society; the structure of movements of protest; the construction of collective identities, in their self-conception as modern societies and their usually ambivalent attitudes to the western centres and programme of modernity which developed among them, differed from any of the European or the American ones – as well as from each other.

XI The concrete contours of the different cultural and institutional patterns of modernity as they crystallized in different societies were continually changing, due to the combination of the tensions inherent in the cultural and political programme of modernity and the continual institutional, social, political and economic developments attendant on the development and expansion of modernity. The institutional and cultural contours of modernities were continually changing, first of all because of the internal dynamics of the technological, economic, political and cultural arenas as they developed in different societies and expanded beyond them. Second, they were continually changing in connection with the political struggles and confrontations between different states, between different centres of political and economic power that constituted a continual component first of the formation of European modernity, and later through the continual expansion of European, later American and Japanese modernity. Such confrontations developed already within Europe with the crystallization of the modern European state system and became further intensified with the crystallization of ‘world systems’ from the 16th or 17th centuries on. Third, they were continually changing because of the shifting hegemonies in the different international systems that developed in the wake of the continual developments in the economic, political, technological and cultural arenas, and in centres thereof (Tiryakian, 1985, 1991, 1994). Fourth, they were changing because of the continual confrontations between interpretations promulgated by different centres and the elites and the concrete developments, conflicts and displacements attendant on the institutionalization of these premises. Fifth, they were continually changing because these confrontations activated the consciousness of the contradictions and antinomies inherent in the cultural programme of modernity and the potentialities given in its openness and reflexivity; and gave rise to the continual promulgation by different social actors, especially the different social movements, of continual reinterpretation of the major themes of this programme and of the basic premises of the civilizational visions and on the concomitant grand narratives and myths of modernity. Sixth, they were continually changing because the very expansion of modernity beginning in Europe entailed the confrontation between the concrete premises and institutional formations as they developed in Western and

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Northern Europe and other parts of Europe – and later beyond Europe – of the Americas and later in Asia, in the Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian and Japanese civilizations. The continual changeability of the institutional and ideological patterns of modernity indicates that the history of modernity is best seen as a story of continual development and formation, constitution and reconstitution of a multiplicity of cultural programmes of modernity and of distinctively modern institutional patterns, and of different self-conceptions of societies as modern – of multiple modernities.2

XII The development and expansion of modernity were not, contrary to the optimistic views of modernity as progress, peaceful. It bore within it also very destructive possibilities – which were indeed voiced, and also often promulgated, by some of its most radical critics, who saw modernity as a morally destructive force, and emphasized the negative effects of some of its core characteristics. The crystallization of the first and the development of later modernities were continually interwoven with internal conflicts and confrontations, rooted in the contradictions and tensions attendant on the developments of the capitalist systems and, in the political arena, the growing demands for democratization and with international conflicts in the framework of the modern state and imperialist systems. Above all they were closely interwoven with wars and genocides, repressions and exclusions constituted continual components thereof. Wars and genocide were not, of course, new in the history of humankind. But they became radically transformed and intensified, generating continuous tendencies to specifically modern barbarism, the most important manifestation of which was the ideologization of violence, terror and war – manifest most vividly first in the French Revolution. Such ideologization emerged out of the interweaving of wars with the basic constitutions of the nation-states, with those states becoming the most important agent – and arena – of constitution of citizenship and symbols of collective identity; with the crystallization of the modern European state system and of European expansion beyond Europe and with the intensification of the technologies of communication and of war.

XIII The multiple and divergent modernities of the ‘classical’ age of modernity crystallized during the 19th century and above all the first six or seven decades of the 20th century in the different territorial nation- and revolutionary states and social movements that developed in Europe, in the Americas, and in Asian and African societies until after the Second World

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War. These contours – institutional and symbolic, ideological contours of the modern national and revolutionary states and movements which were seen as the epitome of modernity – have changed drastically on the contemporary scene with the intensification of tendencies to globalization, as manifest in growing movements of autonomy of world capitalist forces, intense movements of international migrations, the concomitant development on an international scale of social problems, such as prostitution and delinquency, all of which reduce the control of the nation-state over its own economic and political affairs, despite the continual strengthening of the ‘technocratic’ rational secular policies in various arenas – be it in education or family planning. At the same time, the nation-states lost some of their – always only partial – monopoly of internal and international violence to many local and international groups of separatists or terrorists without any nation-state or the concerted activities of nationstates being able to control the continually recurring occurrences of such violence. Concomitantly, the processes of globalization were closely connected in the cultural arena, with the expansion especially through the major media in many countries around the world, including western ones such as European ones or Canada, of what were seemingly uniform hegemonic American cultural programmes or visions. Above all, the ideological and symbolic centrality of the nation- and revolutionary state, of its being perceived as the charismatic locus of the major components of the cultural programme of modernity and of collective identity, became weakened, and new political and social and civilizational visions and visions of collective identity developed. These new visions and identities were promulgated by several types of new social movements. Such ‘new’ social movements, that developed in most western countries, like the women’s and ecological movements, all closely related to or rooted in the student and anti-Vietnam War movements of the late 1960s and 1970s, were indicative of a more general shift in many countries in the world, ‘capitalist’ and communist (such as China): a shift from movements oriented to the state to more local ones; the fundamentalist movements which developed in Muslim, Protestant and Jewish communities, and the communal religious movements which developed for instance in the Hinduist and Buddhist ones, and the various particularistic ‘ethnic’ movements and identities which constituted deformations of the classical model of nation- or revolutionary states gathered momentum especially in the last two decades of the 20th century in former republics of the Soviet Union, but also in most terrifying ways in Africa and in part of the Balkans, especially in former Yugoslavia. These movements developed in tandem with the crystallization of new social settings and frameworks, which also went beyond the ‘classical’ model of the nation-state. To mention just a few of the most important such settings – new, especially to the Muslim, Chinese and Indian diasporas, were the new types of ethnic minorities like those which emerged in many of the successor states of the Soviet Union.

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In these, and in many other settings, there crystallized new types of collective identities often promulgated by some of the movements mentioned earlier which went beyond the models of the nation-state and which were no longer focused on it. Many of these hitherto seemingly ‘subdued’ identities – ethnic, regional, local and transnational alike – moved albeit naturally in a highly reconstructed way into the centres of their respective societies and also often in the international arena. They contested the hegemony of the older homogenizing programmes, claiming their own autonomous places in central institutional arenas – be it in educational programmes, in public communications and media, and very often they are making also far-reaching claims with respect to the redefinition of citizenship and of rights and entitlements connected with it. At the same time, there took place continual shifts in the relative hegemony of different centres of modernity – first European and US ones, moving to East Asian – shifts which became continually connected with concomitant growing contestations between such centres around their presumed hegemonic standing (Tiryakian, 1994).

XIV Such developments raised the problem as to whether the contemporary world would now, as it were, withdraw from the modern programme either in the direction of the ‘end of history’ as promulgated by Francis Fukuyama (1992), in which the ideological premises of modernity with all their inherent tensions and contradictions have become almost irrelevant, enabling paradoxically the rise of multiple postmodern visions, or in the direction, to use S.P. Huntington’s terminology, of the ‘clash of civilizations,’ in which western civilization – the seeming epitome of modernity – is confronted often in hostile terms with other, especially the Muslim and to some extent the so-called Confucian ones within which traditional, fundamentalist, anti-modern and anti-western movements are predominant (Huntington, 1996). Both these approaches implied that we may be witnessing here a process of de-Axialization: that the Axial programme or at least the ‘secondary Axialization’ has been by now exhausted – such exhaustion being manifest both in the development of multiple postmodern and in seemingly antimodern and anti-western, possibly non-Axial movements and identities. A closer examination of the contemporary scene indicates a rather more complex situation. All these developments do indeed indicate far-reaching changes or shifts from the model or models of modern nation- and revolutionary states. They do indeed attest to the weakening of the ideological and symbolic centrality of the nation-state, its position as the charismatic locus of the major components of the cultural programme of modernity and collective identity. But do they all signal the ‘end of history’, the end of the modern programme –

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epitomized in the development of different ‘postmodernities’ – and above all in the retreat, as it were, from modernity in the fundamentalist and the communal religious movements which have been portrayed, and in many ways have also presented themselves, as diametrically opposed to the modern programme?

XV Several characteristics present a much more complex picture. First is the fact that the extreme fundamentalist movements evince distinct modern Jacobin characteristics which paradoxically share many characteristics – sometimes in a sort of mirror image way – with the communist ones, albeit combined with very strong anti-western and anti-Enlightenment ideologies. Both these movements promulgate distinct visions formulated in the terms of the discourse of modernity and attempt to appropriate modernity on their own terms; and bring about the total reconstruction of personality and of individual and collective identities by conscious human, above all political, action, and the construction of new personal and collective identities entailing the total submergence of the individual in the totalistic community. There were, of course, radical differences in the respective visions of the two types of Jacobin – the communist and the fundamentalist – movements and regimes, above all in their attitudes to modernity, and in their criticism thereof; in their attitudes to the basic antinomies of modernity and in the concomitant rejection and interpretation by them of different components of the cultural and political programmes of modernity – or, in other words, in their interpretations of modernity and their attempts to appropriate it. But they all evince a strong preoccupation with modernity as their major reference frameworks. Second, these attempts to appropriate and interpret modernity in their own terms were not confined to the fundamentalist movements. They constitute a part of a set of much wider developments which have been taking place throughout the world, seemingly continuing the contestations between different earlier reformist and traditional religious movements that developed in different societies and religious frameworks throughout nonwestern societies. But in fact in these movements the basic tensions inherent in the modern programme, especially those between the pluralistic and totalistic one as well as the relations to the West, and the perception of the relations between the West and modernity, are played out in new terms. Within all of them the continuous tensions between pluralistic and totalistic tendencies, between utopian or more open and pragmatic attitudes, between multifaceted as against closed identities, are continually played out. But at the same time, all entailed an important, even radical, shift in the discourse about the confrontation with modernity and in the conceptualization of the relation between the western and non-western civilizations, religions or societies (Eisenstadt, 1974).

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Third, one can identify some very significant parallels between these various religious, including fundamentalist movements with their seemingly extreme opposites – the different postmodern ones with which they often engage in contestations about hegemony among different sectors of the society. While within these movements there develop similar combinations of different cultural tropes and patterns, they compete among themselves about who presents the proper ‘answer’ to the ambivalences towards processes of cultural globalization. All these movements shared the concern which, as we have seen, has constituted indeed a basic component in the discourse of modernity from its beginning in Europe, about the relations between their identities and the universal themes promulgated by the respective hegemonic programmes of modernity; and above all the concern about the relation between such authentic identities and the presumed hegemony of, on the contemporary scene, especially American culture. At the same time, in most of these movements this fear of erosion of local cultures and of the impact of globalization and its centres was also continuously connected with an ambivalence towards these centres giving rise to a continuous oscillation between this cosmopolitanism and various ‘particularistic’ tendencies.

XVI The preceding analysis does not imply that the historical and cultural traditions of these societies are of no importance in the unfolding of their modern dynamics. Such importance is manifest, for instance, in the fact that among the modern and contemporary societies, fundamentalist movements develop and abound above all within the societies which crystallized in the framework of monotheistic Muslim, Jewish and some Christian societies, civilizations in which, even in their modern postrevolutionary permutations, the political system has been perceived as the major arena of the implementation of the transcendental utopian vision – even in the modern era if such vision was couched in modern secular terms. As against this, the ideological reconstruction of the political centre in a Jacobin mode has been much weaker in those civilizations with ‘other-worldly’ orientations – especially in India and to a somewhat smaller extent in Buddhist countries – in which the political order was not perceived as an area of the implementation of the transcendental vision, even though given the basic premises of modernity very strong modern political orientations or dimensions develop also within them (Eistenstadt, 1974). Concomitantly, some of the distinct ways in which modern democracies developed in India or Japan – as distinct from the European or American patterns, which do also vary greatly among themselves – have indeed been greatly influenced by the respective cultural traditions and historical experience of those societies. The same has been true also of the ways in which communist regimes in Russia, China, North Korea or South Asia were influenced by historical experience and traditions

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of these respective societies (Ho and Tsou, 1968; Arnason, 1993; Tismaneanu, 1999). This, however, has of course been also the case with the first, European, modernity – which was deeply rooted in specific European civilizational premises and historical experience (Eistenstadt, 1987). But, as was indeed the case in Europe, all these ‘historical’ or ‘civilizational’ influences did not simply perpetuate the old pattern of political institution or dynamics. In all of them, universalist, inclusivist and ‘exclusivist’ seemingly traditional and primordial tendencies are constructed in typically modern ways, and continually articulate, in different concrete ways in different historical settings, the antinomies and contradictions of modernity. Moreover, the importance of the historical experiences of various civilizational ‘traditions’ and historical experience in shaping the concrete contours of different modern societies does not mean that these processes give rise on the contemporary scene to several closed civilizations, which constitute continuations of their respective historical pasts and patterns. Rather, these particular experiences influence the crystallization of continually interacting modern civilizations and movements which cut across any single society or civilization, maintaining a continual flow between them, continually interacting and constituting continual mutual reference points. Moreover, the political dynamics in all these societies are closely interwoven with geopolitical realities, which while needless to say are also influenced by the historical experience of these societies, are yet shaped mostly by modern developments and confrontations which make it impossible to construct such ‘closed’ entities (The Economist, 1999).

XVII Thus the processes of globalization that have been taking place in the contemporary scene do not entail either the ‘end of history’ theme in the sense of end of ideological confrontational clashes between different cultural programmes of modernity – or of ‘clash of civilizations’ which seemingly take themselves out of the programme of modernity and deny it. They do not even constitute a – basically impossible – ‘return’ to the problematique of premodern Axial Civilizations. Rather, all these developments and trends constitute aspects of the continual reinterpretation and reconstruction of the cultural programme of modernity; of the construction of multiple modernities; of attempts by various groups and movements to reappropriate modernity and redefine the discourse of modernity in their own new terms. At the same time, they entail a shift of the major arenas of contestations and of crystallization of multiple modernities from the arenas of the nation-state to new areas in which different movements and societies continually interact and cross each other. Thus indeed modernity is – to paraphrase Leszek Kolakowski’s felicitous and sanguine expression – ‘on endless trial’ (Kolakowski, 1990).

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Notes 1. On the Revolutions and modernity, see, for instance, the special issue on ‘The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity’ of Social Research (1989). On the role of groups of heterodox intellectuals in some of the revolutions and in the antecedent periods, see Cochin (l924, l979), Baechler (1979: 7–33), Furet (l982) and Nahirny (1981). 2. See Eisenstadt’s (2000b) ‘Multiple Modernities’ in Daedalus, and the entire work devoted to this topic.

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5 Note on the Concept of an Axial Turning in Human History Donald N. Levine

Like Weber’s metaphor of the Iron Cage, that of an Axial Age in the great world civilizations has become prominent in the literature of social science and civilizational studies.1 The locus classic of this metaphor is the opening chapter of The Origin and Goal of History by Karl Jaspers, published first in German in 1945. Jaspers there uses the concept to denote a crucially formative period in world history, around the 6th century BC, in which a number of powerful cultural developments took place independently in China, India, Iran, Palestine, and Greece. It is at ‘this axis of history’, he writes, ‘that we meet with the most deep-cut dividing line in history’ (Jaspers, 1953: 1). It is there that what we regard as distinctive of the human species came into being, through a process that ‘cannot be regarded as a simple upward movement’ (Jaspers, 1953: 5). An era of simultaneous destruction and creation, it represented the liberation of humanity from instinctual dispositions into a self-conscious striving toward transcendence and self-determination. ‘This whole transformation of humanity can be designated as Vergeistigung (spiritualization)’ (Jaspers, 1953: 3, translation altered). Jaspers’s metaphor served as the stimulus for a series of extraordinary publications by S.N. Eisenstadt, who utilized it in a wide-ranging series of comparative depth-historical analysis of the Axial civilizations (Eisenstadt, 1982, 1986, 1992, 1996, 1999, 2003). In this note I wish to comment, not on the fruitfulness of that metaphor, but on the question of its origin. The conception of a culturally evolved set of meanings used in the selfconscious transformation of human moral orders formed a central motif in the tradition of social thought that flourished in Germany through the 19th century into the 1920s. Although elements of this conception can be found in earlier British and French thinkers, from Hobbes and Locke to Rousseau and Turgot, it was the combined preoccupation with autonomous human self-direction (following Kant) and cultural creativity (following Herder) that made it so central in the German tradition (Levine, 1995). In the philosophies of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, those themes were fused at high heat. Subsequently, they were introduced into the empirical study of comparative civilizations by Max Weber in his Religionssoziologie.

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Whereas the early 19th century German philosophers treated the development of Geist as a transformative evolution out of nature – as G.H. Mead, following Hegel, would do many decades later – Weber sharpened the point by depicting a reversal of direction in this development. In the early stages of religion, he wrote that religion was employed as a tool for satisfying worldly needs. Spirits were conceived as magical agencies that could be coerced or influenced through gifts and entreaties to cure sickness, bring rain, enhance fertility, and the like. When the belief in spirits to be utilized for worldly goods yielded to the worship of gods served by a cult, the magical ethic of the spirit belief underwent a transformation; a reorientation toward an interest in adhering to divinely appointed norms (Weber, 1968: Part II, ch. 6). As this conception of divine norms became rationally elaborated, it led to systems of thought that enabled persons to make sense of the world, ministering to a human need for Sinn (meaning), which displaced a purely instrumental orientation. In the philosophical anthropology of Max Scheler, this notion of an increasingly self-conscious direction of human order that could produce a reversal of human orientations came to be thematized as the essential distinguishing feature of the human species (Scheler, 1962 [1928]). For Scheler, it was not rationality per se that defined the human essence. Non-human animals, as well as humans, possess the capacity for associative memory that produces adaptive habits, formed through repeated successful organic responses that have been reported back to a central agency or motor system. Beyond habit, what Scheler calls ‘practical intelligence’, the capacity to grasp and master unfamiliar situations, is adumbrated in the ability of some non-human animals (the higher apes) to respond adaptively to changed situations. Even less are humans distinguished by ‘humane’ sentiments, since these animals are closer to humans in their affects than in intelligence, possessing such capacities as generosity, help, reconciliation, and friendship. What Scheler defines as the capacity that gives humans their special position in the world is, then, neither choice nor intelligence, let alone sentiment, but the principle of Geist. Geist is constituted by a quality of selfconsciousness that enables the individual being to center its own existence and to objectify original centers of resistance to natural drives. Humans uniquely possess the capacity to distinguish between essence and existence, to oppose reality with a ‘No’ based on messages from that center. With Geist, then, humans are in a position to move beyond brilliant adaptations to their environment and create ever-evolving ideas that oppose the flow of nature. Although it may not be clear when Jaspers first formulated his metaphor of an axial turning of the sort Weber and Scheler described, it is not unlikely that he was stimulated to do so from a chapter in Georg Simmel’s testamentary publication, Lebensanschauung: Vier Metaphysiche Kapitel (View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays), 1918. In a chapter entitled ‘Die Wendung zur Idee’ (‘The Turning Toward the Idea’), Simmel focusses on the notion of a transformative turning in human life. Simmel provides a

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stunning elaboration of the form and meaning of the metamorphosis in question. He begins by treating the great World-forming categories through which the contents of human experience are diversely organized. But then, he raises the question of how those very World forms come into being. By nature, humans are disposed to create and transmit cultural patterns that serve the interests of survival and well-being. At a certain crucial point, however, humans experience a ‘great turning . . . through which the realms of the Idea arise for us: the forms or functions that life, for its own sake and out of its own dynamic, has brought forth become so autonomous and definitive that conversely life serves them, subordinating its contents to them.’ At first, Simmel says, the great categories of Geist derive from the life process. They function initially only as servants of life and remain entirely contained within the realm of nature. ‘Only when that great axial turning (Achsendrehung) of life has taken place do these ideas become truly productive. Their objectively distinct forms are now the dominant ones; they take up the stuff of life into themselves and it must yield to them’ (Simmel, 1918: 38, emphasis mine).2 At this stage of development, humans reach a level of existence that stands above purpose. When they transcend purpose, humans experience freedom. The antithesis of freedom is not coercion, but purposiveness. Simmel thus stakes out a typology of stages toward the distinctively human that quite anticipates what Scheler would expound a decade later: from instinct, through instrumental rationality, to emancipation from purpose through following an idea for its own sake (Simmel, 1918: 41–5). With the last stage, humans attain what Simmel calls ‘culture properly socalled: . . . the attainment of autonomous forms with unlimited capacity’ (Simmel, 1918: 51). At first, human beings seek knowledge in order to live; but then there are persons who live in order to know. . . . While the image of a particular object may be the same for science as for praxis, the totality of images and their connections that we call science and that constitute the theoretical ‘World’ emerges only through the axial turning (Achsendrehung) that transfers the cognitive images out of the context of their meaning for life into the forms of knowledge itself. (Simmel, 1918: 57, 60)

The same sort of axial turning takes place in the world forms of art, poetry, religion, law, and morality. In the ethical domain, motivations to follow something like a categorical imperative represent ‘forms of action that escape the purposive necessities of life and which turn life as though around an axle, such that these forms now stand as sovereign ideas, determining life and its value by themselves’ (Simmel, 1918: 96). And with the creation of those transcendent forms, humans encounter the inexorably tragic element of Geist: ‘that life, knocking against formations that it has itself produced as strictly objective, often suffers painful bruises’ (Simmel, 1918: 97). In producing his seminal formulation about an axial turning, Jaspers was doubtless aware of Simmel’s work, as were so many other German thinkers

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of the 1920s, including Heidegger, Buber, Horney, and Elias, who drew copiously on his ideas with little or no direct acknowledgment.3 But, Heidegger apart, few of those who took up those ideas realized their power so fruitfully as did Jaspers in his metaphor of an Axial Period, not to mention those who followed him in discourse about the Axial civilizations.

Notes 1. On the status of metaphors in the social sciences generally, see the 1995 special issue of Social Research 62(2), ‘The Power of Metaphor’. 2. John Andrews has produced a still-unpublished translation of these chapters, which I have consulted as a basis for the translation employed here. 3. On the widespread phenomenon of unacknowledged borrowing from Simmel, elsewhere I have cited Erich Pryzara’s line that Simmel stands among those ‘great and forgotten’ figures who ‘today are wells from which people secretly draw water, without running the danger that anyone else will discover these wells’, as well as Jürgen Habermas’s observation of how hard it became after World War II to grasp the extent of the influence Simmel had on his contemporaries (Levine, 1997).

References Eisenstadt, S.N. (1982) ‘The Axial Age: The Emergence of Transcendental Visions and Rise of Clerics’, European Journal of Sociology, 23(2): 294–314. Eisenstadt, S.N. (ed.) (1986) The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Eisenstadt, S.N. (1992) Jewish Civilization: The Jewish Historical Experience in a Comparative Perspective. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Eisenstadt, S.N. (1996) Japanese Civilization: A Comparative View. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Eisenstadt, S.N. (1999) Fundamentalism, Sectarianism, and Revolution: The Jacobin Dimension of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eisenstadt, S.N. (2003) Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities, 2 Vols. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Jaspers, Karl (1953) The Origin and Goal of History. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Levine, Donald N. (1995) Visions of the Sociological Tradition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Levine, Donald N. (1997) ‘Simmel Reappraised’, in Charles Camic (ed.) Reclaiming the Sociological Classics. London: Blackwell. Scheler, Max (1962[1928]) Man’s Place in Nature. New York: Farrar Strauss. Simmel, Georg (1918) Lebensanschauung: Vier Metaphysiche Kapitel. Munich: Duncker & Humblot. Weber, Max (1968) Economy and Society, 3 Vols. Edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. New York: Bedminster Press.

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6 Global Civilization and Local Cultures A Crude Look at the Whole Wolf Schäfer

‘It is vitally important’, said physicist Murray Gell-Mann (1997: 20) recently, ‘that we supplement our specialized studies with serious attempts to take a crude look at the whole.’ Gell-Mann is concerned with the many unsustainable policies in trends of the present, and fears that intelligent life on earth is not taking good care of its future. He wants us to look at the whole because the combined effects of global history are threatening the whole. Gell-Mann’s call to assess the global state of affairs is on target. Human welfare and that of the planet require sustainability of the whole, and sustainability requires a number of strategic transitions. Gell-Mann (1997: 22–5) suggests seven transitions: a demographic transition to ‘a roughly stable human population’; a technological transition to ‘methods of supplying human needs and satisfying human desires with much lower environmental impact per person’; an economic transition to a situation ‘where growth in quality gradually replaces growth in quantity, while extreme poverty . . . is alleviated’; a social transition to ‘a society with less inequality’; an institutional transition to ‘more effective means of coping with conflict and with the management of the biosphere and human activities in it’; an informational transition toward converting ‘for ordinary people as well as elite groups . . . so-called information into knowledge and understanding’; and an ideological transition to a ‘world view that combines local, national, and regional loyalties with a “planetary consciousness” ’. Is the world gearing up for Gell-Mann’s formidable transitions? Maybe it is in small ways, but it is not doing so in a concerted fashion. The social and environmental costs of economic and industrial globalizations are continuing to rise, and herein lies counterfactual hope. Globalization is pushing the problems of the whole into everybody’s face – the global whole is homing in on us. So, how should we look at it? Not too long ago the big picture of human history showed a small number of large local civilizations and a large number of small local cultures. The big picture today looks very different. Atechnoscientific civilization has begun to cover the globe. We are moving toward a global civilization with many local cultures. The local cultures are the flesh and bone of this world

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and the emerging technoscientific civilization is its nervous system. Call it the global hypothesis. Observers of contemporary history usually see more of the old than the new; they are looking at the present with their knowledge of the past. For example, we know that the traditional ideas about civilization and culture are biased and flawed, but what do we know about technoscience? The balance of social power has been shifting in favor of the natural sciences for over a century and now technoscience is moving into the center of civilizational gravity. Sociologists, anthropologists and historians have learned to avoid civilization and, instead, analyze everything with culture. Culture is ‘in’ and civilization is ‘out’, because civilization must be ‘contrasted with savagery or barbarism’, as Raymond Williams (1985: 59) declared in Keywords. Williams (1985: 87, 60) has taught the English-speaking world that culture is awesome – ‘one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’ – and that civilization has a dangerous ‘normative quality’ because it indicates a higher stage of life, one that can be ‘lost as well as gained’. Fully aware of the unsavory usage made of this quality in western civilization, we have become wary of the word ‘civilization’. How can one speak of civilization today! Yet I wonder (after an evaluation of the conceptual history of civilization and culture later in this article): how can one not speak of civilization today? An analytical distinction between culture, as social construction of meaning, and civilization, as technoscientific handling of first and second nature, is necessary to give us a better grip on the whole.

One Civilization or Many? Who says that the world of the next millennium will be different? The future can look very much like the past. This is the message of a leading political scientist, Samuel Huntington, who has become a misleading world historian. Huntington (1993: 22) predicted in a Foreign Affairs article, ‘The Clash of Civilizations’, that war between civilizations will dominate global politics: ‘The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.’ This article, which had a question mark in its title, was followed in 1996 by a book on the clash of civilizations without a question mark: Civilizations in the plural are the concern of this book, yet the distinction between singular and plural retains relevance, and the idea of civilization in the singular has reappeared in the argument that there is a universal world civilization. This argument cannot be sustained, but it is useful to explore as will be done in the final chapter of this book, whether or not civilizations are becoming more civilized. (Huntington, 1996: 41)

Huntington is right to be skeptical about dreams of moral progress, but wrong if he assumes that these dreams are still relevant. The global hypothesis does not assume that civilization is a process that makes better people.

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The ‘universal, scientific, technical, judicial, economic’ civilization, which Paul Ricoeur (1965: 281) began to describe in 1961, is not building a perfect world. A ‘single world civilization’ (Ricoeur, 1965: 271) is making instrumental progress in giving people virtual access to tools of global communication, but not to the good life; it is spreading images of wealth and misery around the world, but not the conditions of equality. Civilizations in the plural are Huntington’s civilizations, world historical entities that we have had all along, clashes included. Civilization in the singular is the civilization of the present, a new species that we have never seen before. The mycelium of a global civilization has begun to spread throughout the world and around the globe in the last quarter of the 20th century. This civilization is not a thing of the future; it is now underway. Huntington (1996: 41) defines civilization as ‘a culture writ large’. A crisp formulation that we should take note of. Huntington’s definition reflects the present meaning of culture and civilization: both words have become nearly synonymous in English in the 20th century. If a civilization is a culture writ large, Huntington could have written about the clash of ‘large cultures’. The concepts attached to the two words are now so similar that it is up to individual taste which word to use. The remaining difference between civilization and culture is size. Cultures can be very small, whereas civilizations are always large conglomerates. This explains Huntington’s choice of the word ‘civilization’. He imagines big clashes among large cultural units, which he calls civilizations in accordance with traditional world history and current English usage.1 Sarcastic remarks like ‘civilization is a cultural entity, outside Germany’ (Huntington, 1996: 41) pepper Huntington’s book and invite dissent. What does it mean? One part of the answer is conveyed by Huntington’s bon mot and implies that everybody in the world sees the unity of civilization and culture; only the Germans are still in the dark. The other part reads: Nineteenth-century German thinkers drew a sharp distinction between civilization, which involved mechanics, technology, and material factors, and culture, which involved values, ideals, and the higher intellectual artistic, moral qualities of a society. This distinction has persisted in German thought but has not been accepted elsewhere.

What can I say? Huntington has a point here. I, too, distinguish between culture and civilization. Huntington’s sarcasm is a good example of the shadows history can cast. German propaganda during the First World War invented the contrast between German Kultur, a good thing, profound and strong, and western civilization, a bad thing, a mere addiction to gadgetry and materialism. This war of words still lingers in Huntington’s mind. However, for a fuller account of the meanings of culture and civilization, we have to reach deeper and dig up the older sources of the 18th and 19th centuries.

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Culture and Civilization How did the different readings of culture and civilization emerge and what did they originally mean? I highlight three turning points. The first change occurred in Germany around 1750 and established culture as social and moral cultivation. The second change was German, as well, and turned culture into a weapon at the end of the 18th century, originally against the German aristocracy and then against the French nation. The third change was analytical. Several authors tried to find an objective meaning for culture and civilization. This analytical understanding was put on a firm footing between the two world wars by the clarifying interventions of Alfred Weber and Robert Merton. The Application of Culture to Society Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn (1952: 149) registered 164 different definitions of culture. They could have distinguished up to 300 definitions but decided to count conservatively. They were lucky to do their definition hunting in the 1950s, long before the advent of cultural studies. The wealth of opinions about culture and civilization is truly staggering and makes one think that one can think whatever one wants to think about these topics. Nevertheless, some interesting ideas about culture and civilization have emerged over time. ‘Culture’ is derived from Latin cultura, which stems from the verb colere, meaning ‘tending’. Cultura leads to cultivation. The word was applied to the working of the land in agriculture, to tilling and husbandry. The innovative application of culture to society and history occurs first in German texts after 1750. Originally, it was not spelled with a ‘K’ but a ‘C’ and meant social and moral cultivation. Before 1750, however, human cultivation was covered in French, English and German by ‘civilization’, which goes back to Latin civis, civilis, civitas, civilitas. This was not a word used in classical Latin. According to Kroeber and Kluckhohn, ‘civilization’ was a Renaissance formation in the Romance languages, ‘probably French and derived from the verb civiliser, meaning to achieve or impart refined manners, urbanization, and improvement’ (Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 1952: 145). The post-1750 addition of culture to civilization was a local German affair until the mid-19th century. Kant and numerous other German thinkers used Cultur and its derivatives to speak about human cultivation. Authors writing in English and the Romance languages kept using civilization. So far, there is no problem; just a regional variation. Instead of one word there were now two words in German for human cultivation: Cultur with an organic and Zivilisation with an urban and political connotation. But note the irony that the cultural understanding of civilization that Huntington is so proud of, is rooted in a semantic innovation of German origin. The spread of the new meaning of culture from Germany to other countries was slow and took the long 19th century from 1850 to 1950. The first

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major application of the new term outside Germany came in 1871 with the publication of Primitive Culture by the English anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917). Tylor had vacillated between using culture and civilization, but eventually chose culture for the title of his book. His opening sentence (Tylor, 1958a: 1) made no distinction between the two words: ‘Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.’ Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952: 147) called this formulation ‘the first, formal, explicit definition of culture’ and ‘birth of the scientific concept’. However, Tylor’s title is not only remarkable for the use of the word ‘culture,’ but also the word ‘primitive’. The combination of the two words was stark and strange. What did it mean? According to Paul Radin ‘primitive’ meant to indicate the beginning of culture.2 More to the point is that Tylor thought of culture and civilization in terms of social evolution. He worked with the idea of advancement from ‘civilization of the lower tribes’ to ‘civilization of the higher nations’. Tylor chose culture because his concept of civilization would not have allowed him to construct a progressive historical narrative from simple beginnings up to higher forms of development. Civilization would have implied too high a stage of human society in the beginning. Therefore, the less demanding term became the object of ethnography, and ethnography the ‘science of culture’. This ‘science’ was not designed to contemplate merely the origins of culture; it was supposed to ‘continue the progressive work of past ages’ and weed out ‘primitive’ traditions. Tylorian ethnography was a ‘reformer’s science’, which went after ‘the remains of crude old culture which have passed into harmful superstition’ and marked them for ‘destruction’ (Tylor, 1958b: 539). Tylor’s innovative use of the word ‘culture’ was quickly accepted by anthropologists, but resisted by humanists and lexicographers in England and France.3 New definitions of culture and civilization were slow in coming.4 Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952: 149) noted with surprise that nothing happened after Tylor for 32 years: ‘The long wait after Tylor is particularly striking. The word culture was by then being bandied about by all kinds of German thinkers; and one has only to turn the leaves of the 1888–98 Old Series of the American Anthropologist to find the term penetrating even to titles of articles.’ The authors found that almost all new definitions (96 percent) were developed in the last two-fifths of the 80 years spanned by their investigation. The Origin of the German Antagonism between Kultur and Zivilisation Now, how did the (in)famous German antithesis of culture and civilization come about? How could the Germans add culture to civilization on the one hand and oppose civilization and culture on the other hand? Norbert Elias’s

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Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation provides the answer.5 The reason that led to the difference between the French term civilisation and the German term Kultur was not nationalism, the contagious political disease of the 19th century, but the struggle of enlightened German citizens with the old regime. French was the language of the ruling upper class in all German states and throughout Europe in the 18th century. Frederick the Great wrote in 1780 about German language and literature in French (De la littérature allemande). He ridiculed the German ‘patois’ as a ‘half-barbarous’ language (‘each local group is convinced that its patois is the best’) and deplored the bad taste of the German-speaking lower classes who got excited by German translations of Shakespeare (‘the abominable works of Schakespear [sic] . . . worthy of the savages of Canada’). He dismissed Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen as a ‘detestable imitation of these bad English pieces’ and could not understand why the public – le parterre – demanded the repetition of these ‘stupidities’ (ces dégoûtantes platitudes). Frederick went on to speak ‘with the same frankness’, or rather contempt, about the quality of the German universities (Elias, 1994: 10–12). The king’s diatribe and the classical works of German philosophy and literature produced by Kant, Goethe and Schiller were contemporaneous, yet worlds apart. Frederick’s opinions reflected the ‘aristocratic tradition of prenational court society’, while Kant and his fellow thinkers articulated the values of civil society. The German antagonism between culture and civilization developed in this context. In 1784, four years after Frederick’s book, Kant (1977: 49) wrote in the Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose: ‘We are cultivated to a high degree by art and science. We are civilized to the point of excess in all kinds of social courtesies and proprieties. But we are still a long way from the point where we could consider ourselves morally mature.’ And he added: ‘For while the idea of morality is indeed present in culture, an application of this idea which only extends to the semblances of morality, as in love of honor and outward propriety, amounts merely to civilization’. Kant’s critique of ‘outward propriety’ and high cultivation for the sake of ‘social courtesies’ was a barely veiled attack on the etiquette of the old regime.6 The German perception of an important difference between Kultur and Zivilisation crystallized in Kant’s seminal articulation. Culture became associated with the higher goals of moral cultivation and civilization with mere good behavior (the Höflichkeit of the courtier). On the bottom of this was a severe social conflict, the class struggle between bourgeoisie and aristocracy. This changed after the French Revolution, and certainly after Napoleon (‘Soldiers, you are undertaking a conquest with incalculable consequences for civilization’). As a result of which, the German understanding of the culture/civilization dichotomy was transformed from primarily ethical and social to primarily national.7

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Analyses of ‘Culture’ and ‘Civilization’ The availability of two related terms was intriguing. Many academic authors felt compelled to go beyond the belligerent use of ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ and identify each word with a distinctive aspect of human history. Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes, published in 1918, however, is the exception to a peaceful and analytical interpretation in that it concocted a unique mixture of analysis and polemics. Spengler combined the popular German dislike of civilization around the First World War with his theory of an unavoidable progression from culture to civilization. The Decline of the West should have been titled the decline of all civilizations. Culture and civilization are crucial phases in the life of all Hochkulturen, the German term for world civilizations, and Spengler counted eight.8 He distinguished a ‘problem of civilization’ by saying that every Hochkultur would eventually lose its soul in the course of urbanization and must die after having completed the phase of civilization. Civilization is the last stage of a Hochkultur; and the inherent (urban) suicide of civilization is like a law of nature.9 Thus, Spenglerian ‘decline’ is the fate of all world civilizations. Cyclical theories of history tend to be predictive and Spengler’s theory of world history was no exception to this rule. The doom of the West was predetermined by Spengler’s (1965: 6) ‘logic of time’. How far advanced was ‘western culture’ at the beginning of the 20th century? Was it still budding in the youthful phase of culture or already aging in the phase of civilization, the highest works of which were presumed to be feats of administration and the application of science to industry? Spengler left no doubt. Western culture had made the transition from ‘culture-man’ to ‘civilization-man’ at the beginning of the 19th century.10 Spengler’s dark perspective added to the misguided heroic nihilism of the 1920s. The combined thrust of his eloquent memento mori of culture and Nietzschean critique of civilization had considerable influence in Weimar Germany, but hardly outside of it.11 The search for an objective reality behind culture and civilization concentrated on the human intercourse with nature. Paul Barth (1922: 597–613) reviewed the ideas of Herder, Humboldt, Guizot, E. du BoisReymond, Morgan, Ferguson, Tylor and Buckle in a sprawling Philosophy of History as Sociology. He identified Wilhelm von Humboldt’s über die Kawisprache (1836) as the first scholarly work to constrain the excessive breadth of the term culture. Humboldt restricted culture to the control of nature by science and technology (Kunst), and civilization to the humanization of peoples (Vermenschlichung der Völker). This equation of culture with the human sway over the physical environment (outer nature) and civilization with the progressive improvement of basic human impulses (inner nature) was carried on in Germany by various other 19th-century authors and eventually Barth himself.12 Lester Ward and Albion Small introduced the Humboldtian distinction into American sociology around 1900 (Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 1952: 15ff., 147).

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Alfred Weber, who had begun to reflect upon culture and civilization before the First World War, returned to the topic after the interruption of the war years and the splash made by Spengler’s Untergang. His reaction to Spengler was mostly unsympathetic. Weber reversed the initial 19th-century interpretation and attributed to civilization what Humboldt had attributed to culture by linking culture to the free-floating creativity of inner nature and civilization to the domestication of outer nature. Weber conceptualized the civilizational process as a cumulative endeavor that is bound to increase human control over the physical environment, whereas culture pertained to a non-cumulative sphere of life under the influence of shifting ends and subjective feelings (Weber, 1920). Weber’s approach influenced a number of German scholars13 and the American sociologists Robert Morrison MacIver, Howard Odum and Robert Merton. Merton (1936: 103) rejected the flourishing sociological and anthropological distinction between material and non-material culture and acknowledged the ‘greater sociological value’ of Weber’s and MacIver’s categories in one of his first articles. He restated Weber’s position: ‘Civilization is simply a body of practical and intellectual knowledge and a collection of technical means for controlling nature. Culture comprises configurations of values, of normative principles and ideals, which are historically unique’ (Merton, 1936: 110). Merton emphasized that culture and civilization are ‘analytical abstractions’, that concrete phenomena ‘may posses both aspects’, and that ‘substantial interaction’ can occur between the ‘elements in the concrete whole’. He criticized Weber’s implicit ‘theory of progress’ and underlined that the rate of civilizational development should not be construed as an independent variable because the ‘interdependence’ between the realms of civilization and culture can have counterproductive effects.14 The rich semantic history of culture and civilization shows three significant changes. The first change launched culture as social and moral cultivation and created a successful conceptual innovation, so successful, in fact, that culture has now become the royal term for all things human. The polemical second change remained a German specialty; it turned culture into a weapon, originally against the internal opponent of the German bourgeoisie and then against the external enemy on the left side of the river Rhine. The third change was less idiosyncratic and more analytical; it sidestepped the combative use of culture and civilization and found an ‘objective’ meaning for each of the two terms. The analytical understanding flip-flopped once at the beginning of the 20th century, but has been stable since. Weber and Merton gave us civilization with a technological and culture with a symbological edge.

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One Civilization/Many Cultures Can one talk about civilization and culture without assuming an essentialist link between the words and the world? I think so. Can one climb on the shoulders of Weber and Merton and observe the current whole more clearly than Huntington? Let me see. Our giants use culture and civilization. Standing on their shoulders gives us a binocular view of the whole. We are bound to spot a world populated by two kinds of interdependent things: multiple cultures with alternative ways of symbolizing and a global civilization with lengthening networks of technoscience. Yet what about Huntington? He has climbed on the shoulders of Spengler and Toynbee. His giants have an overriding concept of culture, which gives Huntington a monocular worldview. Peering down from his perch, Huntington sees a world full of cultures, small and large ones. The largest ones are so-called civilizations, cultures ‘writ large’. Having culture as the one and only category, Huntington has no option with regard to technoscience: it has to be tied to culture, preferably ‘western culture’, and there to its most powerful country, the United States of America. The Spenglerian belief that ‘all civilizations go through similar processes of emergence, rise, and decline’ (Huntington, 1996: 311) and that ours is ‘a mature civilization on the brink of decay’ (Huntington, 1996: 304) creates a problem for Huntington. If western technoscience would spread to competing cultures or civilizations – and it obviously does – it would give them a very powerful tool and could speed up the decline of the West. Huntington has no other choice than to proactively defend the technoscientific advantage of western civilization with real weapons: ‘To preserve Western civilization in the face of declining Western power, it is in the interest of the United States and European countries . . . to maintain Western technological and military superiority over other civilizations’ (Huntington, 1996: 311ff.). We have a better option and a worldview without Weltschmerz. We can distinguish between civilization and culture, and define the social construction of meaning as the work of culture and the technoscientific handling of nature (including ‘second nature’) as the work of civilization.15 The fact that technoscience is on a global romp means that civilization is progressing from a local to a planetary scale. We can situate the emerging global civilization in the pluriverse of local cultures, and all local cultures in the universe of a global civilization. We do not have to give preference to either one, global civilization or local cultures; we can investigate both and discriminate between civilization and culture analytically and with respect to function. Thus, we can level the normative elevation of civilization over culture, but retain a meaningful distinction, and study how the interdependence between the global system and the local flesh works in different places. To catch today’s big picture of culture and civilization requires the exploration of technoscience. Technoscience is a hybrid of scientized technology

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and technologized science.16 Computer science would be an example because it fuses the technological investigation of nature with the scientific design of machines. Technoscience became the driving force of civilization in the 20th century; and it is bound to play an ever-increasing role for some time to come. However, we should neither over- nor understate its case. The overstatement is known as technological determinism (Smith and Marx, 1994). The deterministic view is quite popular among journalists and some postmodernists, less so professional students of science and technology.17 The understatement has no particular name. Many historians and social scientists leave science and technology simply to the specialists, who, in turn, are content with being left alone at the margins of their professions. The binocular view allows us to distinguish between the global whole and its local parts. We can realize, for instance, that globalization is not necessarily Americanization. How do we account for the fact that a country like the USA, which is exporting its culture globally, oscillates between intense popularity and intense unpopularity in other cultures, whereas the growing ensemble of civilizational practices enjoys an almost unhampered global reach? If we throw everything in the bag of culture we cannot understand why most local cultures leave their doors wide open to technoscience, but try to negotiate a ‘cultural exception’ to curb the entry of foreign cultural products.18 Sadam Hussein has prevented the Internet from entering his country – is Iraq therefore a counterexample to the virtually unrestricted global reach of technoscience? Not at all. Mr Hussein is not concerned about the technology of this packet-switching network but the ‘hostile’ cultural and political content it would carry into his realm. How can one disentangle the current mix-up between American culture and globalization? We must distinguish between a powerful local culture and a global civilization. Take, for instance, Hollywood and Microsoft, both are American, hated and loved throughout the world. American culture exposes other local cultures to its lifestyle with Hollywood films; Microsoft offers a ‘localized’ version of Windows 98 in France. Here is the difference: people get upset about the imposing cultural and economic outreach of a local power and not the ‘windowing’ of several concurrently running programs on their monitors, especially if the interface between the user and the software tool is adapted to the local language. The USA may be the avant-garde of globalization today, but Americanization happens to a cultural ‘other’, whereas globalization happens to all cultural others and to America itself. Not too many people care about global civilization at this moment; in fact, most people are prepared by their local culture to dismiss a singular civilization or consider it a dangerous thing. Yet, world music, global email, human rights, green politics and other global pursuits and holistic interests are sowing the seeds for more intense global identifications (Mazlish, 1997). Collective symbolizing has begun to shore up support for the global environment of the human species. People could embrace the civilization of this planet with as much loyalty as they now embrace their local cultures. If

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the shared language game of collective symbolizing can share a local world invested with intersubjective meaning, it can share a global world as well. The loyal feeling for the common globe is achieved, maintained and changed by shared symbolizing, and such symbolizing can create an emotional group identity. What happened before with the social construction of nationalism can happen again. An ‘imagined community’ of the whole planet is feasible: more and more people around the globe are coming into ‘a position to think of themselves as living lives parallel to those of other substantial groups of people’ (Anderson, 1991: 188). World history has charted the expanse of previous civilizations on instructive maps. From the early urban settlements between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia, along the Nile in Egypt, the Indus and Ganges rivers in India and the Yellow River in China to later conglomerates like the Islamic civilization, world civilizations have always occupied discrete areas (with fuzzy borders). This obvious spatial limitation of all preglobal civilizations (obvious to us, but not to pre-global observers with scant knowledge of the planet’s geography) has informed the received definition of civilization as a ‘culture characteristic of a particular time or place’.19 The special place of global civilization is the entire planet, known, but ‘not yet fully explored’ (NASA, 1977: V), monitored by satellites and environmental movements, and probed by scientists, reporters and private companies. Since the Soviet Union launched the first artificial earth satellite in 1957, generations of earth-orbiting satellites have globalized warfare, civilian and commercial communications, meteorology and oceanography, entertainment and land management. Global civilization has no fixed territory; to find its backbone, one has to look for the worldwide matrix of technoscientific networks. This essential constituent defines the civilization of our time as a deterritorialized ensemble of networked technoscientific practices with global reach.

Implications World civilizations cease to exist, once they are wired into the global matrix of the Internet. The global hypothesis predicts that they become local cultures in a global civilization. This opens new frontiers of research: one can follow the World Wide Web into the cultural territories, previously known as world civilizations, and study the ‘glocalizing’ effects of global history in the overlapping networks of local cultures. The study of global history can become a new branch of history and historical sociology. The global-age hypothesis (Albrow, 1997) assumes that historians and social scientists agree upon the leading tendency of the present time. To validate this proposition we can ask: what is the most important pattern of contemporary history? My working assumption is: the massive clustering of the processes of globalization at the end of the 20th century and the emergence of a global technoscientific civilization.

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The Internet provides crucial pieces of evidence for the proposition of a global civilization. It has a growing user base worldwide but remains ‘local at all points’ (Latour, 1993). The user terminals around the world are the places where global technoscience and local cultures interact. The fact that even a globally distributed network is local at all points supplies cultural studies of technoscience with rich food. The Internet is potentially everywhere, yet its technoscientific matrix is full of holes (a universal feature of all nets); one needs money and machines to get connected as well as education and competence to handle its technologies. This globally inclusive and locally exclusive topology of the Net presents critical theory of technoscience with ample fare. A technoscientific civilization claims no particular territory and has no center, but penetrates and connects all capitals and territories. It transcends the nation-state as the unit of historical, political and sociological analysis, undermines the scary idea of a centralized world government (which flourished in the 1950s) and provides numerous pathways for world governance. This gives new social movements a global chance. The boundless energy of technoscience enmeshes the whole planet. The culture of technoscience is becoming the shared context of all cultures. Therefore, the question arises: where is the ‘culture’ of technoscience, if there is one? Indeed, technoscience is energized by a local culture too: the shared context of knowledge workers using and producing technoscience. Their particular ‘culture’ grafts human interests onto the physical rules of the universe; it brings the pair ‘human–nonhuman’ into focus and makes post-humanity studies a must (Hayles, 1999). Finally, another consequence of our binocular understanding of culture and civilization is the discovery that humankind and civilization go together on this planet and have existed always in the singular. For most of the time, people were unconscious of the fact that civilization was distributed over many continents and cultures. To read civilization as human control of first and second nature (irrespective of how haphazard and pathetic that control might have been in the beginning) goes beyond the common understanding that civilization emerged only after the Neolithic revolution had paved the way for cities and writing. The nature-controlling activity of human civilization began instead with the first stone tools (ca 2.5 million years ago), the construction of mental maps in the minds of hunter-gatherers, and, last but not least, the human use of fire (Goudsblom, 1992).

Conclusion The global networks of technoscience have created a common world allowing humankind technically to review the big picture. Today, every conceivable global problem has its complex constituencies, scattered all over the world, with a number of associated discussions, research institutes and publications listed on the Net. More people can look at the whole than ever

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before and review the current information from different viewpoints; we can see what knowledge is there and what is missing. However, we are not only globally enabled by the cosmopolitanism of technoscience but also globally disabled by poverty traps around the world and academic localism after the postmodern turn. Too many of the disciplines that deal with history and culture have become islands unto themselves in a high-tech environment, savvy about the particular, critical about the global, and ignorant about the humanity of technoscience. This is unfortunate because equal and democratic access to the proliferating goods of the emerging technoscientific civilization is not readily available everywhere, and that poses a problem of global proportions. The world might improve a bit if the contemporary humanistic intellectual would take a leave of absence from academic politics and join the natural and social scientists in national governments, multinational firms, development institutions and international agencies. The goods of technoscience are, in theory, universal public goods. But the public-good aspect of technoscientific knowledge is severely limited in practice. Almost all technoscientific innovations are produced by a small number of rich countries (about 15 percent of the earth’s population). Comparatively lucky are the nations that are able to adopt these goods (about 50 percent of the earth’s population) since the poor regions of the world, with more than a third of the world’s population, are currently excluded.20 Such a crude look at the whole is certainly not enchanting. Yet what more does it need to find out that equal participation in the potential cosmopolitanism of technoscience is one of the four or five most appropriate utopian goals for our time? This article has used the terminological resources of civilization and culture to reintroduce civilization as a useful category for global historical analysis and to open the shutters of history and global studies to the exigencies of the present human conditions of technoscience.

Notes 1. Current English allows us to address the culture of Microsoft, for example, but not the civilization of Microsoft. Microsoft civilization, however, would be possible, if the whole world came under the influence of one company. James Gleick (The New York Times Magazine, 5 November 1995) could have used the term ‘Microsoft civilization’ when he denounced an impending ‘Microsoft world’ after the adoption of Windows 95 by the Chinese Communist Party as the official Chinese operating system. 2. See Introduction to Tylor (1958a). Radin writes: ‘the term ‘primitive culture’ appears for the first time so far as is now known, in English or in any language, with something resembling its current meaning in the title of the present book’ (Tylor, 1958a; XIVf.). But the title of ‘the present book’ is no longer Primitive Culture. The title given in 1958 to the volume with the first ten chapters of Tylor’s Primitive Culture is The Origins of Culture. To change the title of a landmark book ‘with something resembling its current meaning’ is rather unusual, to say the least. 3. Webster refers to Tylor’s term in 1929; the Oxford Dictionary not until the 1933

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Supplement, and the ‘earliest adequate recognition . . . in any general English dictionary is of 1947’ (Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 1952: 147). American scientists were less resistive to the use of culture than British, and British less than French, who still preferred the French noun of civilisation for culture in 1952. As of that time, culture was an accepted term in Russia and other Slavic lands, Scandinavia, Holland, Latin America, Germany and the USA. 4. Kroeber and Kluckhohn found not more than six new definitions between 1903 and 1920, but a whopping 157 between 1920 and 1950. 5. Especially relevant is the first chapter of Part 1, titled ‘Sociogenesis of the Difference between Kultur and Zivilisation in German Usage’ (Elias, 1994: 3–28). 6. The critics of the German upper class requested individual accomplishments, in particular the creation of intellectual, scientific and artistic works. The German middle class was very good in that respect. The upper class was good at speaking French, but bad in philosophy, science and art. 7. ‘The German courtly aristocracy unmistakably recedes, and the idea of France and the western powers in general moves toward the foreground in the concept of ‘civilization’ and related ideas’ (Elias, 1994: 25). 8. Classical (Greek and Roman) culture, western culture, the cultures of India, Babylon, China, Egypt, Mexico and the Arabs, each one lasting about 1000 years according to Spengler. 9. Spengler (1965: 24) was clear about that: What is Civilization, understood as the organico-logical sequel, fulfillment and finale of a culture? For every Culture has its own Civilization. In this work, for the first time the two words, hitherto used to express an indefi- nite, more or less ethical, distinction, are used in a periodic sense, to express a strict and necessary organic succession. The Civilization is the inevitable destiny of the Culture. Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a conclusion . . . death following life, rigidity following expansion, intellectual age and the stone-built, petrifying world-city following mother-earth. . . . They are an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and again. 10. Spengler (1965: 182) described the historical situation of his time as follows: Culture and Civilization – the living body of a soul and the mummy of it. For Western existence the distinction lies at about the year 1800 – on the one side of that frontier life in fullness and sureness of itself, formed by growth from within, in one uninterrupted evolution from Gothic childhood to Goethe and Napoleon, and on the other the autumnal, artificial, rootless life of our great cities, under forms fashioned by the intellect. 11. Though there were a number of favorable commentaries from, for example, Evelyn Waugh, Henry and Brooks Adams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Henry Kissinger (‘startlingly accurate predictions’) and Raymond Aron, they did not create a scholarly tradition. Arnold Toynbee, Pitirim Sorokin and Alfred Kroeber developed their own basic concepts and followed Spengler mainly in emphasizing the comparative study of civilizations (Hughes, 1962; Felken, 1988). 12. Barth (1922: 601): Die Teilung des alten, allumfassenden Kulturbegriffes durch Humboldt ist zwar nicht durchaus, doch im großen und ganzen durchgedrungen. Man versteht heutzutage unter Kultur meistens etwa die Herrschaft des Menschen über die Naturstoffe und Naturkräfte, unter Zivilisation die Herrschaft des Menschen über sich selbst, d.h. über seine niederen, elementaren Triebe. Zivilisation bedeutet mehr einen inneren, Kultur mehr einen äußeren Prozeß. 13. Norbert Elias, Erich Fromm, Karl Mannheim, Alexander Rüstow, Eric Voegelin, Edgar Salin, Jürgen Kucyznski, to name just a few, were his students in Heidelberg. Weber’s long life (1868–1958) and refusal to cooperate with the Nazi regime allowed him to play an important role in the American sector of Germany after the Second World War.

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14. Merton (1936: 111): The rate of accumulation is influenced by social and cultural elements so that in societies where cultural values are inimical to the cultivation of civilization, the rate of development may be negligible. Other concrete (‘historically accidental’) factors of a catastrophic nature may of course destroy accumulated civilization. 15. Technoscience monitors, manages and maintains the health of first and second nature (‘second nature’ refers to the ensemble of machines, structures and systems created by technoscience). Thus, technoscience makes second nature, and second nature requires technoscience to thrive. 16. My understanding of technoscience developed from the concept of ‘finalized science’ (Schäfer, 1983, 1985). 17. A ‘soft’ version of technological determinism is still being argued by the economic historian Robert Heilbroner (1994b). Heilbroner’s earlier position, which appeared in 1967 in Technology and Culture, commenced with an affirmative discussion of classic hard-core determinism exemplified by the Marx dictum from The Poverty of Philosophy: ‘The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist’ (Heilbroner, 1994a: 54). Heilbroner’s later position mellowed that stance considerably. A promising way out and around determinism has been suggested by Thomas Hughes (1994: 112), who introduced and refined the term ‘technological momentum’ in 1969 and 1994 for large technological systems, which can be ‘both a cause and an effect’. 18. Jack Lang, France’s Minister of Culture in the early 1990s, fought for the exclusion of the audiovisual sector in the Uruguay round of GATT negotiations. The French insisted on this ‘cultural exception’ to protect their identity – and movie industry – against Americanization (van Elteren, 1996; Kuisel, 2000). 19. ‘Civilization’ in Merriam-Webster OnLine: WWWebster Dictionary (1999). Viewed at www.m-w.com/dictionary.htm 20. See Jeffrey Sachs (The Economist, 24 June 2000: 99–101). Sachs’s map of the world is divided ‘not by ideology but by technology’; it distinguishes between technological innovators, technological adopters and technologically excluded – I want to thank Wolf Heydebrand, New York University, for his suggestion to emphasize the ‘lagging conditions’ of technoscientific equality at this point.

References Albrow, Martin (1997) The Global Age: State and Society Beyond Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Anderson, Benedict (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso. Barth, Paul (1922) Die Philosophie der Geschichte Als Soziologie. Leipzig: O.R. Reisland. Elias, Norbert (1994) The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners – State Formation and Civilization, trans. Edmund Jephcott. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. Felken, Detlef (1988) Oswald Spengler: Konservativer Denker Zwischen Kaiserreich und Diktatur. Munich: C.H. Beck. Gell-Mann, Murray (1997) ‘The Simple and the Complex,’ in David S. Alberts and Thomas J. Czerwinski (eds) Complexity, Global Politics, and National Security, pp. 3–28. Washington, DC: National Defense University. Goudsblom, Johan (1992) Fire and Civilization. London: Penguin. Hayles, Katherine N. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. Heilbroner, Robert L. (1994a) ‘Do Machines Make History?’, in Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx (eds) Does Technology Drive History?, pp. 53–65. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Heilbroner, Robert L. (1994b) ‘Technological Determinism Revisited’, in Merritt Roe Smith

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and Leo Marx (eds) Does Technology Drive History?, pp. 67–78. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hughes, H. Stuart (1962) Oswald Spengler: A Critical Estimate. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Hughes, Thomas P. (1994) ‘Technological Momentum’, in Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx (eds) Does Technology Drive History?, pp. 101–13. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Huntington, Samuel P. (1993) ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs 72: 22–49. Huntington, Samuel P. (1996) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster. Kant, Immanuel (1977) Kant’s Political Writings, ed. with an introduction and notes by Hans Reiss, trans. H.B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kroeber, A.L. and Kluckhohn, Clyde (1952) Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions, Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Vol. 47, No. 1. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum. Kuisel, Richard F. (2000) ‘The French Cinema and Hollywood: A Case Study of Americanization,’ in Heide Fehrenbach and Uta G. Poiger (eds) Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations: American Culture in Western Europe and Japan, pp. 208–23. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Latour, Bruno (1993) We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mazlish, Bruce (1997) ‘Psychohistory and the Question of Global Identity’, The Psychohistory Review: Studies of Motivation in History and Culture 25(2): 165–76. Merton, Robert K. (1936) ‘Civilization and Culture’, Sociology and Social Research 21(November/December): 103–13. NASA (1977) Skylab Explores the Earth. Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Ricoeur, Paul (1965) ‘Universal Civilization and National Cultures’, in History and Truth, pp. 271–84. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Schäfer, Wolf, ed. (1983) Finalization in Science: The Social Orientation of Scientific Progress, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 77. Dordrecht, Boston, MA and Lancaster: D. Reidel. Schäfer, Wolf (1985) Die Unvertraute Moderne. Historische Umrisse einer Anderen Natur- und Sozialgeschichte, Fischer Wissenschaft, Vol. 7356. Frankfurt: Fischer. Smith, Merritt Roe and Marx, Leo, eds (1994) Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Spengler, Oswald (1965) The Decline of the West. New York: The Modern Library. Tylor, Edward Burnett (1958a) The Origins of Culture. New York: Harper and Brothers. (Originally published as Chapters I–X of Primitive Culture.) Tylor, Edward Burnett (1958b) Religion in Primitive Culture. New York: Harper & Brothers. (Originally published as Chapters XI–XIX of Primitive Culture.) Van Elteren, Mel (1996) ‘Conceptualizing the Impact of US Popular Culture Globally,’ Journal of Popular Culture 30(1): 47–89. Weber, Alfred (1920) ‘Prinzipielles Zur Kultursoziologie: Gesellschaftsprozess, Zivilisationsprozess und Kulturbewegung’, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 47: 1–49. Williams, Raymond (1985) Keywords: AVocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford University Press.

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7 Civilization and its Sources Arpad Szakolczai

‘Civilization’ is a complex, multilayered, controversial term. One must start by clarifying its meaning. The first question concerns the nature of the ‘entity’ denoted. This immediately leads to a paradox. It seems that this term, and its adjective, work at two very distinct levels. On the one hand, civilization refers to very large entities, encompassing a number of other macro-units like nations or societies. There is something ‘ultimate’ in the term at this level. It is in this sense that Toynbee considered civilizations as the proper units for the analysis of history, identifying 26 such units during the entire history of humankind. Indeed, the only unit bigger than civilization is humankind itself. On the other hand, civilization – in the sense of ‘civilized’ behaviour or a ‘civilized’ person – refers to the micro-level, to the conduct of the single human being. This is not a simple application to the individual level, as a comparison with the term ‘socialized’ could demonstrate. Thus, the first problem to be solved is to explain this particular dualism between the ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ meanings of the term. The second issue, still at the level of designation, concerns the manner of naming. Terms like ‘civilization’ or ‘civilized behaviour’ can be used both as self-descriptions and as distinctions from others. Though related, the two things are not identical. One can define the other as a barbarian without defining oneself in the particular sense of the civilized. And the self-designation in the manner of civilization does not necessarily require a barbarian as the mirror. What requires an explanation, however, is the reason for the emergence of the self-designation of our ‘entity’ (one can hardly avoid the tautological use of the word civilization here) at a particular moment of time (the mid18th century) as a civilization. A solution could be suggested by pointing to the self-designation that was replaced by the word civilization at the high noon of the Enlightenment. This was, of course, Christianity. This leads to a second problem to be solved: what is the exact link between these two self-designations? Furthermore, the question of the ‘other’ cannot be left at the level of cultural relativism, questioning the possibility of identifying, beyond stigmatization, a behaviour as ‘barbarian’. This is unacceptable exactly due to a

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concern with the dignity of the other. An approach which defines the ‘self’ as the civilized and the ‘other’ as barbarian is, of course, unacceptable. But at a meta-level, it is exactly the treatment of the other that establishes a difference between civilized and barbarian. The ‘barbarian’ is not the ‘other’, but somebody who mistreats the ‘other’ because he or she is an ‘other’. It is from this perspective that both the questions of self-definition and other-definition can be revisited. Linguists have long since established that small communities often use the same word to define themselves and to designate a human being. For them, the ‘other’ – somebody who is not a member of the clan – is simply not a human being. In this sense, a crucial aspect of history concerns the designation and handling of groups of human beings as ‘others’. Foucault’s institutional books – so many histories of techniques of exclusion – can be considered as prime examples of this line of research. The third issue is substantive, and concerns the core meaning of the term. It is captured in one of Elias’s titles: not the better known Civilising Process (Elias, 1994), but the piece ‘Civilization and Violence’.1 The writing of this essay was a major preoccupation of Elias for the last 30 years of his life. It was a reflexive revisitation of the entire problematic of his work; and it hit home. In whatever sense we use the term, ‘civilization’ has the normative connotation of restraining violence. Even at its most formal sense of etiquette and refinement, it implies diminishing rudeness, aggressiveness, thus violence. At this point, it appears that we are back to a basic Enlightenment perspective. However, there is a limit here. The linear logic of the Enlightenment perspective would imply a starting point of unlimited violence, a war of all against all as the ‘state of nature’, the familiar Hobbesian argument. This, however, is untenable, both historically and on the basis of anthropological evidence. The Hobbesian myth of the violent ‘savage’, just as the Rousseauian myth of the ‘good savage’, are pure fictions, modern myths. There are more peaceful cultures, and there are less peaceful ones, insofar as their internal life and attitudes are concerned. The point at which it is possible to generalize is the treatment of others, or the ‘established–outsider’ relations (Elias and Scotson, 1994). The combination of the two previous points moves closer to the solution. The Hobbesian idea of a state of nature is fiction as the starting point of human society, but is based on a genuine lived historical experience. This is the experience of a civil war, which can be defined as a situation in which the fundamental differentiation between the insider and the outsider breaks down, and own-group members can suddenly become enemies; a general condition of dissolution of order, leading to an escalated crisis of violence. It is to this type of situation that we can root the meaning of civilization as the restraining of violence. The term therefore has a basic relationship to a temporal or dynamic dimension. The article has so far come up with two main findings. In substantive

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terms, it argued that the core meaning of civilization is the limiting of violence in inter-human relations. Methodologically, the most promising approach seem to be the conceptualization and study of periods of dissolution of order. The substantive point further underlines the significance of ‘civilizational analysis’. Given the record of violence in the 20th century, there can be no doubt that this question is of fundamental importance for the social sciences, and can by no means be restricted to an ideological meaning. In fact, putting things on a broader perspective, one can argue that there are two broad sets of basic problems for social analysis: the socioeconomic problematic of class relations, inequality and exploitation; and the sociopolitical problematic of warfare, violence, power and oppression. The liberal worldview is based on the conviction that with the advance of economic progress warfare is displaced and human coexistence will be based on peaceful and mutually advantageous trade. The Marxist conviction is that all sociopolitical problems are rooted in inequality of properties. Thus, both of them share the belief that the second set of problems can be subsumed under the first. The events of the 20th century, and the reality of our contemporary world indicate that, globalization included, the case is not so simple. In the following pages, the article first develops a conceptual framework for the study of situations of dissolution of order, based on the ideas of Victor Turner and René Girard. It then gives a genealogical interpretation of the ‘civilizing process’, relying on the work of a series of scholars inspired by the ‘Nietzschean’ Weber, like Elias, Voegelin, or Foucault.

Theorizing Dissolution of Order In sociopolitical analysis, ‘dissolution of order’ is usually theorized as a situation of civil war. Though this approach makes clear the most unusual aspect of such conditions, that in-group members are treated as enemies, it has major drawbacks. It relies too heavily on the Hobbesian perspective, and – important as the phenomenon is for picturing a dissolution of order – it places too much emphasis on the acts of warfare and violence, thus deviating attention from issues of conditions of emergence and lasting effects, the central concerns of a genealogical analysis. It is here that political theory and sociology can be complemented from anthropological perspectives.

Turner and Liminality Victor Turner’s concept of ‘liminality’ (Turner, 1967, 1969, 1992) is usually interpreted as a theorization of carnival, the celebration of forces of renewal and the instability of structures. However, the term can be put to the opposite use, for conceptualizing the anguishing situation in which the

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taken-for-granted order of the world is suddenly dissolving. The first phase of rites of passage – as if using a controlled experiment – can be used to define and model the basic characteristics of an actual situation of dissolution of order. Order is suspended at the start of the rite by a spatial arrangement. Initiands are excluded from the village and usually confined into a small hut at the edge of the territory. Of even more importance is the modality of the separation. Those excluded and confined are also mistreated by the villagers, mocked and abused in very rude ways. Even though this is only permitted during the well-marked limits of a ritual, it is clearly unacceptable, indeed ‘uncivilized’.2 On the other side, by their very existence initiands threaten the community, are prone to commit prohibited acts. In one expression, the initiands are treated, and behave, less like warriors, and more like ‘criminals’. They are also atomized, closed in not only to a small place but also turned towards themselves, suffering various deprivations (food, clothing, shelter, sex), associated with ascetic practices. At the same time, as if against the grain, they develop a strong community bonding (communitas) among themselves. During the performance that ends days or weeks of ‘state of emergency’, things change to the opposite. The conduct of each and every person is strictly regulated, ritualized, in order to minimize danger in a potentially explosive situation, and subordinated to the leadership of the ‘master of ceremonies’. The ritual ends in the collective effervescence of a general feeling of communitas. Moving from the ‘laboratory’ case to the level of real-world large-scale liminality, options become reduced. One would expect the artificial setting of the ritual to collapse, while the basic scenario is repeated, with an everintensified explosion of the surrounding emotions. This means, on the one hand, that the logic of exclusion and criminalization will be set in motion: there will be a general and passionate search for the culprits, those who ‘caused’ the catastrophe. In this search the entire community will be atomized and undifferentiated, becoming a crowd or rather a mob, while sharing an intensified feeling of communitas. At the same time, the need for leadership will also be felt. At this point, the parallels between Turnerian liminality and crowd psychology (Tarde, 1969), elite theory and even Weberian sociology become apparent. Not surprisingly, all these theoretical frameworks were developed in the ‘classical period’ of sociology, in the decades just preceding the First World War, which has been described by Thomas Mann as a build-up of a great ‘liminal’ crisis (Mann, 1999). At this point, the suggestions of the Turnerian analysis can be confirmed from the perspective of René Girard’s works.

Girard and the Sacrificial Mechanism Girard started from the opposite end. Based on a close reading of literary classics like Dostoevsky, Flaubert and Proust, he argued that desire cannot

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be reduced to an object–subject dialectics, as desire is always the imitation of the desire of another, and so must be replaced by a triangle of mimetic desire (Girard, 1976). It is due to its imitative character that desire can intensify and spread out of proportion, thus threatening human coexistence. The function of the institutional framework, the very fabric of society, is to keep the forces of mimetic desire at bay. Soon Girard turned his attention to situations in which the framework comes under threat (Girard, 1977, 1987, 1989). This happens when an unforeseen event, a natural or social catastrophe, pushes society to the brink. Under such exceptional conditions the normal institutional framework breaks down, resulting in a situation of ‘undifferentiation’, and the ‘mimetics of desire’ are unleashed in its most violent way.3 The restoration of order becomes a prime concern for everyone, but the logic of individual action only escalates the crisis. This is identical to the classic Hobbesian dilemma of the ‘state of nature’. Girard suggests a different solution, based on an extensive study of myths, both classical and anthropological. He argues that virtually the entire background tradition of humankind, as preserved in myths, shows the presence of a unique mechanism used to deal with this situation: the reversing of undifferentiation by selecting a single individual (or a small group of individuals) as sacrificial scapegoats (see also Bauman, 2000: 194–8). These innocent people, designated as culpable for the catastrophe, are excluded and killed.4 This act of collective violence succeeds to unify the community against the victims, and thus brings a halt to the mimetic crisis. At this moment another metamorphosis occurs: in its death the scapegoat is transformed from alien and criminal to the saviour of the community, and is revered as a sacred person. Order is thus restored, through violence, by the emergence of the sacred. According to Girard, this is the origin of all religion and culture. By implication, civilization designates a type of community no longer based on the sacrificial mechanism. Though Girard does not use the word, his ideas are more startling than the most naive Enlightenment version of progress. He argues that the ending of the sacrificial mechanism is the heart of the Bible tradition, starting from the story of Cain and Abel, through Abraham and the prophets (especially the ‘Suffering Servant’ of Deutero Isaiah), reaching its culmination in the Gospels. For Girard, the story of the Calvary is the classical scapegoating myth – up to a point. Through his teachings and the following he attracted, Jesus presented a threat to the existing authorities. He was captured, imprisoned and put to trial under false allegations. For the persecutors, including the Roman magistrate Pilate, his innocence was evident. Still, they considered their action rightful, as concerned with ‘the sake of the nation’. This is the same old story of the exclusion and ritual sacrifice of the scapegoat. The difference, according to Girard, only comes with its reception. Up to the Gospels, all persecution and scapegoating myths, including all the founding myths of human cultures, came to be accepted from the perspective

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of the persecutors. The hiding away of the sacrifice of innocents was so successful that even today we ponder, with or against Freud, upon the ‘true’ meaning of the sins of Oedipus, unable to recognize that this was just a persecuting myth and Oedipus was simply innocent. The disciples of Jesus, however, persisted in preserving and telling the world their own version of the story: that Jesus was innocent. It is here that Girard locates the epochal breakpoint of history, the demythicization of the sacrificial mechanism, the end of religion and culture, the breaking of the circle of the ‘eternal recurrence’, the discovery of ‘things hidden since the foundation of the world’,5 and thus – using non-Girardian terminology – the start of the progress of the ‘civilizing process’.

Thematizing the Civilizing Process At this point we can return to the conceptual framework derived from the work of Turner in order to thematize the civilizing process. Apart from the criminalization of the innocent, the study of liminality indicates that situations of dissolution of order possess four main additional characteristics: the ritualization of behaviour, the use of ascetic techniques, the development of a sense of community (communitas) and the need for leadership. If the civilizing process is in fact rooted in situations of dissolution of order, then it must be based on a combination of these four elements.

Brotherhood First of all, we have to discard one of the four as a ‘false path’: this is the Turnerian communitas, the hope of a new brotherhood. A new sense of community, a sudden identification of each and every one involved seems to be a potentially most welcome development. Furthermore, given that such feelings are strongly implied at two different phases and groups of the ‘ritual process’, it would seem most natural to rely on this mechanism of joint identification. However, the historical record of such calls for brotherhood is quite disastrous, and a closer look at the ritual process immediately reveals why. The sense of communitas emerges either among the initiands, at the phase of separation; or among the entire village, at the phase of reunion. Now, in the first case it grows out of a sense of exclusion and deprivation, therefore belongs to the ‘criminalization’ process. The second case is also unconvincing, as the communitas of reunification either accompanies the conclusion of the ritual – thus assumes that everything was all the time under strict control – or is brought about by the sacrifice of the innocent victim. Communitas is therefore thoroughly implicated in the process of criminalization. It cannot provide a peaceful solution to a crisis.

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Institutionalization This would suggest a turn to the opposite pole, the extension of the formal ritual process, or ritualization, legalization and institutionalization. The development of the state, as analysed by Weber, seems to confirm this interpretation. Some aspects of the work of Elias would only further support this perspective. The ‘court society’ could be considered as a missing link in the process of state formation. The court, with its elaborate etiquettes and ceremonies, would seem a further extension and formalization of ritual, a paradoxical state of ‘permanent liminality’ (Szakolczai, 2000a: 222), a step towards the emergence of states. This, however, is only one line of meaning, and with clear limitations. Though states monopolize violence and thus limit its occurrence elsewhere, they can escalate and abuse their force both inside and outside their territory. They can also break down. The ritualization and legalization of all aspects of life works insofar as the power of the centre from where this process radiates is safe, both concerning physical force and the power of mental images. However, once this force, or the spell, is broken, the ritual process by itself cannot do anything else but to reconstruct again the logic of the ritual, which is a return to criminalization and victimization. The history of states is a history of meaningless series of violent events. In Nietzschean terminology, it is well inside the ‘eternal recurrence’ of the same. Both the historical understanding and the hope of the civilizing process require other safeguards.

Asceticism Ascetic techniques seem to be directly relevant to the restraining of violence. All ascetic exercises, or ‘techniques of self’ (Foucault, 1986), aim at controlling the spontaneous, unchecked activities of the body, thus directly relevant to the restraining of violence. Indeed, it is in this sense (as well) that Weber, Foucault and Elias all singled out this aspect as part of the ‘civilizing process’ or the ‘genealogy of modern subjectivity’. The spread of ascetic techniques also corresponds to large-scale periods of crisis, like the ‘Axial Age’ (Eisenstadt, 1986), the collapse of the Roman Empire (Borkenau, 1981), or the ‘waning of the Middle Ages’ (Huizinga, 1990; Hyma, 1965). Still, ascetic techniques possess serious drawbacks. This can be best observed in their homeland, India. As the performance of such techniques requires considerable skills and will-power, they are bound to become the stock of an elite of ‘religious virtuosi’. They could inspire awe by their attitude, and can serve to educate the upper classes, but their power to generate a peaceful renewal is quite scarce.6 Ascetic techniques can also be used in combination with the two elements discussed so far. They can serve as the basis of a new brotherhood, as

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witnessed in religious sects or monastic communities. However, the problem of elitism remains unresolved. An ascetic sect, solely on the basis of asceticism, would never become a driving force of significant historical change.7 It is true that Western monasticism did develop such a momentum – but this was on the basis of elements not discussed so far. A combination of ascetic techniques with the state has been of utmost importance for the development of modernity. This has been analysed by Foucault, Oestreich, or Weber, under the title of ‘social disciplining’ or ‘disciplinary society’.8 The court, and then the entire state apparatus, can develop into a centre that, as opposed to communities of the ‘virtuous’, successfully spreads the required forms of conduct, using the repressive powers granted to the state. The problem is that this mechanism, purely left on its own, could only underline and exacerbate the problems of state power. The state can limit the use of violence in certain ways, but only at the expense of using the force characteristic of its own activities. Even more importantly, it cannot produce ‘renewal’; that is, it does not possess the strength of coming out of a mimetic crisis. The state, the law and the state of law all share the same circular problem: they work insofar as they work; but once they stop working properly, they only repeat the same mechanism that now reinforces disorder. The last available component is ‘leadership’. This would seem to be the least likely candidate, and also the most unpopular in a climate of democracy. If the problem of ascetic techniques is their elitism, then a reliance on the virtues of leadership would seem to locate the civilizing process in the hands of an even more restricted group of the ‘established’. Weber, for all the importance he attributed to the rise of the state, to legal and economic rationality or to inner-worldly asceticism as a source of power, accorded a central role to charisma, a concept closely associated with leadership.

Charisma and Parrhesia Charisma is one of the most widely used terms in political sociology. However, its discussion in the past has been too closely tied to structuralfunctionalist sociology and instutionalization (Horvath, 2000). Originally, though, it was developed by Weber to address the issue of ‘renewal’ and restoration of order. As the central question of this article is to explore the forces that could yield a way out of a spiralling situation of dissolution of order and violence, outside a return to the logic of criminalization, charisma has special affinity with the purpose. The question is whether something can be added to the Weberian perspective starting from the material discussed in this article. Weber defines charisma as a gift of extraordinary qualities, taking over the term from theologians like Sohm. Both parts of the expression are crucial. Charisma, Weber’s central term, is a gift – so Weberian sociology, just like that of Mauss, is based on the relationship of gift. But Weber’s ‘gift’

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is not part of human exchange. It comes out of the blue. It is, metaphorically or literally, an act of God. Weber, of course, is a sociologist, not a theologian, so he puts the emphasis not on the origin of charisma, but on its effects, on its being recognized by others, that it is able to attract a following, or on its reception (Pizzorno, 1986, 1991). The spread of charisma therefore makes use of the same mechanism as an escalating crisis of violence. There is the same gradual build-up of a whirlwind, starting from a single event and eventually reaching all-encompassing proportions. In explaining the emergence of this ‘counter-whirlwind’, we need to look further into the characteristics of charisma. Here we stumble upon another puzzle; another trivial aspect of Weberian sociology that has been studiously ignored by sociologists. The primary example of charisma for Weber is not a politician, nor a conqueror, but a prophet. Weber’s entire sociology of religion is about the spread of prophetic (or salvation) religions. Its systematic part starts with the typology of the prophet vs the priest and the magician (Weber, 1978: 439). Charisma as a prophetic gift has a special quality. Agift is both given and received. It establishes a relationship of mutuality. Mauss and his followers like Polanyi indeed put the emphasis on reciprocity. Charisma as a gift, however, is never given (humanly), only received. It assumes a strictly oneway relationship with the godhead. Even further, Weber makes this point quite emphatically, as he defines the opposite relationship, when human beings are not resigned to accept gifts but try to force their way, as magic. Furthermore, the gift relationship implied in charisma, or the mere acceptance of whatever comes from above, can also be contrasted with the opposite relationship of giving to the deity, or offering, or sacrifice.9 Charisma/gift is thus diametrically opposed not only to magic/forcing but also to sacrifice/giving. While this brings further together magic and sacrifice, it also establishes an almost ethical imperative of human passivity with respect to the godhead. The ‘gift’ a prophet receives has a further peculiarity. The original Greek word is associated with beauty – and there is indeed a characteristically Greek ‘politics of beauty’ (Meier, 1987). However, the charisma of prophets is a message. It is literally ‘received’. This establishes a symmetrical relationship between the godhead and the prophet on the one hand, and the prophet and the followers on the other. The prophet receives a message and develops a following that ‘receive’ this delivery. The prophet is therefore an in-between figure, a mediator, even a ‘transmitter’. Prophets are like AMFM tuners: they are able to receive certain ‘messages’ and transmit them to the population at large. Prophets are media.10 The question now becomes the credibility of this message. It is certainly true that the overwhelming majority (indeed, practically everybody except one – thus we have again the exact reverse of the sacrificing mechanism) are not able to get the message. But how can the prophet convince others about the authenticity of the message transmitted?

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The simple road is to check its truthfulness. This, however, is not so easy. Most ‘true messages’ concern plain statements of fact. A truly prophetic message, however, should contain something extraordinary. An evident possibility emerges when the message is about the future. The central characteristic of ‘traditional’ kinds of prophetic messages – oracles, soothsayers, augurs – was in fact that it contained a prediction.11 There are, however, two major problems with such predictions. The circle that can be influenced by the truth-content of such a message is limited. It can only appeal to those who are present both at the utterance and at the moment of verification. Those who are told jointly about prediction and confirmation have no way of verifying the sequential order. Everything depends on the credibility of eyewitnesses. Furthermore, the prediction of the future for its own sake belongs to the circle of magic and sacrifice. The ‘oracle’ – whether an Etruscan augur, a Celtic druid, or a Zambian diviner – is forcing the gods to reveal a truth about the future, and does this by offering a sacrificial animal (not to mention a human being), even uses the remains for ‘reading’ the future. However, as Zeitlin (1984) argues in detail, the great Hebrew prophets were not augurs. They did not ‘predict’ the future, rather they argued that the moral conduct of the people made certain – negative – outcomes inevitable. In fact, they pointed out that exactly their opponents behaved like augurs – trying to force God by his own promise and creating further exaggerated expectations – and were therefore false prophets. Thus, the emphasis shifts from the nature of the message to the qualities of the messenger. This is a second displacement, as we have already displaced the theological emphasis – the nature of the god, or the source of the message – to the reception of the message. The messenger is credible due to his or her qualities, especially truthfulness of character. It is here that another key Weberian typology can be introduced, the distinction between ethical and exemplary prophecy. The ethical prophet is the one discussed so far, who considers him- or herself as an instrument of God and issues commands as abstract duties – though Weber lists as the clearest types Muhammad and Zoroaster, not the classical Hebrew prophets (Weber, 1978: 447). The exemplary prophet, however, most clearly represented by Buddha, does not claim to pursue a divine mission, rather ‘by his personal example, demonstrates to others the way to religious salvation’ (Weber, 1978: 447). The Weberian typology calls attention to the two sides of prophecy. However, the distinction is relative (Weber, 1978: 450), a matter of predominance of one or the other character, and not exclusive. Any ethical prophet, in order to convince, must behave truthfully; and any exemplary prophet must have some kind of message, otherwise the appeal is restricted. The question now becomes the proper relationship between the truth of message and the truthfulness of conduct. The issue here is a certain quality of the speaker that exerts some kind of spell on the audience, not by any ‘magic tricks’ performed, rather through the sheer power of personal

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conviction in his or her truth. This quality was conceptualized by Michel Foucault in his last two courses at the Collège de France using the term ‘parrhesia’. Parrhesia is the courageous and frank telling of the truth. It implies personal conviction on the one hand and the taking of risks on the other. A parrhesiast can be recognized by the unity and harmony of his or her lifeconduct and speech, of bios and logos (Szakolczai, 1998: 179–86). For Foucault, Socrates was the parrhesiast par excellence. With his analysis Foucault performed what Weber had defined as a major task, but never actually performed – the need to discuss secular philosophy ‘as a very important component of religious evolution’, and to ‘examine more closely the mutual relationship of priests, prophets, and non-priests’ (Weber, 1978: 451). The example of Socrates is also of extreme importance – apart from being the source of our tradition of moral philosophy – due to its modalities. Foucault emphasizes the unity of living and speaking – but Socrates not only lived but also died according to his words. This aspect was central to his followers. Plato became a philosopher on the basis of the experience of Socrates’ death, and not his life. Furthermore, Socrates was put to death through our most sacred institutions – the democratic assembly and the rule of law. This fact forced many self-appointed defenders of democracy to agree with the ruling, from Renan to I.F. Stone. They must have known that their argument was absurd, but could not get out of their own logic. They did not realize that the trial represented the transformation of the democratic process into a persecuting crowd – and that there is nothing inherent in political institutions and legal mechanisms that could prevent it being thus transformed. The various totalitarian and authoritarian regimes of the 20th century present as many cases for rather smooth and imperceptible metamorphoses of the institutional order. The civilizing process, in so far as solely entrusted to ritualized, institutionalized and legalized authorities, remains forever threatened. Socrates, therefore, in his person, in his life and death, carried the message, as against democratic Athens, of the revelation of the persecuting crowd. This message, furthermore, centred on a combination of key values identified so far – parrhesia as a correlate of charisma, and the care for the self as the rationale of techniques of self. However, Socrates was not able to generate a momentum outside the philosophical schools of an aristocratic elite, and a rather hopeless attempt to convince tyrants and emperors to become good and ethical rulers. It is here that we have to make a further step, taking Weber and Foucault where they did not want to go and where few social scientists dared to venture (Girard and to some extent Voegelin being exceptions). The figure of Jesus is the decisive turning point in the line of development sketched in the preceding paragraphs, connecting the lines of ethical and exemplary prophecies, and succeeding, with a resounding effect, in laying bare the sacrificial mechanism. In this sense, Nietzsche again was right on target: Christianity did represent a ‘revaluation of values’; Socrates was closely

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associated with this process, thus Christianity can be rightly considered as a ‘Platonism for the “people” ’ (Nietzsche, 1966: 3); and there is a strict continuity between Judaism and Christianity. He was only wrong at the basic point: this revaluation of values was not the victory of ressentiment, rather a victory over the sacrificial mechanism. The parallels between the lives and teachings of Jesus and Socrates are manifold and well known. The key issue, however, concerns the similarities and differences of their death, and its consequences. Their death exposed the most cherished institutions and entities of their (and our) times: one the democratic assembly and the legal process, the other the people and its established leaders. In the moment of passing the sentence, both were transformed into a persecuting crowd. Socrates and Jesus play a fundamental role in the ‘civilizing process’ because, in distinction to other founders of religion and philosophy, they supported and underlined their message not just by their life but also by their forced death; and because, in opposition to other innocent victims of persecuting crowds, they had disciples who were convinced of their innocence and who managed to keep the tradition of this message. However, while Socratic philosophy remained the pastime of an intellectual elite and was virtually extinct for many centuries, Christianity, still using the language of Nietzsche, did ‘conquer’ the ‘planet’ (Nietzsche, 1967: 117). Why was this so? According to Girard, it was due to the sheer power of the message. The Gospels do contain a revelation that can be justified by the strictest methods of the social sciences: the revelation of the functioning of the sacrificial mechanism. Girard perceives a direct continuity between Christianity and secular liberal democratic humanism. Once the sacrificial mechanism is exposed, it becomes impossible to perform it in a legitimate way, and ultimately, any act of violence becomes questioned. This is the process we see culminating today (not without its excesses), in exposing violence against wives (and husbands), against children, even against animals. At the other end, the treatment meted out not just to the innocent but to the outright guilty has also become problematized. Though this suggestion already makes strong claims on the text of the Gospels, it still fails to explain the attraction of the message. Girard argues that Christianity was not a religion, though it is generally understood to be one.12 He argues that it exposed the sacrificial mechanism, though the official interpretation of the cross as a sacrifice emphasizes continuity with the sacred. In Girard’s reading, Christians become as many M. Jourdains of Molière (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme): practising the elimination of the sacrificial mechanism without knowing it. Therefore it could not be the explicit driving force in the success of Christianity. We now reach the ultimate point of difference between Socrates and Jesus. In contrast to Socrates, Jesus was resurrected on the third day – at least, so we are told. Here we return to the same problem of the credibility of this message – the effective credibility of the disciples, as we live in the world they shaped – and encounter the same set of concerns in the Acts of

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the Apostles: charisma as extraordinary gifts of speech, parrhesia as the frank telling of the truth, and martyrdom as witnessing the truth. We need not, however, further pursue the story here, as the decisive moment of the civilizing process has now been identified, using strict Weberian methodology. In the Protestant Ethic, Weber was concerned with identifying the moment and the force of breakthrough for capitalism, and found it in the inner-worldly asceticism of 17th-century Protestant sects. Similarly, having found the substantial core of civilization in the exposition and elimination of the sacrificial mechanism, we have identified the moment and the force of breakthrough for the civilizing process in the work of the early church fathers. The rest is the spread of the message, not by rational understanding but through the fundamental principle of imitation (Tarde, 1969). Thus, globalization has two driving forces. Both are located not in the West, but in Christianity: in the Protestant ethic, unleashing the ‘spirit’ of capitalism, and in the Gospel story, the driving force of the civilizing process. Both represent the culmination of a huge number of intellectual, moral and spiritual threads, going back to the ‘Axial Age’ and beyond. But they made the decisive breakthrough, for better or worse. Instead of a ‘clash of civilizations’, the key issue may be the relationship between these two forces of globalization.

Concluding Remarks This article argued that term ‘civilization’ does have a substantive meaning, and this is the restraining and eventual elimination of violence from human relations. More specifically, though in-group violence is restrained in every culture, civilization implies an extension of nonviolence towards outsiders as well, thus some degree of universalism. In studying the process of civilization as the restriction of violence, a crucial instance was found in the situation of dissolution of order when the boundaries between insiders and outsiders break down, leading to an escalation of violence and thus an increased concern with its control. In such situation of undifferentiation, the solution found by human cultures was the ‘sacrificial mechanism’, or the criminalization of innocents, by the creation of a new dividing line between the entire community and a set of designated individuals who are excluded and sacrificed as scapegoats, preserved and perpetuated in rituals and myths. The decisive and effective exposition and demystification of the sacrificial mechanism is contained in Plato’s key dialogues and the Gospels. It is at this point that we can return to give an interpretation to the time and place where the term ‘civilization’ emerged as an attempt at selfunderstanding. The mid-18th-century French Enlightenment was exactly the moment of ‘post-Christianity’, in the sense of separating the message and the messenger. This implied two things. On the one hand, the message became increasingly elaborated, systematized and rationalized. This led, due to matters of circumstance, to the extension of the term to all large

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entities, the emergence of an institutional or ‘macro’ sense, irrespective of its original, substantive core. On the other, this was done against the messenger, Christianity. In this way a fundamental self-misunderstanding came to be located at the heart of the self-understanding of our modern world, as the Enlightenment is often, and rightly (again for better of worse), interpreted. This was, and is, to have tragic consequences, as any explicitly antiChristian doctrine was bound to give support to the awakening and re-mobilization of the sacrificial mechanism.

Notes 1. Elias first started work on the essay during the Eichmann trial in 1961, made public several versions in writing and speech, and it eventually became a chapter of The Germans (Elias, 1996). 2. Anybody objecting to this expression should first consider whether they would volunteer to undergo the ritual of Naven, as described by Bateson (1958). In modern societies, college fraternities are the closest one can get to such situations. Significantly, fraternities were very popular in Wilhelmite Germany, while today they practically only exist as trademarks of US academic life. 3. ‘Underdifferentiation’ and ‘triangle of mimetic desire’ are technical terms in the vocabulary of Girard. The first term, close in meaning to Turner’s concept of ‘liminality’, captures the situation – leading to crowd violence – where the previous system of social differentiation, on which order was based, breaks down (see Girard, 1977, 1989). The second contains Girard’s theoretization of desire. According to this, and in opposition to Freud, desire is not evoked by the characteristics of another person as an ‘object’ desired, rather it emerges as the imitation of an already existing desire of another person as a ‘subject’ (see especially Girard, 1976). 4. In other words, they are thus treated as a ‘criminal’. Thus, Girard uncovers at Szakolczai Civilization and its Sources 383 the bottom of myths and rituals the exact same mechanism of ‘criminalization’ as Turner. 5. This is a quote from Matthew (13:35), used by Girard as the title of one of his main books. It is of further interest that the Gospels establish an identity between the scapegoats and the prophets on this same line, when claiming that the innocent blood of prophets has sustained this world since its foundation (Luke 11:50–1). See also Mittendorfer (2000: 21), whose work was used as a reference source for this section. 6. One ascetic technique should be given further attention here, the development of the power of abstract reasoning, especially in connection with the dimension of knowledge, another important modality of liminality. This would lead to the question of ‘salvation through knowledge’, or Gnosticism, as analysed by Voegelin (1952, 1974). 7. For further details, see Goldman (1992). 8. See also Gordon (1991), O’Neill (1985) and Pasquino (1986). 9. Just as one basic connotation of sacrifice is the sacra, or the sacred, used by Girard or Agamben, another general linguistic connotation is ‘offering’ (see, for example, the German word Opfer). 10. If the contemporary world of globalization seems to be shaped by the media and its messages, one should not forget that the world of the last three millennia has been definitely stamped by the prophets and their message. 11. ‘Traditional’ does have a clear meaning therefore, though it is not premodern but preprophetic. 12. This is also an important issue for Voegelin (see, for example, Voegelin, 1974: 44). But while Voegelin emphasizes doctrinal vs experiential aspects, Girard’s point explains the etymological origin. The root of ‘religion’ is religare, or to bind it again – describing the effect of the sacrificial mechanism.

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Bibliography Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bateson, G. (1958) Naven. Stanford: Stanford University Press. (Originally published 1936.) Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Borkenau, F. (1981) End and Beginning: On the Generations of Cultures and the Origins of the West, ed. R. Lowenthal. New York: Columbia University Press. Eisenstadt, S.N., ed. (1986) The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilisations. Albany: SUNY Press. Elias, N. (1983) The Court Society. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. (Originally published 1969.) Elias, N. (1994) The Civilising Process. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. (Originally published 1938–9.) Elias, N. (1996) The Germans. Cambridge: Polity Press. (Originally published 1991.) Elias, N. and Scotson, J.L. (1994) The Established and the Outsiders. Cambridge: Polity Press. (Originally published 1965.) Foucault, M. (1972) Histoire de la folie a l’âge classique. Paris: Gallimard. (Originally published 1961.) Foucault, M. (1975) The Birth of the Clinic. New York: Vintage. (Originally published 1963.) Foucault, M. (1979) Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage. (Originally published 1975.) Foucault, M. (1986) The Use of Pleasure. New York: Vintage. (Originally published 1984.) Girard, R. (1976) Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. (Originally published 1961.) Girard, R. (1977) Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. (Originally published 1972.) Girard, R. (1987) Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. London: Athlone. (Originally published 1978.) Girard, R. (1989) The Scapegoat. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. (Originally published 1982.) Goldman, H. (1992) Politics, Death and the Devil: Self and Power in Max Weber and Thomas Mann. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gordon, C. (1991) ‘Governmental Rationality: An Introduction’, in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, pp. 1–51. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Horvath, A. (2000) ‘The Nature of the Trickster’s Game: An Interpretive Understanding of Communism’, PhD thesis, European University Institute, Florence. Huizinga, J. (1990) The Waning of the Middle Ages. Harmondsworth: Penguin. (Originally published 1924.) Hyma, A. (1965) The Christian Renaissance. Hamden, CT: Archon Books. (Originally published 1924.) Koselleck, R. (1985) Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Mann, T. (1999) The Magic Mountain. London: Vintage. (Originally published 1924.) Meier, C. (1987) La Politique et la grace: anthropologie politique de la beauté grecque. Paris: Seuil. Mittendorfer, K. (2000) ‘Mimesis, Christian Spirituality and Modernity’, PhD thesis, European University Institute, Florence. Nietzsche, F. (1966) Beyond Good and Evil. New York: Vintage. Nietzsche, F. (1967) On the Genealogy of Morals. New York: Vintage. Oestreich, G. (1982) Neostoicism and the Early Modern State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Neill, J. (1985) ‘The Disciplinary Society: From Weber to Foucault’, British Journal of Sociology 37(1): 42–60. Pasquino, P. (1986) ‘Michel Foucault 1926–84: The Will to Knowledge’, Economy and Society 15(1): 97–101. Pizzorno, A. (1986) ‘Some Other Kinds of Otherness: A Critique of “Rational Choice” Theories’, in A. Foxley, M.S. McPherson and G. O’Donnell (eds) Development, Democracy

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and the Art of Trespassing: Essays in Honor of Albert O. Hirschman, pp. 355–73. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Pizzorno, A. (1991) ‘On the Individualistic Theory of Social Order’, in P. Bourdieu and J.S. Coleman (eds) Social Theory for a Changing Society. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Szakolczai, A. (1998) Max Weber and Michel Foucault: Parallel Life-Works. London: Routledge. Szakolczai, A. (2000a) Reflexive Historical Sociology. London: Routledge. Szakolczai, A. (2000b) ‘Norbert Elias and Franz Borkenau: Intertwined Life- Works’, Theory, Culture & Society 17(2): 45–69. Tarde, G. (1969) On Communication and Social Influence, ed. Terry N. Clark. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Turner, V. (1967) ‘Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage’, in The Forest of Symbols. New York: Cornell University Press. Turner, V. (1969) The Ritual Process. Chicago, IL: Aldine. Turner, V. (1992) ‘Morality and Liminality’, in Blazing the Trail: Way Marks in the Exploration of Symbols. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Turner, V. and Turner, E. (1978) Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Van Gennep, A. (1960) The Rites of Passage. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Originally published 1909.) Voegelin, E. (1952) The New Science of Politics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Voegelin, E. (1974) The Ecumenic Age, Vol. 4, Order and History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Weber, M. (1952) Ancient Judaism. New York: The Free Press. (Originally published 1921.) Weber, M. (1976) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Allen and Unwin. (Originally published 1904–5.) Weber, M. (1978) Economy and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. (Originally published 1921–2.) Zeitlin, I.M. (1984) Ancient Judaism. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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8 Civilizational Patterns and Civilizing Processes Johann P. Arnason

Backgrounds and Prospects: Civilizational Theory in the Making Jean Starobinski (1983: 48) describes the notion of civilization as a great stimulus to theorizing. But his own analysis of 18th-century origins and later elaborations shows that the road from idea to theory is anything but straight. The very term ‘civilization’ is ambiguous from the outset; although its main use in 18th-century thought was to affirm a universal process of empowerment and refinement, a pluralistic and potentially relativistic meaning – referring to multiple cultural worlds – seems to have been suggested in passing by those who pioneered the universalistic version, even if it took longer to gain general recognition. As ‘civilization’ became a keyword, it was by the same token exposed to interpretive tensions and conflicts which have more to do with ideological rivalries than with ways of theorizing. Because of the uneven development of the two meanings, civilization in the singular is a much more actively contested idea than civilizations in the plural: at one end of the spectrum, it is linked to critique (both of civilization and in its name), but at the other, it serves as one of the ‘substitute absolutes’ (Starobinski, 1983: 48) which replace a waning vision of the sacred. But the most striking illustration of the complex relationship between notions and theories of civilization is not included in Starobinski’s survey. The sociological tradition, emerging in the wake of the Enlightenment, took up questions closely related to those of 18th-century reflections on civilization, but did not find it easy to integrate the idea of civilization – singular or plural – on the level of basic concepts; decisive moves in that direction were only made at a relatively late stage. This pattern is more clearly visible in regard to the more developed layer of meaning. In the 18th-century universe of discourse, civilization in the singular is associated and often synonymous with progress. Nineteenth-century sociological thought retains a strong link (not an uncritical attachment) to the idea of progress, but this background theme is translated into theories of social evolution, and explicit references to civilization are marginal to the main line of argument. To mention only the most obvious examples, Marx notes the civilizing

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implications of processes which he theorizes in other terms (be it the growth of the productive forces in general or capitalist development in particular), and Durkheim quotes with approval Comte’s definition of sociology as a science of civilization, without any further discussion of the consequences this might have for the self-image of the discipline.1 A more sustained effort to theorize the notion of civilization in the singular began with Norbert Elias’s now well-known work on the civilizing process (Elias, 2000). Elias developed an interpretive framework which may, for present purposes, be described as the unitary concept of civilization. His aim was to replace the incomplete or reductionistic models of classical sociology with a more adequate universal paradigm of long-term processes; the proposed alternative is perhaps best understood as a synthesis of several correctives to the dominant view. The focus on transformations of social power – in its manifold shapes – brought to light a background which the sociological tradition had failed to thematize. At the same time, the civilizing process – as Elias understood it – encompasses the changing patterns and developmental trends of individuation. The interconnected dynamics of social configurations and personality structures are more complex and more open to historical variations than the mainstream strategies of sociological analysis tended to suggest. In particular, Elias argued that processes of differentiation and integration unfolded in multiple and uneven ways, far too diverse to fit the functionalist model of invariant coordination. But when he moved on to justify his model at the level of general theory, his argument took an unambiguously functionalist and evolutionist turn. Three ‘basic controls’ (over external nature, the social environment and internal nature) are singled out as the most universal prerequisites of organized social life; in all three domains, the need to maintain and enhance control is reproduced on an expanded scale, and this dynamic gives a general direction to social development. The unitary version of civilizational theory thus rejoins the trend which Elias had set out to contest. The much less salient notion of civilizations in the plural has had a correspondingly less focused impact on sociological theory. During the most formative phase of the social sciences, it was – more thoroughly than its counterpart in the singular – overshadowed and supplanted by a related concept: different forms of life were theorized as patterns of culture, and this approach to human diversity led to more significant results in anthropology than in sociology. On the other hand, the plurality of civilizations was rediscovered at a turning point of the sociological tradition, but in such an ambiguous and inconclusive way that the new perspectives could not develop into an explicit alternative to the entrenched unilinearist views. Durkheim and Mauss (1971, 1968) reopened the question of unity and plurality; their insightful comments – not fully appreciated until much later – add up to a strong case for recognizing civilizations as socialhistorical units sui generis, different in kind and size from those covered by the concept of society. Although this first step deserves to be seen as a theoretical breakthrough, it was not followed up with any commensurate work on basic

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concepts. Most importantly, Durkheim and Mauss made no attempt to tackle the problematic of civilizations in systematic connection with the concept of collective representations. At the same time (but without any knowledge of developments on the French side), Max Weber’s comparative studies sensitized him to the importance of civilizational patterns and dynamics. In this case, however, the substantive discoveries did not entail any conceptual retooling. Weber made no reference to the idea of civilizations in the plural; he uses terms derived from the concept of culture (such as cultural areas or cultural worlds), but they are too loosely applied to give a clear idea of the units which he proposes to compare; as a result, the implicit civilizational background to his analyses could be disregarded by the most influential interpreters of his work, and serious attempts to reconstruct it were only made from the 1960s onwards. Recent contributions (most notably the work of S.N. Eisenstadt) have put a pluralistic civilizational theory more firmly on the agenda and strengthened its claim to provide the most adequate framework for macro-sociological analysis, but many basic questions remain open. The following reflections suggest some themes for further development; more specifically, they will take the line that a pluralistic theory should pay more attention to the problematic of civilizing processes: that is, the field explored by Elias and his followers from the viewpoint of a unitary concept of civilization. A pluralistic approach is the only way to defend civilizational theory as a distinctive (and arguably superior) paradigm, but one of its uncompleted tasks is to link the analysis of long-term trends and transformations to that of enduring but not immutable cultural patterns. There is, in other words, more work to be done on the civilizational contexts, sources and directions of historical dynamics. If the diversity of underlying premises sets civilizations apart from each other, it remains to be seen to what extent it is reflected in their developmental paths, and especially in the divergent forms or features of the processes which are at first sight easier to categorize in universal terms. The Weberian problematic of rationalizing processes is a prime example of the questions awaiting treatment: it has so far proved more amenable to universalist readings (such as those of Habermas and Schluchter) than to culturalist ones, but a closer connection to civilizational perspectives (adumbrated by Benjamin Nelson) might reinforce the culturalist view. In that context, however, Elias’s attempt to broaden the Weberian frame of reference has an obvious bearing on our problems. If rationalizing processes are embedded in civilizing ones (in the broad sense of transformations affecting the social as well as the subjective context of thought and action), they are by the same token inseparable from the broader field noted above as a testing-ground for civilizational theory. But as I try to show, a more pluralistic perspective on civilizing processes presupposes another change of focus: the multiple forms and levels of interaction between civilizations should be taken more seriously than most civilizational theorists have tended to do.

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Defining Civilizations: A Provisional Model The following sketch of a paradigm for civilizational analysis draws on various lines of argument in sociological theory as well as comparative history. As a whole, it is not identifiable with any particular existing version of civilizational theory, but each of the constitutive features has been thematized – often in explicit connection with some of the others – in significant contributions to the debate. The aim is, in short, to synthesize complementary or converging strands of thought, with a view to constructing an ideal type of civilizational patterns. The components of the model range from cultural premises to geographical contexts. Although the formations most frequently described as civilizations (e.g. the Chinese or East Asian, Indian, Islamic, Byzantine and Western Christian worlds) come closest to the ideal type, they are not equally placed in all respects: some of them exemplify some of the defining traits more clearly than others. On the other hand, a more detailed analysis would have to deal with a whole spectrum of cases which seem in some ways to fit into the category of civilizations, but deviate conspicuously from the norm in other regards. To cover the whole field in question, we would need a typology of civilizational formations, for which the model outlined in the following might serve as a starting point. Finally, the question of the civilizational status of modernity should at least be signalled in passing, even if further discussion is beyond the scope of the present article: this is an issue which civilizational theories have to confront, and some of the six aspects to be considered will be more obviously relevant to it than others. 1. The most crucial question of civilizational theory has to do with underlying, distinctive and formative cultural orientations which may be seen as keys to a specific universe of meaning. Such cultural cores of civilizational complexes are at issue in Weber’s analysis of Chinese and Indian traditions, seen in contrast to each other as well as to the monotheistic cultures. S.N. Eisenstadt’s much more clearly articulated version of civilizational theory refers to ‘cultural ontologies’, defined as visions of cosmic as well as social order, and – in the most interesting cases – of ways to question, contest and transform established models of order. One of the most thoroughgoing case studies of such cultural premises (Schwartz, 1985: 418) concludes that they create ‘not finished solutions but a vast problematique’. Ongoing disputes, successive shifts of emphasis and a more or less pronounced differentiation of traditions can thus take place within enduring frameworks. The Chinese vision of an all-embracing socio-cosmic order – and of sacred kingship and sagehood as its interconnected pivots – may, if we follow Schwartz, be a particularly apt example of such continuities. But other constellations of a comparable kind are easily found, even if the shared assumptions are mostly less manifest than in China. A civilizational problematic seems to have crystallized around the

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Ancient Greek notions of chaos, kosmos, physis and nomos, although comparative approaches to this field are less developed (Castoriadis, 1997a, 1997b). Marcel Gauchet’s analyses of transcendence, dependence and autonomy could be taken as a starting point for comparative study of monotheistic traditions and their civilizational imprints (Gauchet, 1997). The complex and often counterintuitive relationships between visions of exclusive divine authority, human agency and social order constitute a field which the well-known Weberian formulations grasped only from a partial angle. Finally, reflections on the cultural foundations of the modern world have highlighted a pattern of connections and tensions between aspirations to ever-expanding mastery and projects of selfdetermination or self-realization, as well as changing historical frameworks for the coexistence of these trends. Castoriadis and Charles Taylor have explored the in-built conflicts of modern cultural orientations from different but partly convergent angles. 2. The cultural presuppositions of civilizational complexes can thus be analysed without concessions to cultural determinism: a better understanding of their essentially disputed and contextual character is emerging from theoretical debates as well as from historical research. The second aspect of our model is less easily linked to effective progress. Problems of institutional structure and dynamics are perhaps the least developed part of civilizational analysis. Mauss alludes to this line of enquiry when he describes civilizations as the most comprehensive embodiments of collective choice, and hence as the ultimate examples of the arbitrary character of all social phenomena: ‘the domain of the social is the domain of modality’ (Mauss, 1968: 470). That was the very insight which had led the Durkheimian school to stress the centrality of institutions, but Mauss does little to develop the theme, and more recent advocates of civilizational theory have been more successful in reaffirming the constitutive role of culture than in showing how it translates into institutional terms. Here I can only very briefly outline the most general directions of further arguments. Following a pattern which has proved fruitful in various theoretical contexts, a distinction between cultural, political and economic structures seems useful. The analysis of civilizational connections between them would then begin with the question of longterm and large-scale cultural framing of the political and economic spheres. Comparative analyses of political cultures have not made much use of civilizational paradigms, but enough has been written in that vein to suggest some strategic connections. Cultural definitions or interpretations of power may be seen as the most basic premises of divergent historical paths, and comparisons can focus on their integrative, preservative or transformative potential. From this point of view, different traditions vary in regard to their ways of distinguishing and balancing sacred and secular authority; further contrasts can be drawn between cultural visions of concentrated or dispersed sovereignty; but comparative

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perspectives can also serve to clarify cultural preconditions for radical redefinitions of sovereignty (such as the Greek invention of an autonomous political community, analysed by Castoriadis, or the disembodiment of power which Claude Lefort has singled out as a characteristic of modern democracy). As for the economic domain, the question of formative cultural orientations was long overshadowed by quasi-natural models of traditional economies, but a better understanding of their dynamics and divergences has changed the picture. Different modes of accumulation (i.e. ways of maximizing and mobilizing a surplus) and varying capacities to sustain commercial development, especially long-distance trade, can be analysed from a comparative civilizational angle. Another side to the interrelations of civilizations and economies comes to light in changing views on capitalism. Neo-Marxist revisions (e.g. Frank, 1998) extend the life-span of capitalist development backwards and make it more or less synonymous with civilization in the singular; the most effective answer might be a return to the Weberian conception of multiple capitalisms, but with a view to grounding it more explicitly in civilizational contexts and their cultural frameworks. Braudel’s analysis of early modern state-related capitalist dynamics, superimposed on market structures, is a suggestive starting point for comparison with more or less similar processes in other settings.2 3. The next feature of civilizational formations belongs to the institutional dimension, but it is specific and important enough to warrant separate treatment. Comparative studies have sometimes focused on dominant and more or less exclusive worldviews, embodied in canonical texts and represented by cultural elites which shape the profile of a whole civilization through integrative institutions. Jaroslav Krejčí’s version of civilizational analysis is perhaps most consistently geared to this problematic, but his approach took shape in critical dialogue with Toynbee’s more speculative theory (Krejčí, 1982). Although the importance of formative ideas, texts and elites is not in question, the model proposed here suggests treating them as a derivative and variable aspect of civilizational complexes. Dominant and institutionally entrenched worldviews are superimposed on interpretive problematics, which remain – to a varying extent – open to rival constructions. Whether dominant ideas crystallize into full-fledged orthodoxies depends on their specific premises as well as on the overall civilizational context; the most emphatic orthodoxies – and the most acute conflicts with heterodoxy – developed within monotheistic traditions. The notion of orthodoxy is, as has often been pointed out, less applicable to hegemonic currents in Chinese and Indian thought. But the contrasts between these two major cases show how widely the patterns of pluralism can vary: the historical relationship between Vedic religion, Buddhism and Hinduism differs markedly from the interplay of Confucianism, Daoism and other indigenous or imported components of the Chinese tradition.

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As for normative texts, the sacred scriptures of revealed religions are the most obvious cases in point. More or less developed counterparts may be found in other contexts; in particular, the Chinese example shows that canonical texts can be of crucial importance even where it is less appropriate to speak of orthodoxy. The cultural elites in question (identified with dominant worldviews and striving to control their interpretations) share power with other elites in varying and often unstable ways. The medieval Catholic Church, the ulema, the Brahmins and the Chinese literati represent different patterns of intellectual life as well as social power. Further questions can be raised about the presence or absence of all these characteristics in the modern world. But it is worth noting that (as Krejčí observes) an influential version of modernity combined them all in a particularly striking fashion: Communism had its exclusive worldview as well as its sacred texts, its self-proclaimed vanguard and a core integrative institution (the party-state). 4. The first three aspects of the model had to do with the internal structure of civilizations; the following ones relate to their extension in space and time. When Durkheim and Mauss first took note of civilizations in the plural, they highlighted these external features and took the internal foundations for granted. The most visible hallmark – and for Durkheim and Mauss the prime defining feature – of civilizations is that they are ‘families of societies’, sociocultural frameworks within which smaller units can organize themselves in a more or less autonomous fashion, and elaborate their variations on shared themes. This multi-societal structure is most evident in the case of the macroformations mentioned earlier, although there are some significant differences between them: among the major civilizational worlds of premodern times, Islam was no doubt the most emphatically multisocietal, so much so that it has been described as a world-system sui generis (Voll, 1994). To speak of multiple societies is, by the same token, to stress the political fragmentation of civilizational complexes; this point must be qualified in light of the varying capacity of civilizations to sustain projects of imperial integration, but it remains true that complete political unity of a civilizational area can only be envisaged as a very exceptional state of affairs. On the other hand, a broader historical survey is bound to complicate the picture and blur the distinction between societies and civilizations. Sociocultural patterns may be distinctive enough to be described as separate civilizations, even if they are – because of historical circumstances – confined to a single society or barred from diffusion beyond a local domain. Among the first generation of civilizations, the isolated Egyptian case stands in marked contrast to the eminently multi-societal Mesopotamian one. Conversely, societies located within a larger civilizational sphere may develop along their own lines to such a degree that their civilizational status becomes ambiguous. Mauss refers to societies ‘singularizing’ themselves within civilizational frameworks,

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rather than simply constituting singular cases of the broader category, and the possibility of singularization taking a more radical turn is implicitly left open. One of the most striking cases of that kind is the Japanese trajectory, seen in the context of the East Asian civilizational area. 5. In short, the supra-societal or multi-societal potential of civilizations is unevenly developed and open to historical variations which call for comparative studies. Similar qualifications apply to another trait mentioned by Durkheim and Mauss: civilizations maintain their identity throughout successive historical phases. To put it another way, they encompass successive generations of societies (their multi-societal character thus has a temporal meaning as well as a spatial one). A brief glance at major historical examples is enough to signal some problems with further elaboration of this idea. China may be the most clear-cut case of a civilizational pattern with strong roots in archaic beginnings adapting to several waves of social change in such a way that continuity prevails on the level of basic orientations. At the other end of the spectrum, it seems impossible to speak of European civilization as a single historical unit extending from classical origins to modern ascendancy on a global scale. But there are good reasons for interpreting the European experience as a specific multi-civilizational sequence, with the legacies of earlier stages playing a formative role in the development of later ones. An analysis in these terms would have to take complicating factors into account: the transitions from one civilizational episode to another coincide with shifts of the geopolitical and geocultural centre, and interaction with other civilizational sequences is most evident at major turning points (the triumph of Christianity in the later Roman Empire is a familiar example). The overall pattern of Indian history differs from both China and Europe. If the primacy of the Brahmins – based on a specific division of power between priesthood and kingship – is seen as the most characteristic feature of Indian civilization, a plausible case can be made for continuity from early origins to recent times; on the other hand, the temporary but massive impact of Buddhism, the shifting boundaries of the Indian civilizational area (during its most creative phase, it included Southeast Asia and parts of Central Asia) and the Islamic conquest would be easier to fit into a model of several civilizations in succession. In short, comparative studies need both the concept of a multi-epochal civilization and that of a multi-civilizational sequence (Krejčí speaks of a civilizational pedigree), and the choice between them is more difficult in some cases than others. 6. The last constitutive feature to be included in the model is the regional basis of civilizational distinctions. The historical formation and transformation of civilizations take place in geographical contexts, and the most familiar macro-civilizational complexes are frequently identified with large regions (such as East Asia, South Asia and the Near East). A clearer examination will, however, show that the regional contours of civilizational patterns vary in significant ways.

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If East Asia is defined in a narrow sense (that is, identified with the historical triangle of China, Korea and Japan), its boundaries come closer to coinciding with civilizational ones than those of any other major region. The Korean and Japanese transformations of the Chinese tradition were self-contained; Chinese influences affected the course of Southeast Asian history, but Vietnam was the only Southeast Asian polity whose cultural framework was derived from the Chinese model; and although interaction with the Inner Asian tradition of conquest and empire-building was central to Chinese history, the civilizational effects of this contact were much more limited than the geopolitical ones. A very different pattern prevailed in the Islamic world. The first Islamic conquests and the concomitant formation of Islam as a universal religion took place in the oldest and most central multi-civilizational zone (Marshall Hodgson calls it the Nile–Oxus region). As a result, this historical heartland underwent a more effective cultural unification than ever before. Later waves of religious expansion and imperial conquest led to the Islamization of more remote regions which were thus integrated into a supra-regional civilizational formation, but retained enough of their distinctive features to give rise to more or less original variants of the universal model. On the other hand, clearly demarcated regions of historical importance are sometimes characterized by enduring multi-civilizational constellations. One of the most classic examples is the Mediterranean, which has throughout its history been an arena of intercivilizational encounters. Only the Roman Empire imposed a hegemony of one civilization, but as later developments were to show, this paved the way for multiple transformations through further encounters.

Encounters, Innovations and Transformations The preceding inventory of civilizational components does not add up to a model of invariant correlations. Rather, the changing roles and relative weights of the different aspects underline the need for flexible conceptualization: due allowance should be made for the variety of historical contexts. But if the idea of civilizations as uniformly self-contained versions of a fixed general pattern is rejected at this fundamental level, the present line of argument comes into conflict with widespread ways of thinking about the themes in question. The field left vacant when classical sociology abandoned the civilizational perspective was taken over by another tradition, perhaps best described as meta-historical. Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee were the most representative thinkers on that side, but other writers (such as Franz Borkenau) adopted some of their ideas and developed them in original ways. As critics have often argued, this school of thought consistently exaggerates the closure of civilizations, both in the sense of mutual isolation and with regard to the containment of historical

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change. There is, in other words, a strong tendency to conceive of civilizations as separate worlds, and thus to undermine the postulate of mutual accessibility that is inherent in any project of comparative analysis; at the same time, the trajectories of rise, flowering and decline – supposedly internal to each civilizational unit – are subsumed under a universal scheme defined in more or less overtly cyclical terms, with the result that structural uniformity overshadows the diversity of cultural contents. When these meta-historical assumptions are incorporated into more eclectic modes of theorizing, they serve to impose directions without making explicit choices. To mention only the most prominent example, Samuel Huntington refers to writings on comparative civilizational analysis as if they constituted one undifferentiated tradition, but his use of core ideas aligns him with those who stress closure rather than openness. Civilizations are described as ‘the ultimate tribes’, less elaborately structured than Spengler’s symbolic worlds but almost as self-contained when it comes to questions of identity, and their re-emergence after a phase of forced assimilation to the West appears as a return of history to its normal intra-cultural course. The unfinished state of the sociological theory of civilizations makes it vulnerable to amalgamations of the kind proposed by Huntington. One of its most urgent tasks is therefore to develop a more effective critique of the rival tradition. As we have seen, the analysis of civilizing processes can serve that purpose if it is disconnected from the restrictive frame of reference which Elias continued to defend, even if he did not always follow it to the letter. In this context, the problematic of state formation is of particular importance: it was the most central part of Elias’s research agenda, but it also seems to be the field where scholars drawing on Elias’s work have most convincingly moved beyond its limits and become more sensitive to historical diversity and contingency (for examples of recent studies in this vein, see Kürsat-Ahlers [1994], as well as Kuzmics and Axtmann [2000]). This line of enquiry links up with the aforementioned questions of political cultures and their civilizational contexts. The main issue to be examined has to do with long-term directions of state formation: to what extent can distinctive cultural frameworks, embedded in broad and enduring civilizational patterns, determine the political dynamics that unfold over whole historical periods and may even maintain some continuity across the boundaries between them? Several ways of tackling this problem from more specific angles can be suggested. If the emergence of imperial structures is seen as a long-term process, and an upper level of state formation, the obvious contrasts (in strength and kind) between the imperial traditions of different civilizations should also be analysed from the viewpoint of cultural premises. There are some prima facie reasons to conclude that differences in that regard affected the course of history. It seems clear that the Chinese vision of sacred kingship, embedded in – and essential to – a comprehensive socio-cosmic order was a particularly solid basis for imperial rule, and had something to do with the exceptional continuity of the Chinese imperial formation. It also

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allowed for changing combinations of culturalist and universalist claims to legitimacy (the former stressed the superiority of the tradition which embodied a proper image of order, whereas the latter insisted on an exclusive paradigm of world order). On the western side, it can be argued that the Roman Empire – before and after its conversion to Christianity – rested on more problematic cultural foundations. Its original polytheistic framework may have been well attuned to the diversity of cultures and collective identities within the empire (Momigliano, 1987), but it was less effective in conferring sacred authority on the imperial centre; the alliance with Christianity from the fourth century onwards led to momentous changes, but basic problems remained unsolved. Both the late Roman Empire and its two Christian successor civilizations had persistent difficulties with dividing and balancing the spheres of sacred and secular power; the problem was aggravated by the proliferation of heterodoxies which contested the established patterns. Moreover, Christianity was from the outset open to two different strategies of accommodation with political power. They might be described as the Roman and the Caucasian: the Armenian and Georgian states also adopted Christianity as an official religion at the beginning of the fourth century, and each of them identified with a specific version of it (the Armenians with Monophysitism against the empire, the Georgians with orthodoxy against Armenia). This prefigured a long history of Christian contributions to the collective identities and particularisms of small states, in contrast to the empires which aspired to universal Christian rule. Several aspects of the Christian tradition combined to sustain the particularist trend: the notion of a chosen people which Christianity had inherited from its Judaic sources, the relative (but by no means unreserved) openness to translation into vernacular languages, and the availability of heterodoxies which sometimes served to demarcate identities.3 Yet another pattern of cultural influences on empire-building seems to have prevailed in the Islamic world. The belief that Islamic traditions excluded any differentiation of religion and politics has not quite disappeared from public discourse, but scholarly debates have effectively demolished it; it is now widely accepted that Islamic history is characterized by specific forms and trajectories of differentiation, neither identical with those of other civilizations nor reducible to a lower degree of the same dynamic. In the course of the first Islamic conquests, much older traditions and mechanisms of imperial rule were integrated into the new order, and the political sphere thus acquired forms and meanings foreign to the original religious vision of the conquerors. At the same time, the religious framework itself developed in ways conducive to a certain autonomy of social life and restraints on political control over it.4 Attempts to reconcile the two trends within a distinctively Islamic form of empire were relatively shortlived, and a long period of political fragmentation followed. The most successful bids to reassert imperial rule in the Islamic world (the early modern Ottoman, Safavi and Mughal empires) were made at a late stage

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and depended on inputs from the Inner Asian tradition of nomadic empirebuilding. The development of state systems, the opposite of imperial order, may also depend on civilizational preconditions. Here the contrast between Europe and Southeast Asia is particularly suggestive. As historians have often noted, both regions were – in premodern times – characterized by a high level of political fragmentation and ethnic diversity, but in Southeast Asia, this condition did not give rise to a structured state system comparable to the European one (McCloud, 1995). Cultural conceptions of kingship and sovereignty seem to have been a major obstacle to such developments: they favoured hierarchical and fluctuating networks of overlapping polities, rather than a gradual consolidation of clearly defined centres and boundaries. But the cultural orientations involved in the construction of political centres also affect the dynamics of state formation at the most fundamental level. They have far-reaching implications for the direction and momentum, as well as the self-magnifying or self-limiting logic of the processes in question. In this regard, interesting contrasts and parallels have been drawn between Europe and India. An enduring plurality of political centres, engaged in more or less active competition with each other, was characteristic of both these civilizational areas; but as S.N. Eisenstadt and H. Hartman (1992) argue, the respective cultural frameworks channelled the intra-state and inter-state dynamics in different directions. Indian visions of statehood were less geared to a unitary centre and more compatible with a fractured sovereignty of different social groups and sectors. This tendency to fragmentation of the political sphere as such (not merely of its territorial forms) was, in turn, linked to the curtailed sovereignty of a kingship overshadowed by priestly authority. A few words have yet to be said about another critical task: the demarcation of the pluralistic view from the notion of civilizations as closed worlds, with a view to theorizing mutually formative contacts between civilizational complexes. Here the idea of intercivilizational encounters is of key importance. The first author to introduce it as a basic concept was Arnold Toynbee (1954). But when he took up this theme, he was already changing the course of his project in a way that left all conceptual foundations in an uncertain state. Apart from distinguishing between encounters in space and encounters in time (also known as renaissances), Toynbee was primarily interested in the encounters that gave rise to universal religions, which he now saw as a new and essentially supracivilizational mode for social life, without ever giving a clear account of the reasons for moving beyond the original framework of his enquiry. Two later writers developed the idea of intercivilizational encounters in very different directions. On the one hand, the historian William McNeill shifted the focus of analysis towards the transmission of skills and techniques from one civilization to another. He argued that at a decisive turning point (more or less identical with the rise of civilization in the singular), interacting with and learning from others became the main vehicle of

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progress. This hypothesis was subsequently applied to the military aspects of state-building in Europe (McNeill, 1983), and the most crucial phase of the rise of the West could thus be seen as an outcome of intercivilizational developments. But in the end, the emphasis on exchange and transmission led McNeill to tone down the autonomy as well as the internal coherence of particular civilizations, and to conclude that ‘changes in the range and carrying capacity’ of a ‘real communications network’ that had ‘bound human societies together from the start’ (McNeill, 1998: 223) were central to the dynamics of global history. An interactionist conception of civilization in the singular thus prevails over the pluralistic view. The other reappraisal of intercivilizational encounters, less detailed but more important in the present context, was sketched out by Benjamin Nelson (1981). Here the discussion is grounded in an emphatically pluralistic framework, and the latter centres on the ‘structures of consciousness’ which Nelson singled out as the central components of civilizational patterns, and as an underlying dimension never properly thematized by Weber (it should be added that Nelson’s own statements about these structures reflect some ambiguity as to whether the main emphasis should be on explicit worldviews or implicit problematics). The most significant shifts in structures of consciousness are due to changes within and movements beyond religious modes of belief. Although Nelson never clearly defined his conception of intercivilizational encounters, it is clear that his main interest is in contacts and impacts at this level: the encounters par excellence are those which involve or initiate major changes to the structures of consciousness. They may trigger transformations of pre-existing structures, enter into more or less productive combinations with them, or exacerbate previously latent conflicts within them. But Nelson’s typology of encounters also includes cases of refusal to confront or even perceive the intellectual challenges posed by other civilizations, such as the Chinese rejection of Christianity during the early modern phase of contacts with the West. This example of self-perpetuating cultural closure stands out in contrast to later western-induced upheavals in the structures of consciousness of major nonwestern civilizations, including China. There is, however, a particular case which obviously fascinated Nelson more than any other intercivilizational encounter: in several of his essays, he returns to the 12th- and 13th-century transformation of Western Europe, accompanied and decisively affected by intensified contacts with other cultural worlds. During the period in question, the emerging civilization of Western Christendom related to the more advanced Byzantine and Islamic civilizations, as well as the diasporic Jewish one, in a variety of ways which combined to reinforce its innovative potential. Not least importantly, parts of the Greco-Roman legacy were reactivated with the aid of sources preserved by the Byzantine and Islamic traditions. These encounters with ancestors and contemporaries helped to sustain a set of interconnected structural innovations in Western European societies. It can be argued that the complex dynamic at work is best understood as a combination of four

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revolutions: the consolidation of the Catholic Church as a ‘papal monarchy’, the emergence of self-governing urban communities, the ‘feudal revolution’ which brought about a new articulation of rights and obligations, and an intellectual breakthrough which changed both the content and the organization of scholarly activities (Wittrock, 2001). But Nelson’s main theme was the outbreak of ‘civil wars in the structures of consciousness’ (Nelson, 1981: 215), a polarization of faith and reason which owed much to inputs from other civilizational sources and paved the way for the epoch-making intellectual revolution of High Medieval Scholasticism. Nelson was fully aware of the new forms of social organization that took shape during the 12th and 13th centuries, and the rediscovery of Roman law was in his view one of the most important stimuli to broader sociocultural change. But he did not link these developments to the question of state formation as such. In that regard, however, the 12th and 13th centuries were indisputably a watershed (Elias took note of this, although he had little to say about the cultural context), and each of the revolutions mentioned earlier made its specific contribution to the dynamics of state formation. If the feudal revolution happened (historians are still debating the issue), it was at least in part an attempt to consolidate a new framework for statebuilding; the papal monarchy became in many ways a model for secular states; the urban communities invented ideas and techniques that could be put to use on the level of larger communities; and the intellectual revolution led to a revival of political thought. Seen in this context, the advances in state formation were both directly and indirectly linked to the intercivilizational contacts. The role of the Byzantine connection in the rediscovery of Roman law is well known. But the non-Western influences went much further: it seems highly probable that the Norman kingdom of Sicily – a pioneer among 12th-century monarchies – drew on Chinese models transmitted through Islamic channels (Creel, 1970: 11–13). In short, a closer analysis of the 12th- and 13th-century breakthrough could have helped to put the problematic of state formation into a broader multi-civilizational perspective. It could also serve as a starting point for comparison with other historical cases of state structures transformed in connection with – or in consequence of – intercivilizational encounters. To conclude, two crucial developments of that kind should be briefly noted. The Greek polis was the outcome – and became the arena – of a uniquely self-limiting process of state formation (so much so that some analysts prefer not to use the concept of state at all); its early development was accompanied by all-round borrowing of ideas, skills and techniques from the more advanced civilizations of the Near East. Closer contact with older cultural centres thus gave rise to a complex civilizing process, but at the same time, the profoundly original character of Greek civilization found expression in the political domain, where a new cultural vision of power – articulated in confrontation with the Near Eastern neighbours and antagonists – was gradually translated into practices which enhanced the autonomy of action and the plurality of actors. A very different pattern of interaction

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between state formation and intercivilizational dynamics developed in the course of western expansion. Forms of statehood, strategies of state building and ways of legitimizing state power spread from the ascendant West to the civilizational areas which came under its control or influence. In this context, the transfer of western models (including, of course, the communist countermodels) was more direct and global than in any other. But comparative historians, sociologists and political scientists have become increasingly aware of the other side to this process: the ‘historicity of the imported state’ (J.-F. Bayart), the more or less radical modifications of borrowed ideas and institutions in new settings, and – most importantly – the impact of enduring civilizational factors. Recent work on these questions (e.g. Bayart, 1996; Reinhard, 1999), even if not always undertaken with civilizational themes in mind, suggests that the whole field is of exceptional importance for civilizational theory.

Notes 1. A more detailed account of the history of civilizational analysis is to be found in Arnason (2001); theoretical issues are discussed in my Civilizations in Dispute (Arnason, 2003). 2. For very interesting but somewhat inconclusive suggestions on the relationship between civilizations and economies, see Hamilton (1994); to the best of my knowledge, the questions raised in this article have not been pursued further. 3. Hastings (1997) rightly stresses the importance of Christian traditions for nation formation. He mentions Armenia as the first state to become Christian; but since Georgia followed suit very soon, it seems more appropriate to speak of a Caucasian model. 4. Hodgson’s (1974) classic analysis of early Islam opens up perspectives which have been radicalized, often in a very controversial fashion, by later work in the field.

References Arnason, J.P. (2001) ‘Civilizational Analysis, History of’, in Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. London: Elsevier. Arnason, J.P. (2003) Civilizations in Dispute. Leiden: Brill. Bayart, J.-F., ed. (1996) La Greffe de l’état. Paris: Karthala. Castoriadis, C. (1997a) ‘The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy’, in D.A. Curtis (ed.) The Castoriadis Reader, pp. 267–89. Oxford: Blackwell. Castoriadis, C. (1997b) ‘ The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary’, World in Fragments, pp. 84–107. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Creel, H.G. (1970) The Origins of Statecraft in China. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Durkheim, E. and Mauss, M. (1971) ‘Note on the Notion of Civilization’, trans. and introduced by B. Nelson, Social Research 38(4): 808–13. Eisenstadt, S.N. and Hartman, H. (1992) ‘Cultural Traditions, Conceptions of Sovereignty and State Formations in India and Europe’, in A.W. van den Hoek, D.H.A. Kolff and M.S. Oort (eds) Ritual, State and History in South Asia – Essays in Honour of J. C. Heesterman, pp. 493–506. Leiden: Brill. Elias, N. (2000) The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. E. Dunning and J. Goudsblom. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Frank, A.G. (1998) Re-Orient: The Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Gauchet, M. (1997) The Disenchantment of the World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hamilton, G. (1994) ‘Civilizations and the Organization of Economies’, in N.J. Smelser and R. Swedberg (eds) The Handbook of Economic Sociology, pp. 183–205. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hastings, A. (1997) The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hodgson, M. (1974) The Venture of Islam, Vols 1–3. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Krejčí, J. (1982) ‘Religion and Civilization’, Religion 12: 29–47. Kürsat-Ahlers, E. (1994) Zur frühen Staatenbildung von Steppenvölkern. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot. Kuzmics, H. and Axtmann, R. (2000) Autorität, Staat und Nationalcharakter. Der Zivilisationsprozess in Österreich und England, 1700–1900. Opladen: Leske und Budrich. McCloud, D. (1995) Southeast Asia: Tradition and Modernity in the Contemporary World. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. McNeill, W. (1983) The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force and Society since A.D. 1000. Oxford: Blackwell. McNeill, W. (1998) ‘World History and the Rise and Fall of the West’, Journal of World History 9(2): 215–36. Mauss, M. (1968) ‘Les civilisations: Elements et formes’, in M. Mauss Oeuvres, Vol. 2, pp. 451–87. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Momigliano, A. (1987) ‘The Disadvantages of Monotheism for a Universal State’, in A. Momigliano On Pagans, Jews and Christians. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, pp. 142–58. Nelson, B. (1981) On the Roads to Modernity. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield. Reinhard, W., ed. (1999) Verstaatlichung der Welt. Munich: Oldenbourg. Schwartz, B. (1985) The World of Thought in Ancient China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Starobinski, J. (1983) ‘Le Mot ‘civilisation’’, Le Temps de la réflexion IV: 13–51. Toynbee, A. (1954) A Study of History, Vols VIII–IX. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Voll, J.O. (1994) ‘Islam as a Special World System’, Journal of World History 5(2): 213–26. Wittrock, B. (2001) ‘Social Theory and Global History: Three Cultural Crystallisations’, Thesis Eleven 65: 27–50.

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9 Rationalization, Transformations of Consciousness and Intercivilizational Encounters Reflections on Benjamin Nelson’s Sociology of Civilizations Donald A. Nielsen

Introduction The creation of a new science of civilizations remains a neglected item on the agenda of contemporary sociology. Despite the many obstacles facing this project, there are also intellectual resources available for its realization. This article draws on Benjamin Nelson’s vision of civilizational analysis.1 Nelson’s work was multifaceted. His research focused especially on comparative, historical case studies of civilizational processes in religion, science and other cultural spheres. Although his work was analytical and even ‘systematic’ (Nelson, 1981: Chs 2–3, 5), he did not want to create a theoretical ‘system’ or philosophy of history like Spengler, Sorokin, Parsons and several others. His style of investigation into theory and history was linked to an urgent concern about current intellectual and historical challenges. He opposed all theoretical ‘uniformitarianism’, or what others have called ‘essentialism’, as a distortion of the actualities of human experience through their reduction to one or another comprehensive system of concepts (Nelson, 1981: 241–2). In a related vein, he was alarmed by the runaway rationalization of modern societies and its tendency to drive individuals into extreme responses of anomistic opposition. These two concerns need to be kept in view if we are to understand his efforts and the value of a civilizational perspective. In these pages, my discussion draws selectively on Nelson’s work as well as my own previous investigations into civilizational processes (ones inspired largely by Nelson’s example). I focus on historical structures of consciousness, civilizational encounters and the problem of rationalization.

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Civilizational Analysis as a Sociological Perspective The concept of civilizational phenomena is drawn by Nelson especially from Durkheim and Mauss (1971). It is intended analytically and defined as the highest level cultural productions common over long historical periods to two or more peoples, societies, or territories. The concept refers to phenomena with a greater ‘coefficient of expansion and internationalization’ (Durkheim and Mauss, 1971: 812) than those lodged in ‘society’ or the ‘nation-state’. However, it also avoids the prematurely totalizing notion of a capitalist world economy offered by ‘world system’ theorists (Nielsen, 1991b). Indeed, the modern ‘market mentality’ (Polanyi, 1968) and capitalist business practices are only one among several other civilizational phenomena. The notion of civilizational phenomena points especially to the highest level cultural productions such as religions, philosophies, sciences, logics and technologies. It includes what Marcel Mauss called ‘categories of the human spirit’ (Nielsen, 1999: 13–16) defining our views of time, space, causality, the self, the cosmos, the otherworld and spiritual forces (Nelson, 1981: 84). These categories constitute authoritative ‘directive systems’ defining reality, and conflicts often occur among competing ‘mediatorial elites’ over their continuation or change (Nelson, 1981: Ch. 2). The concept of civilization also implies that we study phenomena such as economic exchange, political community, urban formations, social strata and institutions in civilizational perspective; that is, within their defining civilizational contexts, as aspects of what Mauss also designated as ‘total social phenomena’ (Mauss, 1990: 78–9). One central focus of civilizational analysis is the study of intercivilizational encounters, those historical occasions when the central frames of reference of civilizational communities are challenged by contact with others. Such encounters should be clearly distinguished from the recently heralded ‘clash of civilizations’ (Huntington, 1998). Encounters involve much more than ‘clashes’ leading to wars and geopolitical conflicts. The results of such encounters are not identical with the outcomes of political conflicts, victories or defeats. They often result in decisive cultural borrowings, adaptations of alien ideas and creative syntheses emerging from challenges to inherited ways of thinking. Civilizational encounters often result in new cultural creations which decisively modify the future civilizational landscape for one or more of the parties involved.

Civilizations and Structures of Consciousness One centerpiece of Nelson’s civilizational analysis is the distinction among three types of structures of consciousness, which he titled sacromagical (consciousness-type 1), faith (consciousness-type 2) and rationalized structures (consciousness-type 3) (Nelson, 1981: 80, 92–7). Let me briefly discuss each.2

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Sacro-magical structures are characterized by a sense of collective responsibility for lapses from an imagined state of micro- and macrocosmic unity. Central to this structure are sacrifices, expiations and commemorations of collective crimes or wrongs which require repeated atonement (Nelson, 1981: 93). Complex systems of etiquettes preserving or reinstating social and cosmic order are characteristic of such systems. Collective consciousness is authoritative and collective representations prevail over more individuated ones. Nelson thought sacro-magical structures anchored a wide variety of archaic civilizations, including Ancient China, India, Judaism, as well as Greece and Rome in their early phases (and well beyond). He thought this true despite the various rationalistic elaborations possible within this type of consciousness. Faith structures require that all individuals and groups, whatever their social location, engage in continuous purgation of evil thoughts and feelings. This idea is expressed especially in the idea of active conformity in word and deed to a world soul or logos. Faith structures encourage social distinctions between virtuosi in meditation and mystical union and those masses less qualified in these fields. However, their emphasis is on individual and collective participation through practices, imitations and exemplifications. Thus, the responsibility of the individual and the degree of individuation are immediately intensified in faith structures. ‘Any member of the community can claim to be a messenger, exemplar or incarnation of the faith. Charismatic breaks with social class and caste privilege are regularly possible’ (Nelson, 1981: 96). In sum, the faith structures provide for potential universal participation and, therefore, lay the necessary foundation for further total rationalizations. Nelson located the main historical breakthrough from sacro-magical to faith structures in the transition from Judaism to Christianity in the Hellenistic and Roman eras. Rationalized structures initially become possible when the collective representations of the faith structures have weakened and acute disagreement occurs over the main implications and evidences of the faith. This transition requires rational inquiry into the foundations of the faith and clarification of its central rationales concerning action, belief and opinion – indeed, every aspect of the inner life. Nelson argued ‘an axial shift’ (Nelson, 1981: 99) toward a comprehensive rationalized structure took place in Western Europe in the 12–13th centuries. He repeatedly emphasized the importance of this historical era for the subsequent development of the West. He contrasted it with other civilizational settings, for instance China, whose movement toward rationalization was much less comprehensive (Nelson, 1981: Ch. 10). Here, an important implicit distinction emerges between the comprehensive rationalization of consciousness in response to the emerging uncertainties of a faith structure and the partial rationalizations of specific cultural spheres in the absence of a faith structure. Over the longue durée of European modernity’s full gestation, this rationalizing process ultimately leads to a ‘maximum rationalization of intelligence’. For this to occur, ‘substantial numbers of persons [must] be legally

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empowered and psychologically disposed to carry on mental production at the highest level of operation without being called to a halt by disabling private or public inhibitions or barriers’ (Nelson, 1981: 184, 178). This requires that individuals transcend the particularistic restraints of family, kin, caste and class and allow their minds to wander within ‘neutral zones’ provided by institutions free from political and religious dictate. The fuller range of consequences of these rationalizing processes is examined later in these pages.

Analytical Reflections on Structures of Consciousness It is worth noting that this is a typology, much like Weber’s ‘ideal types’. It is constructed to help understand a particular set of historical processes connected with the differential breakthroughs in civilizations toward ‘modern’ outlooks. It is not meant as a comprehensive classificatory device. Indeed, for it to have a wider applicability beyond the questions discussed by Nelson, it requires considerable conceptual differentiation and historical specification. Moreover, just as Weber’s typologies were rooted in his concept of social action, these structures of consciousness imply the concept of experience and the idea of responses of individual actors. The typology focuses on consciousness and places the emphasis on the historical formation of minds and mentalities. Structures of consciousness must be studied through their manifestations in changing human experience and expression; indeed, these three terms together map out a broader field of study than the notion of social action. Studies of the actual manifestations of these structures of consciousness constitute historical ‘phenomenologies’ of experience and expression (Nelson, 1981: 203–5). The typology implies a concrete research program found especially in the study of historical individuals. It is not surprising that Nelson focused frequently on major historical figures such as Abelard, Bernard of Clairvaux, Galileo, Pascal, Luther, Calvin and others. This approach helps us avoid the false choice between ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ analysis. The ‘macro’ concept of civilizational complexes points to the highest level categories constituting the structures of consciousness of civilizations, but they are experienced and put to work by individuals in real ‘micro’ situations and predicaments where conduct, opinion, thought and imagination take place. This emphasis on individual experience, consciousness and forms of expression provides a particularly valuable entry point into the concrete study of such civilizational processes. This analysis of consciousness-types focuses on the advancement of rationalization processes in the West, yet it is framed by an equally strong concern with the precariousness of civilizational patterns, the intercivilizational character of cultural production, the centrality of intracivilizational conflicts, and shifts in global civilizational ascendency (Nelson, 1981: 8–9). It would therefore be a mistake to view them as irreversible evolutionary

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stages or a victorious march toward ‘rationality’. Indeed, Nelson rejected the notions of fixed stages and irreversability as ‘unhistorical’ (Nelson, 1981: 92).3 In any complex society, a given structure of consciousness is not found uniformly distributed among all individuals and groups. Differentiations within as well as among these types, their historical mixes and balances, need to be kept in view. It is possible for ‘regressions’ to occur from one type to another (Nelson, 1981: 97), for instance, from rationalized to faith or sacro-magical structures (Nielsen, 1984). There can occur the selective development in ‘segmental’ form of ‘modernizing’, rationalizing enclaves within fundamentally ‘traditional’ societies as they encounter modern ones. Nelson also noted that the current global revival of faith structures and collectivistic outlooks would provide a fundamental challenge to rationalized structures (Nelson, 1981: 102–5). Intracivilizational processes are another central aspect of such a perspective. They include actors’ adaptations of older civilizational ideas and images to new purposes in changed historical settings. They also involve intracivilizational conflicts among groups over interpretations of the civilization’s key categories. As I have noted elsewhere (Nielson, 1991a: 70–1), they result in permanently structured tensions and polarities within civilizations and give rise repeatedly to movements opposing dominant institutionalized variants of the civilization. Today, as dominant world institutions are solidified, such intracivilizational polarities appear on a global scale. Sociologists will note that this typological and historical analysis is informed by Durkheimian as well as Weberian premises. Durkheimian horizons include the notion of civilizational processes, the emphasis on civilizations as ‘total’ social phenomena, the focus on the central categories constituting experiences, the distinction between collective vs more individuated representations, and the idea of selective rationalizations of sacromagical cultures through their development of rationalizing ‘segmentary’ structures. Nelson’s actual image of sacro-magical structures is highly congruent with the Durkheimian analysis of ‘archaic’ societies, despite his gesture here to Weber (Nelson, 1981: 93). Of course, these Durkheimian perpectives are merged with Weber’s findings, for instance, his studies of rationalization, world religions, institutional spheres, urban fraternization and so forth. However, Nelson’s own creative efforts rely less exclusively on Weber than might be imagined, given his repeated efforts to champion Weber’s general cause (e.g. Nelson, 1969, 1971, 1973b, 1974, 1976a). This raises a related issue. Weber’s way of posing his questions frequently involves asking why in one civilization (the ‘West’) cultural developments of ‘universal significance and value’ emerged which did not occur independently elsewhere (Weber, 1958: 13). This form of question has particularly unhappy consequences. Indeed, Nelson’s work is not entirely free of this tendency. It too easily becomes a study of the ‘success’ and (especially) the ‘failure’ of civilizations in the gestation of particular cultural forms (for example, modern science) abstracted from universal history. It obscures a

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more central question: what structures, histories and experiences did actually occur in different civilizations? To adapt Marcel Mauss’s words, what is given is ‘Rome or Athens, the average Frenchman, the Melanesian of this island or another, and not prayer or law by itself’ (Mauss, 1990: 80). It is this fact of the varied historical phenomenologies of human experience which must be kept in view. Indeed, the new science of civilizations is unlikely to help advance the goal of universal understanding without first reconstituting the varieties of historical experiences of civilizational actors.

Axial Ages, Sacro-Magical Structures and Intercivilizational Encounters As noted earlier, it is necessary to more fully differentiate the various historical cases which can be arranged under these consciousness-types and provide finer discriminations within the typology itself. For example, the notion of sacro-magical structures is stretched excessively. As a result, the historical significance of such structures is partly obscured. A concept which finds commonalities in the civilizational worldviews of Ancient China, India, Judaism, and the early phases of other ‘archaic’ cultures needs greater specification or runs the risk of blurring major differences in historical experience. What specific cultural forms emerged to express Ancient Chinese, Hindu, Jewish and early Greek ideas of collective expiation of imagined collective wrongs? What later developments took place within these structures? Once again, the fact that they can all be designated as sacro-magical structures is less important than the specific modes of experience developing there and their subsequent cultural elaborations. To get at this problem, we must disaggregate the ideas, images and categories embedded in various sacro-magical structures and study their histories, including their relationships to later possible developments with the core sacro-magical structure. Another intriguing historical relationship exists among the three consciousness- types. In Nelson’s view, the transitions from one consciousnesstype to another (that is, consciousness-type 1 to 2, and 2 to 3) are more difficult to achieve than the differentiations within type 3 (that is,. the rationalized). The emergence of faith structures is already a ‘premonition of the next phase’: that is, the rational examination of the contents of faith through the development of a prime science of theology (Nelson, 1981: 94). Related to this is the very suggestive idea that ‘the passage from Consciousness 1 to 2 [i.e. sacro-magical to faith structures] probably represents the most decisive move in the direction of the functionalization of intelligence, the generalization of the terms of reference, and the universalizing of the community discourse’ (Nelson, 1981: 96). It is puzzling that Nelson gave much less attention to the breakthrough toward a faith structure in the West with Judaism and Christianity than he did to the fuller development of rationalized structures in the 12th–13th

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centuries. Perhaps it is because he viewed the latter as ‘an axial shift’, a ‘watershed in the international history of the world’, the ‘prime seed bed[s] of the institutional and cultural developments of the Western world’ (Nelson, 1981: 99, 214). Nelson argues that the various ‘Axial Age’ cultures developed universalizing and rationalizing outlooks to varying degrees and in different ways (Nelson, 1981: 11). In a related vein, he notes that the intracivilizational adaptation of Greek, Roman, and Jewish-Christian ideas in later European history contributed to Europe’s subsequent development of fully rationalized civilizational structures (Nelson, 1981: 98). But these later adaptations assume the prior partial rationalization of specific cultural spheres in these ancient civilizations. We need to understand these rationalizing segments emerging in ancient civilizations after their initial breakthroughs into their ‘axial’ formations (Eisenstadt, 1986). This requires that we again pursue the method of disaggregation and focus on the histories of particular ideas, images and rationales. Later civilizational structures in Western Europe need especially to be linked to the new categories of thought resulting from the encounters among these varied postaxial developments. The intercivilizational encounters in the ancient Mediterranean world are central to the story. They represent what might be called a ‘Second Axial Age’ (Nielsen, 1990a, 1996b, forthcoming; Eisenstadt, 1992). The most important new ideas emerged from encounters among Judaism, Hellenism, Rome and the Near East (Nielsen, 1990a: 93–100). The encounter of Judaism and Greek thought was particularly decisive. It did result in a new faith structure, but also provided the basis for new images of the cosmos, particularly through the merger of Jewish monotheistic creation motifs and Greek philosophical rationales. These new images emerging out of encounter are expressed clearly in the Apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon and the writings of Philo of Alexandria and Origen. There we find two root metaphors at the heart of not only the rise of modern science, but of the modern mentality generally: the idea of ‘laws of nature’ and the related, but hardly identical notion of divine creation by precise weight, measure and number (Nielsen, 1996b). As it sheds its initial religious shell, the idea of the world as a great mathematical hieroglyphic increasingly takes center stage, by the 17th century challenging in importance even the notion of ‘laws of nature’. More recent rationalization processes rely heavily on such an image of reality constituted by weight, measure and number. From a purely analytical standpoint, the crucial issue here is the need to distinguish among (1) ‘Axial Age’ cultures, (2) their subsequent intracivilizational developments, (3) the cultural forms precipitated out of their encounters and (4) the residues of these outcomes in later civilizational developments within various geographical settings. It is not the individual ‘seed bed’ societies alone which were crucial (Parsons, 1966), but the results of encounters among them which were decisive in providing the ‘intellectual capital’ needed for the making of the medieval and modern worlds.

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Faith Structures in Civilizational Perspective Similar remarks could be made about faith structures. Faiths emerge within sociologically defined settings. A faith structure may retain a collectivized religious consciousness and avoid fundamental divisions over the meaning of the faith, including those rationalizing developments which come with greater individuation. Also, faith structures emerge within differing civilizational settings. Antecedent sacro-magical structures provide climates which are variously receptive to the advance of faith structures. Moreover, prior or concomitant rationalizations of civilizational domains such as philosophy, logic, law and others offer varied structures of rationales available for the elaboration of emerging faith structures. Finally, the forms of integration achieved among faith structures and institutions such as the state, family, economy and so forth help define the later direction taken by faith structures. On this analytical basis, a set of distinctions among actual historical faith structures is needed. For example, Roman, Greek and Russian Christianity all emerged out of a common faith structure, early Christianity. In turn, this was only one of several precipitates of the encounters among Judaism, Hellenism and Rome.4 Yet the paths taken by these three religions varied greatly. This depended on the aforementioned degree of collectization, individuation, rationalization and amalgamation with other institutions. Thus, Russian Christianity adopted a highly collectivistic and radically kenotic variant of Christian faith and forged close links with the Tsarist state. In a civilizational setting almost entirely cut off from the sources of Ancient Greco-Roman rationalism (i.e. Greek philosophy, the sciences, Roman law and so forth), it was unsusceptible to further rationalization (Nielsen, 1989). The theme of expiation of sins and spiritual rebirth through suffering in the imitation of Christ remained central. In this respect, despite other differences, it was closer to Greek Christianity than to the heavily juridical and bureaucratic emphases emerging in the Roman Church, especially after the 12th century (Nielsen, 1990b). These themes remained prominent in the 19th century, even after widespread western commercial penetration of Russia. They are central to Dostoyevsky’s writings and played a major role in the Slavophile reaction to the West. They continue to operate even today in the post-Soviet era and may yet become an important global force. Similar questions might be asked about Islam, Buddhism and others from non-European orbits. How are they to be brought under the definition of a faith structure emphasizing individual and collective purgation of evil through conformity with a logos or world soul? Or are different categories important to these faith structures? What historical transformations have they undergone in their civilizational settings in relation to both prior sacromagical structures and in relation to potential later rationalizations of the faith? What are their distinctive ‘coefficients of expansion and internationalization’ (in Durkheim and Mauss’s phrase) in their spread as civilizational religions?

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The Rationalization of the World The study of rationalized structures of consciousness requires us to distinguish among the varieties of rationalization processes. The Weberian concepts of practical, theoretical, instrumental and substantive rationality (Kalberg, 1980) provide a useful starting point. However, this classification must be made more concrete by an analysis of concrete forms and historical phases of rationalization, some of which are noted elsewhere by Weber (1958: 13–31). The links between theoretical and formal rationality require special attention. In particular, we need to examine the variety of historically embedded images and ideas which have encouraged rationalized thought and conduct. Here, Nelson has provided critical leads which must be pursued further. I would emphasize at the outset that more recent rationalization processes depart greatly from the complex of ideas and institutions which were implicated in medieval European rationalization. The 12th- to 13thcentury developments emerged around the notion of conscience and the related institutions of the confessional, moral casuistry, and systematic theology as a prime science (Nelson, 1969, 1981). Nelson linked the 16thto 17th-century scientific revolution and Protestant Reformation to the quest for subjective certitude and objective certainty resulting from transformations in the aforementioned ideas and institutions (Nelson, 1967, 1968, 1981: Chs 3–4, 7–9). However, he also suggested the significance of key images such as the Book of Nature, the Book of Revelation, the machine of the world and others in the rise of modern worldviews and noted the increasing role played by metrical images in early modern European thought. He more briefly noted the deep historical roots of the image of creation by weight, measure and number in the aforementioned texts from Hellenistic Judaism (Nelson, 1981: 158–62, 244–58). Elsewhere, I have provided a detailed examination of the metrical images of creation and moral judgment in both the Wisdom of Solomon and Philo of Alexandria (Nielsen, 1996b). Indeed, as Nelson knew, these images from Wisdom had considerable currency in medieval thought and, I would add, have become important in a variety of ways in defining modern consciousness. In the process of shedding their original religious aura, they became central reference points for specific rationalization processes. Not only the mathematization of nature in modern science, but the modern mentality generally is possessed by the idea of determining thought and conduct by weight, measure, quantity and number. Images of scales and balances (especially balances of power) were already prominent in the Renaissance (Bozeman, 1960: 485–9). They were given greater specificity in William Petty’s 17th-century effort to found a ‘new science’ of political arithmetic for the comprehensive statistical guidance of public policy. In fact, Petty draws explicitly on the Wisdom of Solomon’s imagery of weight, measure and number to legitimate his new science (Letwin, 1963: 138–41). This idea is carried further in Bentham’s mathematical, moral calculus of costs and benefits in the service of the greatest happiness principle.

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It marches into the workplace with Frederick Winslow Taylor’s ‘scientific management’, more accurately called time–motion analysis, which itself is an expression of the inherited ‘Protestant ethic’ ideal in purely metrical forms. Taylor’s work was paralleled by new automated production mechanisms introduced in meat processing and automobile construction (that is, Fordism). Through the combined advances of the science of electromagnetism, prime mathematical logic and the technical capacity for miniaturization of mechanisms, the principle of rule by number is now built into a variety of electronically based cybernetic technologies. These have greatly enhanced the speed and power of information gathering and ‘imperative coordination’ of activity, once lodged in the cumbersome bureaucratic systems analyzed by Weber. As Foucault (1977) suggested, interinstitutional exchange of successful techniques for the management of large populations has led to the spread of surveillance methods from their original use with ‘extraneous’ populations into other ‘routine’ areas of life. As a result, institutions today increasingly resemble one another in their ‘total’ character (Goffman, 1961). These developments provide a glimpse of the new civilization of total surveillance and control by quantitative methods possible in the future, one already envisioned by Eugene Zamiatin in his anti-utopia, We. Acivilizational sociology requires us to recall the deeper historical roots of these modern developments. They emerge not only out of the demands of modern capitalism, the state, the military and other institutional spheres, but also from the historically rationalized structures of consciousness and the multiple historical layers of images and ideas which have repeatedly reinforced and spread that structure. Here, the role of religious ideas and images is far more decisive than might be imagined. An intercivilizational encounter between Judaism and Hellenism gave rise to Philo’s image of a cosmos governed by number and measure. It was repeated in the medieval period with new cosmic images resulting from intracivilizational retrievals of past ideas and the encounter of Christianity and Islam. In the early modern expansion of Europe and the rise of modernity, the intracivilizational reinforcement of new ideas by inherited religious images allowed the aforementioned figures to innovate entirely new rationalizing practices through the ‘fiction’ that they were merely extending older religious and moral ideas. At the center of this process are the twin notions of a total divine creation by number, measure and weight and, as Nelson has noted in a brilliant if undeveloped insight, the correlative duty of humankind to augment this creation through the further creation of mechanisms (Nelson, 1981: 162). The image of a world known and modified by number thus becomes the guiding thread of theory and practice, whose combined powers know no seeming limit. The global spread of these various techniques of rationalization has resulted in contemporary encounters within and between civilizations. Those defending faith and sacro-magical outlooks are pitted against proponents of advanced rationalization. In this process, intracivilizational conflicts on an increasingly global scale over the meaning

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of a rationalized structure of consciousness have resulted in competing conceptions of ‘rationality’ itself. While the outcomes of these conflicts are as yet unknown, there seems little doubt that a civilizational sociology focused on encounters and cultural developments over the longue durée will be needed to fully understand them and their historical roots.

Conclusions A sociology of civilizations will need to be gestated from a free global exchange of ideas from diverse minds. It will involve a veritable ‘dialogue across the centuries’ (Nelson, 1965) with the many civilizational pasts which lie behind us waiting to be discovered. Perhaps the anticipated intellectual gifts of such a new science may lead us to conclusions similar to those drawn by Marcel Mauss from his great study of gift exchange: ‘Societies have progressed in so far as they themselves, their subgroups, and lastly, the individuals in them, have succeeded in stabilizing relationships, giving, receiving, and finally, giving in return’. In the process, they have been able to ‘create mutual interests, giving mutual satisfaction, and, in the end, defend them without resort to arms’ and they have done so ‘without sacrificing themselves to one another. This is what tomorrow, in our so-called civilized world, classes and nations and individuals also must learn’ (Mauss, 1990: 82–3).

Notes 1. Toby Huff has collected many of Nelson’s most important statements published between 1964 and 1975 (Nelson, 1981), including the key theoretical essay on civilizational complexes and encounters (Nelson, 1973a). I have referred wherever possible to this edited volume. For Nelson’s own reflections on his intellectual itinerary, see Walter et al. (1985: Ch. 3). 2. In his study of usury, Nelson conducted a ‘genealogy of ideas’ delineating three stages of moral history in the West: tribal brotherhood, universal brotherhood and universal otherhood (Nelson, 1969: 135–7, 222; Nielsen, 1998: 327). The idea of rationalization does not appear in the index to the 1949 edition of The Idea of Usury, whereas the idea of rationales figures prominently in the ‘New Postscript’ to the second expanded edition of 1969. 3. Nelson’s study of usury already recognized this ambiguity in the historical development of morality. He saw the ‘tragedy’ of a moral history where the expansion of the ethical community from tribal brotherhood to a system of ‘universal otherhood’, with impersonal norms applying equally to all, occurs only through the decreased strength of the moral bond. 4. Two other important outcomes of these encounters should be noted: the elaboration of Roman jurisprudence through the adaptation of Greek philosophical rationales and the emergence in Judaism of a new moral dialectic and schools of textual interpretation culminating in the Mishnah and Talmuds and representing an intracivilizational polarity in opposition to the increasing dominance of Christianity and its Biblical exegesis.

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References Bozeman, Adda B. (1960) Politics and Culture in International History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Durkheim, Emile and Mauss, Marcel (1971) ‘Note on the Notion of Civilization’, trans B. Nelson, Social Research 38(4): 808–13. Eisenstadt, S.N. (1986) The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations. Albany: SUNY Press. Eisenstadt, S.N. (1992) Jewish Civilization. Albany: SUNY Press. Foucault, Michel (1965) Madness and Civilization, trans R. Howard. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, Michel (1977) Discipline and Punish, trans A. Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books. Goffman, Erving (1961) Asylums. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Huntington, Samuel (1998) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Touchstone Books. Kalberg, Stephen (1980) ‘Max Weber’s Types of Rationality: Cornerstones for the Analysis of Rationalization Processes in History’, American Journal of Sociology 85: 1145–79. Letwin, William (1963) The Origins of Scientific Economics. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor. Mauss, Marcel (1990) The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W.D. Halls. New York: W.W. Norton. Nelson, Benjamin (1965) ‘Dialogues Across the Centuries: Weber, Marx, Hegel, Luther’, in John Weiss (ed.) The Origins of Modern Consciousness, pp. 149–65. Detroit, IL: Wayne State University Press. Nelson, Benjamin (1967) ‘The Early Modern Revolution in Science and Philosophy: Fictionalism, Probabilism, Fideism, and Catholic Prophetism’, in R.S. Cohen and Marx Wartofsky (eds) Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 3, pp. 1–40. Dordrecht: Reidel. Nelson, Benjamin (1968) ‘Scholastic Rationales of “Conscience”, Early Modern Crises of Credibility, and the Scientific-Technocultural Revolutions of the 17th and 20th Centuries’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 7(2): 157–77. Nelson, Benjamin (1969) The Idea of Usury. From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood, 2nd edn. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Originally published 1949.) Nelson, Benjamin (1971) ‘The Medieval Canon Law of Contracts, Renaissance “Spirit of Capitalism”, and the Reformation “Conscience”: A Vote for Max Weber’, in Robert B. Palmer and Robert Hamerton-Kelly (eds) Philomathes: Studies and Essays in the Humanities in Memory of Philip Merlan, pp. 525–48. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Nelson, Benjamin (1973a) ‘Civilizational Complexes and Intercivilizational Encounters’, Sociological Analysis 34(2): 79–105. Nelson, Benjamin (1973b) ‘Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Its Origins, Wanderings and Foreseeable Futures’, in Charles Glock and Phillip Hammond (eds) Beyond the Classics?, pp. 71–103. New York: Harper and Row. Nelson, Benjamin (1974) ‘Max Weber’s “Author’s Introduction” (1920): A Master Clue to His Main Aims’, Sociological Inquiry 44(4): 269–78. Nelson, Benjamin (1976a) ‘On Orient and Occident in Max Weber’, Social Research 43(1): 114–29. Nelson, Benjamin (1976b) ‘Vico and Comparative Historical Civilizational Sociology’, Social Research 43(4): 874–81. Nelson, Benjamin (1981) On the Roads to Modernity: Conscience, Science and Civilizations. Selected Writings, ed. Toby E. Huff. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield. Nielsen, Donald A. (1984) ‘Charles Manson’s Family of Love: A Case Study of Anomism, Puerilism, and the Transmoral Conscience in Civilizational Perspective’, Sociological Analysis 45(4): 315–37. Nielsen, Donald A. (1989) ‘Sects, Churches and Economic Transformations in Russian and Western Europe’, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 2(4): 493–522. Nielsen, Donald A. (1990a) ‘Max Weber and the Sociology of Early Christianity’, in William

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H. Swatos Jr (ed.), Time, Place and Circumstance: Neo-Weberian Studies in Comparative Religious History, pp. 87–102. New York: Greenwood Press. Nielsen, Donald A. (1990b) ‘The Inquisition, Rationalization and Sociocultural Change in Medieval Europe’, in William H. Swatos Jr (ed.) Time, Place and Circumstance: NeoWeberian Essays in Religious History, pp. 107–22. New York: Greenwood Press. Nielsen, Donald A. (1991a) ‘Natural Law and Civilizations: Images of “Nature”, Intracivilizational Polarities, and the Emergence of Heterodox Ideals’, Sociological Analysis 2(1): 55–76. Nielsen, Donald A. (1991b) ‘After World Systems Theory: Concerning Janet Abu- Lughod’s Before European Hegemony’, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 4(4): 481–97. Nielsen, Donald A. (1996a) ‘The Question of Max Weber Today’, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 10(2): 375–90. Nielsen, Donald A. (1996b) ‘La Misura divina: creazione e retribuzione nel libro della Sapienza e in Filone. Aspetti dell’incontro fra giudaismo ed ellenismo’, Religioni e Società 11(24): 9–21. Nielsen, Donald A. (1998) ‘Benjamin Nelson (1911–1977)’, in William H. Swatos Jr (ed.) Religion and the Social Sciences: A New Encyclopedia, pp. 327–8. Thousand Oaks, CA: Altamira Press. Nielsen, Donald A. (1999) Three Faces of God: Society, Religion and the Categories of Totality in the Philosophy of Emile Durkheim. Albany: SUNY Press. Nielsen, Donald A. (forthcoming) ‘A Civilizational Encounter in the Era of Early Christianity’, in Anthony Blasi et al. (eds) Handbook of the Social Sciences and Early Christianity. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1989) On the Genealogy of Morals, trans W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. Parsons, Talcott (1966) Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Polanyi, Karl (1968) ‘Our Obsolete Market Mentality’, in George Dalton (ed.) Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi, pp. 59–78. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor. (Originally published 1947.) Walter, E.V. et al., eds (1985) Civilizations East and West: A Memorial Volume for Benjamin Nelson. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Weber, Max (1958) ‘Author’s Introduction’, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans T. Parsons, pp. 13–31. New York: Scribner’s.

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10 Civilizations as Zones of Prestige and Social Contact Randall Collins

A civilization may be usefully conceived as a zone of prestige. It has a center or multiple centers, places where culturally impressive activities go on, places which attract attention. Impressiveness radiates outward from a civilizational core, attracting people inward. They come to renew or confirm their identities as members of a civilization; they come also as sojourners, students or visitors, attracted by a civilization’s magnetism, its cultural charisma, which they wish in some measure to share. Thus a zone of civilizational prestige is also a pattern of social contacts, a flow of people and their attention across space. For this reason, civilizations are more than societies or states; that is to say, more than social structures with boundaries. Civilizations can be located within states and in some degree are dependent upon them, but a civilization as a zone of prestige radiates outward with stronger and weaker degrees of attraction for people at varying distances. These distances, moreover, are not mere physical distances; they are network patterns, like strands of a spider web, which carry civilizational prestige through particular channels which may cross over alien civilizational zones and constitute ties penetrating within them. There are two social aspects to the zone of civilizational attraction. In one aspect, people living outwards from the civilizational centers take their identities from them, and occasionally travel to the centers or refer to them for symbolic purposes. For example American schoolchildren travel to Washington, DC or to Philadelphia to see the monuments representing the national government or its founding. In the other aspect, people beyond the territory of a civilizational zone are aware of a distant civilization, and may conceive an image of it as attractive if also mysterious or different. These distant people too are drawn by the magnetism of a zone of cultural prestige, sometimes making visits, or contacting travelers who represent that civilization in their own midst. I attempt to show, in the historical examples that follow, that civilizations have always had both characteristics. The two aspects, then, are civilizations as zones of loyalty and social identification; and civilizations as networks of attraction at a long distance, from one civilizational zone to another. My approach to civilizations is to

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stress their character as networks of social action, and as historical phenomena. It is less useful to define a civilization as a culture per se, that is as a pattern, which governs beliefs and institutions. This is the notion of a cultural blueprint, a set of rules, concepts or values, a code which exists over and above people’s behavior. The disadvantage of regarding a civilization as a culture in this sense is that it carries the implication that the pattern is an enduring essence; even if we speak of civilizations as rising and falling, appearing and disappearing on the historical stage, the very concept of culture as a noun, a thing-like entity, constrains our analysis by giving the impression that a Platonic form crystallizes in the historical world at a given time and place, until after a sufficiently long passage of years, it is replaced by some other cultural blueprint. In contrast, the conception of civilization as a zone of prestige directs our attention both to social activity and to cultural variety. A civilizational zone has centers; it flourishes or fades to the extent that activities take place there, which promote its magnetism. Civilizations are not static, but active; in terms of neo-Durkheimian sociology, they are built around places where social rituals are carried out at the higher degrees of intensity, generating emotional energy and social charisma. They generate symbolic objects, some of them verbal and literary, others artistic and embodied in physical artifacts that people travel to see. We can study civilizations sociologically by studying the activities that raise and lower the level of civilizational charisma and the degree and distance of its attraction. The other advantage of approaching civilizations as prestige zones rather than as cultural codes is to see there are typically a variety of cultural patterns that make up a civilization. Insofar as civilizations are centers of creativity, historically they have typically been shaped by rival positions, variations in stance within a focus of attention. I attempt here to demonstrate these points with historical examples. The analysis of civilizations given here is drawn from my work on the comparative history of philosophies and the social networks which have carried them (Collins, 1998). Civilizations are, of course, more than philosophies, but using this material gives us some detailed empirical material showing the network patterns of one form of civilizational activity. Philosophy is one of the oldest roles of the specialist in ideas; the philosopher or sage is the general-purpose intellectual, a socially recognized role that emerged in all the literate civilizations. Over the centuries, other roles have split off from the philosopher, the various scientific specialists, historians, literary critics, textual scholars, and, in more recent centuries, social scientists. Philosophers are not the only long-standing intellectual role; there are also poets and other literary creators, and farther afield other cultural specialists such as artists and musicians. Nevertheless, analyzing philosophers as social networks can provide an insight that might be extended to other areas of cultural production as well. These are the connections among masters and pupils, as well as colleagues and rivals, those

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who have worked together in intellectual schools or movements and those who have argued against one another. In all the great world civilizations, there are similar structural patterns in which creativity has taken place in social networks of philosophers; these patterns suggest that network patterns may also be found in other kinds of culture-producing roles, literary, musical, artistic and so on. The key generalization that I would like to make is that civilizational centers attract students and other kinds of visitors, some of them from extremely long distances and across the borders of other civilizational zones. There is a flow inward toward centers of prestige, which we can trace by the method of social networks. Conversely, civilizational centers send out teachers and missionaries into the hinterlands; some to more peripheral parts of the same civilizational zone, some to foreign civilizations. Both processes, the attraction of students and tourists inward, and the propagation of teachers and missionaries outward, manifest the pattern of a zone of prestige. After a series of analytical generalizations, I examine Islamic civilization, with an eye to showing that it, too, has been a typical civilization with multiple competing networks and distant connections, not at all the free-standing, monolithic and unchanging essence depicted both by its fundamentalists and its external critics; and I suggest that this continues to be the case in the relationship between Islamic and western civilizations as a zone of prestige and network contact in the late 20th and 21st centuries.

Ingredients of Civilizational Creativity: Rival Positions Intersecting at a Center of Attention What creates the ‘magnet’ of civilizational attraction, this sense of ‘where the cultural action is’, which radiates out to the hinterlands and even to distant civilizational zones? Judging from the example of philosophical networks, the main ingredients are the intersection of several competing positions or schools of thought, meeting at a common center or at a few such centers linked to each other. We see this pattern in the networks of philosophical teachers and pupils from generation to generation, and in the contemporaneous contacts among eminent colleagues and rivals in the same generation. Centers of civilizational creativity have always been a few main cities or other meeting places (at times, monasteries or universities); although one city may be paramount, it is creative only because it is the point of intersection where rival positions shape themselves vis-a-vis one another. Civilizational creativity is not produced in uniformity but in diversity. This has not taken the form of the officially sanctioned tolerance or indeed imposition of a division of protected spheres of influence that characterize modern ‘political correctness’, but has been an active rivalry of debates, in which one position builds on another and against another. All the great creative periods of civilizations had this character of debates among rival positions; they were held together by making up a field of

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mutually constituting intellectual forces, an attention space which the intellectual factions divided in relation to one another. We may take as an example the centuries during which India was most strongly a magnet for surrounding civilizational zones, and Indian philosophy and religion were exported at great distance. During the period of high prestige of Buddhist civilization in India, especially between the fifth and seventh centuries CE, Chinese philosophers traveled to India to acquire Buddhist texts; they brought back with them the philosophies which had recently been created and were then being taught at the great cultural centers, especially the monastery-university at Nalanda (near Pataliputra or Patna on the lower Ganges). The prestige of the Buddhist heartland had an attraction even at this enormous distance, which under the travel conditions of the time involved a journey of several years or even decades. One of the most famous of the Chinese Buddhist philosophers of the T’ang dynasty, Hsüan-tsang, made his reputation by just such a journey; its charisma even carried over into folk culture, becoming transformed into a magical adventure story (later known as the novel Monkey, or Journey to the West). This period of high Buddhist intellectual prestige in India was a time, not of uniformity, but of intense intellectual debate, and indeed strife both among and within religious factions. Buddhism dominated the best organized structures of cultural production: the monasteries and their offshoot into monastic universities; but it was increasingly challenged by a newly selfconscious Hinduism, based no longer on the traditions of village Brahmins but on networks of Hindu thinkers who were now formulating their own philosophical schools, using the abstract ideas built up over generations of debate in the Buddhist centers. The golden age of medieval Indian philosophy (which was also a golden age of Indian literature generally) was a time of multiple rivalries: Hindu vs Buddhist above all, but further ramified by rivalries among various Buddhist schools and among various branches under the Hindu banner. As I have argued elsewhere (Collins, 1998: Ch. 5) the importance of these rivalries can be shown in detail by the way in which they shaped alliances which synthesized philosophical positions, and oppositions which sharpened the tools of debate and produced new levels of abstraction and reflexivity in ontological and epistemological conceptions. The golden period of the Gupta dynasty and following centuries was made creative because these rivalries were sustained by resources that kept many factions alive. Equally significantly, the networks of the rival Buddhist and Hindu schools were not isolated from each other, but met at the great centers of intellectual action, and some individuals crossed from one network to another carrying ideas with them. It was the energy of this intellectual conflict focused within famous intellectual centers by interconnected networks which cast its glow over far horizons and attracted the attention of intellectuals in China, some of whom felt impelled to travel to find out what was going on and eventually to bring the cultural news back home. In the conflict of Hindu and Buddhist religious orders, and hence of rival controls over the means of cultural production, the balance of institutional

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power and material endowments eventually shifted to the Hindu side. But even as the Buddhist torch dimmed, it still attracted another wave of students from a remote periphery. In the 8th through 10th centuries, sojourners from Tibet came to study at Nalanda and other Buddhist centers in India. This example shows another aspect of zones of civilizational prestige; for in these centuries, Buddhist culture and its organizational bases in India were gradually being displaced by Hindu institutions, and after 1000 CE largely disappeared from India. By the last generations of the Buddhist monastery-universities, the principal masters teaching in India were foreigners from Tibet. This too is a pattern often seen at long-standing centers of intellectual attraction (one may think of the diverse national origins of famous intellectuals in Paris or in England during the 20th century); just what makes a center of cultural prestige is its magnetism at great distance, which tends to transform its networks into ones with highly cosmopolitan collections of recruits. In the case of medieval Indian civilization, the zone of Mahayana Buddhist culture was transferred north; the lineage descendents of the original Tibetan students in India now were the leaders of their own monasterycenters which propagated from a smaller zone of prestige in Tibet to its environs. Centers of civilizations prestige are not fixed, either geographically or in content; over the centuries (and sometimes over the decades), the center of attraction can shift from one branch of a network to another.

Civilizational Importing and Breaking Off Importing Thus far we have viewed the zone of civilizational prestige from its center; let us notice some patterns of how this relationship of cultural attraction looks from the side of the sojourners and importers. These dynamics are nicely illustrated by the connections between China and Japan. The early institutions of Japanese civilization were largely shaped by Chinese missionaries and teachers migrating outward to Japan, and by Japanese students visiting China. Some important parts of this transmission were carried by Buddhists; in this way, Japanese society in the seventh through ninth centuries CE acquired a national religion, a writing system, the institution of monasteries, religious ceremonials and a tradition of philosophical texts. Other parts of Japanese civilization resulted from transmitting nonBuddhist Chinese culture: these too introduced institutions, rituals and ideas, including the political structure of the Chinese state with a reigning emperor surrounded by a court bureaucracy; at several historical periods, both early and late, Confucian and neo-Confucian connections shaped Japanese culture. Here we see several patterns in the dynamics of zones of civilizational prestige. First, not just ideas, or even religions, but entire forms of social structure may be imported through these networks. Cultural contacts carry

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economic and political structures with them; the extent to which this happens is historically variable, and roughly speaking it is contingent upon the relative economic and political power of the exporting civilization visa-vis the importing zone. In the case of India, vis-a-vis China, for example, there was no emulation of Indian political or economic institutions along with the import of Buddhist philosophies, except insofar as the Buddhist monasteries surreptitiously unfolded market dynamics based on the material organization of expanding religious participation. Second, importing may go on repeatedly, over many centuries, and bring in different strands of influence from the neighboring high-prestige civilization (for example, Chinese civilization was not merely Buddhist or Confucian, but a combination of these and other elements). Third, in some historical periods a new civilization builds out of a combination of imported and domestic elements, and on these occasions this new civilization deliberately attempts to break off or at least greatly reduce its ties to the civilization on which it has been dependent. This process was particularly strong in Japan in the Tokugawa period (especially the 18th and 19th centuries) when the National Learning movement flourished, advocating breaking cultural ties with China in favor of indigenous Japanese culture. But in fact, the culture of 18th- and 19thcentury Japan was a complex mixture, and the National Learning movement itself was part of the field of forces which had grown up in interaction with Chinese elements; even movements of intercivilizational break or hostility owe their shape to interaction with the civilization they are opposing.

Intercivilizational Hostility This last example brings us to the larger question of the circumstances under which relationships of civilizational prestige and attraction lead to a cultural ideology which explicitly rejects a relationship which now becomes seen as one of demeaning cultural dependence. This pattern characterized much of the late 20th century, in the shift from European/ western-oriented modernizers to postcolonial, anti-colonial attitudes attacking cultural imperialism. The fact that such cultural shifts from emulation to hostility have coincided with the breaking up of empires and the ideological consciousness of resisting economic domination makes it easy to suppose that the formula is simply that cultural dominance goes along with geopolitical imperialism and economic hegemony; hence cultural resistance is a means of carrying out the political and economic struggle by cultural means. But the example of Tokugawa Japan vis-a-vis China (and the earlier case of indigenous Chinese resistance to the import of Indian Buddhism) shows that cultural resistance can occur in the absence of a struggle against geopolitical or economic hegemony. Conversely, a struggle for military liberation or economic upward mobility may occur without a concomitant rejection of imports from a zone of civilizational prestige; the case of India

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in the period of the independence movement from the British Empire illustrates to some degree the former, and Japan after the Second World War illustrates the latter. On the whole, a nationalistic struggle to catch up militarily is likely to involve a good deal of emulation of the geopolitical hegemons, however hated they may be; and the same applies to economic catching up. Thus there is a distinctly cultural pattern of according prestige to a foreign civilizational zone and of rejecting such prestige. The question is to show how purely civilizational or cultural attraction turns into civilizational repulsion. The case of Tokugawa Japan suggests a theoretical generalization. Japan of this historical period has become famous as a society closed off against the world; western historians think of Japan as having closed its borders to the West, and above all to penetration by Christian missionaries and by incipient western imperial expansion. But this is an overly Eurocentric interpretation. The main concern of Tokugawa religious policy was not so much controlling the penetration of Christianity, but to regain secular government control over the Buddhist monasteries. The regulation of popular religion under central government administration was a political policy aimed at breaking the power of the great Buddhist temples; the exclusion of Christianity was largely a side-effect. The Tokugawa regime not only confiscated the property of the great monasteries, it also promoted a rival religion among the samurai elite: namely Confucianism, imported from China. Thus the elaborate educational system promoted by the samurai lords under Tokugawa quasi-absolutism took as its initial contents the schools of neo-Confucian philosophy which had developed in China in preceding centuries. The tightening of central government control in Tokugawa Japan had the effect, initially, of renewing Japanese orientation towards Chinese culture. To be sure, this was only a shift in focus, since the Buddhist lineages also directly tied back into their Chinese ancestors. For a number of centuries, Japanese high culture had been largely Chinese, not only in religion and philosophy, but in literature as well. Poetry and other respectable highculture forms of writing were done in Chinese; a sideeffect was that Japanese poetry and literature was left largely to women, who thereby tended to dominate by default purely Japanese literary culture while men focused on the more prestigious Chinese literary styles. During the course of the 17th century, however, the main networks of Japanese intellectuals began to include a school of thought which attacked Chinese culture, and began to extol Japanese culture as superior. This happened in stages; first came the Ancient Learning school, which attacked the currently fashionable neo-Confucian schools as not true Confucianism. The Ancient Learning school thus operated something like the Renaissance humanists, in simultaneously advocating a return to the ancient wisdom of an imported civilization, and freedom from subordination to the dogmas of a more recent center of cultural prestige. In Japan, this freedom from merely passively receiving the high-prestige culture of neo-Confucian China was radicalized in the following generations,

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as a nationalistic National Learning school emerged. This extolled Japanese literature and ancient Japanese religion as superior to Chinese thought, rejecting not only Buddhist but Confucian traditions. The National Learning school was no mere atavism; its scholars were careful historians and literary experts, opening up new areas of research as well as new levels of philosophical sophistication, resembling neoorthodox theology and historical philology in contemporaneous 18th- and 19th-century Europe. Moreover, the National Learning school was only one of an array of rival schools – rival branches of the Tokugawa intellectual networks – which simultaneously innovated on many fronts. The older Confucian schools, liberated from Chinese precedents by the Ancient Learning school’s critiques, developed numerous innovations in philosophy, economics, legal thought, mathematics and other fields; the result was to make the middle generations of the Tokugawa equivalent to the Enlightenment period in Europe. I have argued that a movement for cultural or civilizational autonomy is not a mere reflex of geopolitical and economic relationships; it has distinctly cultural dynamics. These dynamics are based on the social networks of intellectuals and the material organizations which provide a base for cultural production. The very nature of cultural dependence is that intellectuals from a peripheral zone travel to a prestigious civilizational center to become pupils and followers, sojourners who carry those lineages back to their homes. Relatedly, the center sends out missionaries, or teachers who make their careers carrying civilizational culture to eager recipients on the periphery. The Tokugawa example suggests that when a formerly peripheral zone builds up an organization of its intellectual world that supports its own local creativity, new factions emerge in the intellectual attention space which are no longer directly dependent upon the chains of imports. Local intellectuals now make prestigious careers through local patterns of creativity; they no longer need the imports. Since conflict among rival positions energizes intellectual action, the old importers become fair game for attack. New local positions are created in the process of attacking the imported positions (which does not exclude the former from incorporating many elements from those they attack, or building upon them reflexively to new levels of sophistication). What are the social conditions of intellectual production, then, which promote local creativity and thereby drive out dependence upon foreign imports? These are the same structural conditions that promote creativity everywhere, and hence were manifested in the earlier distant center of civilizational prestige. These are the existence of material bases which allow rival schools of thought to organize, to maintain themselves as networks of masters and pupils across the generations, building up accumulated sophistication in their arguments, while directly confronting the networks of rival schools in a few centers of intellectual action. The great Buddhist/Hindu networks of debaters at Nalanda had this structure, which attracted sojourners from such places as Ch’ang-an in T’ang China. Later, after Japanese sojourners traveled to the places in China where networks

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had become creative through similar structures, yet another set of networks in Tokugawa Japan built up their own web of debates in the rival schools at Kyoto, Edo and Mito. Once the peripheral zone acquires its own social structures for local cultural creativity at a high level of energy, they become ‘where the action is’ and the old civilizational center at a distance becomes denigrated as foreign. This denigration of the foreign center is strongest during the early generations in which the break is taking place; once local intellectual action becomes firmly institutionalized as its own zone of prestige, hostility toward the old civilizational hegemon becomes muted and may even turn into historical curiosity or nostalgia. To say that these processes of civilizational magnetism and its rejection in civilizational autonomy movements are distinctive of struggles over geopolitical and economic hegemony, is to point to the careers of cultureproducers as the place where cultural admiration and cultural hostility are shaped. It is because intellectuals (including religious intellectuals) at a certain point can make better careers and reap more fame as local innovators rejecting foreign culture than they could in continuing to import the foreign cultural news, that intercivilizational relations shift from admiration to hostility. It is factions in the culture-producing networks that have the strongest interests in intercivilizational imports and exports, both during career opportunities which promote such contacts and those which denigrate and prohibit them.

Where Civilizational Attraction Outweighs Geopolitical and Economic Hegemony There is another way to demonstrate the extent to which civilizational attraction is a reflex of geopolitical and economic relations or is autonomous from them. Most of our intellectual frames tend to conflate these dimensions. It is conventional to regard the great imperial states as reigning civilizations, with cultural dominance following in the wake of victorious armies. But although the two may be connected in particular historical instances, it remains to be shown how geopolitical power translates into civilizational prestige, voluntarily attracting would-be students to the prestigious centers of cultural activity. Similarly, economically centered models such as world system theory encourage the assumption that hegemonic position in the world economy leads to domination of the means of cultural production. To handle this question in regard to all the many forms of culture would take a more elaborate analysis than can be provided here. I confine my argument to showing that neither geopolitical nor economic hegemony automatically creates a center of specifically civilizational prestige. We can show this two ways: historically, there are striking instances where a weak, conquered, or economically lagging region is nevertheless the center of civilizational prestige, and receives culture-seeking sojourners from the geopolitical/ economic hegemons. Theoretically, I show that the conditions which

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promote civilizational creativity, at least in the specific instance of intellectual creativity and hence prestige, are different from the conditions which promote geopolitical and economic hegemony. On the historical side, I note two examples: Ancient Greece and 20th century France. In the period 600 BCE–400 CE, Greece and its settlements became a zone of civilizational prestige, around such centers as Athens and Alexandria. Nevertheless, Greek military power was not especially strong. Greek cultural centers built up on the fringe of a much more powerful state, the Persian Empire, which temporary Greek alliances managed to just fend off from conquering the entire Greek culture zone. After 350 BCE, and for several centuries thereafter, armies who came from the periphery of the Greek region (the Macedonians) and who were attracted by Greek cultural prestige to identify themselves as Greek, were able to expand eastward and southward; but these were confronted again by a renewed Iranian state (the Parthian and then Sassanid Empires) on the east, while from the west a more powerful empire consolidated from Rome which eventually took over the Greek zone of the Mediterranean. What is analytically interesting about this case is that although Roman military organization conquered Greece, Greek civilization retained its prestige, and reached out to absorb Rome. We can see this in the narrower arena of networks of philosophers; the famous Roman philosophers, such as Cicero, were students who went to Athens or elsewhere in Greece and brought the Greek learning into Italy; or teachers from the Greek cities (an example is Plotinus moving from Alexandria to set up a school in Rome). The gradient of the networks shows that the Greek zone of civilizational prestige was largely intact throughout the time from the rise to the fall of the Roman military empire. What are the sociological reasons why a civilization may retain its prestige and its network centrality even after it is eclipsed by the superior military and economic power of another world region? Part of the answer is implicit in what I have already argued. A region becomes a civilizational center, a zone of prestige attracting outsiders, because it has the social structures which promote intellectual creativity: organizational bases for a small number of opposing schools of thought, lineages which are built up over several generations and which intersect with one another in creative rivalry at a few centers of intellectual action. Greece built up such networks in the period of the early city-states, and institutionalized them in a system of higher education which maintained creative rivalry from many centuries. Rome never built up the same sorts of structures and thus remained dependent upon Greek imports. A powerful state does not thereby automatically become a magnet of civilizational attraction, even if the policy of state rulers is to try to aggrandize itself culturally. Nor does civilizational prestige follow from economic centrality. A modern instance is the high cultural prestige of French civilization (at least within the world of intellectuals) in the latter 19th and 20th centuries, a period in which France had fallen to the level of a weak military

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power, and never occupied a central position in the capitalist world system. Indeed, French intellectual creativity and prestige had been extremely high, even during the era of the German occupation in the First World War; and outside of the disciplines of natural science (whose world centers have been largely elsewhere), in the latter 20th century Parisian intellectual culture set the fashions that have been emulated throughout the richer and more militarily powerful parts of the world. The means of cultural production in France during this time were organized in a manner which created intellectual products uniquely capable of commanding attention in international intellectual markets, in philosophy, literary theory and overlapping branches of the social sciences. Briefly put: the advantages in French cultural production which have given it more centrality, more of the sense of ‘where the action is’ than the university-based systems of the USA, Britain and elsewhere result from the distinctive social organization of intellectual life in Paris. There networks of intellectuals involved in academic subjects, literary life, high-culture entertainment, journalism and politics intersect to a degree that contrasts with their relative segregation in the USA and elsewhere; and this intersection has undergirded the production of the hypersophisticated, literary-cum-intellectual culture, with its tone of political engagé, which has become the prestigious intellectual culture of the period since 1940. (On these structural bases, see Bourdieu [1988, 1993], Collins [1998, Ch. 14].) The autonomy of civilizational prestige from geopolitical and economic hegemony is no mere feature of past history, but characterizes the intellectual culture of the world in which we live.

The Case of Islamic Civilization as a Zone of Prestige and Network Contact With these analytical principles in hand, we are in a position to consider a major challenge to intercivilizational contacts in the contemporary world. In recent decades there have been widespread tendencies to regard the Islamic world as standing apart from the normal processes of civilizations. From within, fundamentalists have invoked a changeless essence of original Islam, which is to be maintained and defended against the corrosions of western culture; from without, a typical attitude is to view the Islamic world as distinctively reactionary. It is worthwhile to counter these conceptions by showing briefly that the patterns of civilizational dynamics as networks of prestige, attraction and repulsion operate in the case of Islamic civilization much as they do elsewhere. Islamic civilization takes its name from its dominant religion, but there is a complex relationship between civilization and religion. As we have seen in the examples of India, China and Japan, there are zones of civilizational prestige in which there are several religions; and the interaction among them may produce emergent forms of cultural and intellectual life.

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Religious institutions have been historically central, especially in the early formative period. Religious action, especially new religions, have formed the most impressive center of attention; the social charisma of a civilization is often at first the zone of prestige radiated outward from a religious center. Religious institutions have also provided the material organization for cultural production: places for meeting, schools, occupations for intellectuals, specialists in the care and interpretation of texts. Thus the emergent networks of intellectuals and their ideas in philosophy, science and other topics have often grown from religious organizations such as mosques, monasteries, temples and churches. Religious organization has not been the only place in which intellectual activities have developed; in the ‘Abbasid caliphate, for example, networks developed around court and family patronage as well as in the schools of theological discussion at the mosques in Baghdad and Basra. Historically, we find that intellectual life reaches its height of creative activity where these various networks grow together into a single zone of discussion and argument. The interacting components may be religious and non-religious networks, a multiplicity of religions, or variants and sects within the same religion. Religious institutions have played a key part in the intellectual communities which have built the emergent character of a civilizational zone of prestige. The civilizational prestige of the Islamic world did not develop only as the prestige of Islam as a religion, but in the formation of centers of cultural attraction, in the eighth and ninth centuries CE (second and third centuries AH), where the schools of intellectual activity formed at Baghdad and Basra in Iraq; in later centuries network centers had moved out to Rayy, Nishapur and Shiraz in Iran, as well as to Cairo, Damascus and Samarkand. These schools attracted students from both short and long distances within Dar-al-Islam, the community in which Islam held sway, but also bringing in participants from other cultural regions and religions: in the early period, Sabians, Christians, adherents of the pagan Greek philosophical cults, Zoroastrians, Jews. The period of high civilizational prestige of the ‘Abbasid caliphate was one in which Islamic civilization formed, not only around Muslim institutions and ideas, but as the interaction of Muslim intellectuals with a variety of other cultural traditions: Christians, Sabians, Zoroastrians, Jews and others. The intellectual community had created a larger culture as well, comprising science, medicine, logic and philosophical argument. At its core was Islam as a set of religious institutions and ideas, but also a civilization that attracted attention even from zones of rival religions. During the 11th and 12th centuries CE (fifth and sixth centuries AH), the period of the military eclipse of the Umayyad caliphate and its aftermath at Cordoba, there took place an efflorescence of creative activity in the philosophical networks in Muslim Spain. Much of this activity was also in science and in grammatical studies, but let us subsume these specialities for convenience into the rubric of philosophy, since they all took place in the same network of persons. Here it was especially striking that religious identities

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were various, but were held together in a larger network of cultural interaction. Spanish Islamic civilization comprised both Muslims and Jews; nevertheless this was not an instance of intercivilizational contact (that is, external contact among separate civilizations), but rather Spanish Jews were part of the Islamic civilization. Spanish Jews wrote their philosophy and astronomy for the most part in Arabic, and their topics and concepts were those which the Muslim intellectuals were currently dealing with. In specific instances, we can point to actual network connections among the Spanish Jews and Muslims of the intellectual community. So far what I have described is a pattern within Islamic civilization in Spain, an encompassing zone of cultural prestige made up out of several religious components. Added to this was the arrival of students from an external civilization, the Roman Catholic Christendom of Northern Europe. The meeting place was primarily at Toledo, where Christian intellectuals arrived in order to translate texts from Arabic into Latin for propagation to the north. Christendom was just then beginning to form its own zone of civilizational prestige; its intellectual centers were crystallizing in northern France, at Paris and Chartres. It was largely from these centers that the network of Christian philosophers sent out pupils to Spain. This is the same pattern we have seen elsewhere, such as the Japanese pupils who studied in China, then took back Buddhist or Confucian philosophies to Japan. It also resembles the sending out of missionaries, such as the Indian Buddhists who migrated north to China and who were received there as propagators of highly respected wisdom; in this case, Muslim and Jewish intellectuals from the centers of the Islamic civilizational prestige zone in southern Spain went north, to Toledo or Barcelona, because there was an eager audience for their work. Elsewhere (Collins, 1998: 374, 449), I have argued that the process of transmitting to a receptive foreign audience stimulates creativity, that the activity of exporting ideas stimulates the ideaexporters to further developments. This appears to have been happening in Spain, for the high points of creativity in Spanish Islamic philosophy occurred at just the time when the receptive networks at Toledo were most interested in transmitting these ideas further north into Christendom. In conventional western history of medieval philosophy, this episode is described as the rediscovery of the manuscripts of the Ancient Greeks; the Islamic philosophers are regarded as mere custodians, transmitters of longforgotten Greek texts. In fact, what was transmitted north into the networks of the Christian schools and universities, at Chartres, Paris and elsewhere, were the creative developments made by the Islamic philosophers. Medieval Christian philosophy was swept by two strong waves of influence from the Islamic philosophers (here again I simplify, omitting consideration of the propagation of Islamic mathematics, astronomy and other sciences which tended to come along with the philosophy). To make the point succinctly, the first wave was the reception of Ibn Sina (Avicenna), the combination of neo-Platonism with kalam (rational theology) worked out in Iran during the 12th century CE (sixth century AH), and which became a central

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topic of debate in the Christian universities around 1200 CE. The second wave centered on the reception of Ibn Rushd’s (Averroës) synthesis, originally created around 1190 CE, which became the rallying point of a strong, even fanatical movement of Averroists in French and Italian universities from the 1260s and continuing for two centuries. The position of Averroës is sometimes glibly summarized, in the overly Greek-centric histories, as the rediscovery of Aristotle, but this is to miss the originality of Ibn Rushd in crafting an interpretation of Aristotle which separated him from the until-then dominant synthesis of neo-Platonism, and in constructing a cosmology that was also a cosmopolitan religion of reason appealing to philosophers of all the monotheistic faiths. It had been developed in the cosmopolitan Spanish network of Muslims and Jews, and it was this cosmopolitan outlook on religious matters that was such a powerful import into Christendom. Averroism in Christian Europe became an intellectual force, challenging the narrower doctrinal orthodoxy of Christianity. It played a central role in the emerging variety and clash of positions in the Christian universities which began to generate a European civilization: a zone of intellectual prestige that had grown up under Christian auspices, but which now reached beyond religion to become a creatively emergent field of intellectual activity. In this case of intercivilizational interaction between Islamic Spain and European Christendom, we find evidence of the pattern already noted, that a civilizational prestige zone builds beyond a single religion into a larger cultural activity. Whereas in the case previously noted, the pluralism of ingredients that went into the early Islamic prestige zone of the ‘Abbasid period, this process took place inside the heartland of the civilizational territory, in the Spanish case the process of contact and transmission across civilizational borders generated a new zone of creativity that rose over and above religious identities: first in Spain itself, then by introducing greater pluralism and fostering emergent creativity within European Christendom. In sum, all the main features of civilizational networks are seen in the case of Islamic civilization. First, it became a center of cultural prestige precisely in those periods when it supported a network structure of rival schools of thought, intensely debating in a few centers of intellectual action; especially in the formative period at the height of the ‘Abassid caliphate, these schools consisted of several Christian sects, Zoroastrians, ancient pagan cults, as well as rival schools of Muslim law; it was the debates and syntheses among these which drove Islamic philosophy to high levels of creative abstraction and reflexive concern with ontological and epistemological problems. Again during the golden age of Islamic philosophy in Spain, Muslim lineages intersected with the several factions of Jewish intellectual life, producing yet further creative philosophies, and attracting the attention of Christian intellectuals from the north. Second, the Spanish episode is only one instance where we see the classic pattern of sojourners attracted to the centers of intellectual action, and the

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related pattern of missionaries and teachers from the center migrating to peripheries to spread their high-prestige ideas to eager audiences; we see this as well in the Sufi movements which spread from the Mesopotamian heartland north and east as far as Anatolia, India and central Asia. Third, Islamic intellectual networks were themselves intercivilizational importers during the early generations of the ‘Abbasid period, according prestige to Greek culture brought in especially by Christian scholars, as well as to ideas from Persia and India. The early achievements of Islamic philosophy were syntheses and developments along new lines of opposition developed by intellectual factions as this material was confronted and combined with indigenous developments arising from debates among the Muslim schools. As Islamic intellect took off into its own period of philosophical creativity, there were movements attacking dependence upon alien, especially Greek, thought; the sophisticated epistemological critiques of al-Ghazali (c. 1090 CE) and later of Ibn Taymiyah (c. 1300) are thus instances of the principle that an intellectual community which has taken off into its own sustained creativity breaks its ties to foreign civilizational imports which once got it going. We also see here that these attacks are not simply nativist no-nothingism. Insofar as they carry on debates within a field of intellectual oppositions, they add to the level of sophisticated critique within that field and can pave the way for yet further intellectual discovery. Fourth, intellectual creativity and civilizational prestige are autonomous of geopolitical and economic hegemony. There may be coincidence in time, the ‘Abbasid caliphate was a relative high point in all dimensions, but the connection may only be contingent. In short, Islamic civilization has been as dynamic as European, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, or any other civilization. All are structurally akin, since all are produced by the same sociological patterns of cultural production. No civilizational zone of prestige has ever stood alone; all have been shaped, and have shaped others, through the dynamics of long-distance networks of attraction and at times of repulsion. There is every reason to believe that future historians, looking back on the relations between the Islamic world and the West in the late 20th and 21st centuries, will see a continuation of these networks of relationship shaping their civilizations.

References Abu-Lughod, Janet (1989) Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350. New York: Oxford University Press. Arrighi, Giovanni (1994) The Long Twentieth Century. London: Verso. Bourdieu, Pierre (1988) Homo Academicus. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (1993) The Field of Cultural Production. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Chase-Dunn, Christopher (1989) Global Formation: Structures of the World Economy. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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Collins, Randall (1998) The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Collins, Randall (1999) Macro-History: Essays in Sociology of the Long Run. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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III. HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE ESSAYS 11 Chinese Encounters with Other Civilizations Cho-Yun Hsu

Introduction In Chinese history, there were at least two cases in which foreign influences brought to Chinese culture had such a great impact that the host culture was fundamentally changed. One of these cases was the introduction of Buddhism into China, while another was the intrusion of western culture into China in recent centuries. Between these two cases was the brief encounter of Chinese cultures with Catholic Christianity in the 16th century. Until the arrival of modern western culture, the Catholic Church made little lasting impression on the host culture. Investigation of this particular case, nevertheless, can help us make a comparison with the processes of the other two cultural confrontations – that is the transplantation of Buddhism in the medieval era and the more recent arrival of western culture – and the interactions thereof. There is not sufficient space nor do the details of these historical cases warrant narration here. In this article the major issues to be investigated are: the susceptibility to foreign cultures by the Chinese at the specific time in social milieux; the interpretation of foreign cultures in order to integrate the new elements into the host culture; and the delineation of the cultural assembly processes.

Chinese Cultures in the Han Period before Buddhism The political unification of the entirety of China into the Qin and Han dynasties in the last decade of the third century BCE created not only a gigantic empire in East Asia but also laid the ground for a cultural unification that caused regional subcultures to merge into a universal civilization, with Confucianism occupying the leading role. This cultural

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unification required the incorporation of the contending schools of thought prevalent during the era of multi-state and multicultural competition. Out of this Confucian predominance, especially in the second century BCE, eventually emerged a complicated ideology, emphasizing interaction of human and cosmic systems, culminating in the thought of Dong Zhongshu, the great synthesizer in the mid-second century BCE. Such a system of thought was a mechanistic, multilayered system that maintained a dynamic equilibrium between its human, biological, environmental and cosmic levels. Any changes occurring in one level would initiate a chain of subsequent reactions everywhere else. Thus, in this system, the cosmic order was a predictable one comparable to the concept of natural law. However, an important characteristic of the Dong synthesis is that human will and human behaviors have an impact on the cosmic order. In addition, learned persons, among whom the greatest is the Confucian Sage, once in command of a significant cognitive knowledge, could foresee the future chain reaction brought about by any initial changes (Loewe, 1994: 121–41). Interpretation of human conduct in history as well as phenomena such as movements of celestial bodies, seasonal changes and changes in the biological world, were all organized into the overall Han cosmology. The Han synthesis also absorbed the previously local and regional faiths (for example, various forms of nature worship, ancestor worship, totemism, animism, shamanism) and organized them into a single metaphysical system marked with the Yin–Yang dynamic dualism as well as the cyclical revolution of the five agencies (fire, wood, water, metal and earth). Much of Han metaphysics still survives in today’s traditional Chinese medicine and astrology/astronomy. The synthesis was so powerful and all embracing that these various schools of thought were incorporated into one coherent system. The climax of this system of thought was reached by the first century BCE. In the first century CE, that voluminous apocalyptic document attributed to the sage Confucius or some messages allegedly derived from ancient classics surfaced here and there among the intellectuals as if all changes in state and society could be predicted from deciphering the predictable cosmic order. Confucius himself was depicted as an omniscient sage and an uncrowned sovereign equipped with wisdom and unsurpassed intelligence. Such phenomena brought the organization of Confucian orthodoxy close to prognosticism or even a religion that contained a cosmic theology and a sacred figure. This religion would have also included the Confucian scholars as clergy. For several generations, Confucian scholars interpreted the Mandate of Heaven, through which Han imperial authority was legitimized, as nothing other than revelation of the orderly cosmic mechanism. Under this mechanism, imperial authority would be subject to judgment by scholars who had the intellectual power to evaluate the performance of the government. On a few occasions, Confucian scholars actually impeached the court because of a failure of governance, and in some cases, politicians took advantage of such criticisms to change their policies. An ambitious usurper named Wang Mang (reign 9–24 CE) eventually

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succeeded in seizing the throne by proclaiming that the Han mandate was at an end, just as the cosmic cycle determined. All of the contenders at this time, including the founding emperor of the late Han dynasty, utilized these revelation (or prognostic) materials to justify their own claims. The momentum toward a full-scale religion abated immediately after the Later Han dynasty stabilized during its second imperial reign. The new ruling house then prohibited interpretation of the apocalypse and persuaded scholars to ‘purify’ the classics by means of textual criticisms and annotations. Thereafter the Han intellectuals gradually ceased to engage in theological pursuits. After the first century CE, literati endeavors turned toward scholasticism and a rather dry and dull intellectual atmosphere prevailed. Confucian literati concerned themselves with the practice of this worldly ethics as presented in the classics. Little metaphysics was available as a spiritual fountain-head from which a Chinese religion could develop, while the local and communal faiths at the grassroots level of society remained too unsophisticated to provide the explanations needed to meet transcendental, ultimate concerns, such as life and death, fate and uncertainty, and so on (C.Y. Hsu, 1986: 312–17).

The Arrival of Buddhism Buddhism came into China just at the time when the Chinese people faced an intellectual vacuum. Buddhism, which was a reform against the then corrupted Brahminism in the days of Shakamuni (Siddhartha Gautama, c. 563–483 BCE), already flourished in Central Asia. At the time Han China opened the silk route to penetrate the wide, western region, traders, as well as soldiers and diplomats, traveled between oasis cities and the Chinese western frontier. They might have encountered Buddhists of the Mayahana sect, which had developed in Central Asia, and which deviated somewhat from early Indian teachings. Busy traffic along the silk route should have brought Buddhism to China proper sooner, just as Central Asian animals and plants were already present in China in the second and first centuries BCE. However, in Chinese literary records, early reliable mentions of Buddhism are not found until the first century CE. The earliest archaeological evidence of Buddhist icons is dated not earlier than first century CE (Yu, 1980: 68–77). Nevertheless, the Han dynastic history recorded that, by the mid-first century CE, an imperial prince named Liu Ying, who was enfeoffed in southeastern China, practiced Buddhist activities in his vassal state. The reigning emperor, at that time, praised him for upholding Daoism as well as Buddhism. By the end of the second century CE, a local leader in the east, not far away from Liu Ying’s place, sponsored a Buddhist temple that attracted several tens of thousands of Buddhist converts. Buddhist pamphlets were compiled in Chinese at the end of the first century CE, while a missionary from Parthia translated the Indian texts in the second century CE (Zurcher, 1959: 22–6).

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The spread of new faith was not achieved in a short period of time. This spread may have undergone a long period of development since the opening of the silk route. Then why at this particular time did Buddhism surface so conspicuously? It may not be a mere coincidence that, during this period of development, China experienced a prolonged period of social and economic crisis. In the late first century CE, natural disasters such as famine and epidemics were aggravated by poor governance. Social injustice due to uneven distribution of wealth and a widening gap between social strata polarized society. Large impoverished populations had to leave home to find new homes in the southern frontier provinces. Thus, dislocation must have caused anxiety and hardship and people began to question the fairness of the world. Such crises were recorded eloquently in the essays of social critics (Balazs, 1964). As Confucian scholasticism failed to provide answers to transcendental concerns (such as the meaning of life and death, justice in society, phenomenon and reality, and so forth), people demanded alternatives. Daoism, which contended with Confucianism even as recently as the second century BCE, during the early reigns of the Han dynasty, made a return to the intellectual scene. Not only did the Daoist classics, the Laozi and the Zhuangzi receive enormous attention among intellectuals of the third century CE, but also a Confucian classic, the Book of Changes, was also reinterpreted in the Daoist context (Demieville, 1986: 826–8). It should be noticed that the social critiques of the second century CE, especially Wang Chong, Wang Fu, Cui Shih and Zhongchang Tung, always examined issues basically within a Confucian framework based on secular and social concerns, rather than on inquiries into the metaphysical premise of values (Demieville, 1986: 780–96). It should also be noted that the Daoist revival remained a counter-reaction to Confucian scholasticism. In either of these two camps, there was not even a slight indication that Buddhism had received the attention of the Han intellectuals. The early Buddhist work of literature, the Sutra in Forty-Two Articles, for instance, which is traditionally dated to 67 CE, is a Chinese elementary manual on Buddhist principles rather than a bona fide translation of Indian sutra (Zurcher, 1959: 29–30). Judging from the style of the fragments that survive, one can ascertain it was not a work of elegant literary Chinese used by the Han intellectuals. Therefore, it seems early Buddhist activities up to the second century CE probably remained those among people of the peripheries, either geographically or socially. It would take some time to attract the attention of the literati of the Han social mainstream. In the latter half of the second century CE, Buddhist activities received the attention of the upper level of Han society. For example, a renowned scholar named Xiang Kai, in his memorial to the Han court, linked the Buddhist teachings together with Daoist principles as if they were associated (Zurcher, 1959: 36–8). Such a change should perhaps be attributed to enthusiastic efforts of missionaries from Central Asia, who translated the Buddhist sutra into Chinese. The rapid expansion of Buddhism in China is

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indeed a phenomenon that was not unrelated to the frequent visitation of famine and epidemics of that time. Buddhist translations of the Han period are often rendered in Daoist terminology, a borrowing known in literature as ge yi (i.e. to scrutinize the meaning). Although there were virtually no counterparts of Buddhist concepts in the dominant Confucianism, Daoist concepts bore a considerable degree of similarity with those in Buddhism. Any direct borrowing of terminology would inevitably distort the meaning in the original Buddhist context (Demieville, 1986: 825, 841–2). Nevertheless, by means of the ge yi practice, Buddhism crossed the language barrier and Chinese intellectuals were drawn to an appreciation of Buddhism. A great boost in the promotion of Buddhism in China appeared during the period of southern and northern dynasties (317–589 CE) as China was divided by invasion of alien tribal peoples from beyond the Great Wall. Several rulers of northern states, who also claimed the imperial throne of China, were patrons of Buddhism. The contenders allegedly proclaimed that Buddhism was introduced from a foreign land into China just as they themselves were of foreign origins. For example, a ruler of Xiongnu origin once said, ‘Why should a barbarian not welcome a barbarian deity, i.e. the Buddha?’. Even in the south, where Chinese dynasties were established, the ruling households advanced, for the most part, from military backgrounds. These former soldiers did not feel an affinity for Confucianism, which was still upheld as orthodoxy by the officers who dominated the intellectual communities. One of the southern emperors, Wu of Liang (reigned 502–44 CE), was such a devoted Buddhist that under his patronage numerous Buddhist temples were built with the generous support of donors (Demieville, 1986: 846–8). Again, the Buddhist patrons who helped the growth of Buddhism in China were foreign rulers and warlords, men of the peripheries of Chinese culture.

Chinese Resistance and Adaptation The wide spread of Buddhism in China inevitably encountered resistance from Chinese intellectuals, whose Confucian positive worldview hardly corresponded to the Buddhist ideationism. One of the major battles between the Confucians and the Buddhists concerned the concept of reincarnation. In Buddhism, one’s soul would be reanimated in another life after this life had ended. The soul, or spirit, not the transitory physical body, is the real self. This concept had been repeatedly questioned by Chinese scholars, to whom the spirited self and the physical self were not separate entities. A heated debate took place in 504 CE as a renowned scholar Fan Chen (405–515 CE) wrote an essay on the issue that one’s spirit (or soul) was to be finally extinguished when one died. He also refuted the concept that

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retribution could happen life after life to determine one’s faith in each of the reincarnated lives. He asserted that fate was no more than a series of accidentally occurring events. Fan Chen’s statement was widely circulated among the intellectuals at the very time that Emperor Wu of Liang was patronizing Buddhism as the state religion. The Buddhist emperor provoked fellow converts to rebut Fan’s arguments. These essays were included in a major collection of Buddhist essays that survived the early medieval era (Hong Ming Chi, n.d.: Vols 9–10). Another issue disputed by Chinese and Buddhist scholars was the chain of causalities of retribution. In the Ancient Chinese kinship tradition, descendants bore the consequences for the conduct of ancestors in a manner similar to inheritance of material assets such as estate or property. The Buddhists, however, believed retribution for one’s deeds would be carried forth into subsequent reincarnations. In addition, the Confucian emphasis on filial piety as a cardinal virtue of Confucian ethics was contradicted by the Buddhist monks’ practice of deserting home and denying family linkage. The Buddhist argument was defended by Sun Cho (320–77 CE) in his essay ‘Explanation of the Truth’ (Yu dao lun) (Hong Ming Chi, n.d.: Vol. 3) After the medieval era, Chinese Buddhists gradually reached a compromise on karma transmission by having both individual reincarnation and retribution along kinship lineages. For instance, reward or punishment for one’s deeds could be revealed by rebirth into another life or visited on the family line through the lives of a person’s descendants. Likewise, monks and nuns who deserted their families were deemed to have joined the new family of the clergy and members of the same monastery or nunnery adopted kinship nomenclature, such as uncle, aunt, brother, sister, cousin and so on for their relations. Another issue the Chinese monks needed to face was their status in a secular state. The Indian Brahmin stood so high on the social ladder that the secular ruler could not regard them as subjects. Buddhist monks in China first took the same attitude, claiming that they were not subordinate to state authority and therefore would not bow down or kowtow before the Chinese emperor (Hong Ming Chi, n.d.: Vol. 12). Nevertheless, in China, the imperial emperor’s authority was paramount. A decree was issued in 462 CE that Buddhist monks refusing to address the court properly would be executed (Guang Hong Ming Chi, n.d.: Vol. 6; Demieville, 1986: 853–4). From that point forward, Buddhist clergy obeyed the secular authority like any imperial subject. In addition, monks had to register at the Ministry of Interior Affairs and a certificate of priesthood was also issued to ordained monks by the same office. Thus, the Buddhists were subjugated to political authority.

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Chinese Responses In addition to the adaptation of Buddhism in China to Chinese culture, the Chinese also responded to the introduction of a foreign faith by organizing an indigenous faith, Daoism. The Daoism (Taoism) then implies both a school of thought in Ancient China and a religion that emerged in the end of second century CE. The whole history of Daoism is too complicated to be included in this article. However, two issues are highlighted here. One important issue is that the early Buddhism borrowed much from ancient Daoist terminology to render Buddhist concepts, a practice known as ge yi, which is mentioned earlier. Another issue was that early Daoist sects were organized by leaders of a mass rebellion at the end of the Han dynasty. Daoism was first a secret religion based upon a tradition of sorcery and shamanism that could be traced to China’s remote past. From Buddhism, however, the Daoist borrowed many ritual methods, such as using candlelight, incense-burning and chanting. Daoist priests also organized their clergy in the same manner as Buddhist monasteries; the only difference was that Daoist priests did not renounce their family linkages. Gradually, especially at the popular levels, both faiths, Buddhism and Daoism, which were easily confused, fused into what can be called a Chinese folk faith, still popular among Chinese today (Maspero, 1981: 1–74, 263–98, 431–554; Demieville, 1986: 818–46, 860–71; Zurcher, 1980: 84–147). From the tenth century CE on, Chan Buddhism (Zen Buddhism) evolved into one of the dominant sects in China and later spread to Japan becoming that country’s most important form of Buddhism. It is worth noting that Chan Buddhism is essentially a Chinese product which can trace its roots to Mencian Confucianism no less than Buddhism. Meanwhile, the revival of a new form of Confucianism after the 11th century CE known as neoConfucianism, which absorbed some Daoist elements, can be appreciated as a synthesis of metaphysics and ethics in a fundamental reorganization of Confucianism to respond to the Buddhist challenge. In summary, almost 1000 years was required for the Chinese to receive Buddhism, to respond to its challenge and to reshape Chinese mentalities at both the intellectual and the popular levels. The course of this development is full of rejection, adaptation and revision. The influence of Buddhism on Chinese culture is profound indeed.

The First Efforts to Introduce Christianity into China Nestorian Christianity was brought to China as early as the seventh century CE via trade roots through Central Asia. A stone stele erected in 635 CE recorded these activities in the capital of the Tang Empire. However, Christianity did not take deep root in China. Meanwhile, Nestorians did not represent the Christian mainstream of the Mediterranean world. The first serious effort at introducing western Christianity and European

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culture into China took place in the period of between the 16th and 17th centuries CE. The missionary activities of the Jesuits brought to China not only Christianity, but also a significant proportion of the science and technology developed in Europe (I.C.Y. Hsu, 2000: 97–106). Christian missionaries, including the Jesuits, arrived in the Asia Pacific region as adjuncts to other European activities of ocean exploration and of trade. The most important figure who opened the door to China is Matteo Ricci. Matteo Ricci entered China in 1581 after having learned Chinese in Macao. From the beginning, he dressed himself as a Buddhist monk and he also followed the Buddhist manner as part of his strategy to spread Christianity in south China. Very soon, however, he realized that the mainstream Chinese intellectuals were Confucian scholars. He therefore changed his approach by adopting the Confucian manner and utilizing Confucian vocabulary as a medium for introducing Christianity. His erudition and scholarship won the trust and friendship of Confucian scholars. Among the top level Chinese intellectuals of this period, some of the very best, such as Xu Guang Chi (David Hsu) and Li Zicao (Leo Li) were early Christian converts. These learned Chinese intellectuals were responsible for translating several western scientific works into Chinese. In much the same way as Buddhist monks who borrowed Chinese terminology during the early medieval era, Matteo Ricci borrowed Chinese terminology to render Christian theology to a foreign faithful. For instance, Matteo Ricci, on one hand, utilized the Chinese word Shangdi (which means supreme deity above) and Tian (which means Heaven) to render the Christian concept of God. He also created a word Tianzhu (Heavenly Lord) to solely translate the concept of ‘Our Lord in Heaven’. In his essay to summarize the principles of Christianity, Matteo Ricci freely quoted verses on Shangdi from Chinese classics: the Book of Odes, the Book of Documents and the Book of Changes. Ricci quoted these classics to explain that the concept of a judging god could be found in Confucianism (Ricci, 1985; Dunne, 1962). Matteo Ricci, under the papal prohibition of rendering a translation of the Bible from Latin, only could present Catholicism to the Chinese in the form of essays. In his Chinese work, he depicted God as a fair judge resembling imperial authority. ‘Love’ is mentioned as closely related to something of the nature of Grace with Providence. The notion of Trinity was hardly touched in his Chinese essays. His ontological concerns were basically expressed in a system of Ming neo-Confucianism.1 Moreover, the Jesuits allowed the Chinese to practice rites honoring ancestors by offering food, burning incense and kowtowing to the ancestral tablets or portraits of ancestors. Catholic priests of the Franciscan and Dominican orders, who also entered China as missionaries, interpreted these rituals as rites of ancestor worship. The rivalry between Catholic orders finally aroused the controversy of rites in the early reigns of the Manchu emperors of the Qing dynasty (which replaced the Ming in 1664). In 1720, a papal decree was dispatched to

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missionaries in China that the terms of ‘Heaven’ and Shangdi should not be used to render the concept of God, and that a Catholic should not participate in rituals which were held in Confucian shrines and any ancestral hall of lineage. As a response to such a decree, Emperor Kangxi and his son, Emperor Yungzheng, also decreed a cessation of missionary activities in China. The Jesuits were most actively engaged with upper level Chinese in learned circles. This contact probably explains their heavy reliance on the most influential system of 17th-century China, Confucianism. The Dominican and Franciscans, conversely, were associated with traders and businessmen in southern China, especially Macao. The different interpretations of Catholicism to Chinese audiences should be attributed to this disparity of association.

The Jesuits’ Contribution to Scholarship After the great controversy over rites, a few Jesuits still stayed in China. New replacements were continuously dispatched from Europe from time to time. The momentum of introducing western culture to China, however, was diminished. The priests then stationed in China were regarded as scientists and technicians who served the imperial court in a variety of functions, such as making maps and calendars, observing astronomical phenomena, repairing clocks, manufacturing fine arms and so on. These tasks, which were conducted by several generations of Jesuits, appeared pale in comparison to the great contributions made by their predecessor Matteo Ricci. Ricci and other Jesuits of the early generations informed Chinese intellectuals of a whole array of western knowledge including: mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, cartography and philosophy. It ought to be pointed out, however, that Jesuit scholars, due to the restrictions of their Catholic faith, did not bring to China the most advanced western learning of their time. For instance, the astronomy of Copernicus and Galileo was not introduced to China. Also, the time of the most active engagement between the Jesuits and the Chinese was prior to the great breakthroughs of western intellectual and scientific traditions, which occurred mainly during the era of Enlightenment. It was not until after this period that modern western culture and sciences underwent rapid development (Bennett, 1969). Timing, indeed, is an important factor in the making of watershed historical events. Through the hands of these Jesuits, who periodically sent letters to Europe, Chinese thought, arts and technology were introduced to the West. It is believed that stimulation coming from China provided some of the momentum for the Enlightenment in Europe. Just to name a few wellknown cases, an image of oriental rationalism inspired Voltaire and others to rethink their own cultural heritage. Sinophiles in the visual arts

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channeled western artists in new directions. The benefits of the cultural encounters between Chinese and the West were mutual (Lach, 1965–78). When compared to the introduction of Buddhism into China, the introduction of western culture into China by the Jesuits is rather an aborted effort. Nevertheless, the time-span of the introduction to western culture provided by the Jesuits lasted only approximately two centuries, while the development of Buddhism in China, from its inception in the first century to the full growth of Chinese Buddhism, such as the maturation of Zen sects and Pure-land sects in the 11th century, is a story that is stretched over a millennium. The Jesuits adopted a strategy of penetration into Chinese intellectual circles, which gave them an early entrance into the upper strata of Chinese society. In the late 17th century, the population of Catholic converts was estimated to reach more than 100,000. These converts including learned scholars, courtiers and members of the imperial household, were elite groups, while the Dominican converts were mainly people who were related to foreign trade in southern seaports, and at the periphery of society. These two groups of converts of a new foreign faith were separated by a wide social and geographical gulf, allowing little momentum to sustain a continuation of the spread and deepening of Catholic influence. Returning to the issue of intellectual susceptibility, China during the 17th and 18th centuries was in an extremely adverse political condition. A despotic Ming government preoccupied with internal competition simply could not manage the many natural and human disasters that befell the country. The Qing conquest of China in the late 17th century was accomplished through bloody wars and massacres. Then foreign wars were fought beyond the borders of China in addition to forceful seizure of Chinese property by the Manchus. All aggravated the hardship of the lives of the ordinary subjects (Spence and Wills, 1979). These conditions were no less grave than conditions during the last centuries of the Han dynasty when Buddhism became a viable faith in China. The surge to seek comfort from religion should have provided China with a good reason to accept a profound faith. Yet, it is again a matter of timing that determined the course of history. The late Ming period happened to have witnessed the successful synthesis of the major teachings (namely Confucianism, religious Daoism and sinified Buddhism), in neo-Confucianism, Neo-Daoism (such as the Quanzhen sect) and fully matured Zen Buddhism, respectively. Each of these schools absorbed elements of the other two so they provided people with rich resources to comfort suffering people, allowing them to face daily hardships. Therefore, there was little space for Catholic Christianity to develop. Therefore, the introduction of Catholic Christianity into China was an aborted effort, and because of the failure of Catholicism, the introduction of western culture also appears to have been a passing phenomenon because this particular endeavor has never taken root.

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Introducing Christianity in Modern Times In the 19th century, westerners again knocked on the door of China. This time, they came with gunboats as well as the Bible. The first Protestant missionary who came to China was Robert Morrison, a British priest who arrived in south China in 1807. The early Chinese converts were petty businessmen in areas near Macao and Canton, sea ports where western ships anchored for trade. Leaflets on Christianity in China were distributed by converts to Chinese people in the street. A Chinese translation of the Bible into English by Morrison and his colleagues was also circulated. Little impact was evident among the Chinese intellectuals. The Protestants obviously adopted a strategy very different from the Jesuits by working among the ordinary people, who received only limited exposure to Confucian education. The rather poor vernacular style of Chinese used in the missionary leaflets was evidence of the fact that the Chinese intellectuals were not involved in Protestant Christian missions. In the 19th century, China had just passed her peak of economic prosperity. A long period of profitable overseas trade was gradually reduced to deficiency due to the British injection of opium onto the Chinese market. Good governance under the early part of the Qing dynasty was not sustained and corruption spread widely. Peasant uprisings and natural calamities created hardship for ordinary citizens. The poor southern populations, especially the Hakka, who were on the peripheries of society, were ready to accept religious comfort. One Hakka of Cantonese origin, Hong Xiuguan, was one of those who received the Christian pamphlets on the street and was impressed by the message of salvation as well as the promise of delivery from suffering. Hong eventually gathered thousands of fellow converts to organize a revolt in the name of the Heavenly Kingdom of Peace. Hong and his uprising developed meteorically and swelled into a revolution that swept through a good portion of southern and southeastern China for 15 years (1850–64). A theocracy was established in the name of Christianity. However, Hong’s interpretation was by no means that of Protestant Christianity. It was rather a combination of Chinese folk millennialism in a cloak of Christianity. Hong even claimed that he himself was the second son of God, the younger brother of Jesus. Hong’s utopia, the Heavenly Kingdom of Peace, was depicted as a gigantic proto-socialist community. This movement can hardly be called an implantation of western Christianity in China. At best, it is a local response inspired by the faith (I.C.Y. Hsu, 2000: 225ff.). Contemporary with Hong’s uprising is the Opium War of 1840 and the subsequent decades of encroachment of western powers upon China by means of gunboat diplomacy. China was forced to yield much of her territory as well as her sovereignty under the pressure of the superior weaponry of the western powers (Wakeman, 1966). Alongside the western gunboats were the Christian missionaries, who took advantage of the privileges granted the western powers to establish

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churches in inland provinces of China. The number of converts were not very many. By the end of 19th century, the Chinese Christian population barely reached 1 million and by the mid-20th century, it had reached about 4 million, including both the Catholics and the Protestants. Their relationship with the non-Christian Chinese was not coherent at all. First, they had to give up the Chinese practice of offering food and burning incense to the ancestors because the Christian church regarded such rituals as ancestor worship. The Christians, therefore, alienated themselves from their own neighbors. Second, the Chinese were irritated when they witnessed Chinese Christian converts being protected by foreigners who lived above the Chinese law and customs. The anti-foreign mentality made it difficult for the Chinese to accept Christianity. The situation reached a climax with the Boxer Uprising of 1905. Massive numbers of angry peasants rose up to purge their country of Chinese Christians and missionaries. The armies of the allied West as well as the Japanese army invaded China and demanded huge sums in compensation from China. This particular event, of course, simply deepened Chinese anti-foreign and anti-Christian sentiment (Cohen, 1963, 1997; Esherick, 1987).

Introducing Western Culture into China in Modern Times The introduction of Christianity into China cannot be regarded as a success. However, China, through contacts with the West, was greatly influenced by western civilization. Politically, after the Qing dynasty was overthrown by revolutionaries led by Sun Yatsen, in 1911, a republic was founded to transplant a democracy in China. The course of Chinese democratization is a long and rugged one, which, after three bloody political revolutions in 1911, 1928 and 1949, is yet to be fulfilled. The peasantbased Chinese Communist regime is anything but a democracy. All three revolutions, nevertheless, were mainly purported to follow models of western political ideology (I.C.Y. Hsu, 2000: 482–92, 541–78, 621–70). Economically, China slowly rebuilt her economy over the last one-and-ahalf centuries. Then the indigenous domestic economic system was strangled by the pressure of the modern industrialist economy through which the West and the Japanese exploited the Chinese market. Today, both mainland China and Taiwan have made good progress toward integrating their economies into an emergent global economy. This process of transformation is not an easy one. Be it capitalism or socialism, the mode of production as well as the institutions utilized by China to build a modern economy were totally borrowed from the West (I.C.Y. Hsu, 2000: 565–77, 652–8, 753–5, 803–15, 904–15, 950–9). All of the political and economic changes were based on changes in the cultural sphere. Western concepts of democracy, republic, communism, individualism, capitalism, etc. were introduced to China by students who

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were either educated in schools first founded by missionaries, or by students who returned from foreign lands where they were culturally westernized. During the 19th century, western culture was massively imported by publication of translated western works, first by missionaries and then by their associates in the treaty-ports such as Shanghai. Later on, Chinese intellectuals promoted a movement of learning from the West. Some of them even urged a full-scale westernization of China. The most impressive landmark of cultural reform was the movement of 4 May 1919 and after, led by young intellectuals returning from the West. They successfully reformed the Chinese literary language and devoted themselves to the transplantation of western values, including liberalism, into China (I.C.Y. Hsu, 2000: 493–513). It needs to be noted that the May Fourth movement, as well as its early predecessor (that is, the continual effort to reshape Chinese culture), took place in front of a similar backdrop. China was suffering from foreign encroachment in all aspects – economically, militarily, as well as politically – and China was virtually on the edge of losing its independence as a sovereign state. Frustration and anger led to a feeling of urgency, which motivated the urge to modernize (that is, to westernize in the name of being culturally enlightened and reformed). Both the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party were products of this sense of urgency and a case of trauma common to a great majority of Chinese people. Political radicalization actually is a polemical contradiction against democracy and the liberalism which Hu Shih advocated. Ironically, therefore, the May Fourth movement had such a Siamese twin. Another irony is the phenomenon of cultural alienation which modern Chinese intellectuals faced. They received their western education abroad or in schools in westernized coastal cities. The urban cultural environment had grown distinctively apart from the more traditionally minded rural China. These urban intellectuals, who never returned to rural inland, therefore, were an alienated intelligentsia who lost touch with their countrycousins (Schwarcz, 1986; Wang, 1966). Therefore, the cultural transformation in modern China had reached a dilemma. Cultural alienation coated the coastal-/urban-based Nationalist regime at Nanking, which was not able to reach the mass population of rural China, who were instead mobilized by Mao Tsetung who founded a highly radicalized Communist state. Repeated purges and continual radicalization of Mao’s rule finally culminated in the unprecedented destructive chaos which, ironically, was named the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution. The revolution lasted from 1962 until Mao’s death in 1976 and the downfall of the radical group, the Gang of Four, led by his widow. China today, long after this decade of catastrophe, has yet to recover from the legacy of Mao’s fanatical radicalism (I.C.Y. Hsu, 2000: 689–703).

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Conclusion The introduction of Buddhism was a historical phenomenon in which the transplantation of a religion from one culture to a totally different culture took place. The process of assimilation of this Indian religion and its transformation into a Chinese faith took over 1000 years. The long story of the development of Buddhism into China should include the initial stage of Chinese susceptibility, the borrowing of indigenous Chinese concepts as conducive for the transmission of the faith and the participation of Chinese intellectuals in the revision and interpretation as well as the support of the general population at all levels of society. The abortive effort of the introduction of the Catholic faith was a consequence of limited participation of a small number of intellectuals, while the general population was unaware of the arrival of a new faith. The patronage of the converts provided the Jesuits with certain advantages in their attempts to stay in China but it also restricted their service to the work of court technician. Their contribution to the introduction of western sciences and technologies to China was too confined and the audience too small to leave much of an impression. The Great Rites Controversy was a case of political interference on both sides. The introduction of western culture into China in the 19th century was not just the arrival of Christianity. It was the result of a large-scale western expansion, economically, politically, as well as culturally. The magnitude is far greater than in the case of the introduction of Buddhism; however, the timing is also an important variable because the vitality of Chinese culture was just about exhausted at the time of introduction, while the momentum of western culture was at its zenith. China has already experienced the difficulties of accepting foreign cultural influences; the process of adaptation is still incomplete.

Note 1. I am indebted to Professor Anthony Yu of the University of Chicago for his learned opinion given to me in conversation 19 March 2000.

References Balazs, Etienne (1964) ‘Political Philosophy and Social Crisis at the end of the Han Dynasty’, in Etienne Balazs (ed.) Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy: Variations on a Theme, pp. 198–505. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Bennett, A.A. John Fryer (1969) The Introduction of Western Science and Technology into Nineteenth Century China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cohen, Paul A. (1963) China and Christianity: The Missionary Movement and the Growth of China Anti-Foreignism 1860–1890. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Cohen, Paul A. (1997) History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event; Experience, and Myth. New York: Columbia University Press. Demieville, Paul (1986) ‘Philosophy and Religion from the Han to Sui’, in Denis Twitchet and Michael Loewe (eds) Cambridge History of China, Vol. 1, pp. 808–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dunne, George H. (1962) Generation of Giants: The Story of the Jesuits in China in the Last Decades of the Ming Dynasty. South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press. Esherick, Joseph W. (1987) The Origins of the Boxers’ Uprising. Berkeley: University of California Press. Guang Hong Ming Chi (n.d.) Shanghai: SPPY Editions. Hong Ming Chi (n.d.) Shanghai: SPPY Editions. Hsu, Cho-yun (1986) ‘Historical Conditions of Emergence and Crystalization of the Confucian System’, in S.N. Eisenstadt (ed.) The Origin and Diversity of Axial Age Civilization, pp. 306–24. Albany: SUNY Press. Hsu, Immanuel C.Y. (2000) The Rise of the Modern China, 6th edn. New York: Oxford University Press. Lach, Donald F. (1965–78) Asia in the Making of Europe, Vols 1 and 2. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Loewe, Michael (1994) Divination, Mythology and Monarchy in Han China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mangelo, David E. (1977) Leibniz and Confucianism: The Search for Accord. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Maspero, Henri (1981) Le Taoisme et les religions chinoises, trans. Frank A. Keirman. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Ricci, Matteo, S.J. (1985) The True Meaning of the Lord in Heaven (T’ien-chu Shih-I), trans. Douglas Lancashire and Peter Hu Kuo-chen. St Louis: University of Washington Press. Schwarcz, Vera (1986) The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919. Berkeley: University of California Press. Spence, Johnathon D. and Wills, John E., eds (1979) From Ming to Ching: Conquest, Region and Continuity in Seventeenth Century China. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Wakeman, Fredrick, Jr (1966) Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839–61. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wang, Y.C. (1966) China Intellectuals and the West, 1872–1949. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Yu, Weicao (1980) ‘Dong Han Fuo Jiao Tu Xiang Kao’, Wenwu May: 68–77. Zurcher, Eric (1959) Buddist Conquest of China. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Zurcher, Eric (1980) ‘Buddist Influence on Early Taoism’, T’oung Pao 66(1–3): 84–147.

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12 Perso-Indian Statecraft, Greek Political Science and the Muslim Idea of Government Saïd Amir Arjomand

The study of the encounter of civilizations tends inevitably to be at a very high level of generality and abstraction. Any mechanism proposed to explain the dynamics of civilizational borrowings or conflictual rejection must, however, prove its utility and validity through its application to more delimited instances of civilizational dialogue and interaction. Our case study highlights two features of civilization as a macro-level unit of analysis sketched in the Introduction. The first is its capacity for inter-epochal as well as inter-societal transmission. Secondly, the norm of intercivilizational borrowing is selectivity. Under certain circumstances, however, holistic reification of civilizational complexes can also play a role in intercivilizational encounters.

I The two much older civilizations which flanked the emergent Islamic civilization in late antiquity – the Hellenistic and the Indian – had independently developed fundamentally different political ideas.1 Indian statecraft – my term for arthasha¯stra (more literally, the art/science/craft of government/the polity/the useful) – probably developed roughly in the same period as Greek political science, reaching its culmination in the Arthasha¯stra attributed to Aristotle’s contemporary, Kautilya.2 India saw the birth of statecraft as a technical science of government whose advocates ranked it with the Vedas in the list of sciences, with the more passionate going so far as to consider it superior. This science reached maturity in the late fourth century BCE with Kautilya’s great work, Arthasha¯stra. Whereas the Brahminic tradition had covered rudiments of government and public administration as the moral duty of the person of the king (ra¯jadharma), the subject of the new technical science with its own original categories was the security and prosperity of the polity through rational government by the king. With Kautilya’s synthesis, statecraft was

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separated from the religious learning and became an independent science (Ghoshal, 1959: 12–13, 82–102). Statecraft elaborated reasons of state as pertaining to the sphere of artha (wealth and utility) as distinct from and independent of the religio-moral sphere of dharma (virtue and duty). Despite its striking amorality (especially decried in the Buddhist literature for making it the dismal science among ‘the lower arts’), much of the science of government, as appropriate for the normative regulation of the political economy, the domain of artha, was incorporated into the smriti (‘law’) of Manu and the other canonical smritis such as the Mah¯abh¯arata¯ (Ghoshal, 1959: 65, 103). The Brahminical tradition thus acknowledged much of the content of statecraft as part of the Hindu law as ra¯jadharma (duty of the king), conceived as ‘sufficiently elastic to comprise a whole body of principles and policies of government based exclusively upon the needs and requirements of the king’s administration’ (Ghoshal, 1959: 13). The most ancient of the dharmasa¯tras had, by the fourth century BCE or earlier, already assigned two functions to the king as his special dharma: to protect and to punish. The taxes were due to him for doing his duty of protecting the people against disturbers of public peace. While the Brahmins would instruct the people on expiatory penance necessary for purification after committing a crime, the enforcement of penalties was the essential prerogative of the king. He had the right to fix the punishment as he deemed fit (Lingat, 1973: 66–7). Statecraft identified punishment (danda) with law and made it a divine institution as well as the foremost principle of government. Application of danda (the rod or staff of the king) was essential for the maintenance of order, and necessary for holding the barriers to corruption and intermixture of the castes which constituted the social hierarchy (Kautilya, 1987: 15.1.8, 9; p. 101). It is only through the fear of danda that anarchy and strife can be avoided (Spellman, 1964: 108, 226). The idea was passed through Kautilya to the Brahminical canon (Ghoshal, 1959: 167–9, 255; Lingat, 1973: 208). Dandanı¯ti (science of punishment/law enforcement), an integral part of arthasha¯stra, was thus attributed to Brahma¯ himself, and came to be used as a synonym for statecraft. The duty of protection was stretched to include arbitration in business affairs (vyaraha¯ra), and a small place was carved for civil law on the margin of the ra¯jadharma (Lingat, 1973: 68–70). Kautilya defines statecraft – the science of wealth and welfare ‘by which territory is acquired and maintained’ – also as the science of upholding the social order by just punishment (dandanı¯ti) (Kautilya, 1987: 15.1.1, 2; pp. 100, 105). The treasury is the state’s means for achieving both dharma (virtue) and kama (enjoyment) (Kautilya, 1987: 8.1.41–52; p. 125). ‘From the treasury/wealth [kosha] comes state power [danda]. With the treasury and the army (together [koshadanda]) the earth is acquired with the treasury as the ornament’ (Kautilya, 1987: 2.12.37; p. 254). However, the treasury and the army, as well as fortified cities ‘all depend on the people’ (Kautilya, 1987: 8.1.28; p. 124). Therefore, it follows that the promotion of

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the people’s prosperity is the king’s duty. ‘Hence the king shall be ever active in the management of the economy’ (Kautilya, 1987: 1.9.34–5; p. 149). Arthasha¯stra contains not only a rationalized system of fines and punishments in great detail but also extensive rules for diplomacy, warfare, systematic employment of spies, techniques of deceit and treachery and devices for sowing dissension among cohesive domestic groups as well as external enemies. These ‘Machiavellian’ rules and techniques, all justified by reasons of state, bring out the inevitable tension between statecraft and the religio-ethical branches of learning from which it had become detached. Nevertheless, Kautilya also made a significant contribution to the Indian judiciary system by endowing the king’s edicts (ra¯ja-sha¯sana) with the force of law. The royal edict is presented as one of the four sources of law or bases of justice, and the one which is decisive in actual litigation. The king was urged to apply both dharma and artha in litigation. He could consult the other sources of law as well as reason (nya¯ya) and arrive at a rational determination of righteousness (dharma) even in contradiction to the texts of the legal science (Kautilya, 1987: 3.1.43–5; p. 380; Derrett, 1999: 166, 201). The king thus had legislative power, and his edict, either establishing a new or declaring an existing law which was in doubt, was often inscribed on a stone pillar erected in an important public space. A new literary genre for the expression of the precepts of statecraft in animal fables emerged in the early centuries of the Common Era. The most important example of this literary genre in Sanscrit is the Pañchatantra (the Five Books) whose author salutes the six ‘makers of the kingly science’, including Manu and Cha¯nakya (i.e. Kautilya). This kingly science, also called the science of policy, is expressed in a series of fables. The naturalism of the tales of the animal kingdom frees the rules of statecraft from the constraints imposed to bring it into harmony with dharma in the Brahminical canon, and the king’s policy is said to take many guises, like a harlot. The divergence of the political expedients of statecraft, which include deceit, from morality becomes more overt. Superiority of intrigue to force as a means of dealing with enemies is constantly emphasized. The emphasis on consultation is pervasive, but the choice of councilors and ministers is made to depend entirely on the success of their counsel and ruses in overcoming the perils of ruling and the fickleness of royal fortune and dealing with the king’s enemies in war and diplomacy. Their counsel depends on reasoning, though a purely instrumental reasoning involving deceit, treachery and espionage. The secrecy of counsel is consequently essential for its success (Ghoshal, 1959: 270, 275–91). In the civilizational encounter between Iran and India in the sixth century CE, statecraft attracted the attention of the scholars who traveled from Iran to the Indian centers of learning in search of knowledge.3 Khosraw I, Anu¯shirva¯n (531–79 CE), began his long reign by ending the threat of revolution caused by the communistic heresy of Mazdak. He countered the threat of Mazdakism by the administrative and judiciary reforms that

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earned him the epithet, ‘the Just’. His cultural response to heterodoxy combined support for orthodoxy and the Zoroastrian hierocracy with the encouragement of Indian and Greek learning. The dissemination of foreign ideas naturally encountered resistance. The Indian writings translated into Pahlavi (Middle Persian) included the Pañchatantra and another work on statecraft, Sendba¯d-na¯mah,4 or the Tales of Sinbad, and the life of the Buddha. The Pahlavi translations are not extant, but Ibn al-Moqaffa’ (d. 757) translated the first work into Arabic as Kalilah va Dimnah, which became a classic in Arabic literature. Anumber of competing Persian tales were spun under the impact of the translated Indian works on statecraft. The Pahlavi originals of these have not survived, but medieval Persian translations of two of them are extant. According to a medieval source, a late ninth-century local king in the Caspian region of Tabarestan who claimed descent from ancient Persian kings, translated a collection of Pahlavi animal fables known as Marzba¯nna¯mah so that ‘the knowledge of the Indian philosopher, Bidpa¯i, who compiled the Kalilah va Dimnah, will bite the dust as this collection [will show] the extent of superiority of the Persians upon the people of India and other countries’ (cited in Qazvini, 1909: h). The sentiment was probably shared by the sixth-century author, and reflects a natural hostile reaction to foreign ideas – an instance of a mild ‘clash of civilizations’ – in which many of the latter are in fact dialectically absorbed.

II The composite document known as the ‘constitution of Medina’ marks the foundation of a community (umma) under God, which is unified in matters of common defense and undivided peace, recognizes Muhammad as His Messenger, and invests him with judiciary authority (Denny, 1977). No provisions, however, were made regarding the form of government either in the ‘constitution of Medina’ or in the Koran itself. As the conquering Muslims took over the administrative organization of the Sassanian and Byzantine Empires, they also appropriated the normative order of universal monarchy. This normative order was binding on the Muslim and nonMuslim subjects of the caliphate; and it defined the polity without any meaningful reference to the umma (community of believers). The Koranic term umma became a fundamental point of reference for the shari’a, but not for the development of political ethic and public law. It is rarely used in the literature on ethics and statecraft, and has no special political significance. The bureaucratic class that carried out the fiscal and administrative tasks for the Muslim rulers also translated the Indo-Persian works on statecraft into Arabic. The greatest of translator-bureaucrats was ‘Abdalla¯h b. alMoqaffa’ who translated the Pañchatantra, alongside a massive Epic of Kings, Khoda¯y-na¯mah and several collections of aphorisms on statecraft.

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The Indian precepts were intermixed with the counsels of the Persian kings in the presentation of the tradition of the ancients. An important tract in this literature, which bears the imprint of the Indian idea of social hierarchy, is attributed to the founder of the Sassanian Empire and is accordingly known as the Ordinance (A¯’in) of Ardashir (de Fouchécour, 1986: 93–4). The Ordinance purports to record the act of foundation of order: regulation of the hours of the day, domestic life, dietary and sumptuary regulations, and above all the institution of the social order in the form of (the four) castes. This tract and other works in the early Perso- Indian statecraft literature offered a model for what was lacking in the Koran and the ‘constitution of Medina’: a constitution that regulated the relationship between the ruler and his subjects (ra’iyya), on the one hand, and his viziers and councilors, on the other. This explains why the Perso-Indian literature on statecraft was so easily absorbed into the public law of the caliphate and Muslim monarchies and shaped the medieval Muslim conception of government. It is important to note that the works on statecraft and customs of the ancient kings used the same normative vocabulary as the works of the early jurist, the two key words being sunna (custom or tradition) and sira (manner, way, plural siyar). We know that with the delayed triumph of alShafi’i in jurisprudence, these terms were exclusively appropriated for the Prophet. But the customs and the traditions of the ancient kings were given a similar normative status by the use of identical vocabulary. The title of History of the Prophets and the Kings (rusul wa’l-mulu¯k), is attested several times, the most notable being the great universal history by Tabari in the early tenth century. Independent royal dynasties were established in Iran and in Egypt in the latter part of the ninth century. Pollock’s (1998) thesis on the close connection between polity formation and the rise of vernacular languages in ‘the vernacular millennium’ finds strong support in the promotion of the Persian vernacular by the Samanid dynasty in northern Iran and Transoxania at the end of the ninth and throughout the tenth century. The Samanid state formation went hand in hand with the development of a political ethic based on the Perso-Indian literature of statecraft, which was translated from Arabic and Pahlavi into the dari Persian in the new, Arabic alphabet. Sendba¯d-na¯mah was translated into Persian by a Samanid bureaucrat in the middle of the tenth century, and set in Persian verse by the Samanid court poet, Ru¯daki, as was the Kalilah va Dimnah. At the same time, the Shi’ite Buyids from the Caspian provinces captured Baghdad and became the first of a series of secular independent rulers to assume the title of Sultan – and in Iran, Sha¯ hansha¯ h (king of kings). The bifurcation of sovereignty into caliphate and sultanate was a dramatic expression of the autonomy of the political order in the form of monarchy from the caliphate (Bartold, 1963). But this autonomy had in fact existed since the last quarter of the ninth century – that is, only a little later than the consolidation of the normative autonomy of the shari’a (sacred law). In other words, from the tenth century

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onward, the legal order of the caliphate had two normatively autonomous components: monarchy and the shari’a. These may be called the political order and the shar’i order, respectively. This duality is reflected in the medieval literature on statecraft and kingship as a theory of the two powers: prophecy and kingship. The theory of the two powers, which represented the synthesis between Islam and Perso-Indian statecraft, coexisted with a juristic theory of the caliphate as the apex of the shar’i order, which has received inordinate attention by the Orientalists as representing the Islamic ‘constitutional organization’ (Gibb, 1955). This theory found its definitive expression in the 11th century in a legitimist attempt to shore up the authority of the caliph against the growing power of the Buyid and Seljuq sultans. It subordinated the political order to the caliph as the highest authority of the shar’i order. Historically speaking, the juristic theory of the caliphate always coexisted with the political theory of the two powers, and furthermore, its full historical life spanned no more than two centuries. As we see later, with the demise of the caliphate, it gave way to a theory of the sultanate we characterize here as ‘Islamic royalism’. The great Persian classics in statecraft from the second half of the 11th century are the works of an experienced prince, ‘Onsor al-Ma’a¯li Keyka¯vu¯s, and the greatest vizier of the Seljuq empire, Niza¯m al-Molk. In these treatises, Qa¯bu¯s-na¯mah and Siyar al-Molu¯k, the aphoristic and fablecentered modes of presentation are replaced by systematic treatment of topics in rulership and administration, with many of the examples drawn from recent political and administrative history. Nevertheless, the essential notion of political wisdom as the ruler’s pragmatic art of rational government in consultation with ministers and councilors, is taken over from political aphorisms and fully developed. The need for consultation, constantly backed by the famous Koranic injunctions (Koran, 3: 159, 42: 38) that have in the 20th century been taking as justification of democracy, were interpreted to underscore the importance of wise councilors and competent viziers. In the generation after Niza¯m al-Molk, his protégé, the great jurist al-Ghaza¯li (d. 1111), who was a major contributor to the juristic theory of the caliphate, incorporated many of the aphorisms of statecraft in his various works (Tabataba’i, 1993: Ch. 3), and added a short mirror for princes to his Persian translation/adaptation of his magnum opus, Ihya¯’ ’ulu¯m al-din, the Alchemy of Happiness (Kimiya¯-ye sa ’a¯dat). This tract was published with a much larger second part as the Nasihat al-Molu¯k, which was already attributed to Ghaza¯li in the 12th century, and affirms the theory of dual power: ‘Know and understand that God has chosen two categories of persons, placing them above all the world: the prophets and the kings. The prophets are sent for the salvation of humankind, the kings, for the maintenance of order’ (Ghaza¯li, 1988: 81; Lambton, 1981: 120–1). The theory of the two powers was epitomized in the maxim: ‘kingship and prophecy are two jewels on the same ring’ (Arjomand, 2001b).

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With the absorption of the Perso-Indian literature, the centrality of punishment was carried over from Indian statecraft and deeply colored the Muslim conception of government, so much so that the same term, siya¯ sat, which etymologically meant the disciplining of camels and cattle, and by extension, of the subjects (Lane, 1863: Vol. 1, 1465), came to mean policy as well as punishment. The bureaucrat who translated Kalilah va Dimnah in the mid-12th century with an elaborate preface attributed an important precept of the Arthasha¯stra to Ardashir in a famous adage: ‘there is no kingdom except through men, and no men except through wealth and no wealth except through cultivation [‘ima¯ra] and no cultivation except through justice and punishment [siya¯sa]’. Wealth is the means for conquering the world, and justice and punishment are the elixir of wealth. Peace and security of roads and the preservation of the realm depend on punishment. Hence the priority of justice and punishment in the ethic of the kings (Nasralla¯h Monshi, 1998: 21). In the 13th and 14th centuries, the theory of dual power was somewhat modified. The fundamental distinction between the political order and the shar’i order did not disappear but was accommodated within the framework of the ideal type that I will call ‘Islamic royalism’. According to Islamic royalism, the ruler (sultan) maintained both the political and the shar’i order; was therefore the Shadow of God on earth and the ‘king [pa¯dsha¯h] of Islam’. A collection of early aphorisms on statecraft, attributed to Indian, Greek and Persian sages, many of whom (including ‘Sindbad the wise’) are named, and compiled at the beginning of the 13th century, already contains a typical statement of it: ‘Kingship [pa¯dsha¯hi] is . . . the deputyship [khela¯fat] of God Most High on Earth. If it does not contradict divine command and the Prophetic prescription, and if justice and equity is exercised in kingship . . . its degree will be equal to the rank of prophecy’ (Tuhfat al-Molu ¯ k, 1938: 62). Writing in support of the Khwa¯razmsha¯h’s serious challenge to the suzerainty of the caliph in the 1180s, the Shafi’ite jurist and philosopher, Fakhr al-Din Ra¯zi ignores the ‘Abbasid caliph and considers the king the deputy of God immediately: ‘The order of the world is impossible without the existence of the king [pa¯dsha¯h]; hence it is evident that the king is God’s Caliph’ (de Fouchécour, 1986: 426). Ra¯zi, it should be noted, adopted the form of Greek practical philosophy and its division into ethics, economics and civic politics for the presentation of his ideas on government in an encyclopedia of 60 sciences. He also drew on the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum Secretorum to depict the subordination of the shar’i order to the political order in the form of a circle drawn with eight segments, each containing an aphorism: The world is a garden whose gardener is the dynastic state [dawlat]; the state is an authority [sulta¯n] whose guardian is the sacred law [shari’at]: the sacred law is a policy [siya¯sat] which preserves the kingdom; the kingdom is a polity which the army brings into existence; the army is guaranteed by wealth; wealth is acquired from the subjects; the subjects are made servants by justice; justice is the axis of the well-being of the world. (Ra¯zi, 1905: 207)

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The first three segments represent Ra¯zi’s royalist accommodation of the shar’i order while the other five incorporate an old maxim of the PersoIndian statecraft. After the overthrow of the caliphate, Ra¯zi’s claim on behalf of kings gained universal acceptance, and kings added caliph as well as sultan to their titles. The ’Abbasid caliphate did have an afterlife, a particularly long one in India, where coins kept being minted in the names of dead and living shadow caliphs being maintained by the Mamluks in Egypt, and survived as a symbol into the 20th century. But it became devoid of significance for public law. Monarchy was henceforth derived independently from God. The ruler maintained order in the world; he was therefore God’s caliph or representative on earth. The fundamental principle of the new Islamic royalism was that the ruler (sulta¯n) maintained both the political and the shar’i order; was therefore the Shadow of God on earth, and the ‘king of Islam’. Islamic royalism became the typical polity for the Turko-Mongolian period: from 1258 to 1500 (Arjomand, 2001b).

III The synthesis Islam and statecraft in the preface to Kalilah va Dimnah contains a hint at a third element in medieval Muslim political ethic when the author mentions the needs of ‘the middling people’ with regard to ‘the disciplining/management [siya¯sat] of the self, the household and the dependents’ (Nasralla¯h Monshi, 1998: 21) As was pointed out, the PersoIndian statecraft offered a source for the normative regulation of the political order that was freely drawn upon and reconciled with Islam throughout the eighth and ninth centuries. The translation of Greek philosophy, medicine and astronomy gathered momentum in the ninth century. Plato’s Laws, Timaeus and the Republic, and all of Aristotle’s major works except Politics were translated, together with much neo-Platonic material attributed to them. The philosophers adopted the term siya¯sa from statecraft to denote civic politics (al-siya¯sa al-madaniyya). However, in contrast to the well-being and prosperity of the subjects, which were the goals of Persian statecraft, Muslim philosophers offered, as the telos of government, the happiness (sa’a¯da) of the members of the human association interchangeably termed society and polis (madina). For the great Muslim philosopher, Abu¯ Nasr al-Fa¯ra¯bi (d. 950), political science was the most important branch of philosophy; at one time, he went so far as to take the position that there was no happiness apart from political/civic happiness (al-sa’a¯ da al-madaniyya). His work is therefore singly the most important channel of transmission of Greek political science into the Islamic civilization. Fa¯ra¯bi used ‘civic politics’ (al-siya¯sa almadaniyya) synonymously with ‘governance’ (tadbir) and ‘rulership’ (riya¯sa), and equated the term with the ‘royal craft’. The royal craft was defined, without undue rigor, as the combination of the art of political

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science and the faculty of practical wisdom (Galston, 1990: 95, note 1). The analogy between statecraft and medicine was taken over by Fa¯ra¯bi from the statecraft literature: the goal of political science is the health of the city as the goal of the medical craft is bodily heath: ‘The healer for the bodies is the physician and the healer for the souls is the statesman who is also called the king.’ As the physician uses the medical craft to restore health to the body, so the health of the body politic is restored by ‘the statesman with the political craft and by the king with the royal craft’ (al-Fa¯ra¯bi, 1993: 24–5, #4). Furthermore, as with Perso-Indian statecraft, the objective of the royal craft was to bring order to the civic community by establishing a hierarchy among the classes of citizens and their respective activities (Galston, 1990: 135). One element of Fa¯ra¯bi’s political theory, however, appears regressive in comparison to the theory of dual power in the statecraft literature. In Civic Politics (cited in Galston, 1990: 67), revelation is presented as the union of the prophet with the Agent Intellect, which therefore endows him with the power ‘to define things and actions that direct people toward happiness’. Elsewhere, too, Fa¯ra¯bi conjoins governance and prophecy (al-Fa¯ra¯bi, 1968: 44; Galston, 1990: 94). The distinction between the prophet, the supreme ruler and the true king is completely blurred in the image of the ideal leader of the people to happiness in the City of Excellence. The practitioner of the royal art or political science appears, above all, as the technician of happiness who orders society and the lives of the citizens and ‘should inquire into everything given by the celestial bodies’ (Lerner and Mahdi, 1963: 40). Fa¯ra¯bi edited Plato’s Laws and wrote a commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics. Despite his knowledge of the Aristotelian conception of politics from the last chapter of Ethics, Fa¯ra¯bi decisively turned the focus of political science away from the notions of ‘public interest’ and ‘equality [of the ruler and the ruled] before the law’ and unto the master idea of ‘happiness’, whose achievement had little to do with the deliberations of citizens but was rather a technical matter best left to the ideal ruler and his expert advisors. Aristotle’s sharp contrast between the king and the statesman, which derives from his fundamental conception of the rule of law, is completely lost. Fa¯ra¯bi, as we have seen, simply equates the two terms ‘king’ (malik) and ‘statesman’ (madani). For Aristotle (1962: 1252a, #2, p. 2), in contrast to the uncontrolled authority of the former, the latter ‘exercises his authority in conformity with the rules imposed by the political craft and as one who rules and is ruled in turn’ (emphasis added). Furthermore, unlike the authority of the king and the master over slaves, ‘the authority of the statesman is an authority over freemen and equals’5 (Aristotle, 1962: 1255a, #1, p. 17). There is a corresponding loss of the concept of ‘common interest’ in contrast to ‘despotic’ interest of the master who rules over slaves, and of Aristotle’s (1962: 1279a, #9, p. 12) emphasis that ‘only those constitutions which consider the common interest are right constitutions, judged by the standards of absolute justice’.

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It is true that Fa¯ra¯bi also offers a more realistic typology of the inferior cities, including democracies, which was developed by Averroes (d. 1198) almost to the point of regenerating Aristotelian political science. Nevertheless, his political alchemy of happiness closed the Aristotelian window and left the gate of Muslim philosophy wide open to the temptation of neoPlatonic emanationism, according to which God’s attributes descended upon the earthly ruler (Arjomand, 2001b). Two Iranian philosophers who sought to synthesize Greek political science and Persian statecraft are of particular interest from our perspec¯ meri al-Nisha¯bu tive. Abu¯’l-Hasan al-’A ¯ ri (d. 991) discarded Fa¯ra¯bi’s dedifferentiation of prophecy and kingship for the dual theory of Persian statecraft, which, incidentally, allowed for a more harmonious reconciliation of Islam and philosophy. In the chapter on ‘the excellence of Islam in ¯ meri al-Nisha¯bu relation to kingship’ in his Virtues of Islam (al-’A ¯ ri, 1967: ¯ 152), ’Ameri considers prophecy and kingship the two institutions fundamental for the preservation of the world: There is no authority in learning and wisdom higher than prophecy. There is no higher authority in power and majesty than kingship. . . . It is related from Moses when addressing his people: ‘Remember the favor [God] bestowed upon you when He made prophets appear among you, and made you kings’. (Koran, 5:20)

¯ meri goes even further and tries to reconcile religious jurisprudence ’A and statecraft based on political science in view of the overlap between the ¯ meri al-Nisha¯bu religious and political spheres (al-’A ¯ ri, 1967: 119). The key to this reconciliation is the idea of rational religion, rationality being the quality taken to establish the superiority of Islam over other religions. He divides virtues into three kinds corresponding to the tripartite division of practical philosophy into the governance of the soul (ethics), of the household (economics) and of the city (political science). The use of a Persian term, kadkhodha¯niyya, for household management evokes the estate management of the Persian landed nobility in his native Khora¯sa¯n, and is ¯ meri’s project for a grand synthesis of political ideas that fully in line with ’A include Persian statecraft and practical philosophy as well as Islam. To the latter end, he had already produced a collection of Persian, Indian and Greek political aphorisms, which included long quotations from Plato (Badawi, 1974: 151–61). ¯ meri’s reading of Islam as rational religion is analogically extended by ’A his compatriot ‘Ali b. Mosku¯ yah (Miskawayh) (d. 1030) to the conception of Persian, Indian, Greek and Roman political ethics and norms of statecraft as ‘Eternal Wisdom’, the title of his treatise. In line with the idea of natural, civic religion, ‘eternal wisdom’ is conceived as rational/natural political ethics, which is therefore universal. The pluralist epistemology of this convert from Zoroastrianism granted equal validity to Persian, Indian, Greek and Arab expressions of Sophia Perennis. Ibn Mosku¯yah’s Purification of Ethics is a faithful rendering of Aristotle’s Ethics in Arabic. Happiness is possible only in society and through civic virtues and the pursuit of

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common goods. Ibn Mosku¯yah sharply diverges from Persian statecraft regarding the centrality of punishment in monarchy, and explicitly rejects domination based on force in favor of patrimonial rule based on love and affection. Like God, the king should be kind and merciful, and ‘the relationship between the king and the subject must be a paternal relationship, that of the subject to the king, filial, and that among the subjects, fraternal’ (Tahdhib, 146, cited in Tabataba’i, 1994: 163–4). However, Ibn Mosku¯yah’s conception of rulership and political science did not free itself from the Farabian idea of production of happiness as the craft of the ideal ruler. ‘The ruler of the city’ is the leader who guides his people through the rational sciences. He is the successor of the Lawgiver who guards the Law (shari’a) and protects its foundation. ‘He is the Imam and his craft is the kingly craft [sana¯’at al-mulk]’ (Tahdhib, 141, cited in Tabataba’i, 1994: 161). At this critical point of his synthesis, Ibn Mosku¯yah follows Fa¯ra¯bi’s collapsing of the king and the statesman and turns to the political ethic of Persian patrimonial statecraft and elaborates the relationship between the king and his subjects rather than those among free citizens. The classical Muslim political science culminates in the Akhla¯q-e Na¯seri, a Persian translation of Ibn Mosku¯yah’s Purification of Ethics, which extended its governance of the soul (ethics) and of the household (economics) by a section on civic politics. This last section incorporated some of the writings of Fa¯ra¯bi and Ibn Sina¯, as well as the older aphorisms of Ibn alMoqaffa’. Tu¯si follows Ibn Mosku¯yah in considering love an important factor in social solidarity, which makes the relationship between the ruler and the subjects paternal and that among subjects fraternal (Tu¯si, 1990: 269). He also develops (Tu¯si, 1990: 207–21, 254, 307–8) the Aristotelian notion of ‘the common good’. In a later tract, he even applies it to royal finances, making a distinction between the personal and the public royal revenue and expenditure (Arjomand, 2001b). But the determination of the common good is left to the head of the household in economics, and to the king as the head of the polity who orders diversity into unity as the shadow of God (Tu¯si, 1990: 148). In a major effort at synthesis, Tu¯si also incorporates the political ethic of patrimonial kingship into his political science. The common analogy between the monarch and God is not missing (Tu¯si, 1990: 139). The ruler, who is distinguished from other men by the divine inspiration required for rational government, is called ‘king’ by the ancients, ‘Imam’ by the jurists and ‘statesman’ by Aristotle – so Tu¯si alleges, following the Farabian confusion of king and statesman (Tu¯si, 1990: 253). Whereas his earlier general discussion of justice had followed Aristotle, when he now turns to the topic in the chapter on statecraft and kingship, which is immediately followed by the need for spies in statecraft, the Greek spirit is subordinated to the ethos of the Perso-Indian social hierarchy (Tu¯si, 1990: 307–11).

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IV From the very beginning of its importation in the latter part of the ninth and early tenth century, the proponents of philosophy, which included the Greek political theories, had to face the challenge of revealed religion to philosophy, and sought to reconcile the two. Fa¯ra¯bi took ‘the acquisition of happiness’ to extend beyond this world to the attainment of salvation in the next. Nevertheless, his inclination toward the holistic conception of Greek philosophy resulted in the presentation of religion as an imitation of philosophy as the means for the attainment of supreme happiness (Galston, 1990: 43–7), which was in turn developed into the distinctive Muslim philosophical theory of prophecy (Rahman, 1958), and posed a thinly veiled challenge to Revelation as the fundamental premise of Islam.6 Rational legitimation of religion is the philosophical theory which was a potential challenge to the traditional legitimacy of the shar’i order. This made a clash between Islam and Greek philosophy, including political theory, inevitable, and a rejectionist civilizational response by the pious traditionalists gathered momentum and eventually displaced philosophy to the margin of institutionalized learning. This long and complex Kulturkampf, considered the most fateful in the history of Islamic civilization by many, cannot be discussed here, and I must confine myself to the rejectionist civilizational response only with regard to political ideas. While the ’Abbasid caliphate survived, though seriously weakened during ‘the Shi’ite Century’ (Hodgson, 1974: Vol. 2, 36–9), the rejectionist response was formulated by the jurists who proposed to revive the institution of the caliphate with a program of Shari’a-based government. They developed a theory of the caliphate as a branch of Islamic jurisprudence. In terms of our dichotomy, this theory realistically allowed for the possibility of ‘authority by seizure’, but advocated the subordination of the political to the shar’i order under the suzerainty of the caliph. The Chief Kadi of Baghdad, al-Ma¯wardi, perhaps the best known of these jurists, did not see this branch of Islamic jurisprudence as incompatible with statecraft, and in fact tried his hand at writing a tract in that genre on ‘The Laws [qawa¯nin] of the Vizierate and Statecraft [siya¯sat al-mulk]’. Ghaza¯li, the leading figure in the rejection of philosophy, also practiced the new genre of caliphal jurisprudence early in his career (Lambton, 1981: 107–17), but must have recognized its limits. The choice of words for the title of his great book on ethics in Persian cannot have been accidental. By using the key term of the philosophers in his Elixir of Happiness, he clearly meant to appropriate the field of ethics and civil politics for the jurists. He evidently did not find Persian statecraft nearly as threatening as Greek political science, and followed Ma¯wardi in drawing on it to supplement the theory of Shari’a-based government. After the overthrow of the ‘Abbasid caliphate by the Mongols, the political ideas of the 11th century caliphal legitimists inspired the Siya¯sa al-shar’iyya (Sharia-based politics or policy) by Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328),

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who lived in Syria and wrote in the face of the triple threat of the Mongols, the Shi’ites and the Crusaders. The science of civic politics, as was pointed out, reached its peak in Tu¯si’s Ethics, already subordinating its Greek form to the spirit of Perso-Indian statecraft. From then on, it merged with statecraft, facing its programmatic Islamic counterpart of theories of shar’i government which may in fact have been increasingly accommodated (Tabataba’i, 1994: Ch. 9). The Muslim synthesis of Perso-Indian statecraft and Greek political science was thus complete, and henceforth found expression in variants of the theories of the two powers. The later centuries were times of insignificant change, and the theory of the two powers survived into our era. During the Iranian constitutional revolution, Shaykh Fazlalla¯h Nu¯ri justified the restoration of absolute monarchy in 1907 with a restatement of the theory of the two powers (Zargarinezha¯d, 1998: 163).

V At the beginning of this article, I mentioned the holistic temptation to reject the fact of differentiated historic civilizations for the totalistic conception of civilization, which dedifferentiate it to what is seen as its fundamentals. The reified concept of the West, as was pointed out, became the social myth of the modernizing elite of the Ottoman Empire and Iran in the 19th century. In the 20th century, it stimulated the dispossessed traditional or ‘organic’ intellectuals of Muslim societies to formulate an Islamic countermyth of their own. The political edge of this alternative Islamic social myth became increasingly sharpened as the century was drawing to a close. The late 20th century ‘political Islam’ obliterated the theory of the two powers from an increasingly reified and holistic historical memory, and discovered a hero in Ibn Taymiyya, whose apprehension of the aforementioned triple threat matches their fear of suffocation by the western cultural invasion. Ibn Taymiyya’s monistic idea of ‘Shar’ia-based policy’ was simplified still further into a vehemently rejectionist, antiwestern myth of the ‘Islamic state’ with the primary function of the execution of the divine law. The fact that the myth of the Islamic state matches the reified and holistic picture of the enemy civilization drawn by Huntington does not make it a historical reality. The salient aspect of the historical reality we have analyzed in this article is rather the differential reception of Perso-Indian and Greek political ideas in Islam. The simplest explanation of this differential absorption into the Muslim conception of government is the historical continuity with ancient Iran, which made monarchy a political reality from the ninth century onward (and had strongly influenced the conception of the Caliphate much earlier), whereas the Greek or even the Hellenistic polis had long ceased to exist. Nor could the Greek idea of polis, faithfully rendered as madina, have any ‘demonstration effect’ as the Byzantine

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Empire was by then a Christian monarchy. Its impact depended on the transhistorical property of the Greek civilizational complex, which made possible its intersocietal transmission and rediscovery in medieval Islam and medieval Christianity. Such intercivilizational transmission would, however, be inevitably selective. The fact that the Muslim philosophers from Fa¯ra¯bi to Tu¯si took monarchy for granted, as I have tried to show, critically affected their reading of Aristotle and can therefore account for some of their omissions. This explanation can be supplemented by a single historical fact of great importance. Tu¯si and the Muslim philosophers lacked knowledge of Aristotle’s Politics (Brague, 1993). They therefore mistook the Republic of ‘the divine Plato’ as the natural extension of Aristotle’s Ethics (Averroes, 1974: 4), with the consequent loss of many key Aristotelian political concepts that shaped western political thought. The reception of Greek philosophy by the Muslims was incomplete, and left out the central Aristotelian political conception of common interest as determined by the deliberation by citizens who constituted the ruler and the ruled at the same time. This glaring omission is one of the greatest puzzles in the history of Islamic civilization. It raises the theoretically critical counterfactual question: ‘What if Aristotle’s Politics had been translated into Arabic?’ (And why was it not translated as it was accessible to those who translated Aristotle’s other works?) If Politics had been available, it may have paved the way for detaching the idea of the rule of law and public interest from monarchy and the shar’i order alike. Would Nasir al-Din Tu¯si, who died a year before Thomas Aquinas in 1274 and is, incidentally, credited with the anticipation of Copernicus in astronomy (Huff, 1993: 55–9), not have been able to reconcile the Aristotelian conception of politics with Islam as Aquinas reconciled it with Christianity? The metaphysical metamorphosis of public interest into happiness by Fa¯ra¯bi was perhaps both the consequence and the cause of the Muslim neglect of Aristotle’s Politics. With the omission of the Aristotelian conception of politics, Persian norms came to constitute the substance of the political theory of Tu¯si and his epigone, Greek practical philosophy its form. The conception of the divine law as the source of authority in the shar’i order – already in place by the time Fa¯ra¯bi produced a Muslim version of Greek political science – was a greater obstacle to the reception of philosophy than the Christian conception of canon law as the law that derived its authority from that of the church as the mystical body of Christ (Peters, 1982). The contrast can partly explain the divergence in the reception of Aristotle and political trajectories of medieval Islamic and West European civilizations. This divergence was considerable, but not as sharp as it became in modern times. A traveler equipped with our survey of IndoPersian statecraft and Greco-Muslim division of practical philosophy into ethics, economics and the craft of civic government would still find himself fairly comfortably at home in the political culture of Renaissance Italy (Springborg, 1992: Ch. 18) and of late 16th century France (Foucault, 1991:

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90–8), except for Bodin’s presentation of the public character of sovereignty on the basis of Aristotle’s Politics. By the end of the 18th century, however, the trajectories of political evolution in the Islamic and western civilizations had been pushed much wider apart by two developments in the West: the absolutist state and of capitalism, which brought a new notion of rational government-based ‘statistics’ and ‘policy’ (police, Polizei) (Foucault, 1991), and the democratic revolutions, which vastly expanded the scope of the Aristotelian notions of common good and equality before the law.

Notes 1. Al-Azmeh (1997) emphasizes similarities in the conception and enunciations of power across different civilizations. My focus is, by contrast, on the axiological differences which can account for divers arrangements of the same or similar traits in fundamentally different configurations. 2. As the two approaches to politics developed separately and did not have an impact on Islam until a millennium later, relative chronology of these independent developments is not relevant to our purpose, and we consider the two in the order of their respective importation into the Islamic civilization. 3. So did astrology, supported by the most advanced arithmetic of the era, whose political edge was sharpened in the Islamic civilization (Arjomand, 2001a). 4. The book was translated from Syriac to Greek, and from Arabic and Hebrew to Latin. All its tales were later incorporated into the Thousand and One Nights. 5. In Kita¯b al-Milla va Nusu¯s Ukhra, al-Fa¯ra¯bi (1968: 63, #20) suggests that individuals in the social hierarchy both obey the authority of those above them and exercise their own authority over those below them, but there is no sense of equality before the law. In fact, social hierarchy is immediately said to be an extension of the universe, with God as its manager (mudabbir) and the immediate superior and prototype of the monarch. 6. This challenge is especially clear in the definition of religious sciences and jurisprudence ¯ meri (1967: 119). as civic crafts by Fa¯ra¯bi (Lerner and Mahdi, 1963: 27) and al-‘A

References Al-Azmeh, Aziz (1997) Muslim Kingship. Power and the Sacred in Muslim, Christian and Pagan Polities. London: I.B. Tauris. ¯ meri al-Nisha¯bu¯ri, Abu¯’l-Hasan (1967) al-I’la¯m bi-Mana¯qib al-Isla¯m, A. ed. ‘A. Ghura¯b. Al-’A Cairo. Al-Fa¯ra¯bi, Abu¯ Nasr (1968) Kita¯ b al-Milla va Nusu¯ s Ukhra, ed. M. Mahdi. Beirut: Dar ElMashreq Publishers. Al-Fa¯ra¯bi, Abu¯ Nasr (1993) Fusu ¯ l Muntazaza’ah [Selected Aphorisms], ed. F.M. Najjar. Beirut: Dar El-Mashreq Publishers. Aristotle (1962) The Politics of Aristotle, ed. and trans. E. Barker. New York: Oxford University Press. Arjomand, S.A. (2001a) ‘India’s Contribution to Persianate Political Culture’, paper presented at the Proceedings of the 2001 Indian History Congress. Arjomand, S.A. (2001b) ‘Medieval Persianate Political Ethic’, Studies on Persianate Societies 1.

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Averroes (Ibn Rushd) (1974) Averroes on Plato’s Republic, ed. and trans. R. Lerner. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Badawi, A.-R. (1974/1353) Afla¯tu ¯ n fi’l-Isla¯m. Tehran. Bartold, V.V. (1963) ‘Caliph and Sultan’, Islamic Quarterly VII: 117–35. Brague, R. (1993) ‘Note sur la traduction arabe de la Politique, derechef, qu’elle n’existe pas’, in P. Aubenque (ed.) Aristote politique. Etudes sur la Politique d’Aristote. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. de Fouchécour, C.-H. (1986) Moralia. Les Notions morales dans la littérature persane du 3e/9e au 7e/13e siècle. Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les Civilisations. Denny, F. (1977) ‘Ummah in the Constitution of Media’, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 36(1): 37–47. Derrett, J.D.M. (1999) Religion, Law and the State in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Foucault, M. (1991) ‘Governmentality’, in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect. Studies in Governmentality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Galston, M. (1990) Politics and Excellence. The Political Philosophy of Alfarabi. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ghaza¯li, Mohammad (1988/1367) Nasihat al-Molu ¯ k, ed. J. Homa¯’i, 4th edn. Tehran: Homa. Ghoshal, U.N. (1959) A History of Indian Political Ideas. London: Oxford University Press. Gibb, H.A.R. (1955) ‘Constitutional Organization’, in M. Khadduri and H.J. Liebesney (eds) Law in the Middle East. Washington, DC: The Middle East Institute. Hodgson, M.G.S. (1974) The Venture of Islam, 3 Vols. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Huff, T.E. (1993) The Rise of Early Modern Science. Islam, China and the West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huntington, Samuel P. (1996) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster. Kautilya (1987) The Arthashastra, ed. L.N. Rangarajan. New Delhi: Penguin. Lambton, A.K.S. (1981) State and Government in Medieval Islam. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lane, E.W. (1863) Arabic-English Lexicon, 2 Vols. London and Edinburgh. Lerner, R. and Mahdi, M., eds (1963) Medieval Political Philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lingat, R. (1973) The Classical Law of India, trans J.D.M. Derrett. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Ibn Mosku¯yah (Miskayah), ‘Ali (1966) Tahdhib al-Akhla¯q, ed. Q. Zuraiq. Beirut: The American University. Nasralla¯h Monshi (1998/1377) Kalilah va Dimnah, ed. M. Da¯neshpazku¯h. Tehran: Hirmand. Nelson, B. (1981) On the Roads to Modernity. Conscience, Science and Civilizations, ed. T.E. Huff. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield. Peters, F.E. (1982) The Children of Abraham. Judaism, Christianity, Islam. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pollock, S. (1998) ‘India in the Vernacular Millennium: Literary Culture and Polity, 1000–1500’, Daedalus 127(3): 41–74. (Qazvini), Mirza Muhammad (1909) ‘Editor’s Introduction’, Marzuban-nama. London: Luzac. Rahman, F. (1958) Prophecy in Islam. Philosophy and Orthodoxy. London: Allen and Unwin. Ra¯zi, Fakhr al-Din (1905/1323) Ja¯m’ al-’Olu¯m, ed. M. Malek al-Kutta¯b. Bombay. Spellman, J.W. (1964) Political Theory of Ancient India: A Study of Kingship from the Earliest Times to circa A.D. 300. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Springborg, P. (1992) Western Republicanism and the Oriental Prince. Austin: University of Texas Press. Tabataba’i, J. (1993/1372) Dara¯ madi Falsafi bar Ta¯rikh-e Andishah-ye Siya¯ si dar Ira¯n. Tehran: Kavir. Tabataba’i, J. (1994) Zava¯l-e Andishah-ye Siya¯si dar Ira¯n. Tehran: Kavir. (Originally written 1373.) Tiryakian, E.A. (1985) ‘On the Significance of De-Differentiation’, in S.N. Eisenstadt and H.J.

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Helle (eds) Macrosociological Theory, Sage Studies in International Sociology, Vol. 33. London: Sage. Tuhfat al-Molu¯k, ed. H. Taqiza¯dah (1938/1317) Tehran: Cha¯pkha¯nah-ye Majles. Tu¯si, Nasir alDin (1990) Akhlàq-e Nàseri, eds M. Minovi and A. Haydari. Tehran: Khwarazmi. (English trans. Wickens, G.M., The Nasirean Ethics, London: Allen and Unwin, 1964.) Zargarinezha¯d, Gh., ed. (1998/1377) Rasa¯’il-e Mashru¯tiyyat. Tehran: Kavir.

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13 The Comparison of Civilizations Louis Dumont on India and the West T.N. Madan

Every civilization is carried on the network of a society, and it is impossible in practice to study a civilization and its society apart from each other. (Toynbee, 1961: 282) Modern civilization has the unique advantage of commanding a relatively good knowledge of many other civilizations and cultures; comparison is the fulcrum. (Dumont, 1977: 11)

Louis Dumont’s objective in his monumental oeuvre was to treat the social anthropological (monographic) study of particular societies and cultures as not only an end in itself but ultimately, and more importantly, as a means to the sociological (generalized) understanding of the human condition. The key element of his method was comparison. The comparative method in Dumont’s hands became a series of productive ‘confrontations’ – a dialectic – across time and space. I try in this article to briefly illustrate his method by outlining the course of Dumont’s studies within and across civilizations. Recalling the early years of his career in the late 1930s as a clerical worker in the French section of the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires in Paris, he approvingly mentions the endeavour of keeping a ‘scriptureless humanity . . . alive in its diversity’ (see Galey, 1982: 13). An interest in cultural difference was at that early stage established as the foundation stone of the multistoried intellectual edifice that he was to build over the following 50 years. There could hardly have been a better, more productive, way of developing this interest in cultural diversity – and indeed to recognize it in the first instance – than to proclaim the comparability of local, regional and national cultures and eventually of transnational civilizations. The concept of levels was central to this enterprise, each level of observation and study and of comparison being the ‘stepping stone’ (Dumont, 1971: 60) to another. Moreover, along with other structuralists – Dumont came to know Lévi-Strauss’s work at the Musée – he came to believe that the deeper the differences between two cultures, the greater the likelihood that comparing them will yield significant understandings of both and of social life generally. Without generalization the task of comparison is incomplete.

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In the original edition of Homo Hierarchicus (Dumont, 1967a), in which he presented a sociological model of Indian (Hindu) society – and indeed of Indian civilization generally – to the French reading public, he affirmed that, for his theoretical orientation, he was deeply indebted to the French tradition of sociology (Dumont, 1980: xlv). Within this tradition the comparative approach had been employed with impressive effect by Emile Durkheim himself in his magnum opus, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915) and by other members of the Année Sociologique group. As for Dumont, he acknowledged the influence of Celestin Bouglé (1971), from whom he derived the defining principle of the caste system. It was Marcel Mauss, however, above everybody else, whom Dumont recognized as his mentor. Dumont actually became Mauss’s student in the mid-1930s. Mauss was, of course, a comparativist par excellence and a Sanskritist too (see, for example, Mauss, 1970). Specifically and crucially, Dumont responded positively to Mauss’s teaching that ‘it is through our own culture that we can understand another, and vice versa’. Such a stance implied in the first place ‘an assumption about the unity of mankind’, but that by itself is rather vague and therefore further entails the ‘study of differences’ (Dumont, 1986: 189–90). The moot point is how a focus on difference may be prevented from producing absolute separation in effect even when the notion of the unity of humankind ensures against such a slide in principle. In short, how do we connect, by what procedure? More about this later. Dumont’s cultural and educational background in France had sensitized him to the empirical presence of the individual in society and of the normative value of individualism. His preparatory studies had already got him ready to encounter the group (caste) rather than the individual in India. This difference was to create problems for a comparison of the two cultures. For a start, there was no escape from caste, however, and it was a south Indian subcaste, namely the Pramalai Kallar of Tamil Nadu, that he chose to study. The individual here was submerged in the group, but the local group itself was not an autonomous but an embedded entity. To quote Dumont: ‘All castes of a given culture area – [such as] the Tamil language area – rest on fundamental common institutions. These institutions must be discovered under individual diversity, and they constitute, along with the caste system itself, the social morphology of the civilization in question’ (Dumont, 1986b: 3). The aforementioned task of discovery entailed intracivilizational comparison. The Pramalai Kallar are a subcaste. Much that is true of them is true of all Kallar subcastes and some of it is also true of other castes/subcastes of Tamil Nadu that are of the same or comparable ritual and social status. Understanding is here obtained through an inside-out movement. Castes that rank higher or lower in the social hierarchy also share many values, beliefs and practices with the Pramalai Kallar by virtue of participation in a common regional, Tamil, culture. Tamils themselves are one of the four major linguistic groups, each numbering millions, that together comprise the Dravidian culture of south India.

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A widely shared social organizational feature of the Dravidian south is what used to be called ‘consanguineal’ or ‘cross-cousin marriage’ (marriage of a boy/man with his mother’s brother’s daughter). Intensive fieldwork combined with careful reading of the available ethnography and LéviStrauss’s seminal work on ‘the elementary structures of kinship’ originally published in 1949 (see Lévi-Strauss, 1967), enabled Dumont to provide a new interpretation of the preferential form of marriage among the Dravidian peoples. The method was comparison within the region (at the caste/subcaste and local levels) and the substantive conclusion was that the so-called consanguines, or cross-cousins, are properly conceived of as predetermined affines. Under the prevailing regime, marriages are not merely episodic events, but enduring arrangements between wife-giving and wifereceiving lineages. Affinity (the relationship established through marriage) could thus be said to be inherited or transmitted from generation to generation and in principle permanent. Dumont (1957a) proposed therefore that marriage in south India, being of distinctive character from what it is in the West, should be called ‘marriage alliance’. The contrast was further stressed later when he wrote that, in the West, ‘affinity . . . merges into consanguinity for the next generation . . . [and] is undervalued in relation to it’ (Dumont, 1983: vii; emphasis in the original). At the time of the first publication of the relevant monograph (1957), Dumont stated the conclusion that marriage alliance was ‘the fundamental principle of South Indian kinship’ (Dumont, 1983: 104). Absence of any reference to the character of marriage in north India was apparently due to the fact that no major studies of the subject based on fieldwork were available, although some Indological studies did exist. His own fieldwork in a north Indian village began only that year and he would not have arrived at any definite conclusions. Dumont addressed the issue of the north–south comparison only ten years later (Dumont, 1966). He then noted that although interkin marriage is not allowed, and the institution of marriage alliance is absent, other evidence is available about the relations between wife-givers and wife-takers (such as an asymmetrical flow of gifts from the former to the latter) to indicate a stress upon affinity that appears to be a pan-Indian phenomenon. This consists, he wrote, ‘in the valuation, and in the consequent elaboration and ordering or patterning of affinal relationships. This valuation is, of course, consistent with the caste system insofar as . . . membership [in a caste] depends upon the [caste] status of both parents, and thus upon marriage’ (Dumont, 1966: 113). In his discussion of south India, Dumont had earlier pointed out that the principle of alliance was also ‘fundamental’ in relation to caste, since endogamous marriage was its basis. Hence the conclusion: ‘marriage is crucial on both levels of caste and kinship, . . . it constitutes in a sense their articulation’ (Dumont, 1983: 104). The conception of a comparative sociology and its method are here complete. North India is distinguished from south India through interregional or intracivilizational comparison but, in the next move, both north

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and south are accommodated within a pan-Indian emphasis on marriage, even at the cost of playing down the differences between them. This emphasis serves to bring out the contrast between India and the West (intercivilizational comparison). Thus, he observes that it is ironical that the egalitarian westerners ‘practice subordination – the relation between consanguinity and affinity is exactly . . . a hierarchical relation – while South Indian people, who live in a hierarchical society, . . . make a simple, straightforward, symmetrical distinction between them’ (Dumont, 1983: vii; emphasis in the original). The idea of hierarchy – the encompassing of the contrary – lies at the very core of Dumont’s most ambitious work, namely Homo Hierarchicus (Dumont, 1967a, 1970a, 1980). As is well known – given its status as a modern classic – the book is an analysis of the caste system. The presence of castes everywhere, he had earlier said (Dumont, 1970b: 2–18), was a token of the civilizational unity and distinctiveness of India. Homo Hierarchicus opens with civilizational contrasts being placed at the very centre of the enquiry. ‘The caste system is so different from our own social system in its central ideology’, Dumont wrote, ‘that the modern reader is doubtless rarely inclined to study it fully.’ Moreover, ‘the very authors who have devoted books to it have more often tried to explain the system as an anomaly than understanding it as an institution. . . . More is necessary: the conviction that caste has something to teach us about ourselves’ (Dumont, 1980: 1). Put differently, this meant that caste must be taken seriously as a civilizational scheme or mode and not be treated as a product of social ‘degeneracy’ (see Madan, 1999: 478). The question that arises here is why western observers and thinkers have been so negative about caste. Dumont’s answer is that the unquestioning acceptance of equality as an ideal is responsible for this. The bearer of the values of western civilization knows equality or, its binary opposite, inequality. He or she does not think in terms of hierarchy and fails to ask ‘to what extent [equality] runs contrary to the general tendencies of societies, and hence how far our society is exceptional, and how difficult it is to realize this ideal’ (Dumont, 1980: 20). Ethnocentrism is a universal failing and scholars suffer from it no less than lay persons. The tendency is to make sense of the unfamiliar by comparing it to the familiar. Needless to point out, this procedure introduces category assumptions into the interpretation and may distort it. Thus, no less an intellectual than Max Weber conceived of caste, as Dumont notes, as ‘a particular kind of status group or estate (German, Stand), in the sense of the three estates of the Ancien Régime of France’. The idea that ‘caste is a limiting case of social class’ is widespread (Dumont, 1980: 26). What this does is to obscure the fact that, viewed from within Hindu society, religious values are crucial to an understanding of caste in a manner that renders uncritical comparisons with modern (western) society – and for that matter with the so-called primitive society – misleading. In Dumont’s view, the sociocentricity of the western observer makes him or her introduce considerations of power where religious values are primary; similarly, the

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interests and perspectives of the individual are introduced where the group and holism prevail. An authentic effort at understanding Indian civilization through a focus on the fundamental and ubiquitous institution of caste, according to Dumont, must begin with the first principles chosen by Indians themselves, but should not stop there. The dialectical method requires that the first principles, or ideology, be confronted by practice, and the view from within be confronted by the view from without. The external (western or any other) perspective is not eliminated, but relocated in the structure of the argument as a particular possibility that might illumine other such particulars, rather than as a universal tendency. Instead of ‘classification’, which brings down social and cultural diversities to the level of the lowest common denominator, a more heuristically productive procedure is ‘typification’, which enlarges rather than narrows the framework of comparison, and produces understanding through contrasts (or controlled comparison) (see Dumont, 1967b). Following a methodological first principle that he himself had earlier enunciated – ‘a sociology of India lies at the point of confluence of Sociology and Indology’ (Dumont, 1970b: 2) – Dumont focused on the notion of ritual purity, which he derived from both the Indological tradition and extant ethnography, as the point of departure for his analysis of the caste system. Others too – notably Bouglé (1971), who derived the hierarchical separation of castes and their interdependence from it – had identified this idea as crucial, but Dumont’s handling of it (although indebted to Bouglé’s formulation) was innovative. He disowned any interest in the search for causes: ‘I do not claim that the opposition between pure and impure is the “foundation” of society except in the intellectual sense of the term: it is by implicit reference to this opposition that the society of castes appears consistent and rational to those who live in it’ (Dumont, 1980: 44). The opposition, it must be added, is neither mere difference nor simple social gradation: it is hierarchical: that is, the impure is both opposed to as well as included in the pure. Put as a general principle, hierarchy is ‘the principle by which the elements of a whole are ranked in relation to the whole, it being understood that in the majority of societies it is religion which provides the view of the whole, and that the ranking will thus be religious in nature’ (Dumont, 1980: 66; emphasis in the original). Having grounded himself thus, Dumont proceeded to demonstrate that the various aspects of the caste system – marriage rules, dietary regimes, hereditary occupational roles, etc. – can be derived from the necessary and hierarchical coexistence of ritual purity and its opposite impurity. By his interpretation, caste is different from other forms of social stratification through the ‘disjunction’ of ritual status and secular (politico-economic) power within the social system. Secular power, although opposed in principle to ritual status, is encompassed by it. Homo Hierarchicus is neither a historical account of the caste system nor an explanation of it in merely behavioural (interactional) terms. It is rather

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a logico-deductive ‘experiment’ to derive the form (or ‘structure’) of the ‘system’ from ‘a single true principle’ (Dumont, 1980: xiii, 43). Since castes exist ‘from one end of the country to the other, and nowhere else’, which fact points to an empirical ‘unity of India’ (Dumont, 1970b: 4), the underlying ideology – ‘a system of ideas and values’ (Dumont, 1980: 36) – signifies a civilizational perspective. The ideology does not explain everything, although it encompasses the social reality, nor does the observation of actual behaviour reveal everything. A ‘residue’ remains, which can only be explained through a ‘confrontation of ideology and observation’ (Dumont, 1980: 77), Thus, the exclusion of power from the notion of status leaves unexplained empirical evidence of the exercise of authority. To understand it, the principle of hierarchy is held to be applicable but also incomplete: it is ‘completed by dominance’. But the first principle may not be abandoned through the elevation of economics and politics to a level on par with or above religious values. Doing so would amount to ‘a misconstruction of Indian civilization’ (Dumont, 1980: 183, 388). When such an equation is seen to occur, in fact, it can only be termed the pretentiousness of power. Internal comparison is thus built into Dumont’s model of the caste system. An external comparison also is indicated, in the assertion that castes are found in India and nowhere else, and is required for a complete understanding of the phenomenon. The argument is completed by providing an answer to the crucial question: ‘Are there castes among non- Hindus and outside India?’ (Dumont, 1980: 201–16). So far as communities adhering to other (non-Hindus) religions are concerned (notably Indian Muslims and Christians constituting respectively about 13 and 2 percent of the total population), Dumont’s contention is that caste is found among them in ‘more or less attenuated forms. . . . A non-Hindu group cannot be regarded as independent of the environment in which it is set, as really constituting a society by itself, however strongly its values push into this direction’ (Dumont, 1980: 210). Pushing comparison outside the subcontinent to consider traditional Sri Lankan social organization, Dumont acknowledges the presence of ‘all the characteristics of caste’ but notes that ‘the king has remained the centre both of group religion . . . and of political and economic life . . . the supremacy of the priest [standing for religious values, notably ritual purity] is an Indian fact which has remained unexportable’ (Dumont, 1980: 216). What is of deeper significance in the context of the present article is the paradigm of intercivilizational comparison that Dumont presents, hierarchical Indian society vs egalitarian western society. As he puts it, the task is to ‘set the two types face to face’ to show that ‘explicit and valorized ideas in the one case’ are ‘by contrast, subordinate or unrecognized in the other’. Each type comprises the same elements, but the manner of their arrangement is different, even irreconcilable. To wit, hierarchy (separation and interdependence) as a value is opposed to equality (in a framework of economics and politics); holism (‘society taken as a whole’, ‘man [sic] as society’), to individualism (‘man as individual’); subordination of economic and

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political interests to religious value, to relegation of religion to the private domain (individual life); individualism as renunciation (‘individual outsidethe-world’), to holism as totalitarianism. To leave the characterization in the foregoing mutually exclusive form would be ‘mechanical’: it is important to note that ‘the pole of opposition which is not valorized is none the less present, each implies the other and is supported by it’. Thus, ‘the tendency to hierarchize still exists [in modern society]’, although occasionally in ‘ferocious and morbid’ forms (e.g. as racism) (Dumont, 1980: 232–3, 265). It follows that if the two civilizational perspectives are reversed, hierarchical society will illumine egalitarian society and vice versa. *

*

*

Having started at home in Europe, Dumont set out on a voyage of discovery to India, only to return home to discover Europe in its own varieties of civilizational unity and diversity. The holism and hierarchy of traditional Indian society enabled Dumont to problematize the individualism and equality of modern western society. He queried: ‘how and why has this unique development that we call “modern” occurred at all?’ (Dumont, 1977: 7). It was, in his judgement, nothing less than a ‘revolution of values’. In all traditional (premodern) societies, ‘the relations between men’ had been ‘more highly valued, than the relations between men and things. This primacy is reversed in the modern type of society, in which relations between men are subordinated to relations between men and things’ (Dumont, 1977: 5). The reversal entailed in a manner of speaking the subversion of the whole of society and its replacement by the parts, namely selforiented, choice-making, rational individuals operating in compartmentalized and specialized domains of activity. The paradigm shift had its beginnings in the late 18th century (Dumont suggests 1776, the year of publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations as a convenient date) and was consolidated throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The political and the economic were separated through the severance of ‘the link between immovable wealth and power over men’, and ‘movable wealth becomes autonomous’. Symbolizing the dominant role of the economy in society, ‘the market and its concomitants’ within the political philosophy of ‘liberalism’ acquired almost a ‘sacrosanct role’ in society. In Karl Polanyi’s (1957) well-known formulation, this was indeed ‘the great transformation’. Focusing on the ideology underlying this transformation, Dumont describes its progression through a careful consideration of the views of several social thinkers, notably François Quesnay (France), John Locke (England), Bernard de Mandeville (the Netherlands), Adam Smith (Scotland) and Karl Marx (Germany), all makers of the modern ideology. It was Quesnay who introduced the idea of the economic domain as ‘a consistent whole’, although he believed this holism to be ‘the projection on the economic plane of the general conception of the universe as an ordered

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whole’ (Dumont, 1977: 41). In other words, Quesnay’s was a basically traditional position, notwithstanding the bow to the conditional autonomy of the economic domain. Locke of course preceded Quesnay, but he had already gone further in the direction of the separation of economics from politics, illustrated best by his conceptualization of the notion of ‘property’ within an individualistic framework. ‘What is essential is that, with property, something that is exclusively of the individual is made central to a realm of consideration and facts that was governed by holistic, hierarchical considerations.’ In Locke, Dumont writes ‘Morality and economics provide, in the “law of nature”, the basis on which political society should be constructed.’ In other words, ‘politics as such is reduced to being an adjunct of morality’ (Dumont, 1977: 53–4). With Mandeville a critical transition occurred: value and fact were separated. In his Fable of the Bees, private vices bring about public virtue in the form of activity and prosperity, not by any internal logic but by skilful political management. From a careful examination of the import of the Fable and of Mandeville’s views on the nature of morals and society, Dumont concludes that Mandeville disjoined hedonism from morality and established ‘the primacy of the relation of man to goods over the relations between men – if not in principle, then in the actual life of a large and powerful society’ (Dumont, 1977: 81). Material prosperity thus became a self-certified moral end. Mandeville is important in relation to Adam Smith’s curious notion of the ‘Invisible Hand’, of how in the economic domain the apparently selfish pursuit of particular interests by individuals unwittingly yields the common good (Dumont, 1977: 61). Crucial to Dumont’s argument is Smith’s ‘stress on labour as a measure of value’ and his ‘preference for the definition of value through exchange’ (Dumont, 1977: 92). The consequence of this orientation is that human beings are presented as the creator of wealth in relation to the material world. The full potential of value thus created by humans is realized through exchange. In sum, ‘we have here the elevation of the individual subject, of man as “self-loving” labouring-and-exchanging, who through his toil, his interest, and his gain works for the common good, for the wealth of nations’ (Dumont, 1977: 97). In his detailed discussion of Marx that follows, Dumont shows the logical steps by which the ‘material conditions of life’, already a central idea in Smith and in the burgeoning economic ideology of the West, are given explanatory value by Marx. For him production is the human activity par excellence: ‘production in the economic sense is used here as the prototype of a much wider category that tends to encompass the whole of human life. Relations between men are subsumed under a term that properly designates relations to things’ (Dumont, 1977: 156). As Marx himself put it, ‘Religion, family, state, law, morality, science, art, etc. are only particular modes of production and fall under its general law.’ The ‘paramountcy’ of the economic domain, conceived of as the infrastructure in relation to the other domains, the superstructure, is explicitly asserted. Indeed, ‘Marx can be said

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to have brought economic ideology to its accomplishment’ (Dumont, 1977: 155, 169). Economics, it will be noted, has become economic ideology and as such is irreversible – it is, in Max Weber’s famous phrase, the modern human being’s ‘iron cage’. From the traditional Indian perspective, this is an inversion of values, for there the moral order (dharma) encompasses the unified politico-economic domain (artha): value and fact remain integrated in a holistic configuration. To call it non-modern, instead of traditional, would amount to the illegitimate imposition of the categories of one ideology upon another, a procedure that Dumont rejects. By the time Dumont completed his exploration of the genesis and triumph of economic ideology, the link between individualism and equality had receded into the background. Further studies were devoted to the elaboration of the idea of individualism. The ‘global’ (general, ‘most common’) ideology of individualism, constitutive of western civilization, having been described, he finally focused on the comparison of national cultures. ‘It is a fact that modern ideology takes notably different forms in the different languages or nations or, more precisely, in the different subcultures that more or less correspond to these languages and nations’ (Dumont, 1986a: 15–16). To stress and illustrate the point, a Franco- German ideological – in fact cultural – contrast was formulated in stark terms (Dumont, 1986a: 130–1): On the French side I am a man by nature and Frenchman by accident . . . there is nothing but a void between the individual and the species. . . . On the German side . . . I am essentially a German, and I am a man through being a German: man is immediately acknowledged as a social being. . . . Therefore, while the French were content with juxtaposing nations as so many fragments of mankind, the Germans acknowledging the individuality of each nation, were preoccupied with ordering the nations within mankind in relation to their value – or to their might.

Dumont’s last book, The German Ideology (1994), while sustaining the Franco-German contrast – in fact refining it to make room for interaction within the framework of modernity – focuses on the German variant of the modern ideology. Dumont explains that the beginnings of the divergence between the two national cultures are traceable, in significant measure, to the fact that the German version of the Enlightenment was religious in contrast to the French, which was secularist. In the setting of Lutheran Pietism and Reformation, the German variant of individualism emerged as a cultural category par excellence, distanced from the French (western) variant, in which the sociopolitical domain was crucial under the influence of the Revolution. But the political category was not absent in the German ideology: the belief that the German state had a vocation to dominate the world took care of that. Both the variants were the outcome of the ‘interaction’ (or dialectic) of a ‘world civilization’ (universalism) and particular national cultures (Dumont, 1994: 36 passim). The ‘idiosyncratic formula’ of German ideology was the combination of community holism and self-cultivating individualism. In this context, Dumont presents a detailed and insightful analysis of the ideal of ‘selfcultivation’ (Bildung) expressed through an extraordinary intellectual and

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artistic blossoming in Germany between 1770 and 1830, which was marked by the growth of community consciousness defined culturally. Dumont warns the readers of his book at the very outset that whatever he has to say about the German ideology is about ‘yesterday and before’, and disclaims any knowledge about ‘the Germans of the present day’ (Dumont, 1994: 3). From the methodological point of view, a reference back to Dumont’s work on India is in order at this point: he himself stresses the continuity (Dumont, 1994: viii). As in the Indian case, the principal concern is with the articulation of ideology, and with the tension between principle and actuality, but the latter is not altogether neglected. The ‘preoccupation’ with principles is considered typical of the French intellectual tradition. Thus, the predominant ideology is said to be that of the Left, but the ideological subordinate Right, although ‘ideologically impotent, has been empirically powerful in the long run’ (Dumont, 1994: 209). The relative lack of interest in the happenings of the present day, whether in India or in Germany, is an expression of this preoccupation. Not that he does not consider contemporary changes in the caste system: in fact, he provides an insightful analysis in terms of a world of ‘relations’ and interdependence being replaced by competitive ‘substances’ or blocks (Dumont, 1980: 222). But the manner he does so – interestingly as an exercise in comparison between the past and the present – results in a devaluation of the same: change is said to be confined to the ideologically subordinate politico-economic domain (Dumont, 1994: 228; see also Madan, 1994: 61–71; 1999: 479). As for the German–French contrast, it has immense philosophical import that can only be noted here. In Dumont’s own words, ‘How, without contradiction, can we acknowledge the diversity of cultures and at the same time maintain the universal idea of truth-value? I think it can be done by resorting to a . . . complex model . . . where truth-value would figure as a “regulative idea”, in the Kantian sense’ (Dumont, 1994: 34). Such an exercise is not, however, taken up in the book. Indeed, it ends with a rhetorical question that once more and – as it turned out – for the last time underlined Dumont’s fascination for the comparative study of ideologies (Dumont, 1994: 235): That these two countries, each bound to its idiosyncrasy, are impervious to that of its neighbour, should not cause surprise. But is it not pathetic to see each of them neutralize its own experience in order to salvage the ideological framework in terms of which the country has been wont to think of itself and the world over a great length of time?

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The fact that I consider the Dumontian approach to the study of civilizations a most valuable and novel contribution does not mean that all one has to do is to mechanically borrow his categories and procedures. He invites emulation rather than uncritical imitation. In my own study of the ideologies of secularism and fundamentalism in India (Madan, 1997), I

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identified ‘religious traditions’ within the setting of Indian civilization (Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism), and examined them with a view to finding out if they harbour ideas comparable to those of ‘secularism’ and ‘fundamentalism’ as these have been formulated in the West in the context of Christianity. The dualism of the latter, expressed in the dichotomy of the sacred and the profane (or secular), is not exactly echoed by the former. Nor is the passage of cognitive categories from one civilizational matrix to another (anticipated in the hopefulness of the Enlightenment universalism or as a historical inevitability) unproblematic. To say so does not, however, mean that cultural traditions are insulated phenomena and that intercivilizational communication does not occur. Nor did Dumont think so. To hold otherwise would mean falling into the suffocating trap of cultural solipsism and denying what for an Indian is undeniable: namely that India has throughout the 20th century responded creatively, if not always thoughtfully and successfully, to the call of tradition and the invitation of modernity.

References Bouglé, Celestin (1971) On the Caste System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dumont, Louis (1957a) Une sous-caste de l’Inde du Sud. Organisation sociale et religion des Pramalai Kallar. Paris and the Hague: Mouton. Dumont, Louis (1957b) Hierarchy and Marriage Alliance in South Indian Kinship. London: Royal Anthropological Institute. Dumont, Louis (1966) ‘Marriage in India. The Present State of the Question. Part III: North India in Relation to South India’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 9: 90–114. Dumont, Louis (1967a) Homo Hierarchicus: Essai sur le systeme des castes. Paris: Gallimard. Dumont, Louis (1967b) ‘Caste: A Phenomenon of Social Structure or as an Aspect of Indian Culture?’, in A. de Rueck and J. Knight (eds) Caste and Race: Comparative Approaches, pp.28–38. London: J. and A. Churchill. Dumont, Louis (1970a) Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dumont, Louis (1970b) Religion, Politics and History in India. Paris and the Hague: Mouton. Dumont, Louis (1971) ‘On Putative Hierarchy and Some Allergies to it’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 5: 58–78. Dumont, Louis (1977) From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Dumont, Louis (1980) Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications, complete English edition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dumont, Louis (1983) Affinity as a Value. Marriage Alliance in South India with Comparative Essays on Australia. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dumont, Louis (1986a) Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dumont, Louis (1986b) A South Indian Subcaste: Social Organization and Religion of the Pramalai Kallar. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Dumont, Louis (1994) The German Ideology: From France to Germany and Back. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Galey, Jean-Claude (1982) ‘A Conversation with Louis Dumont’, in T.N. Madan (ed.) Way of Life: King, Householder, Renouncer: Essays in Honour of Louis Dumont. New Delhi: Vikas. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1967) The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

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Madan, T.N. (1987) Non-Renunciation: Themes and Interpretations of Hindu Culture. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Madan, T.N. (1994) Pathways: Approaches to the Study of Indian Society. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Madan, T.N. (1997) Modern Myths, Locked Minds: Secularism and Fundamentalism in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Madan, T.N. (1999) ‘Louis Dumont: A Memoir’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 33(3): 473–501. Mauss, Marcel (1970) The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Cohen and West. Polanyi, Karl (1957) The Great Transformation. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Toynbee, Arnold (1961) A Study of History, Volume XII, Reconsiderations. London: Oxford University Press.

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14 Confessions of a Eurocentric John A. Hall

Even a simple word can imply a judgement. Consider the following statement. The great issue of civilizational analysis has been that of ‘the Rise of the West’, the greatest analyst of which process has been Max Weber. Now there is no doubt that ‘great’ and ‘greatest’ properly describe the character of a cognitive field, and of the domination within it of a particular author. The purpose of this article is to draw attention to a set of powerful contemporary scholars who accept this assessment, but who firmly resist the alltoo-often hidden implication that such domination reflects ‘greatness’ seen as genuine intellectual merit. Such scholars object to Eurocentrism, in itself and in Max Weber, on the grounds that it is both factually wrong and so to speak morally deficient – in presuming one civilization to be inherently superior to others. No issue deserves more attention in an issue devoted to ‘rethinking civilizational analysis’ than this. We can best get a handle on the charge of Eurocentrism by noting some distinctions at work in the thought of Max Weber. His analysis of ‘the rise of bourgeois rational capitalism in the West’ can usefully be seen as revolving around three issues. First, Weber stands opposed to Marx and to other social evolutionist thinkers of the 19th century in suggesting that the success of the occident was less inevitable than the result of a fortuitous opening. This seems a sign of humility, as is indeed the case insofar as the emphasis is on genuine accident. But matters are not quite so simple. The rise of rationality in Europe was deemed by Weber to be accidental in the sense that it resulted from non-rational, religious reasons. Nonetheless, the fact that only one civilization is held to have possessed key developmental attributes – and it is such tracing of occidental uniqueness that is the second element within Weber’s work – at least makes a sense of superiority possible. But care must be taken here. For the third element within Weber is that of moral evaluation. The severity often associated with Weber’s persona often gives the impression that he somehow endorsed occidental rationality. That is far from accurate. He admired the Puritans most of all for existentialist reasons, that is, because they took destiny into their hands, and thereby moulded history. The dull, daily application of instrumental thinking was for Weber far less attractive: this is the iron cage in which we lose touch with our very selves, that is, with our human capacity for agency. If my first task is that of expounding the anti-Eurocentric argument

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prevalent among contemporary economic historians, the second is that of using these Weberian distinctions as an aid to evaluation of an approach which seeks to establish itself as a new paradigm. But two preliminary points are in order before going any further. The first point is entirely personal, and it follows from a particular view of Max Weber’s work. Even though the great German thinker’s account of the rise of the West is complex, even confused, there is no doubt but that it conjoined, as he intended, both ideal and material factors. Among recent accounts of ‘the Rise of the West’ the late Ernest Gellner’s subtle Plough, Sword and Book is, in my view, truest to him in spirit (Gellner, 1988a). An earlier book of my own (Hall, 1985) endorsed Weber’s problem, that of the difference of the West, but argued – as did others (Jones, 1981; Mann, 1986) – that the structural factors he had in mind did more to explain what really happened than did the cultural element forever associated with his name. Differently put, I am – and have been openly charged by some of the authors to be discussed as (Wong, 1997: 14; Epstein, 2000: 12) – Eurocentric. This explains the title of this article. Now confession can have two characters – an admission of guilt of course, but sometimes an occasion for justification, as with James Hogg’s justified sinner. So the question before me is simple: exactly how guilty should I feel? Second, it is important to stress that the issues raised by the charge of Eurocentrism are enormous, involving as they do nothing less than the character of modernity. Hence, it is impossible in a short article to consider more than a few authors – Bin Wong (1997), Jack Goldstone (1998, 2000, 2001), Kenneth Pomeranz (2000) and Larry Epstein (2000) – so as to suggest a line of interpretation. My hope is that imperfection will be excused on grounds of importance.

Power and Economic Progress The central finding of recent economic history scholarship (considered, to begin with, as a unified group) can be put in a sentence. Before 1800 few differences existed between the leading agrarian centres of the world. What has come to be termed ‘Smithian industriousness’ was generally present, that is, market exchange had become sophisticated, with the benefits of specialization leading to roughly similar life expectancies in China and in Europe (Wong, 1997: Part 1; Pomeranz, 2000: Part 1). Capitalist practices were as well known in the East as in the West, with the position of merchant dynasties being perhaps most secure outside northwest Europe. Crucially, recent research has shown that there was nothing unique, as was once believed, about the European family pattern. Chinese and Japanese families were as sensitive to Malthusian pressures as were those of Europe, albeit their means of fertility control probably included a greater resort to infanticide. The conclusion drawn from this is not that any part of the world might have pioneered the socially evolutionary step that is modernity. To the

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contrary, the case being argued is that the sophisticated, industrious capitalism of the agrarian world, for all that it was blessed with craft production and exchange, was always unlikely to lead to any higher ‘stage’. Perhaps the prime mover behind this whole interpretation has been Tony Wrigley, the impact of whose Continuity, Chance and Change (Wrigley, 1988) is very clearly present in all of the authors to be discussed. That very striking book argued – or even demonstrated – that capitalism does not make modernity, given the limits to human power imposed by reliance solely on organic sources of energy. This understanding allowed Wrigley to offer a sustained reading of the great political economists, pointing out that none of them, from Adam Smith through to John Stuart Mill, expected sustained growth. Moreover, their fears of actual decline were more than justified, according to Pomeranz, as expansion in varied economic centres reversed when land shortage set in – especially as the need to feed and warm expanding populations led to the exhaustion of timber supplies (Pomeranz, 2000: Ch. 5). The fact that modern economic growth depends upon the exploitation of fossil fuels makes the breakthrough to a new form of economy seem far more the result of luck, of a curious concatenation of conjunctural circumstances, than of any innate European (or, perhaps, British) merit or ability. What mattered a great deal for the breakthrough in European economic development was the presence of abundant coal supplies at the heart of productive areas. Everything might have been different had Chinese coal supplies been located in the South rather than in the North (Pomeranz, 2000: 63–4 and Ch. 6). If we turn now from this shared common ground to the specific cases of particular authors, it is important to spell out a methodological implication, and to note two rather differing accounts of the social forces that led to the evolutionary jump in human affairs that is modernity. Bin Wong’s China Transformed is a very rich elaboration of the general points so cursorily mentioned. The author is abreast of the latest developments in social theory while possessing the sustained sense of structural conditions that comes with close association with the work of Charles Tilly. A very great deal is to be learned from his comparative analyses of economies, state-making and forms of popular protest in China and in northwest Europe. Still, the greatest importance of China Transformed in the present context lies at the methodological level. Most importantly, Wong insists that like be compared with like – more particularly, that the successes of the Yangzi river area be compared with Holland or Britain. Differently put, he – and Pomeranz – are extremely suspicious of vague, essentialized comparisons between whole civilizations. This is not to say that no such comparisons are made by these authors – Wong, for instance, has a good deal to say about the recurrence of political unity in China in comparison to the multipolar disunity of the European heartland after the Fall of Rome. Nonetheless, the point being made is fundamental: we should privilege social processes rather than civilizational analysis as such. A corollary of this position amounts to a call for fairness. Comparisons should be

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two-way, not least so that the ‘failures’ of Europe can be seen in light of Chinese successes. There is everything to be said for this view, and I return to it later. The most obvious merit of Jack Goldstone’s recent essays in this area is the synoptic range that a major historical sociologist brings to the subject. His accounts of what he terms ‘the California School’, not least since Pomeranz and Bin Wong are in the same department at the University of California at Irvine, are exceptionally thorough and lucid. But Goldstone has a position of his own, and this certainly merits analysis. Fossil fuel power cannot be utilized without the appropriate knowledge, and Goldstone accordingly seeks to explain the emergence of modern science. His answer to the subtitle of one of his papers – ‘England’s Peculiar Path: Would the World be “Modern” if William III’s Invasion of England in 1688 had Failed?’ (Goldstone, 2001) – gives the answer in the form of a resounding negative: One of James II’s first acts after defeating William’s invasion is to dismantle the Royal Society, that hotbed of Anglican and anti-Jacobite beliefs, and the chief forum for experimental science. Isaac Newton, who had led the opposition to James II’s efforts to Catholicize Cambridge University in 1687, is relieved of his Professorship, and his followers are persecuted and driven from the Universities. The latter’s curriculum is given over to Cartesians, whose view of the solar system as a system of vortices prevails for the next century. Advances in mathematics continue, but with little practical impact on technology. After all, Descartes has proclaimed that all matter is extension, and all force consists of collisions by particles of matter; thus there can be no vacuum (hence on atmospheric steam engines) and no mysterious forces acting at a distance, such as gravity. (Goldstone, 2001)

As it was, Anglicanism triumphant endorsed and promoted empiricism. Just as important was the spirit of toleration: this was a precondition allowing dissenters – who were often from the lower social orders – to contribute to technical and scientific knowledge. A fundamental point in this account should be highlighted. Diversity within the European states system mattered enormously, albeit it would have been of no significance had one of the different elements not contained an element of liberty. Pomeranz’s superb book stands virtually opposed to Goldstone’s intraEuropean story – an account so much based on a rather traditional admiration for England. The Great Divergence offers a sustained, carefully wrought, general argument – whose many subtleties and ingenious calculations simply cannot be summarized here – about nothing less than the making of the modern world. A good deal of his attention is given to spelling out, in remarkable detail, the commonalities of advanced Smithian agrarian life – in the course of which he makes clear that Europe in 1800 probably lagged somewhat behind China. This is not to say that he refuses to note differences. Very much to the contrary, he notes elements of the European social portfolio – the ability to marshal capital for long-term ventures and the presence of aggressive militarism – that were to prove consequential. For one thing, silver from the New World at last gave poor Europe a

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commodity to send to China so that it could purchase its superior commercial goods. Far more important is the way in which these institutional differences allowed for the great divergence. Pomeranz argues that ecological strains were beginning to affect both Europe and Asia adversely by 1800. Europe’s great escape certainly depended upon a switch to fossil fuels, but quite as important was the abolition of a land constraint – that is, the securing of food and materials from the New World. Everything in this political economy rested upon British naval superiority, the material basis for which lay in the timber supplies of North America. Eurocentric selfcongratulation should of course be extinguished once we put at the centre of our attention the dreadful fact that the extraction of cotton and sugar rested on slave labour.

The Baby and the Bath Water The intensity of the heat generated by the debate as to whether or not European civilization was conducive to development was always excessive, and certainly ought now to be contained. I have no difficulty whatsoever in admitting error, and am simply deeply interested in and convinced by, to take but two examples, recent scholarship on the sensitivity of families to Malthusian pressures and on the robustness of markets in much of Asia. It is good to have one’s attention shifted away from capitalism to cognition. A guilty confession is of course in order: some scholarship that feeds into the anti-Eurocentric position was available some time ago, and it was a distinct failure on my part not to have found and to have absorbed this. But my purpose was that of trying to tell the truth. It may even be possible for me to take some pride, of a Popperian kind, in having produced a general view of sufficient clarity to have encouraged others to disprove it. This whole point can be put differently by reiterating – and then glossing – a point made by Ernest Gellner (1988b). Many scholars interested in ‘the European miracle’ had no special brief for Europe. It would in fact have been better, as he suggested, to have spoken about the miracle that happened in Europe rather than carelessly using an expression that could be misunderstood to connote a sense of innate superiority. Further, there is everything to be said for insisting, as does Wong, on the undoubted fact that the great civilizations of India, Islam and especially China were more successful than the West – in that they created and maintained stable forms of social life. The reputed restlessness of the West represented a type of delinquency, an inability to provide rules of the game that gained general social acceptance.1 Implied in this view is nothing less than the proper way of looking at social evolution. It is ‘natural’, even ‘desirable’ to learn to fit into one’s surroundings. Only the alienated and uneasy impose change upon us. Differently put, the West caused a jump in social evolution most of all because of its relative failure as a civilization. This last consideration effectively deals with the first Weberian category

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with which we began. Recent scholarship makes the growth of the power of the West seem even more fortuitous than Weber had imagined. Escape from the confines of busy, commercial agrarian life was inherently unlikely, and any conceptualization of the one occasion on which this happened endogenously should give heavy emphasis to the accidental nature of a strange occurrence. But what about the other two categories, that of European ‘uniquenesses’, that is of institutional packages putatively present only in Europe, and that of moral evaluation? We have seen already that these categories tend to shade into each other, and that will certainly be unavoidable here. Nonetheless, there is everything to be said for trying to separate them, not least by considering them in turn. If my first confession came from guilt, a second confession – that I remain Eurocentric – seems to me entirely justified. The point here is simple. There is a danger in the anti-Eurocentric turn of throwing the baby out with the bath water. Differently put, much recent scholarship should be read as removing error so as to allow an improved account of a key episode in the historical record. For we cannot help but be vitally interested in what enabled the West to transform the history of human power, for however short a period. There is no sign that the scholars examined here have lost interest in this analytic question: very much to the contrary, they are best read as helping us to provide better answers to it. Further, there may still be a great deal to be said for hanging on to prior Weberian accounts which emphasized the role played by the pattern of European politics. Larry Epstein’s (2000) Freedom and Growth has helped clear much ground in this area. He argues that what matters for economic growth is order, that is, the regulation of markets and the provision of justice, and produces ingenious evidence to show, in the spirit of David Hume, that there was little difference in this regard between constitutional and absolutist regimes. His account wobbles somewhat when it comes to explaining state building. On occasion, he sees war as merely destructive, but more generally sees multipolar competition between states as a Darwinian force driving states to increase their reach and control (Epstein, 2000: 53–69). It is very noticeable that European state competition plays a role in Pomeranz’s account of the great divergence: the presence of militarism made it possible to conquer those parts of the world which allowed Europe to escape from the limits of the agrarian world. Political forms matter quite as much for Wong, not least in his account of the way in which Chinese institutions helped to recreate and were themselves reinforced by political unity. Further, the variety of European states played a crucial role for Goldstone, as noted, in the emergence of modern technology. British empiricism mattered, and it is likely that it would not have had such salience had Catholic hegemony been established in Europe.2 Finally, the speed with which industrial practices spread, first in Europe and then in the rest of the world, surely has a great deal to do with geopolitical necessity, that is, with the need to imitate the leading edge of power so as to avoid being overwhelmed (Sen, 1984).

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Discussion of any unique elements can, as noted, all too easily smuggle in moral judgements. It is all too easy to see empiricism and modern science in this light – hence as a meritorious element within western civilization. All that can be done in this whole realm is to try to be as open as possible, to bring to the fore judgement rather than let it creep in once the lights are lowered, through the back door. There is most certainly a case to be made for endorsing the impact of modern science: it provides the enhanced life expectancy and fabulous standard of living to which we have become accustomed. Of course, a negative case can be argued as well – as it obviously is by those intellectuals who condemn what they hold to be caging categories of western rationalism. More generally, balance is needed. I continue to believe that the European combination of capitalism and states encouraged civilizational dynamism, but am more than prepared to admit that the secret to dynamism served, in the industrial era, as the most obvious cause for disaster. Part of the attack on Eurocentrism rests on the notion that imitation of the advanced core is desirable and necessary. Perhaps science is desirable; certainly the means of modern war have been felt by many developing states to be absolutely necessary. But there is everything to be said for pointing out those institutional packages which should not and perhaps need not be copied because superior local practices are inherently superior. The urge to imitate within Europe led not just to industrialization but quite as much to a particular form of nationalism. The German, Ottoman and Russian Empires (and to a lesser extent the Magyars within Austro-Hungary) all sought to homogenize their peoples in the belief that uniformity would lead to efficiency (Lieven, 2000). In so doing, of course, they did much to create the secessionist nationalism which eventually did so much to destroy them. The consequence of this is so obvious that it can be put in a nutshell: the history of modern Europe is a dark one, that of continued ethnic cleansing (Mann, 1999; Taylor, forthcoming). The temptation to ethnically cleanse populations is present in the rest of the world, not least as it may be related to nothing less than democracy. But it is at least possible to point to a better way (Hall, 1996). David Laitin has made much of the manner in which some African states and India have managed to live with difference by institutionalizing linguistic diversity (Laitin, 1992). A citizen of India needs three plus or minus one languages. Competence in the two official languages of India is enough if one lives in a Hindi province, but a third language is needed if the province is not Hindi-speaking – and a fourth if one belongs to a minority within that province. Laitin’s most recent research in Central and Eastern Europe suggests that the aftertaste of the Soviet Empire may be so horrible as to make homogenization inevitable (Laitin, 1998). But parts of the developing world may be able to do better. India works – although one’s faith in Laitin’s analysis of Africa has recently taken a severe beating. The advanced world certainly has no right to give advice in this area given that virtually every nation-state in the advanced West

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now rests on a clear ethnic majority. If we want to learn about multiculturalism we should look to others, and cease propagating our own naive and self-satisfied views. Differently put, much of the developing world would do well not to imitate the West.

Notes 1. I am indebted to Patricia Crone for this formulation. Her view as a whole is expressed in her impressive Pre-Industrial Societies (1988, especially chapter six). 2. At this point there is a tension between the positions of Epstein and Goldstone, the former being suspicious of the impact of constitutionalism, the latter still wed to the view that the form of regime mattered a great deal. Still, Epstein’s data concern interest rates while Goldstone is concerned with useful knowledge, so there should not, in fact, be a no-holds barred disagreement between the two authors.

References Crone, P. (1988) Pre-Industrial Societies. Oxford: Blackwell. Epstein, S.R. (2000) Freedom and Growth: The Rise of States and Markets in Europe, 1300–1750. London: Routledge. Gellner, Ernest (1988a) Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History. London: Collins Harvill. Gellner, Ernest (1988b) ‘Introduction’, in J. Baechler, J.A. Hall and M. Mann (eds) Europe and the Rise of Capitalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Goldstone, Jack (1998) ‘The Problem of the “Early Modern” World’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 41: 289–94. Goldstone, Jack (2000) ‘The Rise of the West – or Not? A Revision to Socio- Economic History’, Sociological Theory 18: 175–94. Goldstone, Jack (forthcoming) ‘Europe’s Peculiar Path: Would the Modern World be “Modern” if William III’s Invasion of England in 1688 had Failed?’, in N. Lebow, P. Tetlock and G. Parker (eds) Counterfactuals in History. Columbia: Columbia University Press. Hall, John A. (1985) Powers and Liberties: The Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West. Oxford: Blackwell. Hall, John A. (1996) ‘How Homogeneous Need We Be? Reflections on Nationalism and Liberty’, Sociology 30: 163–71. Jones, Eric (1981) The European Miracle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laitin, David (1992) Language Repertoires and State Construction in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laitin, David (1998) Identity in Formation: The Russian Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lieven, Dominic (2000) Empire: The Russian Empire and its Rivals. London: John Murray. Mann, Michael (1986) The Sources of Social Power. Volume One: From the Beginning to 1760 AD. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mann, Michael (1999) ‘The Dark Side of Democracy’, New Left Review 235: 18–45. Pomeranz, Kenneth (2000) The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sen, Gautam (1984) The Military Origins of Industrialization and International Trade Rivalry. London: Frances Pinter. Taylor, Charles (forthcoming) ‘Democratic Exclusion (and Its Remedies?)’, in R. Bhargawa, A.K. Bagchi and R. Sudarshan (eds) Multiculturalism, Liberalism and Democracy, pp. 138–63. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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Wong, R. Bin (1997) China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wrigley, E.A. (1988) Continuity, Chance and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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IV. CRITICAL ESSAYS 15 From Indigenous Civilization to Indigenous Modernities Sacred Narratives, Terra Nullius and an Australian Bestiarium John Rundell

The concept of civilization can be deployed as an interpretative device in order to contribute to the way we can understand the impact of New World settlement upon the indigenous peoples of Australia.1 It is argued that there was a clash of civilizations – in a way that shares some affinities with Huntington’s understanding in terms of configurations of power and culture (Huntington, 1996: 41–4). In this particular context this clash can be reconstructed according to two different conceptual strategies internal to the concept of civilization: a political juridical one, which emphasizes sovereignty, and one that emphasizes forms of power in terms of collective representations. The outcome of this clash was the formation of a modernity specific to the Australian indigenous population. Civilization was never an innocent, homogeneous, nor uncontested term. It has always been an interpretative device that has divided the world into those who are ‘civilized’ and those who are not. Civilization and Australia’s founding myths On their arrival in Botany Bay in 1788 the British brought two myths with them that were to become the founding ones of the Australian New World. The first was that the society they would build would be an extension of metropolitan Britain. This would be the case not only in terms of its architecture and use of space, but also its core cultural pre-suppositions. It would be white and predominantly Protestant, notwithstanding the multi-racial and multi-ethnic composition of the British Empire, and the vexing issues, for the British at least, of Catholicity and the Irish question to its immediate west.

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This first founding myth established the tenor of Australian racism throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries. This myth was overturned, officially at least, only in 1966 when the Liberal-Country Party Commonwealth Government abandoned racial discrimination (The White Australia Policy) as the basis for its planned migration programs. Culturally, a multi-racial and multi-ethnic composition has been official bipartisan policy since the 1970s (Reynolds, 1998). The second and not unrelated myth was that the fifth continent was largely uninhabited. This second myth was based on information supplied to the British government by such people as Banks and Matra who had sailed with Cook on the Endeavour. Speculating from this earlier voyage it was assumed that even if the coast was inhabited, the inland was not. And so when the soldiers, convicts, and settlers came in contact with the indigenous population an unusual paradox emerged. An invisibilization of the visible occurred, which enabled the customs and laws of the indigenous people to be ignored. This second myth was announced on the landing of the British Fleet in 1788, concretized and enshrined by the British Privy Council in 1889 when it was re-asserted that, prior to 1788, no ownership or tenure of the land existed. This was the myth of terra nullius and it was also re-asserted on three other occasions during the 19th century – in 1824, 1829, and 1879 (Reynolds, 1998).2 This second myth has become Australia’s foundational story – of greater importance than the mythic status of the British metropole. It became the greater foundational myth because of its deeply imbedded presence for the way that settler Australians understood themselves both culturally and as sovereigns. This foundational myth of terra nullius did not come out of nowhere. For the best part of 150 years the British, and the other European competitor imperial powers, had been deploying the new navigational techniques to discover, colonize, and settle worlds hitherto unknown to them in the Americas, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific. In each case the indigenous populations were fought and treaties were entered into on the basis of a political recognition of sovereignty in the process of colonization. In some cases, for example India, there was the recognition that some societies the British were extending their rulership over were as sophisticated as their own. This mode of sophistication was given a name of civilization, which in the 18th century carried two predominant meanings. One was associated with rulership, sovereignty, and statehood, the other with customs and manners, which would later be transposed into one of the many meanings of culture. The idea of rulership was part of an intellectual debate that referred to two competing political traditions that have long and deep roots within European political thought, certainly from the 14th century onward. These traditions are the juridical, which embodied the notion of right, and the republican, which embodied the notion of virtue (Pocock, 1985). The juridical notion of sovereignty referred to the codification of rights and liberties in law, which exhibited an internal tension – one version referred to the rights of subjects, another to the command of the prince or the demos in

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which the law is vested that has power over subjects. This centralization of power, which was synonymous with statehood, also entailed that this formulation of juridical sovereignty acquired a territory based, power-saturated administrative dimension. Rulership and sovereignty were condensed to the ideas of juridical sovereignty over a discrete territory.3 Furthermore, both juridical and republican notions of civilization were accompanied by an idea of a private sphere limited to economic, religious, and cultural freedoms. In this context and with the assistance of the concept of manners, a civilized life came to denote the refinement and enrichment of personality through the cultivation of commerce and the arts. It was their function to tame and refine the passions, and as Adam Ferguson would say, ‘polish manners’ (Ferguson, 1991). During the 19th century a further process of conceptual development occurred. Civilization, at least in the historical, anthropological, and archaeological meanings of the term, came to be used taxonomically and objectivistically to denote societal types that underwent processes of differentiation. There are two key assumptions that buttressed one another – one of complexity and one of evolution. These assumptions enabled the distinction between the pre-civilizational and the civilizational to be re-drawn, either masking or replacing an older distinction between savage/barbarian and civilization. Civilization now denoted societies that had evolved from simple, unitary societies to more complex ones in the key areas of social structures, moral and ethical development, and cognitive and aesthetic capacities. Civilization came to denote a series of complex social processes that included a growing division of labor and power between social groups, as well as technological innovation and specialization. The latter included increasing abilities to transform nature either through increased and more sophisticated agriculture (after its domestication during the Neolithic period) or the construction of a built environment from monumental architecture to canals and aqueducts.4 Whilst some controversy emerged over the importance of technological innovation as the hallmark of civilization, the civilizational taxonomy also coalesced around three other social processes. Two of these processes continued to emphasize the re-organization of the material world – the growth and development of cities (which V. Gordon Childe termed the urban revolution), and state and empire formation, and organized militarization. Both of these processes entailed growing power and control over extended social and natural space through the inventions of institutions of rulership and administration. In other words, and as one commentator has noted ‘a civilization possesses a material and political organization that permits it to exercise power over an extensive area and to reach out effectively to regions beyond its control’ (Chodorow et al., 1989: 8; see also Armillas, 1968: 218–221). In a slightly different formulation, it must be capable of giving ‘coherence either to a wide ranging empire or to a system of states for at least several centuries’ (Kavolis, 1987: 3). The other social process that civilizational analysis emphasized was in the

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area of general cultural development, especially aesthetic representation, and cognition and ethics, that is, in forms of reflexive and speculative thinking. In concrete terms, the invention of writing and the shift from naturalistic and mimetic art forms to symbolic abstraction and stylization are viewed as central to this taxonomical dimension. In particular, writing is viewed as paramount because of the way in which it could be used to manage space and time. Writing could be ‘applied to the formulation of complex astronomical and mathematical information; to the compilation of laws, cosmologic lore, or dynastic lists (and eventually to the substance of history); to the registration of transactions, contracts, and deeds; and even the recording of magical incantations . . .’ (Armillas, 1968: 216). Laws and lists gained an increasing force and legitimacy because they became socially objectified points of reference by those groups wielding social power. Moreover, the social division that emerged between the literate and the non-literate, together with a specialized hierarchy of scribes who also used writing as a resource for the accumulation of social power, is also viewed as taxonomically significant (Rundell and Mennell, 1998: 1–29).

Hail to thee Australia’s shores/We bring a civilization Given the particular assumptions outlined above regarding the material and the cultural complexity imputed to those societal forms that were termed civilizations, an empirical blindness occurred regarding the societal form that already existed on the fifth continent. Indigenous life was an existence unidentifiable in the lexicon of this meaning of civilization, which especially privileged juridical sovereignty and literate culture. Constructed in this way, the encounter between the indigenous people and the British occurred across a chasm, with a notion of civilization on one side, and its radical other – primitivism – on the other, which could be deployed either negatively or as the basis for a critique of civilization (Smith, 1989; Williams, 1990). Thus, there was no need to engage with or adapt to the presence of the indigenous people. In these terms, no civilizational encounter took place. As Reynolds, for one, puts it, ‘no treaties were ever negotiated like the hundreds signed with indigenous people in North America, Africa, and New Zealand. There was no recognition of acceptance in Australia that remnant sovereignty survived annexation permitting autonomy or local government’ (Reynolds, 1996a: xii). The juridical notion of sovereignty became the constitutive dimension for a hermeneutics of civilization in the context of Australian settler-colonization. Before turning to the Australian context, though, we can see the way in which the juridical notion of sovereignty was deployed in another setting, the New Zealand one. In 1837, the then Colonial Secretary, Lord Glenelg wrote, in reference to the Moari states, that ‘they were not savages living by the chase, but Tribes who have apportioned the country between them, having fixed abodes with an acknowledged property in the soil, and with

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some rude approaches to a regular system of internal government’ (Glenelg in Pocock, 2000: 26; see also Williams, 1990). The key phrase, in relation to the Maori, is ‘not savages living by the chase’. As Pocock points out, Glenelg was drawing on the background 18th century idea whereby the capacity to establish a ‘fixed property in the soil’ was viewed as the start of two processes – the development of civil society and the development of civil government. In other words, the Maori could be viewed in civilizational terms as a proto-civilization that had crossed a threshold to create property in land, as well as a form of sovereignty by way of a chiefly structure, which was competent to settle disputes (Pocock, 2000). Pocock suggests that this proto-civilizational construction was ‘an important step away from the supposition that “people’s living by the chase” lacked political ability and toward the proposition’ that a capacity to make treaties ‘might arise in the order of natural development before the governmental’ (Pocock, 2000: 31). As he goes onto say, within this framework, ‘the capacity to engage in war, terminate it by treaties, precede it by alliances, and behave wisely and unwisely, justly or unjustly, in the practice of these activities was important in what was termed the progress of society and the human moral story’ (ibid.). In other words, the British Crown in its encounters with other indigenous peoples in Northern America (for at least 150 years before Glenelg’s remarks) had already developed a complex picture of North American tribal leaders’ abilities to conduct war, negotiate peace and make politics through oratory. This complex picture was also presented in the literature of the day. In his 1767 and well known An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Adam Ferguson, who should be read sympathetically in the broader context, portrays a knowledge of indigenous American tribes engaging in primitive democracy. To be sure, the goal of Ferguson’s work was to provide a history of the formation of civil society, which in his influential view, was ordered around the distinction between civilization and non-civilization, a distinction he posited in terms of polished and rude societies. For him, rude societies were those that are not yet differentiated in terms of manners and styles of life, which he further divided between those that were savage and those that were barbarian. Savage societies were characterized, by him, as not yet internally specialized, in that property relations and political forms were neither institutionalized nor mediated by abstract rules. Nonetheless, they were, according to Ferguson, on ‘the eve of erecting republics [in which] their love of equality, their habit of assembling in public councils, and their zeal for the tribe to which they belong, are qualifications that fit them to act under that species of government’ (Ferguson, 1991[1767]: 99). Notwithstanding their democratic practices, though, Ferguson constructed a watershed between rude and civilized societies that occurred as patterns of increasing differentiation and specialization in the areas of the economy, culture, and state building. For our purposes here, the latter is most important. For him, state building involved the formation of separate institutions, i.e. bureaucracies, for the administration of state-power, as well as standing

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armies for territorial conquest and the formation of empires. The formation of institutions and codes that settle disputes – the development of law and the judiciary, all of which coalesce in the idea of juridical sovereignty – were also defining characteristics of state-building, for Ferguson. In the history of this debate, treaties were negotiated with Maori and other Polynesian societies on the basis of the recognition of juridical sovereignty and a proto-state form, no matter how one-sided these treaties were. No such treaties were entered into with the indigenous people of Australia. Within the context of the circle of civilizational understanding outlined above the doctrine of terra nullius was invoked. The effect of this doctrine was to refuse the idea of ‘a reason of state’ to Australian indigenous peoples and thus a sovereignty that could have become the basis for the recognition of, and negotiation with, the particular civilization of the fifth continent. From this perspective, there was no juridical sovereignty and no political structure or proto-state with which to negotiate, the outcome of which could have been a form of treaty. This doctrinal view was expressed in 1836 by Justice Burton when he stated, ‘although it might be granted that on first taking possession of the colony, the Aborigines were entitled to be recognized as free and independent, yet they were not to be considered as free and independent tribes. They had no sovereignty’ (Burton in Reynolds, 1998: 209). In other words, terra nullius, in this instance, referred not to the empirical invisibilization of an entire people, but to their politico-juridical invisibilization, of which profound consequences were to follow. Whilst this orthodox view that there was only one sovereign and only one system of laws in Australia was contested in the colonial courts, nonetheless, ‘both the British and colonial authorities endeavored to maintain the myth of an empty land’ (Reynolds, 1998: 210). And on the basis of this founding myth of terra nullius, with its internal dialectic between territorial-juridical sovereignty and its absence, the indigenous population could effectively be re-made into something that they were not – primitive and savage.

Theorizing indigenous civilization – the social ontology of the sacred This chapter has been arguing that a notion of civilization was constitutive for the way in which the colonial settlement of Australia proceeded. The notion of civilization crystallized around three main features against which the indigenous population could be invisibilized in territorial-juridical terms. Civilizations were sites of power centered on states and cities and they were territorially expansive. They were also literate and the invention of writing also entailed an increased capacity for the symbolic abstraction of reality, and hence an increase in the range of creative interpretations. However, this chapter also argues that Australian indigenous life can be reconstructed in civilizational terms other than those described above, drawing not only from current archaeological and anthropological research,

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but also from a richer culturalist notion of civilization articulated in the works of Durkheim and Mauss. Current archaeological and anthropological research has established a more dynamic picture than one derived from background assumptions of stasis, especially in the areas of the nature of the social networks and power structures of Australian indigenous life (Lourandos and Ross, 1994).5 A dynamic picture has emerged in relation to its pre-state form of alliance networks that involved ‘the mediating role of ceremonial and inter-group gatherings and exchange systems that helped to regulate social relations between competing populations and networks’, and bound together societies that otherwise lacked centralized political controls (Lourandos, 1997: 319). Furthermore, these extended alliance networks were grounded in gerantocratic forms of power. These gerontocracies monopolized resources and social knowledge (Lourandos, 1997; Lourandos and Ross, 1994; Hiatt, 1966, 1986; Meggitt, 1966). This archaeological and anthropological research can be further elaborated, though, in terms laid out by Durkheim and Mauss, especially in their work where they directly invoke the notion of civilization. As has been argued elsewhere, the concept of civilization served a triple purpose in Durkheim’s later work (Rundell and Mennell, 1998: 21). What is less important here is the way Durkheim deploys the term civilization in order to explore his proposition that the human animal is both angel and beast, and that a civilizing process is played out as a long history of tensions between them. What is more important and interesting here is the second purpose for which he mobilized a concept of civilization. This purpose was to further explore his insistence that this civilizing process is constituted through patterns of collective creations and interpretations that are created and represented in symbolic form. For Durkheim, humankind is the symbolizing animal. It is through symbolization, in whatever form it takes, that civilizing processes occur and social individuals are made. If the human being is the symbolizing animal, this capacity for symbolization is lifted out of everyday life and coheres as a social ontology. He names this social ontology the sacred, which does not obey profane laws, but follows its own logic of social creation. In this sense, civilizations are not only collective representations, but also collective creations, that is, socially originating forms of interpretation through which human beings, as he says, ‘have pictured to themselves the world and themselves’ (Durkheim, 1976: 9). Moreover, Durkheim’s notion of civilization entails that they are not only social creations or social ontologies, but are also creative for the social membership. This is where the idea of creativity can enter at the level of social agency. Whilst it is an overstatement to claim that for Durkheim the social membership create these social ontologies, nonetheless civilizations are acted out, re-made and re-affirmed in the rites and rituals ‘in which individuals represent to themselves the society of which they are members’ (Durkheim, 1976: 225). In this sense, they are also the primary media through which creativity and individual self-expression can be articulated.

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In Durkheim’s view, collective representations tie individual and social creativity together; they are the forms through which a single individual transforms his or her own creative life into one that is simultaneously individual and social. In other words, collective representations are particularized by individuals in such a way that they become meaningful for the individuals concerned. They are simultaneously internalized and re-created in a way that maintains, rather than disrupts, the individual’s relation to the sacred. ‘[E]ach individual has his own, made in his own image, associated to his own intimate life, bound up with his destiny . . . These beings are the objects of rites which the individual can celebrate by himself outside of the group’ (Durkheim, 1976: 424). In this way, and even on his or her own, the social individual is part of a collective force that he or she can animate in terms of his or her creative capacities. As Durkheim further points out in the section on rites in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, collective representations are media through which both social relations are expressed and dramatized and individual creativity is expressed. Ceremonies are effervescent, tumultuous events where not only collective representations are expressed and re-made, but also selves (Durkheim, 1976: 344–50). Moreover, for Durkheim, if human beings are the symbolizing animals then civilizations only make sense as the social space where this symbolizing activity occurs. However, as Durkheim goes on to note, symbolization or cultural creation cannot be contained within discrete territorial units, be they ‘societies’ or ‘nations’. This aspect of the geography of civilizations became a third purpose for which the notion was mobilized by Durkheim, and enabled him to bring together the problem and theme of cultural creation together with territoriality and, unexpectedly, power. In ‘A Note on Civilisation’ (1913) written jointly around the time that The Elementary Forms of Religious Life was published (1912), Durkheim and Mauss argue that it is misleading to begin civilizational analysis with political conceptions. Rather, there are societal dimensions such as language and culture that are supranational and these cannot be bound to politically determined spaces. For Durkheim and Mauss, these types of extensive social forms do not exist merely ‘as isolated instances, but also as complex and interdependent systems which without being limited to a determinate political organism, are however localisable in time and space’ (Durkheim and Mauss, 1998: 152). Hence, civilizations are not ‘the product of a state or a people alone. Rather they extend beyond these frontiers, whether they extend out from a determinate area by a power of expansion originating from within, or whether they result from relationships established among societies and so are the common product of these societies’ (Durkheim and Mauss, 1998: 153; Arnason, 1988). In this sense, they point to an indeterminate and unequal relation between political and symbolic frontiers, and the way in which these frontiers expand unequally and often in tension with one another beyond their local origins and regions and become internationalized. In the Australian context, this ‘internationalization’ could refer to the way in which these

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uneven frontiers spread throughout the continent through ceremonial ritual, exchange and trade. Mauss reiterates and extends the basic thesis of ‘A Note On Civilization’ in his own ‘Civilisations: Elements and Forms’ written in 1927. Mauss defines a civilization as the ‘sum total of the specific aspects characterising the ideas, practices and products common, that is more or less common to a number of societies’ (Mauss in Arnason, 1988: 90). In this sense, a civilization is a shared historical source of intellectual and material wealth, a type of hypersocial system of social systems or ‘family of societies’. A single society can even create and define itself against this hyper-social system. Furthermore, in an implied argument against social evolutionists, diffusionists, and the high culturalist critics of civilization who equate it with social corruption, Mauss points to a series of diverse elements that can constitute a civilization. These can range from custom and ritual, mentalities, arts, techniques, and money. Mauss notes that there is interpermeability between these variety of features that make civilizations arbitrary and uneven. Hence, they should be taken on their own terms (Arnason, 1988). In addition, civilizations are also perspectivistic. For Mauss, they mark the boundaries – and not only in linguistic terms – between insiders and outsiders, between those who belong to a particular civilization and project it as singular, unique, or even universal, and those who do not. It is this capacity for constituting a boundary at the end of the symbolic frontier, so to speak, that also indicates for Mauss the power internal to civilizations. It is not material in the strict sense, but exists ‘as a myth, as a collective representation’ (Mauss, 1998; 157). In other words, power refers to the capacity of a civilization to mark its collective representations in terms of relative openness or closure to others. Put more strongly, in these terms power means symbolically formed agonistic relations between the self and the other, marked more by a condition of closure than openness (Mauss, 1998: 157). In summary, then, and as a way of bringing the intensification debate and Durkheim’s and Mauss’s work together, the concept of civilization generally comes to refer to a constellation of mundane and sacred creativity, systemic coherence, and power. Moreover, civilizations endure across time. For Braudel, for example, the rapid changefulness of the present belies the real nature of civilizations – their long durée. It is this characteristic, more than any other that for him, defines them and gives them depth which enables them to survive the patterns and crises of the short term (Braudel, 1975: 757–58). Following his more poetic formulation of civilizational time, their long durée entails that they are ‘many times more solid than what one might imagine. They have withstood a thousand supposed deaths, their massive bulks immoved by the monotonous pounding of the centuries’ (Braudel, 1975: 775–76). Taken together, culturally instituted understandings of social creation, non-state, as well as state-based forms of territoriality through which power is mobilized in closed or open ways, and histories of the long-run can be seen

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as markers of not only civilizations generally, but also of an Australian indigenous one. Nonetheless, in the context of this more general formulation of civilization derived from the works of Durkheim and Mauss, the specificity of Australian indigenous civilization cannot be fully captured by the distinction that Durkheim makes between the sacred and the profane. This is also notwithstanding Durkheim’s desire to impute an essential elementary structure to them, an essentialist attitude that flowed through to Lévi-Stauss and his work on kinship. Rather, their culturally instituted understandings of social creation are given shape through what Rumsey has termed ‘inscriptive practices’. Inscriptive practices are a form of world orientation through which the past actions of human beings who are known in cosmological form are inscribed in and retrieved from the landscape by social actors in the present. Rumsey explains that ‘what is most characteristic of this “mode of orientation” is not necessarily any particular emphasis on mythic versus historical consciousness [or sacred or profane knowledge], but the realization of both in a particular form of inscription – in the places through which one moves in the course of social life’ (Rumsey, 1994: 127). In other words, Australian indigenous civilization uses ‘features of the landscape as a medium for the production and reproduction of meaning’ (Rumsey, 1994: 116). As inscriptive practices, these features of the landscape cut across both the sacred and the profane, the present and the past in active ways through which Australian indigenous civilization is constantly re-inscribed and re-interpreted. This culturally instituted social ontology with its own form of inscriptive practice based in landscape became the more important blind spot of the Australian occidental colonial-settler civilization. Neither story-telling, song or art through which the inscriptive practices were articulated were appropriated as forms of understanding within the horizon of this colonial-settler civilization, which viewed writing as one of the civilizational watersheds.6 In the encounter between indigenous civilization and the one that the British brought with them, material resources either were systematically ploughed under or turned into museum curiosities, and the inscriptive practices either went unnoticed, were ignored, or were inadequately captured under the term of ‘nomadic’ (Griffiths, 1996; Rumsey, 1994).

Civilizational encounters: multiple modernities, indigenous modernities, and inscriptive practices The re-making of indigenous populations into first subjectless subjects of the British Crown, citizenless subjects of the Australian nation, and much later citizens also resulted in their ‘aboriginalization’, or their indigenous modernization7. This re-making was a configuration of unplanned cruelties, frontier violence, missionary activity, scientific racism, and a paternalistic incorporation into welfare and labour economies mediated as much

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by flour, sugar, and tea – as money. This re-making continued to occur up until 1967 when a Federal government sponsored referendum gave legal recognition to the indigenous population. More precisely, this intersection or clash between indigenous civilization and a New World in the making, and the inscription of the indigenous population into Australian aborigines can be conceptualized in terms of two indigenous modernities – the indigenous modernity of a racially constituted bestiarium, and after 1967, the indigenous modernity of citizenships. The modernity of the bestiarium was one of the modernities of the Australian continent from 1788 and for its indigenous inhabitants the constitutive experience of their modernity among all of the modernities that were co-present. In other words, multiple modernities (Eisenstadt, 2000) arose in the antipodes that were configured by the variety of features through which modernity, generally, was constituted, and the variegated ways that these competing forces impacted upon the indigenous population. As mentioned above, these features also included for Australia, as elsewhere in the New World, the territorialization and juridification of sovereignty under the conditions of both empirial-colonial expansion and nation-building through various forms of immigration – convicts, settlers, immigrants, the formation of a civil society defined by property rights and later representative democracy, all of which went under the name ‘civilization’. The constitution of multiple modernities, again for Australia as elsewhere, also included ‘the continual constitution and re-constitution of a multiplicity of cultural programs’ that were as old as the variegated modern project itself, and included the technical imagination, as well as claims for autonomy and freedom (Eisenstadt, 2000: 2; Heller, 1999). The cultural programs of modernity also included the imagination of race, which functioned, especially in settler societies, generally as the mark of exclusion of slaves and indigenes not so much from the projects of modernity as a whole, but from some of its dimensions, especially its political ones. In the Australian context, though, the category of race also entailed exclusion from territorial-juridical sovereignty, as well as from politics. Moreover, from the vantage point of racially conceived interpretations Australian indigenous people as ‘Aborigines’ became representatives of the earliest stage of human development in 19th century evolutionary theories. In this way biological characteristics became the metaphors through which the human race was evolutionarily mapped and reconstructed according to a sliding scale from the lowest to the highest, or the most animalic to the most human (Darwin, 1998; Reynolds, 1996b; Cowlishaw, 1987; McCorquodale, 1986). The potent mix of the territorial-juridical notion of sovereignty, which grounded the image of terra nullius and the category of race set the conditions for, and resulted in, a particular Australian barbarism, which became the other side of the civilizing of the Australian continent. It is here that invisibilization also turned into a ‘logic of elimination’ (Wolfe, 2001: 871). The construction of a territorial image of an empty land in terms of

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juridified territorial sovereignty entailed that its counter-image of the primitive could be given coherence as absolute outsider. This barbarism can be captured under the more general term of bestiarium, which refers to the value positions of race and territory that the civilisers held, and the way these values functioned as enclosing interpretations of those deemed to be outside civilization (Feher, 1987: 260).8 In other words, the bestiarium refers to the self-images and cultural resources that were created and mobilized, in this case, on the basis of race that orientated and gave meaning to a form of social power that constructed the indigenous population as the absolute outsider. From such a value position a series of interpretations, practices, and institutions were either created or mobilized that resulted in unplanned, and then, systematic exclusion of the indigenous population from territorialjuridical sovereignty. Four phases marked the history of the Australian bestiarium and indicated a shift from the position of excluding or keeping the indigenous population on the outside, to breeding them out by diluting their blood through the practices of miscegenation (Wolfe, 2001: 871–3).9 The first phase can be termed the bestiarium of frontier settlement and occurred throughout all of the frontiers of the Australian New World, and included violent seizures of land, naked war, and exterminating practices (Reynolds, 1996b). The second phase is the bestiarium of conversion and included all Christian denominations in which the notions, activities and practices of christianization were synonymous with those of civilization, and it laid much of the groundwork for ‘the aboriginal-in-the-making’ (Attwood, 1989). The third phase, the development of ‘civilized’ welfare paternalism, or the bestiarium of welfare, was a technique of submission and governmental and missionary surveillance. It marked the beginning of an ethnocide proper and distinguished this phase from previous ones. This ethnocide developed fully when the bestiariums of the mission and welfare combined and coalesced with scientific racism, the result of which was a fourth phase of forced mergence and assimilation. Its main logic and rationale revolved around the policy of the forced removal of aboriginal children from their parents and was the nadir of the histories of the Australian bestiarium (Bringing Them Home Report, 1997; van Krieken, 1999; Wolfe, 2001). In his own analysis of this history that critically draws on Elias’s formulations of civilizing and de-civilizing processes, van Krieken argues that this particular barbarism resulted in the decivilization of the indigenous population (van Krieken, 1999: 299). Arguments about colonization and civilization often assume a totality of subordination, or in this case decimation and annihilation. And yet, rather than being a totalizing process, in the Australian context, clashes, encounters, and exchanges between modernities and the particular civilizational contexts and backdrops became spaces for further creative interpretations. Moreover, the various dimensions and cultural programs of what have been termed multiple modernities are themselves conflictually configured creating further spaces that throw interpretations into relief, de-stabilizing them and enabling the creation of new ones. In this way,

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the process of the Australian indigenous bestiarium remained incomplete, geographically dispersed and contested (Reynolds, 1996a, 1996b). The long dureé of Australian indigenous civilization and its inscriptive practices continued its presence as a living form that continuously shaped the nature of the indigenous modernity itself. Indigenous inscriptive practices provided the parameters of their interpretation of their modernity and later responses to it in the context of the broader Australian one. As Beckett points out, ‘it is important to grasp that Aboriginality arises not simply in reaction to colonial domination, but out of a space in which Aboriginal people are able to produce and reproduce a culture that is theirs . . . It is no less Aboriginal if it concerns the lives and adventures of local identities, or the wanderings of particular families. What is critical . . . is that it provides them the means to interpret meanings emanating from the dominant society, and to redistribute the effects of external forces’ (Beckett, 1994: 102; see also Austin-Broos, 1994). The space of Aboriginality developed its own history of encounters between colonizer and colonized drawing not only on their own civilizational resources and inscriptive practices, but ones drawn from the modernities they became subject to. It is not a matter of the civilizational versus the non-civilizational, of pre-modernity versus modernity, of myth versus history, of the pre-political versus the political, but rather of the civilizational ontologies that are deployed and the way they are recreated and re-interpreted in whatever spaces are available.

Notes 1. The author would like to thank Saïd Amir Arjomand and Edward Tiryakian for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this contributing chapter. It is based on a paper presented at the XVth ISA World Congress of Sociology, Brisbane 2002 entitled ‘The Australian Bestiarium: from indigenous civilization to indigenous modernities’, and initially grew out of a workshop organized by the journal Thesis Eleven on Australian civilization held in Melbourne, Australia, 2001. 2. This juridical sovereignty was stated and re-stated at least five times: in 1788 with the proclamation of settlement at Sydney Cove; in 1823/24 with the development of a Charter of Justice which replaced the ad hoc legal system with regular procedures. In 1824, Sir John Pedder became Chief Justice of Van Dieman’s Land. In 1829 the western half of the continent was proclaimed as a colony for and by the British Crown in a series of events culminating in The Western Australian Act 1829 (UK) and Lieutenant-Governor Stirling’s Proclamation of the Colony on 18 June. In 1879 the Queensland colonial legislature passed The Queensland Coastal Islands Act, which legally incorporated the Torres Strait into the Colony of Queensland. In 1889 in their judgement of the Cooper versus Stewart case, the British Privy Council re-stated the principle of terra nullius. 3. This idea of juridical sovereignty is the target of a critique by Henry Reynolds, for example, and a contestation, which was fought out at the level of constitutional law through which the myth of terra nullius was overturned in the 1992 High Court Mabo Judgement. See Reynolds, Aboriginal Sovereignty, and the arguments put forward by the full bench of the High Court of Australia in its judgement in Mabo and Others v. Queensland (no. 2) (1992), 175 CLR 1 F.C. 92/014. See especially the judgement by J. Brennan. 4. In the 19th century the works of Lewis Henry Morgan (Ancient Society), Friedrich Engels (The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State) and Herbert Spencer (The

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Principles of Sociology) laid much of the groundwork for this taxonomical approach. In the 20th century the works by V. Gordon Childe (Social Evolution) and Robert Redfield (Peasant Society and Culture: An Anthropological Approach to Civilisation) continued to do so. 5. In terms of material life, current archaeological research, especially in and around the intensification debate, has established that for Australian indigenous people a major change occurred in the use of stone tool technology with the appearance of what has become known as The Australian Small Tool Tradition. These stone tool technologies were previously thought to be unchanged and unsophisticated (Lourandos, 1997; Flood, 1999; Williamson, 1998). Further changes were established in food procuring and processing techniques such as fish traps. Nonetheless, and notwithstanding the importance of the recognition of growing technical sophistication, an emphasis on changes in tool technology and food productive techniques may well be misplaced and belong to a background idealization of our own technically centered industrial civilization. Technical mastery and control entered the realm of the mundane on the basis of inscriptive practices such as initiation and firing. 6. To be sure there were instances of hermeneutical sensibility and cultural, and often personal openness, notwithstanding empirical and scientist objectivism. For example, see the letters of Gillen to Spencer in Mulvaney et al., 2001. 7. I am deploying the term ‘aboriginalization’ in the wake of Bain Attwood’s work on ‘the making of the Aborigines’. See his The Making of the Aborigines, 1989. 8. To be sure, Feher deploys this term to refer to the totalitarian logics of Nazism and Stalinism, and the surveillance-disciplining social technologies of welfare capitalism. Nonetheless, given these remarks it can be extended to encompass the historical dynamic of European colonization, including the Australian one. 9. Wolfe identifies three phases – confrontation, carceration, and assimilation, whilst van Krieken concentrates on the period of the forced removal of indigenous children from their parents.

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Rundell and Stephen Hennell (eds) Classical Readings in Culture and Civilization. London: Routledge. Elkin, A.P. (1979) The Australian Aborigines. Revised Edition. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Eisenstadt, S.N. (2000) ‘Multiple Modernities’, in Daedalus 129 (Winter): 1–29. Engels, Friedrich (1942) The Origins of the Family, Private Property and Communism. New York: International Publishers. Feher, Ferenc (1987) ‘In the Bestiarium’, in Ferenc Feher and Agnes Heller (eds) Eastern Left, Western Left. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ferguson, Adam (1991[1767]) An Essay on the History of Civil Society. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Flood, Josephine (1999) Archaeology of the Dreaming. Revised Edition. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Griffiths, Tom (1996) Hunters and Collectors: The antiquarian imagination in Australia. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Heller, Agnes (1999) A Theory of Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Hiatt, L.R. (1966) ‘Local Organisation Among the Australian Aborigines’, in Ian Hogbin and L.R. Hiatt (eds) Readings in Australian and Pacific Anthropology. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Hiatt, L.R. (1986) Aboriginal Political Life. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. Hiatt, L.R. (1996) Arguments About Aborigines. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huntington, Samuel P. (1996) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the New World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster. Kavolis, Vytautas (1987) ‘History of Consciousness and Civilisational Analysis’, Comparative Civilisations Review 17 (Fall): 1–19. Lourandos, Harry (1987) ‘Pleistocene Australia. Peopling a Continent’, in The Pleistocene Old World. Regional Perspectives. New York: Plenum Press. Lourandos, Harry (1997) Continent of Hunter-Gatherers: new perspectives in Australian prehistory. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Lourandos, H. and Ross, A. (1994) ‘The Great Intensification Debate’, Australian Archaeology 39: 54–63. Mauss, Marcel (1998[1927]) ‘Civilisation: Elements and Forms’, in John Rundell and Stephen Mennell (eds) Classical Readings in Culture and Civilisation. London: Routledge. McCorquodale, John (1986) ‘Legal Classifications of Race in Australia’, Aboriginal History 10(1): 7–24. Meggitt, M.J. (1966) ‘Indigenous forms of government among the Australian aborigines’, in Ian Hogbin and L.R. Hiatt (eds) Readings in Australian and Pacific Anthropology. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Morgan, Lewis Henry (1964) Ancient Society. Cambridge, MA: Belknap. Mulvaney, D.J. (1989) Encounters in place, outsiders and Aboriginal Australians 1606–1985. St Lucia: Queensland University Press. Mulvaney, J., Murphy, H. and Petch, A. (eds) (2001) My Dear Spenser. The Letters of F.J. Gillen to Baldwin Spencer. Melbourne: Hyland House. Pocock, J.G.A. (1985) ‘Virtues, rights and manners: A model for historians of political thought’, in Virtue, Commerce and History. Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteeth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 37–50. Pocock, J.G.A. (2000) ‘Waitangi as Mystery of State: Consequences of the Ascription of Federative Capacity to the Ma¯ori’, in Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton and Will Saunders (eds) Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Redfield, Robert (1956) Peasant Society and Culture: An Anthropological Approach to Civilisation. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Reynolds, Henry (1996a) Aboriginal Sovereignty. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Reynolds, Henry (1996b) Frontier. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Reynolds, Henry (1998) ‘Sovereignty’, in Nicolas Peterson and Will Saunders (eds) Citizenship and Indigenous Australians Changing Conceptions and Possibilities. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.

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Rumsey, Alan (1994) ‘The Dreaming, Human Agency and Inscriptive Practice’, Oceania 65(2): 97–115. Rundell, John and Mennell, Stephen (1998) Classical and Critical Readings in Culture and Civilization. London: Routledge. Smith, Bernard (1989) European Vision and the South Pacific. 2nd Edition. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Spencer, Herbert (1969) The Principles of Sociology. Hamden, CN: Archon Books. Van Krieken, Robert (1999) ‘The barbarism of civilization: cultural genocide and “the stolen generation” ’, British Journal of Sociology 50(2): 297–315. Warner, W.L. (1958) A Black Civilization: A Study of an Australian Tribe. Revised Edition. New York: Harper Collins. Williams, Glyndwr (1990) ‘ “Far more happier than we Europeans”: Reactions to the Australian Aborigines on Cook’s voyage’, in Susan Janson and Stuart Macintyre (eds) Through White Eyes. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Williamson, Christine (1998) ‘Late Holocene Australia and the Writing of Aboriginal History’, in Tim Murray (ed.) Archaeology of Aboriginal Australia: A Reader. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Wolfe, Patrick (2001) ‘Land, Labour and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race’, The American Historical Review 106(3): 866–905.

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16 A Clash of Civilizations or of Paradigms? Theorizing Progress and Social Change Daniel Chirot

Cultural anthropologists have largely given up on the notion that there has been social evolution, despite the uncomfortable fact that their archeological colleagues are faced with the reality of evolutionary stages all the time. Most cultural anthropologists now favor a multicultural perspective that pronounces all cultures more or less equal (Kuper, 1999). It might seem strange to equate this methodological approach with the one favored by Samuel Huntington’s (1996) famous book about the inevitable clash of civilizations caused by the near immutability of boundaries between major cultural traditions, but both follow a common logic. (Though Huntington’s book is a call for a more isolationist American foreign policy disguised as an interpretative historical essay, it is the historical aspect of his thesis that has become influential rather than the policy recommendations.) Huntington’s ‘civilizations’ are far broader than what most anthropologists would call ‘cultures’; and for Huntington there is a clear value hierarchy, with the West seen as a morally superior, if presently endangered civilization. Contemporary anthropologists reject such a hierarchy, and if anything, tend to reverse it (Marcus and Fischer, 1986). Both approaches, however, deny the validity of the old functionalist-evolutionary theory that sees humanity’s history as a long march toward a common, modern type of society, first reached by the West but accessible to all other humans. The history of how cultural anthropology shifted from its functionalevolutionary base in the late 19th and first half of the 20th century to an increasingly postmodernist rejection of any such notions is an interesting one but need not detain us here. What is important, rather, is to see how much this shift was produced by an ideological change that began in the late 1960s. It was not new knowledge as such that caused the old theory to be abandoned but a political reinterpretation that increasingly viewed Western European and American culture as imperialistic, mechanistic, alienating, and somehow inauthentic. This was not a new phenomenon in intellectual life, as it had its roots in the anti-Enlightenment, antiuniversalistic and anti-modernist thought of Rousseau and especially Herder, who believed that each culture has its own unique virtue and could only

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decay from being polluted by the arrogant French (Gellner, 1992: 26–7; Chirot, 1996). The ‘civilizational’ approach is equally ideological but much older. Long ago the Greeks consigned the Persians to an irremediably despotic and obscurantist but menacing Asian civilization, and most other non-Greeks (including the Macedonians) to the status of barbarians (Aeschylus, 1996; Green, 1991: 6–7). The Greeks were hardly unique, however, as all the great classical agrarian cultures and religions, or at least their elites, were quite certain that they possessed the one true way of organizing societies and leading the proper life (Lewis, 1995). In the end, then as now, it amounts to a question of one’s taste. If it is the western way, or now, the American way, that one despises, then multicultural anthropology which privileges everything non-western, nonmodern and anti-capitalist offers the theory of choice. If, on the other hand, one appreciates western, especially American, individualism, progress and democracy as well as the material success brought by capitalism, then those parts of the world that have not adopted, perhaps can never adopt, the western ways are either barbarians or hopelessly despotic ‘Asiatics’. Underneath much of the rhetoric about such issues that is all there is – taste. The master ideologues on both sides of the discussion accuse the others of bad faith, bigotry, hypocrisy, or just plain blindness, but both Huntingtonians and multiculturalists in all their varieties agree that human societies are not, cannot evolve toward a roughly similar, single modern type of social structure with a broadly common modern culture. How good a representation of the world does either side of this ideological divide offer? Neither does a very satisfactory job, though for opposite reasons. The multiculturalists have to pretend that there has been no progress, and more than that, they have to deny the nearly universal desire for a better material life and more personal freedom. Intellectual critics (including religious ones) may rail against crass American tastes and low-brow culture, as romantic anti-modernists decried industrial England in the 19th century, but most people everywhere want to be as free, as rich, as mobile and as easily able to enjoy carefree sex (or so it seems from American films, television and popular music) as Americans. More than a century ago, Nietzsche’s deep hatred of his own increasingly bourgeois world, and his contempt of all things English, captured the anti-modern intellectual’s aristocratic disdain for industrial civilization and the way it spread material benefits as well as democratic privileges to the vulgar masses. He even called on Germany to unite with autocratic Russia to become masters of the world, to give up ‘the English principle of the people’s right of representation’, and above all, he added, ‘No American future’ (Nietzsche, 1954: 565–7, 802). On the other hand, to insist that only westerners can enjoy the fruits of modernization also misleads. It may have been that Greek and Roman notions of individual freedom and private property for a small elite ultimately gave Western Europe a head start in the race to modernity, as many,

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including David Landes, have suggested (Landes, 1998: 31–2). Or, more likely, it may be that the rationalizing ethic of some western Christians was the key to the early commercial, scientific and finally industrial and political revolutions of the West, as Max Weber would have it (M. Weber, 1998). But to be first has never meant that followers cannot do as well or better. We are long past thinking that only Japan seems able to imitate the West because of the dubious proposition that its mixture of Shinto and Buddhism is somehow ‘Protestant’ (Bellah, 1957). Now, as the pages of the Far Eastern Economic Review regularly attest, some substantial portions of China, not only Taiwan and Hong Kong but also the coastal cities from Canton to Shanghai, have become some of the most dynamic economic parts of the globe, while the area around Bangalore in India has become one of the world’s main software exporting centers. Malaysia, Turkey, Mexico and Brazil have become major industrial economies with per capita GNPs that place them in the upper middle income ranks of countries in the world (World Bank, 2000: 10–13, Table 1.1). A restrictive thesis that maintains that only a small number of European nations can become modern has come to seem silly. This does not even include the transformation of some of the most Catholic, previously backward, parts of Europe that were once considered hopelessly unprogressive, Spain, Ireland and Portugal, into advanced modern economies. Nor are democracy and an increasing respect for individual rights exclusively western. People all over the world, from Iran to Indonesia to Mexico, are demanding political and legal rights that go far beyond those that were available to the vast majority of Western Europeans in the 19th century but are now part of the continuing liberal revolution that has been the ideological foundation of modernization for two centuries.1 All of the world may not be on the verge of adopting a single cultural model, but many of the key elements of what has come to be defined as the modern, liberal, western, democratic, individualistic, capitalist way of life have spread very widely, and continue to do so. That is the true meaning of what is commonly called ‘globalization’, and that is why globalization appals those who want to resist this trend (T. Friedman, 1999). If this is so, and if the denials of this trend are largely ideological, is it worth debating an issue that boils down to a matter of willful distortions of fact and misunderstanding about the nature of modern social change? The answer is unequivocally yes, if only because policy decisions are made on the basis of such ideological tastes and misunderstandings. The debate itself shapes our understanding of what is taking place, and often distorts our perceptions of reality. After the publication of Samuel Huntington’s (1996) book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, for example, some Turkish intellectuals took the position that since the West was consigning them to eternal Muslim backwardness and obscurantism, they might as well abandon all efforts to join Europe and move closer to Iran and the Arab world. Fortunately, this tendency has lost ground in Turkey. As a

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demonstration of how wrong it is to classify groups by their seemingly deep cultural predispositions, in Turkey many Islamists now want to join Europe, which they see as protecting religious and civil rights, while the supposedly westernizing, hard-line Kemalists in the army are increasingly nationalistic and turning away from Europe for precisely the same reason, they want to maintain an authoritarian, militaristic system in place. In the 1970s, the socialist prime minister Bulent Ecevit was fervently opposed to joining Europe because it was too capitalist and exploitative. Later, the same secularist Ecevit was in favor of joining Europe, as are today’s Islamists.2 Similar doubts about joining Europe have been voiced by many Russian intellectuals, who have long believed that the West will always use the supposed barbarism of Christian Orthodoxy as an excuse to marginalize Russia. The fierce nationalist resentment this has provoked over the past two centuries promoted anti-modern, anti-capitalist, anti-democratic and anti-western Slavophilism. Russia was bound to fail and be rejected by the West anyway if it tried to take a westernizing approach, so it should develop its own, uniquely pure, communitarian and native version of modernization. It was Communism’s adoption of this position that gave it considerable legitimacy among Russian nationalists, but the failure of Communism left this ‘Russian idea’ in limbo from which it is only slowly recovering (McDaniel, 1996). Now, there are voices in Russia claiming that it is happening all over again – the West is rejecting Russia, so Russia must find its own solution by rejecting western modernization and going back to its genuine roots (Ziuganov, 1996; Khazanov, 1997). Unfortunately, if such an attitude prevails, it will bring another century of backwardness and misery to Russia. Here we can see that the Huntingtonian approach has much in common with what the multiculturalists are demanding. It is among intellectuals in India with postmodernist ideas (Chakrabarty, 1992) that one finds the same kind of anti-modernist response as among the neo-Slavophiles in Russia and Islamic fundamentalists in the Muslim world, though they would naturally deny this heatedly. That substantial portions of the population feel threatened by modernization means that these intellectuals have an audience and that policy errors could stop the recent rapid economic growth in India by returning it to the autarkic, failed policy that guided Congress during the first four decades of Indian independence. In non-western societies, both those who accept a Huntingtonian interpretation and multiculturalists turn their backs on modernization as a western import that does not fit their conception of the good society, and both are sure that the western model is wrong for them. What is the reality, and what theoretical stance best explains the nature of progressive social change in the modern world? Strangely enough, it is the very functionalist-evolutionary perspective abandoned first by cultural anthropology, and subsequently by sociology in the 1970s. Taking an evolutionary-functionalist perspective on change alters the debate about the ‘clash of civilizations’ because it suggests that seemingly

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irreconcilable cultural differences are more a product of different rates of modernization than of permanent cultural divisions. Cultures are codes – like genetic codes, sets of rules that guide social organization and personal behavior. They may be less precise than genetic codes, and they certainly can be subjected to willful human change, so the analogy with biological evolution is only that, an analogy. Nevertheless, the similarities are important. Over generations people work out codes of conduct that are enshrined as customs and laws, tastes and preferences, and guiding concepts of how to react to various exigencies. New rules, tastes and customs constantly enter into cultures, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. These may have little or no significant effect on a society, they may be beneficial and contribute to survival, or they may be harmful. The key to understanding social change is that the circumstances in which any society lives, even the most isolated and remote, are never permanently fixed. It turns out, more or less by accident, that certain cultural patterns are more flexible and allow for easier adaptation as climates, social environments, technologies and population densities change. Cultural patterns that are too inflexible, or that fail to provide successful solutions to serious new problems faced by a society provoke crises. These may be fatal, or they may lead to greater flexibility. As with biological evolution, the rate of change is almost certainly not constant, but irregular, a matter of ‘punctuated equilibrium’ as periods of relatively slow change are followed by sudden clumps of serious new challenges (Sahlins and Service, 1960; Boserup, 1981). Long ago, Shmuel Eisenstadt tried to show that there were strong commonalties between all the classical agrarian empires of the past, though he later fell into the error of insisting that at some time each of the major world religions set its sphere of influence on a path from which deviation was almost impossible (Eisenstadt, 1963, 1986). Indeed, agrarian kingdoms and empires all developed warrior aristocracies at one time or another because this was an efficient way to fight wars, and because those who became professional war lords possessed the physical strength to grab a surplus from their peasants. Only in remote mountains or otherwise protected regions did more democratic, tribal cultures survive. This was such a universal development that it overrode all the supposedly enormous cultural differences between the classical civilizations. Similarly, urban merchants arose everywhere and they were more likely to quantify and rationalize their surroundings than lords or peasants. In the long run, religious elites everywhere tended to downplay the virtues of military bravura and the calculating greed of merchants, and the official clerks who served ruling dynasties emphasized the role of learning and administrative rationality. These combinations of classes and valuepredispositions arose over and over again with startling regularity because these types of occupations and attitudes were in demand and were best able to keep advanced agrarian societies functioning (M. Weber, 1968: 1351–2). What have been called big cultural barriers between the major cultural clumps called civilizations were largely produced by accidental differences

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in the distributions of power between the same sets of competing kings, warrior aristocrats, merchants, clerks, priests, peasants and neighboring hill or desert tribes hovering on the edges of established agrarian states. Geography, the accident of being on a migratory or trade route, the quality of the land and the frequency with which it was subjected to natural catastrophes such as floods or droughts, the nearness or distance from nomadic and less civilized border tribes – these determined different outcomes. There were cultural differences, to be sure, but the basics were very similar in all agrarian states, except that accidents made some groups relatively more powerful in some places and not in others. To give a major example, it was the accidental independence of merchant cities in Western Europe combined with the fact that the best lands of Western Europe were not subject to frequent climatic extremes or exposed to nomadic raids that lay behind the ‘European miracle’ (Jones, 1981). The greater independence of towns and merchants allowed the greater flowering of a rationalizing ethic, and the long-term stability in agricultural production without too many interruptions built up a capital base unmatched elsewhere, except to some extent in China. Finally, the failure to unite Europe (unlike China, which kept on coming back together), allowed more stimulating technological, economic, intellectual competition to push evolutionary change faster. But the cultural elements that made up western civilization in the Middle Ages were the same as those elsewhere, and only small differences in the relative weight of each determined a different outcome (Chirot, 1986). No agrarian civilization solved the problem of population cycles. In good times, population growth outstripped technological progress and caused declining per capita returns in food production as well as the overproduction of grasping nobles. Wars, disease and famines then erupted until the situation was redressed. This endless cycle made up much of the drama of classical history, from China to India to the Middle East to Europe and even to the Mesoamerican classical civilizations. This is why from the time when agrarian states first established themselves in antiquity until the late Middle Ages the human population grew slowly (McEvedy and Jones, 1978: 342–51). The story of how the West broke out of this pattern was a mainstay of social science theorizing throughout the 19th and well into the middle of the 20th century. Only in recent decades has this problem ceased to be the single most important one posed by the social sciences. Then, at least in sociology, world systems theorists came along to sneer at the problem by claiming that Western Europeans were only better thieves and not cultural innovators, and postmodernists began to deny that the West had invented anything other than its own mythological narratives (Wallerstein, 1974; AbuLughod, 1989; Lyotard, 1979). Yet, something did happen in the West and it transformed the world as much as did the much earlier agrarian revolution that occurred in the several millennia before 3000 BC. As in the earlier revolution, the human population again began to grow very rapidly,

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and human societies were dramatically altered. The biggest difference is that this second great transformation has taken place in, at most, 300 or 400 years rather than 3000 or 4000 (Diamond, 1997: 176–91, 215–92). Now, once again, humanity is faced with a new set of unprecedented challenges and it has been obliged to adapt to the new circumstances by creating new types of social organizations, new cultures. As in the agrarian past, however, only a fairly narrow set of workable options exist, though all sorts of experiments have been and will continue to be tried everywhere as people struggle to combine old habits with new requirements. In the modern transformation it turns out that the set of possible solutions are narrower than ever before because of the emergence of a single world market and because of the fantastic progress in the speed of communications. Societies and systems that do not adapt will fall behind, their people will become restless and rebellious, and they will fail. One difference now may be that evolutionary pressures exposing failures no longer need to manifest themselves mostly through military conquests, enslavements, famines or forced expulsions as they did in the past. The customs, laws, ideologies and forms of organization that block free exchanges of ideas and technologies, of goods and capital, of labor and skills have only to produce slower economic growth for people to become discontented. Those hostile to the new requirements may think that the rich capitalist powers, now led by the USA, are plotting their destruction. But no plot or direct intervention is really necessary. Fundamentalist Muslim regimes, right-wing corporatist autocracies, corrupt, closed plutocracies, or other such holdovers from the late agrarian age hurt their societies by insisting on maintaining poorly adapted social and economic systems. Typically, their leaders understand this but hold onto power desperately, afraid that adaptation to the new requirements will sweep them away. That is why they are so afraid of the free exchange of ideas and information, as that will make their failures all the more apparent to the people they rule. Where does this leave the ‘clash of civilizations’? An evolutionary-functionalist line of theorizing suggests that the ‘clash’ is largely a function of uneven modernization, and is therefore unlikely to last very much longer, certainly not much more than through the present century. It is not fixed eternally in either the historical past or the future. One way of verifying this is to look at situations in which civilizations, complex cultural patterns shared by many similar and usually adjoining societies, really did clash in the past in irreconcilable ways, and then to see if any parallels exist today. Three major types of conflicts between cultures and societies existed during the long agrarian age. One was between essentially equal, highly adapted empires, kingdoms and other state structures. Romans and Persians, or many Christian and Muslim political entities, fought countless wars along their borders. They claimed to be very different from each other, but were not, and in fact understood each other well enough to form alliances that cut across religion and cultures very easily. These conflicts were similar to those that occurred within each ‘civilization’, between and

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within Christian and Muslim polities or within the boundaries of the Roman and Persian spheres of influence.3 Somewhat different and more genuinely ‘civilizational’ were the conflicts between advanced agrarian societies and the less politically sophisticated mountain, desert and forest people around them. When the more advanced agrarian state societies were divided, or exhausted from recent wars and plagues caused largely by the population cycle that periodically devastated them, the surrounding ‘barbarians’ might gain military victories. But in the long run it was almost always the established agrarian civilizations that won by either vanquishing the tribes or converting them to their way of life and usually their religions as well. Ibn Khaldun, observing this process in North African history, explained the phenomenon as one in which hard desert nomads conquered soft city dynasties, installed themselves as rulers, and in turn became soft and lost their ability to push back new nomadic tribes (Ibn Khaldun, 1969). Demographic pressures and internal divisions within coastal Arab elites who, like most elites, overreproduced themselves, probably had more to do with this cycle than urban corruption. Ecologically fragile dry areas on the edge of deserts in the Middle East and North Africa were also most likely to suffer from periodic ecological degradation that weakened agrarian economies. But even here, aside from the original Muslim conquest in the 7th century, nomadic invaders always wound up adopting the culture and religion of those they conquered. Later conquerors – Arab or Berber nomads, Turks and Mongols –who came into the Islamic sphere all converted to Islam and adopted the way of life of those they had conquered (Ashtor, 1976). This was true everywhere, whether in China, whose dynastic cycles resemble the pattern observed by Ibn Khaldun, in Europe where waves of invading barbarian tribes were Romanized (or in the East, Byzantinized) and Christianized, in India, or in Persia. In the end the style of life and organization of the established agrarian states triumphed because that was the only way to sustain elite cultures on the backs of local peasants and to fight off enemies.4 With the perfection of guns after the 17th century, these kinds of tribal invasions of agrarian states became impossible because it was no longer possible to make up with endurance and good horsemanship the overwhelming military superiority of established states (Keegan, 1994: 207–17). The third and even more fundamentally civilizational type of conflict in the agrarian world occurred when established states pushed out into significantly more backward tribal areas that were geographically suited for colonization. This happened untold numbers of times, which is precisely how ‘civilizations’ came to occupy such large areas as tribe after tribe was conquered and either absorbed, destroyed, or forced to flee into ever more remote and inaccessible regions. We know some of the stories. Caesar’s legions penetrating into Gaul far from the old Roman border overwhelmed the Celtic tribes. Combined with subsequent colonization, Gallic culture as such had almost ceased to exist by the time Gaul was conquered by the

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Franks (Bloch, 1968: 155, 434). The Chinese were masters of this kind of overwhelming cultural extinction, as Han immigrants pushed into southern China and absorbed, destroyed, or expelled the local tribes. In China, the process continues to this day around the ‘barbarian’ edges of Han civilization (Diamond, 1997: 332–3).5 It did not always require strong state structures to do this. Whenever people at a higher technological stage moved into areas peopled by cultures at a lower stage, the result was similar. Expanding Bantu populations with iron-working technology, for example, eliminated the prior cultures that had lived in eastern and southern Africa, reducing them to increasingly fragmented Khoisan remnants (Diamond, 1997: 378–401; Iliffe, 1995: 35–6). In the early modern age, as West European technology advanced rapidly, the westerners gained an advantage over the rest of the world. When people with guns and efficient military organization ran into slightly more backward agrarian states, however, both sides understood quite well what was happening. They recognized what kings, aristocrats, long-distance traders, gold, slaves and mercantile greed were all about (Cipolla, 1965). But when early modern Europeans ran into pre-state, even pre-agrarian peoples, there occurred the most tragic of all ‘civilizational’ clashes. Without fixed state structures, kings, or landed aristocrats, and generally without strong notions of private property in land, pre-agrarian people could hardly understand what it was that the Europeans wanted. Their technologies allowed only very low population densities, especially if they were still primarily hunters and gatherers, as in Australia and large parts of North America. Even if they were slash and burn agriculturists, such people needed vast amounts of land to survive. Nor could Europeans understand why this was so, or why it was that treaties signed meant nothing.6 Then there was the matter of biological evolution as people who had lived in societies with much lower population densities tended to have been exposed to far fewer diseases than those who had lived in densely packed human environments. The native peoples were therefore subjected to terrible epidemics when they came into contact with immunologically more sophisticated Europeans. There ensued the most genuine, irresolvable and tragic ‘clashes of civilization’ and cultural as well as physical exterminations (Thornton, 1987; Diamond, 1997: 210–14). These kinds of tragic conflicts between societies at very different evolutionary stages are drawing to a close as few such extreme gaps remain today. Where they still exist, however, the tragedies continue, whether in West New Guinea since the arrival of Indonesian power, or in the Amazon as gold prospectors and lumbermen move in (Sims, 2000; Cleary, 1990). Today what are called ‘civilizational’ conflicts are, by and large, between societies that are at different, but not so enormously different stages of sociocultural evolution. Two types of cultural conflicts dominate the contemporary world. One is between people who are essentially similar as, say, the Germans and French were at the start of the 20th century, or as Indians and Pakistanis are today. There may be religious or ideological differences

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between them, as there were between the capitalist West and the socialist USSR until 1989, but these are no more immutable than the FrancoGerman conflicts from 1870 to 1945. We should remember that in the early 20th century, differences between nation-states within Western Europe were seen as deeply ingrained, based on centuries of culturally divergent histories, even millennia, and perhaps even due to basic racial, biological differences (E. Weber, 1986: 105–6, 130–41). This now looks like a very bad joke that unfortunately produced two world wars and enormous suffering. Driving from Madrid to Stockholm today one can note changing scenery and languages, some different foods, but no obvious ‘civilizational’ differences except rather trivial ones. The other, more fundamental kind of cultural conflict is the difference between societies at different evolutionary-technological stages. If the extreme differences between hunter-gatherers and modernizing societies is almost a thing of the past, what are called ‘third world’ or just frankly less advanced, poorer societies are still much closer to their agrarian past than are those societies that have industrialized and are moving into a postindustrial age. There are now almost no purely agrarian societies any more, but there are certainly many where a large portion, often even majorities of the population are unable to benefit from the skills and technologies widely available in the most advanced economies. It was to address the reasons for such lags, and to offer solutions for redressing them that modernization theory, based on evolutionaryfunctionalist thinking, was developed in the 1940s and 1950s. Unfortunately, the abandonment of this approach in the 1970s left sociology bereft of any theoretical basis for explaining why such lags existed or what could be done about them. That left us open to the fallacies proposed by postmodernists, who simply deny that differences are explained by lags, and those proposed by Huntingtonians, who suggest that they are irremediable. It is politically incorrect and unpopular to say, but nevertheless true, that the technological stage in which societies found themselves at the start of the 20th century has made a big difference in how well they have adapted to modernizing pressures. Societies farthest on the scale from the West at the start of the industrial age have found the leap to modernity most difficult (Lenski and Nolan, 1985). Thus, the highly sophisticated, literate states in 1800 with very advanced agricultural techniques and an already developed sense of nationalism such as China, Korea and Japan have been able to catch up to the West and in some instances surpass it fairly quickly in the late 20th century. Indeed, most of China would probably be as well off today as Taiwan and the Hong Kong to Canton complex if it had not suffered the misfortunes of almost 30 years of Maoism (Vogel, 1989, 1991). Quite the contrary situation exists in parts of the world that had very low literacy rates or none at all, rudimentary state structures without a bureaucratic-service tradition, and backward agricultural technologies. This is most obvious in sub-Saharan Africa (Diamond, 1997: 398–401). Of course the slave trade and the internal wars it engendered until the very end of the

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19th century in parts of Africa made things all the worse, and so did early 20th-century colonialism by the Europeans, particularly in its most brutal forms (Curtin, 1969; Hochschild, 1999; Pakenham, 1991). Nevertheless, it is sheer delusion to ascribe all the difficulties Africa has had in modernizing to the colonial legacy. Sub-Sahara’s economic development has lagged so far behind other parts of the world, including other formerly colonized and war-ravaged societies, that external exploitation provides insufficient explanation. Nor is it simply a matter of a technological lag, as better technologies are widely available, and there have been cases elsewhere in the world of relatively backward economies adopting new technologies and modernizing very rapidly (Lancaster, 1999: 18–35). The almost complete absence of effective bureaucratic institutions, at both the private and governmental level, and the lack of loyalty to any social institution larger than an individual’s family and immediate circle of clients have probably been even bigger barriers to Africa’s development than technological backwardness (Jackson and Rosberg, 1982; The Economist, 2000: 22–4). But this is also the function of a lag in social evolution. Sociocultural modernization is more than mere technological progress, and it is impossible to separate the material from the social and political consequences of backwardness. Africa can modernize, but only by adopting an institutional and social structure that more closely resembles that which evolved over centuries in the capitalist early modernizers. This means establishing a legal framework for protecting private property rights, strengthening impartial judicial systems, permitting private businesses to flourish without either overregulating them or overtaxing them, remedying the extreme gender inequality that exists in most African societies and wastes enormous amounts of human capital, and concentrating government efforts on building adequate infrastructures (African Development Bank, 2000: 39–42). None of this is easy, but a good first step is to recognize that the ills from which Africa suffers are not the inevitable consequences of fixed civilizational differences. The most advanced western societies of today once had social structures that were as clientelistic, as corrupt, as hostile to private property rights and as unfair to women as African societies. Today, progress can actually be faster because the changes necessary for sound modernization are well understood; but that means abandoning the specious reasoning that either condemns modernity as an evil or somehow makes it seem unreachable for those in the world who have not yet achieved it. One can find other parts of the world that demonstrate the validity of the proposition that greater contact with and adoption of the ways of more advanced economies and societies accelerate modernization, for example, Eastern Europe. There, those societies long exposed to Western Europe, influenced by western urban merchants, and possessing superior western agricultural techniques such as the three-field system and the moldboard plow by the late Middle Ages were able to modernize more quickly than their less advantaged neighbors. As it was mostly geographical proximity to

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Western Europe that determined how advanced these parts of Eastern Europe became, and the regions closest to the West were also more exposed to western markets during the 19th century, these most westernized societies have done far better in the 20th century than the more remote and technologically backward parts of Eastern Europe. The argument put forward by dependency theorists and world system theorists that contact with the capitalist West made places like Poland or Hungary backward is completely wrong. Closer contacts dating back to the late Middle Ages have made Poland and Hungary better able to adapt to the modern world, and even to move faster than most other post-Communist societies in overcoming the negative consequences of 40 years of socialism (Chirot, 1989). Where does this leave the discussion about the ‘clash of civilizations’? It suggests that the real problem is one of modernization. But that is not what most opponents of westernization choose to believe. When Iran’s religious leaders overthrew the Shah in 1979 and pronounced America to be the fount of all evil, they were rejecting many aspects of modernization, including increasing freedom of thought, the liberation of women and mass consumerism. Yet, they too have had to compromise to keep Iran strong and to satisfy their people’s demands.7 An absolute rejection of modernization consigns a society to a lower evolutionary stage, and in the modern world, that means that its people will feel increasingly unfree, poor and weak. Unfortunately, this does not begin to settle the problem as some optimists have suggested.8 It does not mean that all those who try to modernize in a non-capitalist, non-democratic, non-consumerist fashion must always succumb to the lures of the West and reform their ways. It does not make cultural differences caused by evolutionary lags any less profoundly felt. Most of all, it does not eliminate extreme dissension within every contemporary society about the value and morality of modernization as it has been practiced most successfully by West Europeans and Americans. This becomes evident by looking at the location of the most bitter conflicts about modernization and westernization, because these do not occur between different societies but rather within almost every society. In every Islamic society there are westernizers as well as anti-westernizers, those who want to modernize following an open, democratic, more liberal path and those who think it is more desirable to reject the liberal western path. Not all Iranians really believe that the way of the reactionary Imams is the right way; those who do not may well be a strong majority. But this kind of division exists everywhere, even in the USA, and it persists as well within many individuals who have conflicting emotions about which is the best way to cope with the modern, increasingly globalized world. The Middle East contains many of the best, but far from the only examples of the many contradictory forces at work. For example, the Kemalist tradition in Turkey is westernizing, anti-clerical, and has fostered substantial democratization, but this has allowed a strong Islamist party to grow. Because of this, and because of the Kurdish problem, the Turkish military cannot easily reconcile itself to a genuinely open, entirely free,

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democratic political system; but Turkey is too closely tied to Europe, and has too strong a democratic past to revert to simple military authoritarianism (Kasaba and Bozdogan, 2000). On the other hand, equally westernizing and secularizing Tunisia under Presidents Bourguiba and Ben Ali has remained strongly anti-democratic, but this has given a covert Islamic radical movement the opportunity to attract opposition forces who are actually much more of a menace to westernization and democacy than Turkey’s Islamists. To this day, the complicated interplay of Islam, westernization, democracy and autocracy leaves room for many different political and social outcomes (Angrist, 1999). In Iran, the Imam Khomeini bitterly assailed westernization but oversaw the writing of a constitution that is full of contradictions because it tries to promote Shiite theocracy while also establishing a rational-legal modern state that admits the possibility of democratization and some measure of free thought (Arjomand, 2000, 2001). Such contradictions are by no means limited to Islamic societies. In France there are intellectuals whose rejection of American globalization borders on what might seem to be an utter rejection of the modern world (Besset, 2000), and in the USA significant segments of the population believe that Darwinian evolutionary theory should not be taught in schools (Glanz, 1999). It was only a little over a half century ago that the European nation most advanced in science and technology was ruled by Nazis who rejected capitalism and democracy as degenerate Jewish perversions of modernity and who sought to recreate a mythical medieval Volksgemeinschaft. Only in 1991 did a Soviet Communist regime that had reverted to a kind of primitive, anti-democratic, anti-market, anti-liberal and deeply antiwestern Slavophilism, finally collapse because of its inefficiencies and failure to keep Russian modernization moving forward (Arendt, 1951; McDaniel, 1996). Social evolutionary pressures do not guarantee that the most efficient solution will always win in the short or even medium run. This is the paradox that led Douglass North to wonder why, when it is so clear which of all economic systems works best, there are so many societies that reject it (North, 1990). His answer was that ruling classes do not necessarily seek to maximize the general well-being, only their own hold on power. But to this he should have added that ideology, religious faith and just plain uncertainty mean that there is always room for inefficient, even harmful solutions. Once these are in place and legitimize a particular set of elites, they will hold on as long as possible, and only fall when their failures lead to military weakness, popular revolt, or changes by members of the elite who realize that they need to modernize to survive. Before that point is reached a society may be led into catastrophe as Germany and Russia were, and as is happening right now in a diverse set of societies from Afghanistan to the Congo to Burma and North Korea. In some cases, only the most dramatic sorts of failures finally lead people to understand that the solutions they are trying cannot work.

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The determined loyalty of so many western intellectuals, including many sociologists, to socialist ideals long after it had become obvious that this was also an evolutionary dead end shows that we all have the capacity to pick wrong solutions and hold them against all evidence. The ‘clash of civilizations’ is in that sense within all of us, dividing all societies and even individual minds. Western nations retain the capacity to make the wrong choices, to struggle against liberal modernization and lead themselves into disaster. After all, it was not a despotic Asiatic culture that devised the 20th century’s most viciously anti-liberal, and ultimately selfdestructive and dysfunctional regime, but the highly westernized, advanced Germans in the 1930s. In 2000 it was not a wild-eyed imam from a dusty madrasa who most eloquently preached against the modern corporation and free-flowing international trade but an American named Ralph Nader backed by the supposedly most progressive activists in the USA. It is necessary to remember all this if we are to speak about the resistance to modernization that is the hallmark of the most intense cultural clashes in the contemporary world. We have no way of knowing what forms of social organization will prove to be the most adaptable in the 22nd or 23rd centuries. We do know, however, that in the future, just as in the past, there will be contentious debates about which way to go, how to adapt to change, and how to direct it. We know, also, that the most bitter clashes of competing cultures will not be mostly between cultures at different evolutionary stages of development, because existing gaps can be closed, as they have been in many cases in the past. Rather, we can predict that both the Huntingtonians and postmodernists are wrong, and that the most severe, irreconcilable cultural clashes will be within societies, between different ideas about how to continue modernization, what to reject and what to accept. We also know that within any society, when the wrong side wins, tragedy will ensue. Notes 1. A look at the Document section of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (www.unhch.ch/) only begins to indicate how seriously the issue of basic human rights is taken in a growing number of countries in the world, if only to satisfy international opinion and avoid condemnation. 2. Now in power, the moderate Islamists are maintaining a pro-European position. See the Turkish newspapers Radikal and Yeni Safak to follow the twists and turns of these debates. Also, see Kasaba and Watts (2001) and Yavuz (1999), and also Kösebalaban (2002). 3. See, for example, the many references to the wars and treaties between Rome and the Parthian Empire in Mattern (1999). Rome’s relations with Sassanid Persia and the degree to which their perceptions of each other were rather similar, despite their cultural differences, are discussed by Christensen (1971: especially 126–37). There is a huge literature on Christian–Muslim relations in the Middle Ages, but a good example of how closely intertwined relations between these hostile ‘civilizations’ really became can be seen in Ostrogorsky’s descriptions of relations between the rising Ottoman state and the late Byzantine Empire (Ostrogorsky, 1957: 475–509). 4. Owen Lattimore once wrote a provocative article suggesting that Chingiz Khan deliberately did not launch an invasion of China as soon as possible to avoid this pattern of

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leaving the steppe open to new tribes able to start the cycle all over again (Lattimore, 1963). In the long run, however, the Mongols followed the old pattern of becoming partly Sinicized, eventually losing their comparative advantage, and being overthrown (Morgan, 1986: 198–205). 5. Edward Friedman sees some hope for the reassertion of ethnic diversity in a postLeninist China, but he also explains how the Communists were even more ruthless assimilationists than their imperial predecessors (Friedman, 1995: 54–8). 6. Though it is only one of hundreds of such stories, and one of the most extreme examples, the case of the extermination of the Tasmanians described by Robert Hughes captures the essence of such tragedies (Hughes, 1988: 414–24). 7. That, presumably, is what lies behind the continuing struggle in Iran between the majority of the population that seems to be backing the reformist efforts of President Khatami, and the more anti-western religious establishment. See Arjomand (2000). 8. The best known ‘optimist’ in that sense is Francis Fukuyama (1992), or at least, that is the way his well-known book about the ‘end of history’ has been interpreted. Even if his central argument is accepted, of course, it has become evident over the past decade that the forces of anti-capitalism, anti-democracy and anti-liberalism remain active and are vigorously counterattacking the trend toward westernizing modernization. See Ken Jowitt’s (1992: 249–331) accurate prediction that this would happen.

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17 The Clash of Civilizations A Model of Historical Development? Gregory Melleuish

How is one to understand world history considered as the history of humanity? This is not an easy question to answer, especially given the extraordinary variety of conditions under which human beings live. The reality of cultural diversity would appear to make the task of someone constructing a general history of humanity rather daunting. Yet there is also a great variety in the languages created by human groups, and it is possible to group these languages into families. It has also been the normal practice of historians to group together human units into a number of entities – these include societies, cultures, civilizations and political units such as states – that have things in common, and which effectively become the actors of world history. Human history can then be conceptualized as the interaction among such actors, and these interactions can take a number of forms ranging from peaceful trade and the interchange of ideas to war and extermination. It is clear, however, that when we use a term such as ‘the state’ we are looking at human entities in a different way from when we use the term ‘society’. We assume that states, as actors, will interact differently than do societies. States interact as political entities conducting diplomacy and war while social interaction can range from intermarriage to the copying of customs, including dress, diet and social practices. This article is concerned with the explanatory power of the term ‘civilization’ when it is used to designate an historical actor. Recent books have written about what is termed the ‘clash of civilizations’, arguing that civilizations can, and do, clash and conflict with each other in much the same way that states interact (Burke, 1997; Huntington, 1996). Is this possible? Are civilizations entities that are capable of clashing or does the power of the term ‘civilization’ to explain human phenomena for historians rest on something else? Our starting point in such an inquiry must be to address the issue: what is a civilization? It is extremely difficult to define a civilization exactly. Accepting this difficulty, Fernand Braudel proceeds by running through a history of the word, followed by a consideration of civilizations as geographical areas, societies, economies and ways of thought (Braudel, 1995: 9–23). Michael Mann also

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admits that ‘we can never exactly define what we mean by “civilization” ’. He goes on to say that this is why civilizations are usually defined in terms of lists of characteristics, and proceeds to quote from Gordon Childe’s list (Mann, 1986: 73–4). Civilizations are difficult to define because they are by nature slippery: not only are they large, amorphous entities but they also change over time, shedding and acquiring not only characteristics but also geographical regions. Once the Middle East was the jewel in the Christian crown, and Spain an important part of Islamic civilization. One must agree with Mann: in the final analysis one is reduced to making lists of characteristics. What constitutes a civilization? One can point to economics, to culture, to ethics, to religion, to language, to artistic style, to social and political structures, aware that in any particular civilization only some of these factors may be significant. Two contrasting elements emerge from any attempt to characterize civilizations. The first is that they are complex and pluralistic entities that contain a range of possibilities within them that are capable of being developed, even if only by sections of the civilization. The second is that the term ‘civilization’ is an ideal type, and its purpose is to turn an entity that is difficult to define into something manageable – so that it can be used for purposes of historical analysis. As long as we recognize the limits of our intellectual tools I believe that it is possible to say that there are such things as civilizations, but we should be careful regarding the role that we allocate to civilizations as historical actors. Civilizations are not unified entities, such as states and cultures, nor can political or military power be attributed to them. Rather civilization should be seen as a particular way of understanding the peoples and societies who compose it. I would also argue that the power of civilization as a tool for explaining historical narrative is limited because of the level of abstraction at which it operates. Consider, for example, the case of European civilization. We can say that, in ideal typical terms, there is such a thing as European civilization. Its origins can be traced to the Carolingian empire and the fusion of the Graeco- Roman heritage, Christianity and Germanic political and social institutions that was capped by the assumption of the imperial role by Charlemagne. It is possible to point to unifying elements within the emerging European civilization, including the use of Latin as the language of high culture (Latin was to be the language of the Hungarian parliament until 1848), the use of the Roman rite and the prevalence of a number of shared political forms, including representative institutions, monarchical kingdoms and urban communes. Robert Bartlett (1993: ch. 1) has argued that from about 1000 AD the members of this Carolingian core began expanding eastwards into Poland and the Baltic, south-eastwards into what became outre mer, but also Sicily and Greece, westwards into Ireland and southwards into Moorish Spain. European civilization was expanding but that was a consequence rather than a cause of this military activity. Equally one should look at the forces that made for diversity and disorder within the European world. We know from Marc Bloch (1965) that

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feudalism was never universal in Europe, and if Susan Reynolds (1994) is right there may never have been any feudalism, it being the invention of lawyers after the fact. There is also the division in Europe between those who followed the traditional common law and those who were the heirs of Roman law, not to mention the religious fractures caused by the reformation and by linguistic divisions. Thomas Ertman (1997) has recently traced the evolution of the European state which he divides into four types, emphasizing how particular historical forces led them onto differing paths. What links the various components of European civilization is that their political, linguistic, economic and religious features have family resemblances; they are not identical but are like the various members of a family of languages. The genealogy of the term ‘civilization’ also provides a clue regarding its mode of understanding human beings and their flourishings. In its initial formulation, from Adam Ferguson through to Guizot, civilization was conceived in terms of the progress of society and its economic development from hunter-gatherer to complex commercial order. Moreover, the liberal theorists who developed this idea of civilization were convinced that commercial society was replacing an earlier social and political order based on war. The progress of civilization therefore was not to be explained in terms of military clashes but as the triumph of a peaceful humanity over its dangerous primitive instincts. This is perhaps best summed up in Benjamin Constant’s (1988: 308–28) distinction between ancient and modern liberty, as he argued that modern liberty meant that commerce had replaced war as the dominant way in which human societies interacted with each other. Hence most theorists of civilization have not considered war to be part of civilization. In the 19th and 20th centuries civilization has generally had a normative dimension that opposes it to war and associates it with commerce, science, technology and intellectual progress. Hence for Gordon Childe (1982) the motor of history in the development of civilizations was the development and diffusion of ideas and technological advances. In other words, civilization conventionally has been linked to the ways of peace and to large human entities that develop goods, technologies and ideas, and then exchange those products with other civilizations. If the traditional view of civilizations emphasized the ways of peace, how then has it been possible to develop a ‘clash of civilizations’ model of history? I think that there are three crucial elements of the ‘clash of civilizations’ view. The first draws on the violent narrative of the 20th century with its history of genocide and ethnic cleansing, and concludes that groups of human beings cannot get on with groups who are different from them in terms of race, religion and culture. The second focuses on the new historical sociology of the past 30 years and its emphasis on the state and war as the motor of human history. This includes the work of sociologists such as Michael Mann (1986) and Charles Tilly (1992). This mode of historical explanation, especially when combined with the idea of the military revolution (Parker, 1996), has borne much fruit, particularly in terms of explaining European state formation. But it does provide a model of historical

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development that is almost Darwinian in nature as it portrays states seeking to expand and survive by preying on and swallowing up other states. Clearly it also links up with the realist theory of international relations. The third is a tendency to treat civilizations as if they were unified political and cultural entities, that is, states capable of behaving as historical actors in a unified and forceful fashion. In their recent works Samuel Huntington (1996) and Victor Lee Burke (1997) have attempted to flesh out a clash of civilizations model of history based on these assumptions. Both writers accept that ‘human history is the history of civilizations’ (Huntington, 1996: 40). What then is meant by the term ‘civilization’? They agree that civilizations are coherent and compact entities founded on a common identity and hence capable of behaving in a unified fashion. Huntington wants to make identity the central feature characterizing a civilization, so that civilizations become like culturally homogenous nation-states. In other words he attempts to collapse civilizations into cultures. He claims that ‘culture counts, and cultural identity is what is meaningful to most people’ before asserting that cultural identities ‘at the broadest level are civilization identities’ (1996: 20). ‘Civilization’, he further claims (1996: 43), ‘is the broadest cultural entity’. He asserts that civilizations are the ‘biggest “we” within which we feel culturally at home as distinguished from all the other “thems” out there’. Yet when it comes to the contemporary world Huntington has problems identifying its civilizations clearly. Papua New Guinea is coloured on the map as a member of Western civilization while the Pacific islands are not, Israel is not differentiated from its Islamic neighbours, Hong Kong appears as a dot of Western civilization on the coast of China, and it is difficult to discern from the map exactly to what civilization he believes the Philippines belong. At the same time he has both Indonesia and Malaysia as members of Islamic civilization, but is quite happy to quote the Muslim Dr Mahathir as an advocate of the view that there is a common Asian culture. Needless to say no such Asian civilization appears on Huntington’s map; instead it is divided among Sinic, Buddhist and Islamic civilizations. Huntington wants to make civilizations into what might be termed ‘deep structures’ that are resistant to change and to penetration from outside. According to him, members of a civilization should have no desire to convert to the religion of another civilization, and yet we are living through one of the great ages of religious missionary activity. One of the major features of the contemporary world, as of human history, is the way in which religions jump civilizations, as evidenced by the establishment of a major Buddhist temple in Wollongong, Australia. Conversion is one of the great facts of human history; most human beings do not have the same religion their ancestors had 2000 years ago, and some regions have undergone two or more conversions. For Huntington, civilizations are like billiard balls: hard, inpenetrable and clashing; even if he has trouble working out which civilizations are which. Central to this argument is the contention that during most of human

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existence, contacts between civilizations were intermittent or non-existent. This is an extraordinary statement as it ignores the relationship among Europe, Islam and Byzantium during the middle ages, not to mention the constant communications among civilizations that dates back to the Sumerians. To take but one example; this is the impact of Islam on Byzantium that led to the Iconoclast controversy and ultimately influenced the formation of European civilization (Herrin, 1987: ch. 8). In a different context, another example of the movement of ideas across civilizations is Buddhism, which Adshead (1988: 52) describes as the first world institution because of its missionary activity throughout Asia. One can also consider the transmission of Indian Sanscrit civilization to South-east Asia (it survives today in Bali), followed by Islam at a later stage. There have been interactions among civilizations across the whole Eurasian land mass and Africa, and possibly between Asia and the Mesoamerican civilizations; there are no pristine civilizations that have not had contact with, and been influenced by, other civilizations. Huntington requires not only pristine civilizations but also an historical process whereby the ‘West’ moved out and imposed its hegemony on every other civilization from about 1500 onwards. Again this is not supported by the evidence. European states, most notably Spain, spent much of the 16th century defending themselves against the imperialist onslaughts of the Ottoman empire. The final invasion of Europe by the Ottomans was repelled at the walls of Vienna in 1683. The Balkans were not finally decolonized until the early 20th century; and Bosnia can be viewed as a problem created by Ottoman imperialism. Islamic powers such as the Ottomans were imperialists; after all the British did not acquire India from native Indian rulers but largely from an Islamic imperial power, the Mogul empire. Under any model Islam was just as imperialist as Europe: it had the misfortune to lose, but not without first putting up a good fight. To give another example, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto (1996: 414) argues that in the scramble for Africa, Ethiopia behaved like any other imperial power. Relationships among states as well as civilizations are much more complex than Huntington allows. This problem also marks the attempt by Victor Lee Burke to explain the dynamic of European history in terms of the clashes between European civilization and other civilizations. Subtitling his study ‘War Making and State Formation in Europe’, Burke attempts to bring together war, states and civilizations. He argues that civilizations clash for a variety of reasons: political, religious, geographical and military. Following Huntington, he also claims that they clash for what he terms identity reasons, there is a ‘civilization consciousness’, thereby leaving himself open to the same objections that we made to Huntington’s attempt to collapse civilization into culture (Burke, 1997: 6). He states that his aim is to put ‘states and wars at the centre of social change’ (Burke, 1997: 8). It was, he contends, ‘the clash of civilizations and war [that] created and transformed the European state system’ (Burke, 1997: 10). He wants to combine the clash of civilization thesis with

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the war and states historical sociology of Mann and Tilly. ‘The Western state system,’ he claims, ‘was the product of the clash among great civilizations’ (Burke, 1997: 16). Or as he expresses it, ‘Islamic, Viking, Mongol, and Byzantine civilizations created a social structural forge, and the pressure from this forge formed the modern Western state system’ (Burke, 1997: 26). There are two obvious objections to this statement. The first is that it ignores the role of conflict among European states themselves in the creation of the European state system. Certainly one can accept that external forces and warfare and the competition that they spawned were crucial factors in creating European states. Recently, for example, Bailey Stone (1994) has argued the case for the significance of geopolitical factors in explaining the origins of the French revolution, and Thomas Ertman’s (1997) model of state development places great emphasis on the way in which particular states responded to external crises. The fact of the matter is that for too long historians have ignored relations between states as a motor of historical change as they pursued an agenda of social history that tended to focus on what went on within states. An historical approach that gives due place to external factors, and which in particular recognizes that Europe has been influenced by other civilizations, is to be welcomed, but it is important to get the balance right. Other civilizations are not the only factor. The second objection is that an acceptance that external factors, including competitive warfare, are important does not mean that this has to be conceptualized in terms of clashing civilizations. There can be no doubt that the Viking incursions into Europe had a significant impact on the development of European civilization as it helped to destroy the Carolingian empire and give rise to a fragmented feudal political structure. But was this really a clash of civilizations, or does its significance lie in the way in which parts of Europe responded to the crisis that it created? Certainly it is difficult to see Viking raids as raising a significant identity clash. Equally one would like to know just what impact the Mongol invasion had on England or Italy, while recognizing that it was important for eastern Europe. The case of Byzantium is even more complex because in a sense European civilization could not come into being until western Europe had uncoupled itself from the tutelage of Constantinople as happened with the crowning of Charlemagne as Roman Emperor. The real clash between Europe and Byzantium came in the missionary activity among the Slavs (Bartlett, 1993: 255). The model of clashing civilizations only really works if we make specific states the carriers of particular civilizations, and so combine political and military power with the more peaceful pursuits of civilization. Other states then should line up behind the major carrier and support it because of their shared civilization. Needless to say this is how Huntington views the role of the United States in relation to the other members of ‘Western civilization’. It is also a profoundly anachronistic model of history as it seeks to impose the 20th-century ‘ideal’ of an ethnically and culturally homogeneous nationstate back onto a past that was composed of much more heterogenous civilizations.

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I believe that the clash of civilizations is also largely dependent on one particular aspect of history: the relationship between Christianity and Islam. In this case we appear to have a continuing series of conflicts and clashes involving religious and cultural issues such as the expulsion of the Moors from Spain following the fall of Granada. And yet even here the situation is quite complex. One of the reasons the Muslim armies were able to overrun much of the Eastern Roman Empire was because Byzantine rule proved to be fragile in the face of major schisms within the Christian communities, many of whom were quite happy to be rid of imperial rule. Early Islam did not actively seek to convert Christians and Jews, preferring to levy taxes on them. They were to be protected because they were ‘people of the Book’. At the same time Christians did not recognize Islam as a new religion but tended to see it as a Christian heresy (Fletcher, 1997: 304). They certainly did not see it in terms of clashing civilizations. Indeed as Richard Fletcher (1997: 301) has pointed out, in early medieval Europe many laypeople had trouble distinguishing between Christianity and Judaism. Christians living under Islamic rule were influenced by Arab culture and eventually wrote their theology in Arabic, just as the Nestorian Christians further east who took Christianity to central Asia and China used Syriac (Brown, 1997: chs 10, 11). At the same time Islamic civilization absorbed substantial elements of the Greek and Persian civilizations that had flourished in the areas they had conquered. There simply was no unified Christian civilization, or Islamic civilization. In the longer term many Christians in those areas conquered by the Arabs became Muslims but it took some three centuries for these conversions to make a significant social impact (Fletcher, 1997: 307). Instead of a clash of civilizations we have a clash between the Byzantine empire and the Arab armies complemented by rather complex relationships developing between their civilizations. During this early period it was not unknown for Christians even in western Europe to convert to either Judaism or Islam. The relationship became more difficult in the 11th century as a revitalized western Christendom began expanding from its Carolingian core, into pagan north-eastern Europe and Spain and the Middle East. The first crusade began inauspiciously with massacres of Jews and culminated in the bloody slaughter of Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem, an event that was to sour Christian–Muslim relations for centuries. Even so, in Spain during this period Muslim communities were not forcibly converted by their Christian conquerors, but were allowed to keep their religion and laws, just as had the Christians following the earlier Moorish invasions (Bartlett, 1993: 208). Again it would be wrong to confuse warfare and conquest conducted by states and the processes of civilizational interaction that were taking place among the different ethnic and religious communities. What then after 1492 as a religiously cleansed Spain took on the forces of the Islamic Ottoman empire? Do we now get a clash of civilizations between the Christian West and Islam? In this regard I should like to quote from Andre Gunder Frank regarding the situation further east in Asia:

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Muslims (Mamluks, Ottomans, Persians, Indians) fought with each other, and they forged alliances with different Christian states (for example, Portuguese, French, Venetian, Hapsburg), which also vied with each other all in the pursuit of the same end profit. The Muslim Persian Shah Abbas I sent repeated embassies to Christian Europe to elicit alliances against their common Muslim enemies, and later made commercial concessions to the English in compensation for their help in throwing the Portuguese out of Hormuz. (Frank, 1998: 81)

Frank’s point is that Muslim states behaved in much the same way as European states, and that religion could sometimes be useful as a means of legitimizing certain actions. It did not, however, drive the actions of states. At the same time it is illegitimate to cordon off European states as somehow ‘different’ and operating in a world of their own. Frank also points out (1998: ch. 1) that it was only in the 19th century when European states finally did assert their dominance over the rest of the world that non-Europeans began to be portrayed as intrinsically inferior by Europeans because of civilizational factors. In the 17th and even the 18th century this would have been impossible given the power and wealth of China and India and the military might of the Ottoman empire. Nineteenthcentury Europeans invented the oriental/occidental distinction and inflicted such notions as oriental despotism on the rest of the world. It was no longer a world of conflicting states but one in which the West ruled because of its superior civilization. Out of this hubris was born the idea of history as the clash of civilizations. At first sight the idea of the clash of civilizations as expounded by Huntington would appear to be a retreat from this hubris. He attacks the idea that there is a universal human history that can be identified with the history of the west and which will lead to a common outcome for all of humanity, as argued for example by Francis Fukuyama (1992). This attack has two prongs: these are the contention that westernization and modernization are not the same thing and an argument regarding the thinness of universality. However it is clear that Huntington wishes to distinguish between the modern and the West in order to defend what he believes to be the unique qualities of Western civilization. The West must defend and preserve its inheritance. This argument rests on a peculiar argument which identifies European civilization as Western civilization and defines its characteristics in terms of Anglo-American liberal values. Huntington provides the following characteristics of Western civilization: classical legacy; Catholicism and Protestantism; multiplicity of languages; separation of spiritual and temporal authority; rule of law; social pluralism; representative bodies; and individualism. Reading this list one would not be aware that communism and fascism dominated large parts of Europe during this century. Huntington claims that the ‘West was the West long before it was modern’ (Huntington, 1996: 69), and yet he provides an Enlightenment version of that civilization that excludes both paths that have been taken in Europe and potential future paths. The idea that Western civilization is about Magna Carta, as Huntington claims, strikes me as at best flippant and at worse false,

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particularly as the Magna Carta relates to the very particular politics of medieval England. This is to confuse one vision of European civilization with that civilization itself. As David Gress (1998) has pointed out, there has been a large range of competing ideas attempting to define the nature of Western civilization. The view that Westernization does not equal modernization holds for Europe itself. European civilization has pursued a number of paths, many of them having very little to do with the supposed values of Western civilization. In his recent book The Birth of the Leviathan, Thomas Ertman (1997: especially ch. 4) argues that there were a number of roads taken by the different European states from the medieval period through to 1800. There were patrimonial states, bureaucratic states, patrimonial constitutional states and one example of a bureaucratic constitutional state, Britain. Only Britain really fits Huntington’s model of Western civilization. The other states from bureaucratic Prussia to patrimonial France lack some of the characteristics that Huntington suggests mark out Western civilization. A similar argument could be applied to 19th- and 20th-century Europe; there were many in Europe who believed that the values of ‘Western civilization’ were not necessary to build a modern state. At the same time there are characteristics that connect many of the world civilizations. For example, European civilization has links to Orthodox civilization in the shape of Christianity, to Islamic civilization through a common religious and cultural heritage, even to Indian and Buddhist civilizations via shared linguistic, cultural and religious elements. There are no pristine civilizations; there are invariably linkages and things in common. This may not equal universalism but it does emphasize that civilizations have similarities as well as differences, and that to overplay differences produces a distorted historical picture. So where does this leave us with regard to civilizations and their role as actors in world history? I do not think that any critique of the ‘clash of civilizations’ model challenges the idea that one fundamental understanding of history involves the development of civilizations and their interactions and relationships with each other. The view that war and states have been crucial in the development of modern Europe and the wider world remains as significant as ever; and surely Burke is correct in emphasizing that it was conflict with non-European powers as well as European ones that assisted in the formation of the European state system. But I believe that it is a mistake to bring together the idea of civilization and the war/states view of history in a single model. Warfare and states go together, not warfare and civilizations. Civilizations are more amorphous entities that generally contain states; they do not have the capacity for force that states possess, and it is difficult to establish a causal link between civilizations and military action. States go to war, not civilizations, even if the leaders of those states sometimes try to use the rhetoric of civilization to justify their actions. Civilizations are neither states nor are they cultures. Their role as formers

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of identity is limited owing to their relative remoteness from the immediate experience of everyday life. Civilizations are complex and heterogeneous entities that are capable of developing in a variety of directions and providing the seedbed for a variety of possible cultures. Both Magna Carta and Auschwitz are emblematic of European civilization. Different parts of a civilization develop that civilization in different ways. External factors are also important in the development of civilizations. On this issue I remain attached to the older ideal of civilization as found in the works of Gordon Childe: civilizations interact in a variety of ways as goods, ideas and people move between and among civilizations. The ways of peace have been just as significant as the ways of war. Civilizations are not closed systems like billiard balls but porous and open to outside influences. The issue of Western civilization remains more problematic. There have been a variety of conceptions of the West and Western civilization; it is a contested ideal. Most certainly Americans and Europeans do not agree on its meaning and significance. Nevertheless its use in the clash of civilizations theory of history clearly has a political dimension, as it identifies the United States as the principal carrier of Western civilization. The consequences of bringing together state and civilization, the ways of peace and those of war, are both a distortion of history and the corruption of a moral ideal.

Note First published in Thesis Eleven, Number 52, August 2000: 109–20.

References Adshead, S.A.M, (1988) China in World History. London: Macmillan. Bartlett, Robert (1993) The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950–1350. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Bloch, Marc (1965) Feudal Society, Vol. 2. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Braudel, Fernand (1995) A History of Civilizations, translated by Richard Mayne. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Brown, Peter (1997) The Rise of Western Christendom. Oxford: Blackwell. Burke, Victor Lee (1997) The Clash of Civilizations: War Making and State Formation in Europe. Cambridge: Polity Press. Childe, V. Gordon (1982) What Happened in History. Harmondsworth: Peregine Books. Constant, Benjamin (1988) Political Writings, trans. Biancamaria Fontana. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ertman, Thomas (1997) Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe (1996) Millennium: a History of our Last Thousand Years, London: Black Swan. Fletcher, Richard (1997) The Conversion of Europe. London: HarperCollins. Frank, Andre Gunder (1998) ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fukayama, Francis (1992) The End of History and the Last Man. London: Hamish Hamilton.

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Gress, David (1998) From Plato to Nato: the Idea of the West and its Opponents. New York: Free Press. Herrin, Judith (1987) The Formation of Christendom. London: Fontana. Huntington, Samuel P. (1996) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster. Mann, Michael (1986) The Sources of Social Power, Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parker, Geoffrey (1996) The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West 1500–1800, 2nd Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reynolds, Susan (1994) Fiefs and Vassals. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stone, Bailey (1994) The Genesis of the French Revolution: A Global-Historical Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, Charles (1992) Coercion, Capital, and European States. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

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18 For the Last Time Civilizations Hamid Dabashi

By the end of the millennium, a spirit of doom and termination pervaded the soul of the American Right and there is no better text to see that sense of nostalgia and decay than in Jacques Barzun’s (2000) From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life. As one of the most distinguished cultural historians of the century, Barzun has written From Dawn to Decadence with a sense of prophetic doom. With a magisterial language at once celebratory and mournful, Barzun sets upon himself the obituary task of grieving the demise of the Western Civilization. He declares early in his massive volume: It takes only a look at the numbers, to see that the 20th century is coming to an end. A wider and deeper scrutiny is needed to see that in the West the culture of the last 500 years is ending at the same time. Believing this to be true, I have thought it the right moment to review in sequence the great achievements and the sorry failures of our half millennium. (Barzun, 2000: 176)

To Barzun the present is decadent, corrupt, misguided and a failure. The great achievements of the Western Civilization have been made and now is the autumn of its decline, its universal promises undelivered. Barzun notes with curiosity the fact that his possessive ‘our past’ is a problem as to whom exactly it refers to, but whitewashes over it as ‘that is for each person to decide’ (Barzun, 2000: 422). That is the first in a succession of narrative strategies to claim the West for the mighty and the victorious over the last 500 with nothing as much as a hint at the catastrophic consequences of ‘Our Western Civilization’ at its home and its abroad. The text as a result is a nostalgic celebration of High European Culture, its art and music, philosophy and literature, sciences and technology. The result a visit to the museum, guided by a world class museum tour guide, knowledgeable of all the dead certainties. Whence Civilization? The re-emergence of civilizational thinking at the last two decades of the 20th century and at the heart of capitalist modernity is a defense mechanism, a

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futile attempt to salvage an outdated mutation of capital and culture at the commencement of the project early in the 18th century. At a time when the rapid globalization of capital has dismantled the very viability of national economies, at a time when postmodernism has self-destructed the cultural production of national cultures, and at a time that poststructuralism has deconstructed the very metaphysics of presence at the heart of the Enlightenment and all its categorical (e.g. civilizational) constructs, retrograde forces like Huntington, Bloom, or Fukuyama have put up feeble resistances to moral and material forces beyond their, or anybody else’s, control. More than anything else these feckless attempts make for rather pathetic scenes to observe, when outdated good and evil no longer recognize that the changing world has turned them into museum pieces. The phenomenon is not limited to malicious voices like Huntington’s, outdated pieties like Bloom’s, or vested political interests like Fukuyama’s. Far more superior intellects like Richard Rorty’s, Jacques Barzun’s, or Harold Bloom’s are missing the point too. We are in the midst of massive sub-terranean changes in the material composition of the world and the moral correspondence to it is yet to come. As Northrop Frye observed about a quarter of a century ago (Frye, 1974), the success of the Spenglerian conception of history and the very constitution of the West has been so thorough and so successful that it is now apparently very difficult not just for those who have a vested interest in the ideological construct but even for fairer and more liberal minds to see its historical fabrication. But to us at the receiving end of the project in its colonial territories there is no magic in seeing how the idea emerged and how it celebrated itself. To us it is quite evident that the very categorical constitution of ‘civilization’ is an Enlightenment invention for very specific reasons and objectives, including its beneficiaries, excluding its victims. The invention of civilizational thinking occurred at a very specific historical juncture in the rise of Enlightenment modernity. Neither the aristocratic nor the ecclesiastical orders of feudalism and scholasticism thought or practiced in civilizational terms. From Hegel’s philosophy of history to Goethe’s conception of Weltliteratur to Herder’s idea of world history, to Kant’s groundbreaking metaphysics of morals, the very conceptual categories of civilizational thinking were coined and set in motion at the commencement of capitalist modernity. From the dawn of civilizational thinking in Hegel and Herder, to the wake of instrumental rationalism in Max Weber, the collapse of the polyvocality of what had not yet given birth to the very idea of ‘Europe’ as a cultural contingency announced the supratribal formation of the ‘Western Civilization’. The premodern configuration of power in medieval Europe had placed the aristocratic houses and the ecclesiastical orders as the bipolar centers of social structure, corresponding with a dynastic historiography (aristocratic) claiming Christendom (ecclesiastical) as its universal frame of reference. At the dawn of the capitalist revolution, the aristocratic and ecclesiastical nuclei of power gradually gave way to the rising bourgeoisie and as a result the dynastic histories yielded to conceptions of national cultures, while

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Christendom simultaneously yielded to the idea of Western Civilization, with the rising Enlightenment philosophers replacing the clerical order as intellectuals organic to the new social order. The idea of the Western Civilization at the commencement of capitalist modernity was thus to the European national cultures what Christendom was to dynastic histories during the medieval period. As the rising bourgeoisie replaced in power and prestige both the aristocratic and the ecclesiastical orders, the conceptual legitimacy of dynastic histories and Christendom lost their epistemic credibility to those of national cultures and their enframing and emplotment in the Western Civilization. Because of its anxiety of class legitimacy, and because it could not genealogically compete either with the aristocratic or with the ecclesiastical orders, the rising European new class was intuitively drawn to such universal and universalizing abstractions as national cultures and universal civilizations. Formation of national cultures and the civilizational contexts of those cultures was the ideological byproduct of a specific period in the operation of capital. In that nascent configuration of forces and relations of production, the aggressive formation of national economies was the optimal unitary basis for the working of the capital and its colonial consequences. National economies and national cultures were first concocted at the metropolitan centers of the capital and then gradually extended into the colonial consequences of the project. Civilizational thinking was therefore a European Enlightenment project to give its rising bourgeoisie a universal frame of collective identity. The Western Civilization gave universal identity to European national cultures. German, French, or British cultures were thought of as particular manifestations of, so the story unfolded, the Western Civilization. While national cultures were concocted to distinguish one economic unit of capital from another, civilizational thinking was invented to unify these cultures against their colonial consequences. Islamic, Indian, or African civilizations were invented contrapuntally by Orientalism, as the intelligence arm of colonialism, in order to match, balance and thus authenticate ‘The Western Civilization’. All non-western civilizations were therefore invented exactly as such, as negational formulations of the western, thus authenticating the western. But there was much more to these non-western civilizations than simply to authenticate the western negationally. Hegel subjected all his preceding human history into civilizational stages leading to the Western Civilization, thus in effect infantilizing, Orientalizing, exoticizing and abnormalizing the entire human history as preparatory stages toward their implicated spiritual goal. As colonial nationalism aped and replicated nationalism of the capital at the European centers of the project, so did Islamic or Indian civilizations mirror, though in a contorted image, the inaugurating principiality of the Western Civilization. There thus developed a division of labor in the nature and function of national cultures and their civilizational context. While national cultures corresponded to national economies as the analytical unit of the economic

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working of capital, their constructed civilizational context targeted the colonial consequences of the capital. European national cultures were the domestic expressions of the national economic units of the working capital, while the simultaneous construction of the Western Civilization identified and distinguished the constellation of these national capitals and cultures from their colonial consequences. ‘Islam’, as indeed ‘Africa’, ‘China’ or ‘India’ were simultaneous abstractions invented and animated by the project of Orientalism in the speculum of ‘The West’ as the Civilizational Self of all its colonial Others. The European national cultures thus emerged as the ideological insignia separating the European national economies as the currencies of cultural exchange-value, while the very idea of the Western Civilization was to distinguish the accrued totality of those cultures and economies from their colonial consequences. It is thus not accidental that practically the entire scholarly apparatus at the service of civilizational studies of non-western civilizations was the handiwork of Orientalism as the intelligence arm of colonialism. Islamic, Indian, or Chinese civilizations were concocted, crafted, documented and textualized from scattered bodies of alternating evidence by successive armies of European Orientalists negationally authenticating the simultaneous construction of the Western Civilization. As from Hegel to Herder the idea of the Western Civilization was being crafted, far less illustrious but far more numerous an army of Orientalists were mirroring its civilizational others as Eastern Civilizations in general and Islamic, Indian and so on in particular. As the colonial territories are mined to extract the raw material of a massive productive machinery switchboard in European capitals, the same exploitations are at work on the historical memories and evidence of colonized societies to serve the ideological foregrounding of the Western Civilization. Oriental texts were exploited by Orientalists to concoct Oriental civilization with the same tenacity and dexterity as the colonial territories were exploited for minerals by colonial officers. Practically all these civilizational mirrors are on the site of the colonial territories of European capital. They were all constructed to raise the Western Civilization as the normative achievement of world history and lower all others as its abnormal antecedents. By the sheer force of European capital, conceptions of national cultures and civilizational constructs became the world picture of reality and were hegemonically adapted in colonial territories with the same force as their economies were being incorporated into the global order of capital. Very soon in the colonies too, dynastic, regional, or tribal histories were carved and renarrated into national cultures and placed within the civilizational constructs – Islamic, Indian, or Chinese. Iranian, Egyptian, or Turkish cultures were carved out of scattered memories and evidence and placed within the general rubric of the Islamic Civilization, to match and contest, and thus to authenticate and superordinate, the Western Civilization. Thus on the colonial territories, fabricated national cultures and civilizational contexts became the sites of hegemonic incorporation into the project of

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capitalist modernity, though from its colonial end. The more political nationalism functioned as a site of resistance to colonialism, the more cultural nationalism incorporated vast bodies of extraterritorial resistances to the project of capitalist modernity. We have launched nationalist movements against colonialism just to entrap ourselves ever so thoroughly in the project, having been modernized from the colonial end of the capital. The people plotted into the Islamic Civilization, or Indian, Chinese, or African, did not of course roll over and play dead to authenticate the Western Civilization. These colonial fabrications in turn became the sites of sustained ideological resistance to colonialism. In the case of Islamic Civilization, as in others, the colonially constructed site began to mutate into a site of resistance to colonialism and called itself ‘Islamic Ideology’. The result was the production of a knowledge industry, a journalistic offshoot of Orientalism, that began to brand moral and material resistance to imperialism ‘Islamic Fundamentalism’ and use it as a ploy to authenticate the civilizational superiority of the West and the barbaric inferiority of the rest. Barnard Lewis became the doyen of this journalistic extension of oldfashioned Orientalism, and in a massive narrative output continued to authenticate the Islamic Civilization as the supreme civilizational other of the Western Civilization. Meanwhile native informers as varied as Fouad Ajami, Bisam Tibi, Fatimah Mernisi and Daryush Shayegan doubly authenticated the passivity of the Islamic Civilization by having it take, as they put it, a ‘vacation from history’ (Shayegan, 1997). Against all these feeble attempts, in the emerging globality of the working capital and its corresponding cultures, the metaphoric division of the world into civilizational boundaries, or center and periphery, are no longer valid. Whether invited for a dialogue or targeted for a clash, the very practice of civilizational thinking has received a new lease on life by Huntington’s generation of nervous reactionaries to resist the uncharted consequences of globalization. The move is to pull the terms of engagement with our present predicament back to the early 19th century, when civilizational thinking was first launched in correspondence to the specifics of capital and colonial bifurcation of the world, enabling the beneficiaries of the capital, incapacitating its colonial victims. The move is thus to place the colonial cultures back where they belong and restore authenticity to the utterly discredited notion of the Western Civilization and all its false cousins. Civilizational dialogue, as indeed civilizational debates, clashes as indeed conversations, are therefore a latter-day collapse into the bare necessity of will to power disguising itself as will to truth, pragmatics of power selling itself as political theory. Reversing back to civilizational dialogue or debate, clash or conversation, is to resist ideologically the corroding power of the spiral capital that sells you a pair of Nike whether you take them off before you do your ablutions and pray in a mosque or put them on to go for a jog in your bikini, so far as you wear them out quickly and go back for another pair. Both the formation of national cultures and the civilizational framing of them corresponded to an age of capital in which the economic constitution

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of the European national economies and their colonial peripheries were the optimal unitary operation of economic production. At the threshold of the 21st century, the self-same capital has evolved in the global logic of its operation and the unitary basis of national economies and their colonial consequences can no longer serve as the currency of its operation. The circular spiral of capital and labor has now so ferociously destroyed the artificial national boundaries of its own making not more than 200 years ago that it is no longer possible for any conception of national economy to have a legitimate claim on operation. The result is the aggressive acculturation of individuals from their national economies and national cultures, as they are being thrown into an entirely new configuration of capital and its everchanging cultures. A quick look at the USA, which is by far the most aggressively mutated national economy and national culture, reveals that we can no longer think of this country as having a claim over either side of the same coin. The influx of migratory labor into the USA has initially created a so-called ‘multicultural’ society to which conservative thinkers like Huntington, Fukuyama, Bloom, Barzun and so on have violently reacted. Huntington’s thesis of the clash of civilization is a disturbed reaction to this phase of cultural confusion at the heart of the globalizing capital. What he and his cohorts do not understand is that they are quite late in responding, and that they are responding to something already on its way to change. Their real heartbreak is yet to come. This so-called ‘multicultural’ phase to which Huntington and Co. have responded so violently is only a transitory period in the modular reconfiguration of capital and labor. The real firework is yet to come. This transitory multiculturalism we witness today in the USA or Western Europe will soon give way to the logic of the globalizing capital that has already entered its electronic phase. Asians and Latinos in the USA, South Asians in England, the Turks in Germany, the Indians and Koreans in the Persian Gulf, samples of a far more massive migratory pattern of labor and capital, are now the prime examples of a spiral movement that will utterly shatter not only the unit of national economy but also its constituent conception of national cultures. From the new configuration of global capital and labor, the material basis of a new culture is already evident which is neither nationally cultural nor recognizably multicultural. That material reconfiguration of capital and labor is generating its own culture which is at once postnational and as a result post-civilizational.

References Barzun, Jacques (2000) From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life. New York: HarperCollins. Frye, Northrop (1974) ‘The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler’, Daedalus ‘Twentieth Century Classics Revisited’, Winter: 1–13. Shayegan, Daryush (1997) Cultural Schizophrenia: Islamic Societies Confronting the West. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

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Index ‘Abbasid caliphate 143, 145, 146, 169 Aborigines 9, 42, 206, 211, 213 aboriginalization 210 Abu Nasr al-Fa¯ra¯bi 171–2, 174, 177 Achsendrehung 69 Adas, Michael 18 Adler, Bruno 27 Africa, French colonization 31–2 African civilizations 26, 33 Agent Intellect 171 agrarian civilizations 221–4 Alchemy of Happiness 168 al-Ghaza¯li 168 alphabetic writing, first 16 Al-Qaeda 10, 39 ¯ meri al-Nisha¯bu¯ri 172–3 A Americanization 80 see also United States ancient civilizations 16 Ancient Greece concepts 107 faith structures 125 polis 116 political science 8, 172, 177 prestige 141 rationalism, Ancient Greco-Roman 126 sacro-magical structures 121 zones of prestige 141 Ancient Learning school 138, 139 Ancient Rome sacro-magical structures 121 Annual Review of Sociology 34 anthropology 3, 6 antinomianism 51, 52 Anu ¯ shirva¯n 166 Apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon 125 Apostles, Acts of 98–9 Aquinas, Thomas 176–7 archaeology 16 archaic societies, Durkheim on 123 Aristotle 8, 145, 171, 172, 174, 176, 177 Arjomand, Saïd Amir 1–13, 162–79 Arnason, Johann P. 5, 103–17 Arnold, Matthew 18 Arthasha¯stra 163, 165 artha (wealth and utility) 164, 165, 188 asceticism 93–4 ascivilization 17–18, 19 Asia see Central Asia; China; East Asia; India; Southeast Asia Asian civilizations 33

Assyrian civilization 16 astronomy 149, 156 attraction, civilizational see civilizational attraction Australia bestiarium 9, 211, 212 didjeridu use 42 founding myths 201–4 indigenous civilization 206–10 Liberal-Country Party Commonwealth Government 201 Australian-Polynesian civilization 23 Australian Small Tool Tradition 214 Austro-Asian civilization 23 autonomy of humankind 50 Averroists 145, 172 Avicenna 144 Axial Age asceticism 93 Civilizations 3, 38, 48, 49, 50, 52, 54, 64, 67 de-Axialization 61 Jaspers on 69 rationalizing structures 125 Second 3, 49, 54, 61, 125 axial turning concept 67–70 axis of evil state of union address (2002) 41 Axtmann, R. 112 Aztec civilization 16 Babylonian civilization 16 Baghdad 143, 167 Balandier, G. 1 Balkans 238 Banks, Joseph 202 barbarism 1, 4, 5, 19 Australian 211–12 behaviour 87–8 China 225 Christian Orthodoxy 220 civilizational analysis 30, 31, 32, 39, 41 culture and 72 Greeks on 218 Barthel-Bouchier, Diane 2, 21–2 Barth, Paul 77 Bartlett, Robert 235 Barzun, Jacques 11, 245, 246 Basra, mosques in 143 Batouala (R. Maran) 30, 31, 32, 41 Bayart, J.-F. 117 Beckett, Jeremy 213 Beck, Ulrich 39

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behaviour, civilized 14, 87 Bellah, Robert 35 Ben Ali, President 229 Bentham, Jeremy 127 bestiarium, Australian 9, 211, 212 Bible tradition and sacrificial mechanism 91 Bidpa¯i 166–7 Bildung (self-cultivation) 188–9 Bin Laden, Osama 10 biological sciences 15, 25 Birth of the Leviathan (Thomas Ertman) 242 Blau, Peter 21 Bloch, Marc 235 Bloom, Harold 246 Boas, Franz 21, 26–7 Bogenkultur 24 Book of Changes 151, 155 Book of Documents 155 Book of Nature 127 Book of Odes 155 Book of Revelation 127 Borkenau, Franz 111 borrowing, cultural 27, 29 Bosnia 238 Boswell, James 30 Botany Bay 201 Boudon, R. 34 Bouglé, Celestin 181, 184 Bourdieu, Pierre 37, 142 Bourguiba, President 229 Bourricaud, F. 34 Boxer Uprising (1905) 159 Brahmin caste 7 Brahminical canon 164 Brahmins 110, 150, 153 Braudel, Fernand 40, 108, 209, 234 Brinkman, Carl 33 British Fleet 202 brotherhood 92 Buddhism in China 5, 8, 150–2, 153–4, 156, 160 Hinduism and 108, 135–6 impact 110 in India 135 Mahayana sect 136, 150 pluralism and 108 Zen 154, 157 Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc de 15 bunmei 16 Burke, Victor Lee 237, 238, 242 Byzantine civilization 115, 166, 175, 240 California School 195 Calvary, story of 91 capitalism 108 Carolingian empire 235 cartographic method 24 caste system 7, 181, 183, 184, 185

Castoriadis, Cornelius 48, 107, 108 categories of human spirit (M. Mauss) 120 Catholic Church 116 Central Asia, Buddhism in 150 chain of causalities 153 charisma 94–5, 97 Charlemagne 239 Chernobyl disaster (1986) 39 Childe, V. Gordon 203, 235 China barbarism 225 Buddhism 5, 8, 150–2, 156, 160 resistance/adaptation 152–3 Christianity 8, 154–6, 157–9, 161 civilizational patterns 110 Cultural Revolution 160 Daoism 108, 150, 151, 152, 153–4 Neo-Daoism 157 Han period 148–50, 151 Jesuits 8, 154, 156–7, 158 sacred kingship vision 112 sacro-magical structures 121 Western culture, introducing 159–60 China Transformed (B. Wong) 194 Chirot, Dan 11, 217–33 Christian-European civilization 48 Christianity China 8, 154–6, 157–9, 161 faith structures 121, 124 Islam and 240 Judaism and 98 see also Judaism Nestorian 154 Roman Empire 110, 113 self-designation 87 Western Civilization replacing 11 Cicero 141 cities 14 civic politics 170 Civilization: The Word and the Idea 21 civilization see also civilizations comparative analysis 2, 4 as concept 15, 19, 207 culture and see culture de-differentiation 4 definition 4, 22–3, 73, 81, 87–8, 99, 207–9, 234–5 as discourse 30–4 dynamics of (sociological analysis) 36–8 European 235 historical perspective 14–18 ‘invention’ of term 1–2, 14, 15, 32 language and 74 local cultures and 71–86 of modernity 3, 35, 39–43 see also modernity as process 14–15 see also civilizing process

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Index self-designations 87 sources see sources of civilization technoscientific 81, 82 see also technoscience civilizational analysis 19, 30–47 discourse, civilization as 30–4 institutional structure and dynamics 107 modernity 39–43 see also modernity significance 89 as sociological perspective 120 see also sociological tradition (civilizational analysis) civilizational attraction and geopolitical/economic relations 5, 140–2 rival positions intersecting at centres of 134–6 civilizational complexes 4, 38, 107, 122 civilizational creativity 134 Civilizational Dimension of Modernity (S. Eisenstadt) 51 civilizational encounters 4–5, 120 civilizational forms 21–9 civilizational pedigree concept 110 civilizational phenomena 120 civilizational prestige 136–7 civilizational processes see civilizing process civilizational theory 103–5 Civilization (K. Clark) 30, 31 civilizations see also civilization agrarian 221–4 ancient 16 characteristics 27, 235 clash of see clash of civilizations comparison 180–91 defined 106–11 European 33, 235 as ‘families of societies’ 109, 209 indigenous 206–10 physical areas 21, 24 similarities/variations 23, 27 single/multiple 72–3, 79–81, 103–4, 105 size 73 and structures of consciousness 115, 120–2 analytical reflections 122–4 as total social phenomena 120, 123 as zones of prestige/social contact 40, 132–47 civilizing process 5–6, 14, 98, 104, 112 thematizing 92 Civilizing Process (N. Elias) 37 civil law 14 civil society 15 Civil War, English 48 clans 25 Clark, Kenneth 30, 31 clash of civilizations 5, 9, 10–11 civilizational analysis, sociological tradition (S. Huntington) 38

253

encounters distinguished 120 historical development model 234–44 holistic conception 163 modernity 61 paradigms, or 217–33 single/multiple civilizations 72, 73 Clash of Civilizations (S. Huntington) 219 cloning 7 codes, cultures as 221 Cold War era 9, 33 collectivities/collective identities 52, 54 Collins, Randall 5, 132–47 colonization, legitimation 31 Communism, failure of 220 communitas (community bonding) 90, 92 Comparative Civilizations Review 38 computer science 80 Comte, Auguste 104 conflicts, civilizational 225–6 Confucian civilizations 61 Confucianism Buddhism and 152 Daoism and 108 Han period 148–9, 150 Jesuits and 156 neo-Confucianism 138–9, 154, 155, 157 values 35 consanguineal marriage 182 consciousness, structures of see structures of consciousness Continuity, Chance and Change (T. Wrigley) 194 Cook, Captain 202 Copernicus 156 court society, and institutionalization 93 creativity, civilizational 134–6 Critical Dictionary of Sociology 34 Cui Shih 151 cultura 74 cultural morphology 21–2, 25–6 cultural ontologies 106 cultural orientations 106, 107, 108 Cultural Revolution, China 160 culture 3, 74–8 analyses 77–8 application to society 74–5 codes, cultures as 221 implications 81–2 Kultur and Zivilisation, German antagonism 3, 75–6 language and 74 meaning 15, 75 modernity, cultural programme of 48, 49, 50–1, 55, 57, 211 multiple cultures, one civilization 79–81 ontologies, cultural 106 orientations, cultural 106, 107, 108 physical environment, human sway over 77 primitive 75, 83

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culture continued science of 75 size of cultures 73 two class (Zweiklassenkultur) 25 customs 28 Dabashi, Hamid 11, 245–50 Dandanı¯ti (science of punishment) 164 danda (state power) 164 Daoism 108, 150, 151, 152, 153–4 Neo-Daoism 157 Decline of the West (O. Spengler) 77 de-differentiation 4, 164 Der Untergang des Abendlandes (O. Spengler) 77, 78 Descartes, René 53 determinism 80, 107 dharmasa¯tras 164 dharma (virtue and duty) 164, 165, 188 didjeridu 42 disciplinary society 94 discourse, civilization as 30–4 dissolution of order 89, 90 dominant trait 25 Dominican orders (Catholic priests) 155 Dong Zhongshu 149 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 126 ‘dragons’, East Asian 1, 35 Dravidan peoples, marriage among 182 dual power theory 169 Dumont, Louis 8, 180–90 Durkheim, Emile 2, 8, 9 archaic societies 123 comparative approach 181 concept of civilization 207–10 cultural borrowing 27 internal/external structure of civilizations 109 multi-societal character of civilizations 110 sociological tradition 36, 55, 104 symbolization 207, 208 East Asia, definition 111 Egypt, digging in 16 Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. 2, 3, 6, 11 agrarian empires 221 Axial civilizations 67 modernity 39, 48–65 pluralism 105 sociological tradition 35, 38 Elementary Forms of Religous Life (E. Durkheim) 181, 208 Elias, Norbert 2, 5–6 civilizing process 14, 37, 88, 104, 212 culture/civilization 43 Kultur and Zivilisation, antagonism 75–6 modernity 53 Nelson contrasted 38 encounters civilizational 4–5, 120

intercivilizational 38, 114, 115, 116, 120, 128 ‘seed bed’ societies 125 Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences 33 Endeavour, the 202 ‘end of history’ 61 English Civil War 48 Enlightenment China and 156 concept of civilization and 33, 87, 88 Encyclopédie 32 globalization and 43 modernity 48, 53, 246 post-Christianity 99 sacrificial mechanism and 91 secular nature 31, 40, 99, 100 self-designations 87 sociological tradition and 103 Epstein, Larry 193, 197 Erasmus 53 Ertman, Thomas 239, 242 Essay on the History of Civil Society (A. Ferguson) 205 essentialism 119 established-outsider relations 88 Ethics (Aristotle) 8, 171 ethnocentrism 183 Eurocentrism 8, 192–200 power, and economic progress 193–6 Europe Southeast Asia contrasted 114 Western, 12th- and 13th-century transformation 115, 124–5 European civilization 33, 235 European modernity, expansion 58 faith structures of consciousness 120, 121, 124, 126 families of societies, civilizations as 109, 209 Fan Chen 152 Fanon, Frantz 31 Fa¯ra¯bi, Abu Nasr al 170–2, 174, 176, 177 Faubion, James D. 49 Febvre, Lucien 21 Ferguson, Adam 205–6 Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe 238 feudalism 15, 235, 246 Fichte, Johann-Gottlieb 67 forms of civilization 21–9 Foucault, Michel 37, 53, 88, 94, 97, 128 Fourier, Charles 18 France Africa, colonization of 31–2 Ancien Régime 183 ‘civilization’, invention of term 1–2, 14, 15 French Revolution 48, 59, 76, 239 zones of prestige 141–2 Franciscan orders (Catholic priests) 155 Frank, Andre Gunder 240–1 Frederick the Great 76 Freedom and Growth (L. Epstein) 197

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Index Freivaterrechtliche Kultur 24 Freud, Sigmund 18, 92 Frobenius, Leo 22, 25–6 Fukuyama, Francis 61, 231, 241 fundamentalism, religious 4, 9, 10, 60, 62, 63 Galileo 156 Gang of Four 160 Gauchet, Marcel 107 Gautama, Siddartha 150 Geist principle 68, 69 Gell-Mann, Murray 71 Gellner, Ernest 193, 196 Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (F. Tonnies) 18 genocides 59 geographical areas 21, 24 German Ideology (L. Dumont) 188 Germany Kultur and Zivilisation, antagonism 3, 75–6 volk 15 ge yi 151–2, 154 Gibbon, Edward 16 gift exchange 94–5, 192 Girard, René 90–2, 98 Glenelg, Lord 204–5 globalization Americanization and 80 costs, social/environmental 71 decentering of civilizations 43 modernity 60, 63, 64 sub or counter 5, 7 world-system analysis and 1, 32 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 76, 246 Goldstone, Jack 193, 195, 197 Gospels 91–2, 98 Graebner, Fritz 25 Great Axial Civilizations 48 see also Axial Age greatest happiness principle 127 Great Religions 48 Great Revolutions 48, 51 Great Tradition 6 Greece see Ancient Greece Gress, David 242 Guizot, François 16, 17, 26, 32 Gupta dynasty (China) 135 Habermas, Jürgen 32, 105 Hakka population (China) 158 Hall, John 8–9, 42, 192–200 Handbook of Sociology (N.J. Smelser) 34 Han period, China 148–50, 151 Havel, Václav 30, 31, 42–3 Hebrew prophets 96 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 67, 68, 246, 247 hegemony, geopolitical/economic 5, 140–2 Heidegger, Martin 70 Hellenistic era 121, 125, 126, 127, 128

255

Herder, Johann Gottfried von 15, 67, 77, 217–18, 246 Hertz, Robert 24 hierarchy, value-idea of (India) 8 High Medieval Scholasticism 116 hikaku bunmeiron (comparative civilization theory) 16 Hinduism see also caste system and Buddhism 108, 135–6 fundamentalism 4 values 6–7 Histoire de la civilisation en Europe (Guizot) 16 historical perspective 1–2, 14–18, 234–44 Historic Atlas of Civilization 26 history, axis of 67–70 History of British India (James Mill) 16 History of the Prophets and the Kings 167 Hobbes, Thomas 67, 88, 89, 91 Hochkulturen (world civilizations) 77 Hogg, James 193 Homans, George 21 homo hierarchicus/homo equalis 8 Homo Hierarchicus (L. Dumont) 181, 183, 184–5 Hong Kong 237 Hong Xiuguan 158 hostility, intercivilizational 137–40 Hsüan-tsang 135 Hsu, Cho-Yun 8, 148–62 Hubert, Henri 28, 36 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 77 Huntington, Samuel 2, 5, 9, 10, 11 civilization analysis 112 sociological tradition 38–9 clash of civilizations 61, 72, 217, 237, 238 see also clash of civilizations culture 74, 79 multiple civilizations 73 Western civilization 241, 242 Hu Shih 160 Hussein, Sadam 80 Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (Kant) 76 Ikegami, Eiko 6 importing 136–7 India ascetic techniques 93 Buddhist civilization 135 caste system 7, 181, 183, 184, 185 Dumont on 180–91 hierarchy, value-idea of 8 historical patterns 110 importing and 137 marriage structures, Dravidian south 182 Pramalai Kallar subcaste 181 sacro-magical structures 121

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India continued statecraft, Perso-Indian 8, 163–77 indigenous civilizations 206–10 indigenous modernization 210–11 and inscription practices 213 Indo-Europeans 35–6 industrial society 15 Inkeles, Alex 50 institutionalization 93 instrumental rationality (Zweckrationalität) 53 intercivilizational encounters 38, 114, 115, 116, 120, 128 intercivilizational hostility 137–40 inter-civilizational patterns/process 5, 6 inter-epochal transposition, civilizations 4 internalization 208 International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences 33, 34 International Institute of Political and Social Sciences Concerning Countries of Differing Civilizations 33 International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations 38 Internet 81, 82 inter-societal transmission, civilizations 4 intra-civilizational patterns/process 5, 6, 7, 123 Iron Cage metaphor 67, 188 Islam 109, 175, 176 and Christianity 240 Islamic civilization 115, 249 as zone of prestige/network contact 142–6 Islamic cloning 7 Islamic conquests 110, 111, 113 Islamic fundamentalism 4, 9, 10 Islamicization 6, 7, 111 Islamic philosophers 144 Islamic royalism 168, 169–70 Jacobin movements 54, 62, 63 Japan as civilization 17 intra-civilizational processes 6 modernity, expansion 58 Perry’s ships 16, 17 Social and Economic History Society conference (1991) 16–17 Tokugawa period 137, 138, 139, 140 Jaspers, Karl 67, 68, 69 Jesuits, China 8, 154, 156–7, 158 Jesus Christ 91, 92, 97, 98–9 Jewish civilization 115 Johnson, Samuel 30 Joint Forum of Ministers of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) 9 Judaism Christianity and 98 see also Christianity conversion to 240

Hellenism, intercivilizational encounters 128 Spanish Jews 144 structures of consciousness 121, 124, 125, 126 kadkhodha¯niyya 172 kalam (rational theology) 144 Kalilah va Dimnah 166, 167, 169, 170 kama (enjoyment) 164 Kangxi, Emperor 155 Kant, Immanuel 3, 67, 74, 76, 246 karma 153 Kautilya 163, 164, 165 keimo (Enlightenment) 17 Keywords (R. Williams) 72 Ibn Khaldun 224 Khoda¯y-na¯mah 166 Khomeini, Imam 229 Kluckhohn, Clyde 74, 75 koshadanda 164 kosha (treasury/wealth) 164 Krejči, Jaroslav 108, 110 Kroeber, Alfred 4, 74, 75 Kultur 73 and Zivilisation, German antagonism 3, 75–6 Kulturekreise 21, 24–5 Kulturgeschichte 21–2, 25–6 Kulturkampf 174 Kurds 228 Kürsat-Ahlers, E. 112 Kuzmics, H. 112 La Grande Encyclopédie 32 Laitin, David 198 Lamarck, Jean Baptiste 15 Latin 235 Laws (Plato) 171 leadership 94 Lefort, Claude 108 Lerner, Dan 50 Levine, Donald N. 3, 67–70 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 180, 182, 210 Liberal-Country Party Commonwealth Government (Australia) 201 liberalism 186 liminality concept 89–90, 92 Liu Ying (prince) 150 Li Zicao 155 local cultures, and civilization 71–86 Locke, John 67, 186, 187 Macedonians 141 Machines as the Measure of Men (M. Adas) 18 MacIver, Robert Morrison 78 McNeill, William 114–15 macro/micro units of analysis 87, 100, 162

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Index Madan, T.N. 8, 180–91 Magna Carta 241–2, 243 Maha¯bha¯ rata¯ 164 Mahayana Buddhism 136, 150 Malayo-Polynesian civilization 23 Manchu emperors 155 Mandate of Heaven 149 Mandeville, Bernard de 186, 187 manners 14 Mann, Michael 234, 235 Mann, Thomas 90 Manu 164, 165 Maori 204, 206 Mao Tsetung 160 Maran, René 30, 31, 32, 33 Marx, Karl/Marxism 55, 89, 103–4, 186, 187 neo-Marxist revisions, capitalism 108 Marzba¯nna¯ mah (animal fables) 166 Matra, James Mario 202 Mauss, Marcel 2, 8, 9 civilizational analysis as sociological perspective 120 civilizational forms 21–9 concept of civilization 207, 209, 210 definitions of civilization 107 Dumont, Louis, as student of 181 Gallic contribution 36 gift exchange study 94–5, 192 internal/external structure of civilizations 109 multi-societal character of civilizations 110 reciprocity 95 Mayan civilization 16 May Fourth movement (China) 160 Mazlish, Bruce 1–2, 32 Mead, G.H. 68 Meiji period (Japan) 17 Melanesian civilizations 23, 25 Melleuish, Gregory 11, 234–44 Menghin 25 Merton, Robert 3, 74, 78, 79 Mesopotamian civilization 16 meta-historical tradition 111–12 metaphysics 149, 150 Micronesian civilization 23 Mill, James 14, 16 Mill, John Stuart 16 mimetic desire 91, 100 Ming period (China) 157 Mirabeau the elder (Victor Riqueti) 14 Mishnah 129 mission civilisatrice 22 mode of orientation 210 modernity Aboriginal modernities 9 antinomianism 51, 52 civilization of 3, 35, 39–43 classical theories 55, 59 collectivities/collective identities 52, 54

257

cultural programme of 48, 49, 50–1, 55, 57, 211 as distinct civilization 48–66 expansion/development 58, 59 ideologies 49, 54 institutional patterns 56, 57 multiple modernities 40, 211 patterns of, changes in 58–9 political process 51–2 reflexivity 49, 50 social movements 54, 60 tensions/contradictions 53 themes 51, 56, 57 totalizing/pluralistic visions 53, 54 utopian visions 53, 54 modernization, indigenous 210–11 Mogul empire 238 Montaigne, Michel de 18, 53 Ibn al-Moqaffa’ 166 Morphology of Civilization (O. Spengler) 26 Morrison, Robert 157 Ibn Mosku¯yah 172, 173 Muhammad (prophet) 96 multi-civilizational sequence concept 110 multiculturalism 1, 250 multi-epochal civilization concept 110 Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires (Paris) 180 Muslims 7, 10, 39 see also Islam; Islam civilization; Islamic cloning; Islamic fundamentalism; Islamicization; Spain, Muslim civilizations 61 Nader, Ralph 230 Nasihat al-Molu¯k 168 National Learning movement 137, 139 Négritude 32 Nelson, Benjamin 2, 4–5 intercivilizational encounters 38, 115 sociology of civilizations 119–31 structures of consciousness 115, 116 New School 5 New Zealand 204–5 Niceforo, Alfredo 21 Nielson, Donald 5, 119–31 Nietzsche, Friedrich 93, 97, 218 Nile-Oxus region 111 Niza¯m al-Molk 168 non-interference doctrine 31 nuclear technology 41 Nu ¯ ri, Shaykh Fazlalla¯h 175 nya¯ya (reason) 165 Odum, Howard 78 Oestreich, G. 94 OIC (Joint Forum of Ministers of the Organization of Islamic Conference) 9

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Opium War (1840) 158 Ordinance of Ardashir 167 Organization of the Islamic Conference 7 Orientalism 248 Orientalism (E. Said) 35 Origin and Goal of History (K. Jaspers) 67 Ottoman empire 238, 241 pa¯ dsha¯hi 169 Paleolithic Congolese society, ‘uterine culture’ 25 Pan-Asian civilization 23 Pañchatantra (Five Books) 165, 166 Papua New Guinea 237 parrhesia 97 Parsons, Talcott 37 Parthian Empire 141 Patriot Act (2001), United States 39 Pedder, Sir John 213 Perry’s ships 16, 17 Persian Empire 141 Perso-Indian statecraft 8, 164–77 Petty, William 127 Philippines 237 Philo of Alexandria 125, 127, 128 philosophy 133, 135 phratries 25 physical area of civilizations 21, 24 Plato 97, 170, 171 Plotinus 141 Plough, Sword and Book (E. Gellner) 193 pluralism/pluralistic perspectives 5, 104, 105, 108, 109 see also single or multiple civilizations Pocock, J.G.A. 204–5 Polanyi, Karl 186 police 14 Politics (Aristotle) 8, 176, 177 Polynesian societies 23, 206 Pomeranz, Kenneth 193, 194, 195, 196 power, and economic progress 193–6 practical intelligence 68 Pramalai Kallar subcaste (Tamil Nadu) 181 primitive culture 75, 83 Primitive Culture (Edward Burnett Tylor) 18, 75 prophets 95–6 Protestant Ethic (M. Weber) 99 Protestant Reformation 127 proto-civilizational construction 205 public opinion 15 public sphere 15 Purification of Ethics (Ibn Mosku¯yah) 172 Qa¯bus-na¯mah 168 Qin dynasty (China) 148 Qing dynasty (China) 155, 157, 159 Quesnay, François 186, 187

Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred Reginald 21 Radin, Paul 75 ra¯jadharma (duty of the king) 163–4 ra¯ja-sha¯ sana (king’s edicts) 165 Rational Choice Theory 21 rationalization of intelligence 121–2 modernity 53 rationalized structures of consciousness 120, 121, 124–5 Weber on 5, 105, 127, 246 of world 127–9 Ra¯zi, Fakhr al-Din 169 Redfield, Robert 6 reflexivity 49, 50 Western 1, 32 regional basis, civilizational distinctions 110 reincarnation 152, 153 religion, as civilization source 14 Religionssoziologie (M. Weber) 67 religions, universal 114 Renaissance 127, 138 renaissances 114 Reynolds, Susan 235–6 Ricci, Matteo 155, 156 Ricoeur, Paul 73 Riqueti, Victor (Marquis de Mirabeau) 14 rival positions 134–5 Romance languages 74 Roman Empire 240 Christianity 110, 113 Rorty, Richard 246 Rosetta Stone 16 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 18, 67, 88, 217 rule by number principle 128 Rumsey, Alan 210 Rundell, John 9, 201–16 Ibn Rushd 145 Russia, on Europe 220 sacred kingship, Chinese vision 112 sacrificial mechanism 90–2, 98, 99, 100 sacro-magical structures of consciousness 120, 121, 123, 124 Said, Edward 35 Sakamoto, Rumi 19 Samurai, taming of (Japanese process) 6 Sanscrit civilization 238 Sanskritization 6–7 Sassanid Empire 141, 167 scapegoat, sacrifice of 91 Schäfer, Wolf 3, 71–86 Scheler, Max 3, 68, 69 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von 67 Schluchter, Wolfgang 105 Schmidt, Wilhelm 25 Second Axial Age 3, 49, 54, 61, 125 see also Axial Age Secretum Secretorum 169

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Index secular perfectibility 15 seed bed societies 125 self-designations 87 Semiticization 35 September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks 1, 9–10, 39 Sha¯hansha¯h (king of kings) 167 Shakamuni 150 Shakespeare, William 76 Shangdi (supreme deity) 155 shari’a (sacred law) 167 shar’i order 168, 170, 174, 175, 177 Shi’ite Buyids 167 Shinto 219 Sicily, and Chinese models 116 Siddartha Gautama 150 Simmel, Georg 3, 68–9 simple societies 18 Sina, Ibn 144 Singer, Milton 6 single or multiple civilizations 72–3, 79–81, 103–4, 105 see also civilization; civilizations Sinn (meaning) 68 sira (manner) 168 Siyar al-Molu¯k 168 Small, Albion 77 Smelser, N. J. 34 Smith, Adam 186, 187 smriti (law) 164 social disciplining 94 social evolution 217–33 social movements 54, 60 social phenomena 28 social sciences 15 sociological tradition (civilizational analysis) 2–3, 34–9, 103 analysis as sociological perspective 120 first generation 34–6 second generation 36–8 third generation 38–9 sociology of civilization 43, 119–31 ‘classical’ 36 history and 29 meaning 104 Socrates 97–8 Sorokin, Pitirim A. 2, 37, 38, 44 sources of civilization 87–102 asceticism 93–4 brotherhood 92 charisma 94–5 institutionalization 93 liminality concept 89–90 order, dissolution of 89 parrhesia 97 prophets 95–6 religion 14 sacriticial mechanism 90–2

259

Southeast Asia Europe contrasted 114 sovereignty colonization 202 territorial-juridical notion of 202, 204, 206, 211, 213 Spain, Muslim 5, 143–6 Spengler, Oswald civilizational forms 22, 25, 26 culture and civilization, analyses 77, 78, 79 meta-historical tradition 111 Srinivas, M.N. 6–7 Starobinski, Jean 103 statecraft, Perso-Indian 8, 164–7, 175 state of nature 88, 91 Stone, Bailey 239 structures of consciousness 115, 120–2 analytical reflections 122–4 Structure of Social Action (T. Parsons) 37 Sultan, title of 168 Sun Cho 153 sunna (custom/tradition) 167 surveillance methods 128 Sutra 151 symbolization 207, 208 Szakolczai, Arpad 6, 87–102 Tales of Sinbad 166 Talmud 129 Tamil Nadu 181 Tang Empire 154 Taoism 108, 150, 152, 153–4, 157 Tarde, Gabriel 27, 28 Taymiyya, Ibn 146, 174, 175 Taylor, Charles 107 Taylor, Frederick Winslow 128 TCM (traditional Chinese medicine) 149 technoscience 3, 53, 72, 79–83 teetotalism 7 terra nullius doctrine 202, 206, 211 terrorism see also September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks international 39 Tian (Heaven) 155 Tianzhu (Heavenly Lord) 155 Tibet 136 Tilly, Charles 194 time-motion analysis 128 Tiryakian, Edward A. 1–13, 30–47 Tokugawa period Japan 137, 138, 139, 140 Toledo 144 Tonnelat, Emile 21 Tonnies, Ferdinand 18 total social phenomena, civilizations as 120, 123 Toulmin, Stephen 53 Toynbee, Arnold 79, 87, 108, 111, 114

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traditional Chinese medicine 149 traits 21, 25, 27 transitions, strategic 71 Trautmann, René 43 truthfulness 96 Tunisia 229 Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques 67 Turkey, Kemalist tradition 228 Turner, Victor 89–90 Tu¯si, Nasir al-Din 176–7 Twin Towers terrorist attacks 2001 1, 9–10, 39 Tylor, Edward Burnett 18, 75 Umayyad caliphate 143 umma (community of believers) 166 undifferentiation 91, 100 uniformitarianism 119 United States American Revolution 48 globalization and 80 migratory labour into, influx 250 modernity, expansion 58 nuclear technology and 41 Patriot Act (2001) 39 universal monarchy 166 urban revolution 203 Usury, Idea of 129 value-rationality (Wertrationalität) 53 van Krieken, Robert 212 Vedic religion 108 vegetarianism 6 Vergeistigung (spiritualization) 67 Vietnam 111 View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays (G. Simmel) 68 violence, restraining (civilization as) 88, 89 virtue, notion of 202 Volk 15 vyaraha¯ra (arbitration) 164 Wagner, Peter 53 Wang Chong 151 Wang Fu 151 Wang Mang 149 Ward, Lester 77 wars 59 Wealth of Nations (A. Smith) 186 weapons of mass destruction 41 Weber, Alfred 3, 74, 78, 79 Weber, Louis 21 Weber, Max Alfred Weber distinguished 3 caste 183 charisma 94–5 comparative studies 35, 67, 105 ideal types 122 Iron Cage metaphor 67, 188

modernity 44, 49, 53, 55 rationality 5, 105, 127, 246 religion 68 sociological tradition 2, 34–6 West, rise of 8 Wertrationalität (value-rationality) 53 Western civilization 61, 242, 247, 248 characteristics 241 Westernization 6, 7 White Australia Policy 201–2 Williams, Raymond 72 Wisdom of Solomon 127 women civilizing process, role in 14 subjugation of 7 Wong, Bin 193, 194, 195, 196 World forms 69 world system analysis civilizational analysis 43 civilizational phenomena and 120 crystallization of systems 58 globalization and 1, 32 Islam 109 World Trade Centre terrorist attacks 2001 1, 9–10, 39 World Wide Web 81 Wrigley, Tony 194 Wu of Liang (Emperor) 152–3 Xiang Kai 151 Xu Guang Chi 155 Yin-Yang dualism 149 Yugoslavia, dissolution of 31 Yukichi, Fukuzawa 17 Yungzheng (Emperor) 155 Zamiatin, Eugene 128 Zeitlin, I.M. 96 Zen Buddhism 154, 157 Zhongchang Tung 151 Zivilisation 74 and Kultur, German antagonism 3, 75–6 zones of prestige, civilizations as 40, 132–47 attraction, civilizational, hegemony, geopolitical/economic 5, 140–2 rival positions intersecting at centres of 134–6 creativity, civilizational 134–6 hostility, intercivilizational 137–40 importing 136–7 Islamic civilization 142–6 Zoroaster (prophet) 96 Zoroastrian hierocracy 166 Zweckrationalität (instrumental rationality) 53 Zweiklassenkultur (two class culture) 24, 25

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The ISA Handbook in Contemporary Sociology (SAGE Studies in International Sociology)

Sociology and Ideology (International Studies in Sociology and Social Anthropology)

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