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The term ‘civilizational analysis’ is used here to describe a whole cluster of traditions, rather than a specific theoretical perspective. The shared theme is a plurality of fundamental and comprehensive sociocultural patterns, seen as sufficiently different from each other to justify the idea of civilizations in the plural, and in contradistinction to civilization in the singular. This is the conceptual framework preferred by some of the most seminal theorists in the field. This is predominant in contemporary debates, although authors who opted for a different terminology must be included in the present survey.
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1. Origins And Directions Of Civilizational Analysis
1.1 General Characteristics
In the context of a broader history of social thought, the civilizational approach emerges as a counterpoint and a potential corrective to mainstream modes of theorizing. It is only in the most recent phase that one can speak of progress towards it becoming a fullyfledged alternative. The most obvious contrast has to do with visions of history: civilizational lines of interpretation stress the plurality of historical trajectories and contest the claims of general evolutionistic theories. For the same reason, the emphasis on original and mutually irreducible cultural configurations runs counter to functionalist postulates of universal constraints or imperatives. This need not mean an outright rejection of any common frame of reference, but its explanatory scope is at best limited.
Civilizational analysis deals with units of larger dimensions and longer duration than the single societies that they encompass, and this focus of interest leads it to question the self-contained image of society (and the underlying fixation on the nation state) that has been central to the sociological tradition. The large-scale and long-term patterns in question can be conceptualized in various ways, and different approaches may be reflected in more or less developed typologies of civilizational formations. In some cases, the organic metaphors commonly linked to functionalist images of society reappear on the civilizational level, but they should not be mistaken for a defining characteristic of civilizational thought.
If civilizational analysis is defined in these broad terms, it does not emphasize any particular type of intercivilizational relations at the expense of others. The historical experience to be analyzed includes closures, encounters, and conflicts. In different situations, some of these patterns of interaction become more salient. Different theoretical approaches may entail correspondingly selective views of the intercivilizational field. For example, debates on this topic have been marked by a disproportionate emphasis on civilizational conflict.
Finally, the civilizational perspective may serve to highlight macrohistorical continuities as well as major ruptures. Overall, contemporary historians have been more sensitive to civilizations as phenomena of the longue duree (Braudel is the prime example), but comparative sociologists (such as S. N. Eisenstadt) have been no less interested in the civilizational dynamics set in motion by major cultural breakthroughs.
1.2 Early Developments And Nineteenth-Century Reversals
The explicit idea of civilizations in the plural seems to have grown out of the same historical developments as that of civilization in the singular (Starobinski 1983), although it took longer for the plural to be codified for official usage. Both are eighteenth-century responses to internal transformations of the West as well as to encounters with non-Western societies and traditions. However, the pluralistic view was much less clearly articulated and became more marginal as the new phase of Western expansion from the early nineteenth century onwards seemed to herald a triumph of civilization in the singular.
In retrospect, elements or anticipations of civilizational analysis can be found in the writings of earlier authors. Giambattista Vico’s New Science (definitive Italian edition, 1744; for an English translation, see Vico 1968) is perhaps the most frequently invoked example. Those who regard Vico as a pioneer stress his interest in ‘the differences as well as the similarities in the patterns and paces of social and cultural processes and structures across histories’ (Nelson 1976, p. 875). But it can be objected that the latent civilizational perspective remains subordinate to an exclusive focus on European cycles of rise and decline, seen against the background of Greek, Roman, and Jewish sources. The most systematic recent interpretation of Vico’s work (Lilla 1993) suggests that the whole comparative inquiry is only a sideline to a traditionalist critique of modernity.
Another ambiguous precursor is Montesquieu, whose Spirit of the Laws (first published, 1748; for an English translation, see Montesquieu 1989) linked the analysis of legal and political regimes to ‘customs’ and drew on new knowledge of Asian civilizations (especially China). But the project as a whole is still centered on the traditional problematic of political philosophy and its implications for a reformist response to absolutism.
Eighteenth-century encounters with Asia were widely and variously reflected in European thought and literature. The attitude of the educated public was less prejudiced than it later became, and the ‘intuition about the equal value of cultures,’ which Charles Taylor (1990) has identified as a persistent but often subordinate theme in Western thought, was more in evidence. A shift to markedly more Eurocentric approaches took place around 1800 (Osterhammel 1998). The potential openings to civilizational analysis, which we can attribute to the Enlightenment in retrospect, were thus blocked by contrary trends before they could translate into more lasting results.
If some progress was made towards the articulation of a more pluralistic approach, it was more directly linked to the concept of culture than to the ideas of civilizations in the plural. In Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind (first published, 1784–91; for an English translation, see Herder 1968), there is no reference to cultures in the plural, and culture in the singular remains closely associated with progress and enlightenment. But the emphasis on the singularity of each people gives a pluralizing twist to the model. Cultural particularities are, however, thematized in a way which proved much more important to the history of nationalist thought than for the civilizational approach to human diversity.
The mainstream of nineteenth-century social thought was uncongenial to civilizational analysis. This was the case for the theories drawing on the legacy of German idealism as well as the positivistic conceptions of general social evolution, reinforced by (but not derived from) the Darwinian discovery of biological evolution. The Marxist tradition may be seen as a meeting ground for ideas from these two sources. On both sides, a unilinear vision of history and a universalistic model of development set strict limits to the recognition of cultural plurality.
Contrary to some recent suggestions, it does not seem justified to include Hegel among the pioneers of civilizational analysis. His plurality of collective spirits is only a derivative aspect of the progress of the world spirit throughout universal history, although he undeniably made a certain effort to grasp the individuality of the cultures (including China and India) that he consigned to lower levels of the unfolding design. Similarly, Marx’s scattered comments on the Asiatic world and its deviation from the Western pattern of development do not go beyond a general contrast between progress and stagnation (explained in terms of fundamental economic structures). But his well-known analysis of India under British rule reflects some interest in the characteristics of a markedly alien civilization.
2. The Classics Of Civilizational Analysis: Sociologists And Metahistorians
Major contributions to civilizational analysis—on theoretical as well as substantive levels—were made during the most formative period of modern sociological thought (roughly between 1890 and 1920). But the new perspectives were not developed to the same degree as the ideas that became more central to sociological theory. In the absence of systematic sociological inquiry, the comparative study of civilizations was pursued along very different lines by writers who defied the conventional academic division of labor.
2.1 Durkheim, Mauss, Weber: The Sociological Discovery Of Civilizations
A clearly defined sociological concept of civilizations in the plural appears for the first time in a short text by Durkheim and Mauss, little noticed at the time and long neglected by the most influential interpreters of the Durkheimian tradition, but more recently rediscovered by theorists who have tried to reactivate the civilizational perspective. The Note on the notion of civilization was first published in 1913 (for an English translation with a commentary by Benjamin Nelson, see Durkheim and Mauss 1971) and is obviously related to arguments developed in other writings during the last phase of Durkheim’s work, such as the Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. The common theme is a perceived need to go beyond the concept of society formulated in earlier works (now seen as too close to the idea of a given system of structures and functions) and to explore various ways of doing so.
The particular insight provided by the notion of civilizations in the plural has to do with large-scale units and long-term processes which encompass multiple societies. Civilizations ‘reach beyond the national territory’ and ‘develop over periods of time that exceed the history of a single society’; they constitute ‘a moral milieu encompassing a certain number of nations’ or ‘a plurality of interrelated political bodies acting upon one another’ (Durkheim and Mauss 1971, pp. 810–11). The emphasis is on the cultural unity of civilizational complexes (‘moral milieu’ is obviously to be understood in a broad sense), and political plurality appears as a normal rather than a problematic condition. But there is no a priori classification of unifying and fragmenting factors: Durkheim and Mauss call for a comparative study of the civilizational potential inherent in various categories of social phenomena: ‘the unequal coefficient of expansion and internationalization (Durkheim and Mauss 1971, p. 811). Although the connection is never made explicit, this variety can also be seen as a matter of the forms and degrees of social creativity, and thus related to a theme which figures prominently in other texts.
Mauss returned to the problematic of civilizations in a later debate with Lucien Febvre and others. A specific civilization is, as he put it, a ‘family of societies’ or a ‘hyper-social system of social systems’ (Mauss 1930, p. 89; the term ‘system’ is evidently not used in a very rigid sense). He proposed a more advanced conceptual framework than in the earlier text: the elements of civilizations—the unequally unified ideas, practices, and products characteristic of a civilizational complex—are distinguished from their forms, i.e., the patterns that grow out of complex combinations of such elements. In addition, the comparative study of civilizations would deal with the characteristics of the areas or regions over which they expand, as well as the interconnections of the societies that belong to them. With regard to the last point, Mauss adds a passing but potentially far-reaching comment: societies may ‘singularize’ themselves and enhance their individual features against a broader civilizational background. The varying outcomes and possible implications of such processes are also a matter for comparative analysis.
Mauss went on to draw an important theoretical conclusion. The plurality of civilizations is the most striking case of a characteristic common to all forms of social life: their arbitrariness, or—in other words—the formative role of collective choices embodied in more or less coherent patterns (Mauss 1930, p. 97). Once again, the civilizational perspective brings out the theme of social creativity.
Mauss seemed to have thought of this interpretive model as equally applicable to ‘primitive’ and ‘civilized’ societies (if anything, the anthropologists had been quicker to recognize civilizational phenomena than the sociologists). However, it is clearly more attuned to the latter case (the reference to ‘families of societies’ with shared cultural horizons and historical traditions is easier to understand in that context). The idea of civilizations in the plural is thus reconnected to civilization in the singular, and the prime objects of comparative analysis would be the advanced civilizational complexes (Hochkulturen) whose dynamics have shaped the course of world history. Neither Durkheim nor Mauss made any significant moves in that direction, and later attempts linked to the Durkheim school (especially Marcel Granet’s work on China) did not do much to concretize the theoretical project outlined above.
The most important substantive contribution of classical sociology is to be found in Max Weber’s analyses of the contrasts between patterns of development in Western and non-Western civilizational settings. But the absence of explicit conceptual foundations and the lack of a clearly defined research program made it difficult to distinguish the civilizational perspective from more narrowly focused parts of Weber’s work. The idea of culture as a distinctive way of lending meaning and significance to the world—outlined in Weber’s earlier methodological writings—is never put to systematic or comparative use. Although the major civilizational studies variously refer to ‘cultural centers,’ ‘cultural areas,’ and ‘cultural worlds,’ cultural patterns and contexts are never theorized as such.
The resultant ambiguity of Weber’s argument is reflected in later controversies around his work. Forms of rationality and dynamics of rationalization were the main foci of his comparative analyses, and he repeatedly stressed that they were always embedded in specific settings. But when it comes to details, the constitutive frameworks—from overall civilizational configurations to specific sociocultural spheres that crystallize within them in varying ways—are overshadowed by a seemingly uniform—but unequally developed—rationality in progress. Those who set out to reconstruct Weber’s problematic have therefore been tempted to ground it in more or less differentiated universal models of rationality, rather than to start with a plurality of cultural patterns and their formative imprints on civilizational complexes.
The civilizational aspect of Weber’s project neither was given from the outset nor equally present in all parts of his work. His original and most abiding concern was the combination of multiple and successive developments which had set the Western trajectory apart from all others. The interest in other civilizations developed in this connection and did not lead to totalizing interpretations of non-Western traditions in their own terms or attempts to reorient the comparative strategy from their points of view. None of Weber’s comparative studies aspires to do what Louis Dumont later proposed to do through a new interpretation of India. On the other hand, closer consideration of non-Western cases raises questions which go beyond the initial issues, reveals new interconnections and opens up new perspectives on the Western experience.
This shift towards a more comprehensive framework was still in progress in Weber’s last writings, but the results varied—both in kind and in degree—from case to case. Weber’s most extensive work on the ancient world focuses on socioeconomic structures. The analysis of ancient Judaism is primarily concerned with a religious breakthrough and its long-term rationalizing potential. The studies of China and India (Weber 1920–21, pp. 1–2) deal most extensively with complex and long-term interrelations of cultural traditions and institutional contexts, and are therefore closest to the model of civilizational analysis as defined by Durkheim and Mauss.
2.2 The Other Tradition: From Spengler To Toynbee And Beyond
As shown above, the sociological classics left civilizational analysis in a very inconclusive and fragmentary state: there was no connection between the Durkheimian sketch of a theoretical framework and the Weberian exploration of historical testing grounds, and neither of the two overtures was followed by further work. For several decades after Weber’s death, the idea of a comparative study of civilizations was mainly associated with metahistorical projects of the kind exemplified by Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1923) (for an English translation, see Spengler 1926–28) and Arnold Toynbee’s Study of History (Toynbee 1934–61). Among later attempts to deal with questions raised by Spengler and Toynbee, Franz Borkenau’s posthumously published fragments (Borkenau 1981) deserve special mention.
In general terms, this tradition should be given credit for preserving the insight that the dynamics of world history involve units of greater size and longer duration than the single (or artificially singled-out) societies more familiar to mainstream scholarship, and that the patterns of formation, flowering and decline of such macro units call for closer examination. Moreover, analyses in this vein have sometimes thrown new light on inter-civilizational relations, despite a tendency to stress the separate and self-contained history of each civilizational domain. Spengler’s notion of ‘pseudomorphosis’ is a case in point. It refers to the impact of dominant cultures in latent decline on those emerging within their orbit; the original example was the transformation of the Near East in the shadow of the Roman Empire, culminating in the rise of Islam, but plausible attempts have been made to generalize the concept.
On the other hand, the Spengler–Toynbee tradition has been beset by major problems. Apart from a general tendency to indulge in speculation far beyond the limits of historical evidence, more specific weaknesses are inherent in the overall pattern. Spengler, Toynbee, and those who followed their lead were—notwithstanding differences in emphasis—inclined to exaggerate the cultural or societal closure of civilizational units. Nevertheless, at the same time, they took a cross-civilizational identity of developmental patterns for granted: a uniform, more or less consistently cyclical model was applied across otherwise rigid boundaries.
When it came to concrete analysis and demarcation of civilizational domains, this line of thought led to a dilemma. If the self-contained units in question are defined based on unique cultural features, claims to cross-cultural understanding and theorizing are thereby undermined. To avoid this self-defeating turn, exemplified by Spengler’s work, Toynbee shifted the focus towards civilizations as ‘societies,’ distinct and durable frameworks of interaction, but found it very difficult to specify the characteristics of a civilizational society. At an advanced stage of his project, he sought to defuse the problem by relegating civilizations to the prehistory of universal religions.
3. The Renaissance Of Civilizational Analysis
Since the 1970s, several developments have led to a revival of interest in civilizational analysis. The plurality of civilizations has resurfaced as a key theme in the work of prominent historians (Braudel 1994). Projects drawing on anthropological and sociological traditions have moved towards a civilizational pers-pective; here Louis Dumont’s work on India is of particular importance (Dumont 1967). Occasional attempts have been made to bring the problematic legacy of Spengler and Toynbee into the orbit of a historical sociology of civilizations. Various approaches to a shared problematic are represented in the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations, which publishes Comparative Civilizations Review. However, when it comes to innovative theoretical conceptions, two projects seem to deserve a somewhat more detailed account.
3.1 Benjamin Nelson: Orientations And Encounters
Benjamin Nelson’s programmatic outline of a civilizational theory, presented in a series of essays (Nelson 1981) but never developed in a systematic fashion, is inseparable from a reinterpretation of Max Weber’s work. As Nelson argued (in the 1960s and 1970s, when more restrictive readings of Weber dominated the field), the agenda most succinctly summarized in the ‘Author’s Introduction’ to the Protestant Ethic, centered on the comparative study of civilizational patterns and their historical trajectories. At the same time, Nelson went beyond Weber in thematizing the cultural cores of civilizational complexes. The different clusters of cultural orientations, also equated with ‘structures of consciousness,’ gave rise to correspondingly different frameworks for the rationality of conduct, social coexistence, and reflexive thought. Nelson took a particular interest in the rationalizing efforts which led to the overcoming of traditional dualisms, such as those of the religious and the mundane life or the insider and the alien, and this enabled him to reinterpret the triangular comparison of China, India, and the West in more focused terms than Weber had done.
But the emphasis on breakthroughs to more inclusive and interactive forms of social life did not lead Nelson to neglect the other side of civilizational dynamics: some of his essays stress the productive potential of internal conflicts at the level of the most basic cultural premises (he refers to them as ‘civil wars within the structures of consciousness’). His favorite example was the highly articulate tension between faith and reason in the course of the eleventh and twelfth-century transformation of Western Christendom.
This crucial phase of European history, much more important for Nelson’s genealogy of modernity than it had been for Weber, also exemplifies the decisive role of intercivilizational encounters: the interaction with the Byzantine and Islamic worlds had an epoch making impact on Western ways of life and thought, not least through an unprecedented revival of interest in classical sources. Nelson discussed other encounters, such as the contacts between China and the West, and although his treatment of this problem was in some ways inconclusive, he did more than anybody else to integrate it into the domain of civilizational theory.
3.2 S. N. Eisenstadt: Breakthroughs And Dynamics
In contemporary social theory, S. N. Eisenstadt’s work stands out as the most sustained exploration of civilizational themes. His interest in this field grew out of several research projects, but they converged in a critique of the conventional distinction between tradition and modernity. The diversity of modern societies could not be explained without reference to the ongoing formative role of traditions, and the most important factors of that kind have to do with enduring civilizational legacies. A comparative study of empires, designed to distinguish their complex social and political structures from stereotypes of traditional society, raised questions about civilizational backgrounds and their influence on imperial formations. Most importantly, a comparative analysis of modern revolutions (Eisenstadt 1978) took an explicitly civilizational turn: the ‘great revolutions’ that had come to be seen as paradigms of radical change were based on a more fundamental cultural shift which opened the constitutive visions of social order to dissent, protest, and innovation. The revolutionary cultural foundations of modernity mark it as a new civilization.
After discovering the civilizational dimension from these different angles, Eisenstadt’s next step was a closer examination of the historical cases that seemed to have brought it to the fore in the most revealing way. The epoch already described by some earlier authors as an ‘Axial Age,’ covering a few centuries around the middle of the last millennium BC, was—as Eisenstadt argued—the prime example of a civilizational breakthrough. In some major cultural centers (ancient Greece, ancient Israel, India, and China), radical changes to cultural ontologies gave rise to new images of social order: ideas of a fundamental contrast between transcendental and mundane realities, unknown to more archaic cultures, translated into order-building visions and strategies.
Nevertheless, the expanded scope for imagination, in the interpretive as well as the institutional domain, was also conducive to higher levels of interpretive conflict and ideological rivalry; the elites and coalitions that mobilized the new cultural resources had to confront more or less structured currents of heterodoxy and dissent. Eisenstadt’s analyses have high- lighted the variety and dynamism of social formations that develop within this framework, although the Axial constellation—defined in the most general sense—seems to have a uniform structure (for a theoretical discussion, accompanied by case studies of major civilizations, see Eisenstadt 1986). Among the off- shoots of the Axial transformation, European civilization—shaped by recurrent combinations of diverse sources—became the main center of another civilizational mutation: the transition to modernity. But other civilizational backgrounds left their traces on the specific patterns of modernity that emerged within their orbit.
Both the analysis of Axial civilizations and the general interpretive framework growing out of it are still in progress. The results so far achieved suggest that this is a particularly promising line of inquiry.
4. Alternative Views
Among the few constructive responses to the metahistorical tradition discussed in Sect. 2.2, Jaroslav Krejci’s work is noteworthy for its scope and ambition (Krejci 1982, 1993). The starting point is a critique of inconsistencies and loose ends in Toynbee’s theory. In particular, the incomplete analysis of creative elites as civilization builders and the unclear status of universal religions as supracivilizational units are singled out for reconsideration from a more sociological angle. As Krejci sees it, ‘protagonist groups and changing relationships between them (such as the shifting balance between Brahmins and kshatryas in India) play a key role in the construction of civilizations.’ But they operate through specific core institutions (empires, states, churches, or ideological communities of various kinds) and are inspired by distinctive—more or less overtly religious—visions of the human condition. Religious traditions are thus reintegrated into the civilizational frame of reference, and their formative role is analyzed in terms of interpretive patterns that lend meaning to life and death.
Krejci distinguishes various ‘paradigms of the human predicament,’ ranging from the theocentric invented in ancient Mesopotamia to the utilitarian version of the anthropocentric in the modern West. This key to civilizational theory provides an alternative to the more common typologies of social formations, based on the division of labor, and to the a-theoretical use of geographic or historical criteria to demarcate civilizations. However, once the defining anthropological premises have been identified, geographical and historical perspectives can be given their due; it becomes possible to distinguish civilizational areas and sequences.
Arguments developed by Johann P. Arnason (1988, 2001) draw more directly on classical sources. The ideas put forward by Durkheim and Mauss on one side and Weber on the other are seen as incomplete insights to be synthesized, but this would require a closer connection between the Weberian theme of world interpretation and the Durkheimian notion of collective representations. The idea of imaginary significations—introduced by Cornelius Castoriadis—appears as the most suitable basis for such a rapprochement.
Imaginary significations are horizons of meaning, irreducible to experiential foundations as well as to functional constraints or rational principles. Specific clusters of such significations are at the core of different social worlds and structure their relations to nonsocial domains of reality as well as their internal forms of differentiation and integration. On this view, civilizational patterns can be analyzed as the most comprehensive and distinctive constellations of imaginary significations. In that capacity, they give rise to specific ways of being in the world and corresponding types of relationships between the main spheres of social life. These constitutive frameworks make it possible for civilizations to encompass groups of societies and maintain their identity throughout successive historical phases (for Durkheim and Mauss, integrative capacities manifested in space and time were the defining feature of civilizations). At the most visible level, civilizational formations take the shape of regional configurations, central to the agenda of comparative history.
To speak of civilizations in this sense is not to prejudge the levels of coherence, unity, and consistency. The approach just outlined can allow for significant variations in all these respects. In particular, it may be argued that some civilizations are more markedly characterized by conflicting cultural orientations than others (among the major non-Western traditions, interpretations of India have laid more emphasis on this theme than those of China). Comparative analyses of such differences—and other related ones—would be the most effective antidote against the identitarian and over-integrated models which continue to obstruct the progress of civilizational studies.
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