Civilization
= "a kind of vast social entity, a collection of interacting cities, a civilization, which functions in varying degrees as a real unity or "atomism," and as a field. A "civilization" is not a "culture," a "state," or a "nation." Ordinarily the boundaries of this social entity transcend the geographical boundaries of national, state, economic, linguistic, cultural, or religious groups".
Definition
David Wilkinson:
"In the time and space-bounded "ocean" of human sociocultural phenomena there exists a kind of vast social entity, a collection of interacting cities, a civilization, which functions in varying degrees as a real unity or "atomism," and as a field. A "civilization" is not a "culture," a "state," or a "nation." Ordinarily the boundaries of this social entity transcend the geographical boundaries of national, state, economic, linguistic, cultural, or religious groups.'
Due to the interdependence of the whole civilization as a system/field and its parts, these vast civilizational social networks tangibly condition most of the surface ripplings of the sociocultural ocean, including the historical events and life-processes of smaller sociocultural systems and the actions of individuals and groups living in a given civilization.
Without an adequate knowledge of the civilization we can hardly understand the structural and dynamic properties of its important parts of all its subsystems, regions, and components - just as without a sufficient knowledge of a primate troop as a whole, of its gross structure and. gross functioning, we cannot understand the nature and behavior of its member individuals.
Screening a list of some 70 candidates yielded a list of 14 entities which appeared to be societies at a civilized level (criterion: cities; further evidence: record-keeping, economic surplus, nonproducing classes, etc.) which were also connected world systems - militarily closed, geotechnologi-cally isolated social-transactional networks with an autonomous political history during which they did not take or need not have taken much account of the possibility of conquest invasion, attack (or alliance and cooperation) from any outsiders, although the members of each such system did recurrently conquer, invade, attack, ally with, command, rule, legislate, cooperate with, and conflict significantly and effectively with, and only with, one another. own 1961 revision of his earlier list, mainly by combining members of the prior rosters. The current civilizations list is different from Toynbee's and Quigley's, but still more different from Spengler's (1926-8) or Danilevsky's (1920).
Vis-a-vis Toynbee: of Toynbee's revised 1961 list I recognize Aegean under that name, Egyptic as "Egyptian," Middle American as "Mexican," Andean as "Peruvian," Sumero-Akkadian as "Mesopotamian;" combine Indus and Indie as a single "Indie;" combine Sinic and the Toynbeean "satellites" of Sinic - Korean, Vietnamian, and Tibetan - as "Far Eastern;" promote the Toynbeean satellites Mississippian, North Andean (as "Chib-chan"), Japanese, and South-East Asian (as "Indonesian") and a combination of Toynbee's "abortive" Far Western Christian and Scandinavian (as "Irish") to full civilizational status. Of Toynbee's full civilizations, five are not on my list: Syriac, Hellenic, Orthodox Christian, Western, and Islamic are regions or phases of a single continuing civilized society which I call (see Table 7.1 and Figure 7.1) "Central civilization." The same treatment is meted out to some of Toynbee's satellite civilizations -"Elamite," Hittite, "Urartian," Iranian, "Italic," and Russian - and to several of his abortive civilizations - Nestorian, Monophysite, and the Medieval Western City-State Cosmos. Toynbee's abortive First Syriac civilization I have treated as a shared semiperihery of Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations.
Vis-a-vis Quigley: my list includes Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Japanese civilizations, and contains reasonable matches to Quigley's Cretan, Mesoamerican, and Andean. I do not accept the separateness of Quigley's "Indie" and "Hindu" civilizations, nor of his "Sinic" and "Chinese." And Quigley's Hittite, Canaanite, Classical, Islamic, Orthodox, and Western civilizations seem to me to constitute cultural regions and epochs within the polyculture of a larger civilization, that which I have called Central civilization.
Vis-a-vis Spengler: while my list mentions Egyptian and Mexican civilizations, and contains reasonable matches to Spengler's Babylonian, Indian, and Chinese cases, I do not recognize the separateness of his Classical/Apollinian, Arabian/Magian, Western/Faustian or (suppressed) Russian civilizations; these are, rather, conflicting cultures within a single civilization, namely Central civilization.
Vis-a-vis Danilevsky: while my list contains Egyptian, Mexican, and Peruvian entities, and reasonable matches to Danilevsky's Ancient Semitic, Chinese, and Hindu-Indian, I do not recognize the separateness of Iranian, Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Arabian, European, or Slavic civilizations, all of which are (to me) conflicting cultures within the polycultural compost of a single larger society: Central civilization.
My differences with the four lists cited reflect my application of a social criterion, while Danilevsky and Spengler employed cultural criteria and Toynbee and Quigley used mixed sociocultural criteria. The similarities between lists reflect this coincidence: where e.g. Spengler or Danilevsky found cultural coherence in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Mexico, Peru, and India, I found a period of geosocial isolation and historical autonomy.
(http://abuss.narod.ru/Biblio/WS/ws-5000_4.htm)
History of the Concept
PAWEŁ SKRZYDLEWSKI:
"The term “civilization” appeared and spread in the Enlightenment and was understood as that which brings progress, material development, and spiritual development, which allows man to overcome contrary things coming from nature, from man himself, and from human society (Marie J. A. de Condorcet). An understanding of being a polished man who is formed in customs (Victor Riqueti de Mirabeau), in everything that primitive people do not experience, was associated with the term “civilization.” This understanding corresponded to an earlier understanding of civilized man in the Renaissance that came from Erasmus of Rotterdam, i.e., a responsible citizen possessing social virtues and a necessary refinement of manners, and this understanding had a valuative character. For Stanisław Staszic, civilization is the socialization of man, the family, the nation, and other associations.
During the Enlightenment, by civilization was understood that which permits man to build a new order of social life, different from the existing order that was shaped under the influence of Christianity. The foundations of civilization were thought to be in reason, in nature, in what is human, in what brings benefit and is pleasurable, in what is clear and evident. Civilization so conceived was inscribed into the context of utopian thought and in different, self-redeeming conceptions of humanity. In the Enlightenment, a different understanding and appraisal of civilization appeared, seeing in civilization the cause of the fall and enslavement of man (Jean-Jacques Rousseau) who by nature is good, perfect, and capable of self-realization. According to Rousseau, civilization was the cause of man’s corruption and depravity, and therefore it deserves to be condemned and rejected, while man himself should return to a way of life in agreement with nature.
Another meaning of the term “civilization” appeared in the works of Johann G. Herder and François Guizot, for whom civilization (like culture) is a synonym for moral and intellectual progress. According to Wilhelm von Humboldt, we should understand by civilization everything that facilitates people living together in harmony; civilization is manifested in technology, tools, law and customs, and in institutions. Civilization so conceived is externalized and incarnated in matter by culture. For Edward B. Tylor, civilization is the whole of culture produced by any given society from primitive times up to the present moment. Alfred L. Kroeber, like Robert Merton, understands civilization as that by which man and society influence the world of nature and as what man himself has incorporated in material reality. For many scientists and thinkers, the terms “civilization” and “culture” are strictly connected, since there is no culture without civilization, and no civilization without culture (Feliks Koneczny, Georg Simmel, Christopher Dawson, Thomas S. Eliot, Albert Schweitzer, Jacques Maritain, Jean Laloup, and Jean Néllis).
Modern times, due to the German subjectivist thought (Immanuel Kant), brought idealist cu r rent of ways of understanding culture as sharply contrasted with civilization. Civilization is what is outside man (his spirit, psyche), and what has being in matter as a product. Culture (Kultur), on the other hand, is a unique, internal, spiritual reality of man. It represents values (obligations) produced by man himself a rated from the external and real world (Georg W. Hegel, Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert, Wilhelm Dilthey, José Ortega y Gasset, Ernst Troeltsch, Benedetto Croce Meinecke, and Henri Berr).
In the twentieth century, the problematic of civilization was raised in different domains of culture.
In academia, Oswald Spengler, Arnold J. Toynbee, and Feliks Koneczny developed a specific understanding of civilization; in art (especially in science fiction literature), Herbert G. Wells, Stanisław Lem, Aldous L. Huxley, and George Orwell meditated on civilization; on the moral and religious plane, the question of civilization was taken up by Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II. Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, and Alvin Toffler with their publications had an important influence on the understanding of the theory of civilization in the twentieth century.
Various reasons led people to take up the problematic of civilization (armed conflicts, the disintegration of man, society, and the state, social, cultural, and economic crises that posed a threat to man; social, cultural, technological, and scientific revolutions; attempts to find a definitive understanding and grasp of man’s history as a whole; questions concerning the identity of a variety of cultures in the context of the truth about man and the truth revealed on the pages of the Gospel). Civilization was considered in different disciplines, but the historical sciences, philosophy, and the social sciences with particular consideration of the political sciences had priority.
The problems raised in studies of civilization were focused on the following questions: What are civilizations, and where should one seek the reason for their existence? Are we dealing with many different civilizations, or only one, and if there is a plurality of civilizations, what is the reason for this plurality, and how do civilizations differ? Are there rules and laws of the development of history (and if there are, what are they)? In what measure do civilizations influence man and his human life? What is civilization? How and due to what does civilization develop? How do civilizations influence each other, and is a stable synthesis of civilizations possible? What role do the conditions of the natura l environment, natural resources, races, languages, religions, and customs perform in the shaping of civilization? What sort of knowledge are investigations of civilization? The above questions reveal the connection of civilization and the cultures that arose in the bosom of civilization with man himself, his life as a person, and his role in the reality of social life."
Source: "This article is a part of The Universal Encyclopedia of Philosophy to be published by the Polish Society of Thomas Aquinas. It is a revised and translated version of the encyclopedia entry originally published in Polish as: Paweł Skrzydlewski, “Cywilizacja,” in Powszechna encyklopedia filozofii, vol. 2, ed. Andrzej Maryniarczyk (Lublin: PTTA, 2001)." [1]
Defining Civilizations
1. Matthew Melko:
"Civilizationists tend to agree that civilizations are distinct from primitive cultures. Spengler saw these high cultures being born, having a soul, emerging in a very short period of time. Others have insisted that it is not a matter of civilizations gradually evolving from primitive cultures. Coulborn sees them on several occasions emerging relatively quickly and decisively, replacing a multiplicity of primitive societies on several occasions with unified cultures that are entirely different [1958: 3-30], Civilizations are perceived to be a great deal larger than primitive cultures, usually incorporating a great number of primitive cultures, but in so doing, transforming them. Civilizations are characterized by new religious forms, "higher religions" that contribute to civilizational unity, religions that are qualitatively different from those of primitive cultures [e.g. Spengler 1980: I, 399-402; Toynbee 1934-1961: XII, 68-102; Coulborn 1958: 129-171; 1966:412-413,417-421], Economically civilizations exercise greater control of the environ-ment, practicing agriculture, domesticating animals, employing metals, building surpluses. Civilizations are also characterized by new political forms that unify much larger areas and bring about more centralized political unification which is often not to the benefit of most of the people who experience this transformation. It is a matter of debate whether the building of economic surplus is a cause of the political transformation, or whether the religious, economic and political transformations are themselves integrated responses to another challenge, such as desiccation or population pressure. The developing political and economic forms enable civilizations to build cities and lead them to develop methods of record keeping that often, but not always, include writing. Invariably the development of cities, and the intense change involved in the whole process induces a need for new expressions of art, manifested particularly in the architecture of the cities, which in turn provide scope and need for sculpture, engraving and painting. Warfare, as a means of controlling territory, was seen as a phenomenon of civilization. Primitive societies did fight one another, but not for the control or acquisition of territory. Civilizations have much more elaborate systems of stratification, with a small minority of religious and political leaders dominating a powerless and subordinate majority. Regardless of civilizational characteristics, there must be universals. Technologies, irrigation for instance, can be operated only in a limited way, or they will not work. Much of the difficulty with definition has come from the critical thinking capacities of our scholars. If you start to list the characteristics of a civilization, the critical thinker will show you that primitive societies have these characteristics, they have horticulture if not agriculture, centers if not cities, often war over similar issues to those of civilizations, some way of keeping records if not writing. But civilizations have a mass, style, economy and sets of internal relationships that make them distinctly different from primitive cultures. There may be marginal cases, primitive cultures that were coalescing and on their way to becoming civilizations, but for one reason or another didn't get there. We debate about these, but that need not get in the way of our acceptance of a number of mainstream civilizations, not only by civilizationists, but by librarians in their cataloging, by journalists in their reporting, by all of us. And this shows that I still cannot get away from the plurality of civilizations, even while trying to frame a definition. For now, then, let's say a civilization is a large society possessing a degree of autonomy and internal integration, an agricultural economy, religion, stratification, warfare, usually cities and writing, or some other method of keeping long term records, and central government at least at a regional or urban level."
(https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1551&context=ccr)
2. Layne Hartsell on civilization as war against nature:
"Defining Civilization
The foundation of civilization or logic, characteristics, and tendencies all coalesce with a core substance of large-scale, human settlements as urban centers, and then other characteristics of agriculture or farming; writing and codification of laws (beyond accounting and recordkeeping); monumental architecture; and advances in science and technology (authoritarian technics).
Urbanization is the process towards a city, Childe’s “a single built up area” with “agglomerations of population” 54 where resource extraction increases to meet the demands of human settlements, and where “socio-spatial constructs and their relationship to empirical evidence of change in the physical and functional aspects of urban form” 55 occur that not only go beyond the carrying capacity56 but beyond the landbase itself concerning soil, minerals, rocks, rivers and so on.57
Such a process is one of catastrophic extraction and the highly refined version is imperialism. Therefore, civilization is a spatio-cultural system based on catastrophic extraction in which the removal of organic and physical dimensions of a landbase identify as expansion through the destruction of nature and dehumanization and early death, e.g. in mining, quarrying, and agriculture. At some point between early semi-settled human societies such as Uruk, or nested villages or megasites (non-urban hive),58 and the city-state (late Uruk, Babylon, Egypt), through a combination of internal tyrannical rupture and invasion from external forces, urbanization first came about. Urbanization might be more precisely located when a tyrannical rupture occurred at a Sumerian megasite and then claimed its hinterlands by incorporating areas of the Zagros mountains for lapis lazuli and minerals creating the city-state (regional incorporation).59,60 As mentioned, this process was later identified as civilization in the modern age looking back on “development”, and moving forwards into modernity where city-states turn into city-regions that have now become a global system of metropolis: Babylon to Memphis to Athens to Rome to Venice to Paris to New York to the Pearl River Delta and Lagos/Abidjan. Civilization is the cultural pattern of the dominance of humans over nature61 or “empire of man,” or imperium in naturam,62 and commonly referred to as a war against nature.63 "
- 54 V. Gordon Childe, “The Urban Revolution,” The Town Planning Review 21, no. 1
(1950): 3–17. pg 4.
- 55 Michael Neuman and Angela Hull, “The Futures of the City Region,” Regional Studies 43, no. 6 (July 1, 2009): 777–87, https://doi.org/10.1080/00343400903037511. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
(Harcourt, Brace &World, 1961).
- 56 M. A. Hixon, “Carrying Capacity,” in Encyclopedia ofEcology, ed. Sven Erik Jørgensen and Brian D.
Fath (Oxford: Academic Press, 2008), 528–30, https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-008045405-4.00468-7.
- 57 Andrea L. Brock, “Urbanizing the Eternal City: How Did the Ancient Romans
Transform and Adapt to Rome’s Riverine Landscape?,” World Development Perspectives 26 (June 1, 2022): 100426, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wdp.2022.100426;
- David Harvey, “Cities or Urbanization?,” City 1, no. 1–2 (January 1, 1996): 38–61, https://doi.org/10.1080/13604819608900022;
- Jensen, Endgame, Volume 1;
- Encyclopedia Britannica, ed., “Urbanization,” in Britannica (London, UK: Encyclopedia Britannica, 2022), https://www.britannica.com/topic/urbanization.128
Typology
Civilization According To Eric Voegelin
Bill McClain and Jack Elliot:
"Civilizations
"1. We can distinguish three type of civilizations:
A. cosmological
B. anthropological (or classical)
C. soteriological
2. They are roughly identical with Toynbee's three generations of civilizations. The main civilizations by generations are:
A. Egyptian, Babylonian
B. Sinic, Indic, Israelitic, Hellenic
C. Far Eastern (with offshoot in Japan), Hindu, Byzantine, (with offshoot in Russia), Islamic, Western
3. The decisive event in the anthropological civilizations is the discovery of the psyche as the sensorium of transcendence
...
"1. To the three main types of civilization correspond roughly three main types of legal cultures--roughly, because of the numerous intermediate forms.
A. Cosmological civilizations symbolize order by analogy with cosmic order. The political community is a microcosmos. (Prototype discussed in class: early Chinese symbolism.)
B. Anthropological civilizations symbolize order by analogy with the order of the human soul. And the order of the human soul is achieved through attunement to the unseen transcendent measure. Society is a macroanthropos. (Prototype discussed in class: Plato's conception of society as man written large.)
C. Soteriological civilizations develop more clearly the experience of transcendent revelation and grace that reaches out to all mankind. Spiritual order is differentiated from temporal order. (Prototypes discussed in class: Israelite and Christian revelation, division into spiritual and temporal powers)." [Voegelin, "Supplementary Notes for Students in Jurisprudence Course" in CW 27:76-78] "
(http://watershade.net/ev/ev-dictionary.html)
Characteristics
1. Keith Chandler:
"There are at least eight principal attributes that clearly characterize all civilized societies:
1. A hierarchical social organization dominated by a power elite which is not accountable to the powerless majority and for whose actions there is little or no redress.
2. Concentration of power and wealth in fortified urban centers.
3. Written language, the understanding and use of which are monopolized by the elite and its functionaries.
4. An economic system which vests title to the wealth produced by the society in the elite and controls that wealth by a strictly measured allocation of all industrial, agricultural, forestry, and mining resources within the control of the central power.
5. Skills, training, and labor specialization designed to serve the goals of the power elite.
6. Extensive slavery or serfdom.
7. A grand mythology portraying society as originating from and continuing to be influenced by suprahuman powers with the elite as the conduit of that influence.
8. A military establishment which is utilized not only for external defense and aggression but also for internal control and repression of the dispossessed majority."
(http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Civilization-civilization-achievements-differences/dp/059520550X)
2. Robert Bedelsky:
"Mankind constructed societies and civilizations as total systems to enhance survival and longevity. There have evolved at least four subsystems within civilizational systems.
These are:
1. Government — this subsystem evolved from heads of families to tribal chieftains to kings and emperors to manage defense and overall coordination by using power, law, and economic tools.
2. Science and technology — by innovation, adaptation and accumulation of material knowledge, SciTech society emerged and often ignored tribal and national boundaries.
3. Trade and production — Currency, banking, trade and distribution enabled production and transfer of goods and services within a society/civilization.
4. Religion, human will and non-material consciousness — belief system, culture, literature, art and philosophy unified thought and orientations facilitating collective action among a large population."
(https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2242&context=ccr)
David Wilkinson
"The various civilizations are not necessarily based upon any major premise, nor do they necessarily articulate, develop, and realize such, nor are they necessarily logically or aesthetically consistent or complementary. Each civilization is a causal system; it may or may not be a "meaningful" one, or evolve toward or away from "meaningfulness." Since civilizations are not assumed to be "meaningful" unities, they need not possess any major premise, prime symbol, ultimate principle, or fundamental value that is articulated by their cultural phenomena. But they might in fact do so.
Do they in fact do so? I would guess that they do not, but, rather, that each will be found to articulate a different evolution of a different dialectic, i.e. a different struggle among a different set of conflicting premises, symbols, etc. Artists, philosophers, charismatics, and prophets within civilizations frequently seek or seem to create or discover meanings, premises, prime symbols, ultimate values, and Utopian re-orderings in and for their civilizations. Instead they ordinarily create dialectical controversies.
Since we need not assume that the cultural field of any civilization is completely unified, nor that it is meaningfully consistent, the question of whether, when, and how cultural unity, consistency, or interaction exist becomes hypothetical, to be explored empirically rather than by definition or axiom.
In such exploration, I would begin with the guess that over many generations the culture of any civilization will tend toward greater second-order integration - mutual agreement on what its areas of discord are -with continuing first-order inconsistency (continued discord). Its causal 'unification will likely be dialectical, organized as a continuing struggle of changing opposit(though withoutany final synthesis ever terminating the dialectic).
Indeed, the likelihood that we will find all civilizations actually highly and evolvingly contradictory, conflicted, dialectical, is so strong that we might reasonably study civilizations on the assumption that each, far from being an organic cultural unity, is in fact "a cultural field where a multitude of vast and small cultural systems and congeries - partly mutually harmonious, partly neutral, partly contradictory - coexist" (Sorokin 1950: 213).
On this assumption, one would research a civilization's cultural individuality precisely by identifying, not a prime symbol, major premise, fundamental value or ultimate principle, but the collection of such symbols, premises etc., that coexisted, conflicted, and coevolved within it, their mutual relations of dominance and displacement, challenge and response, fusion and fission.
Systematic cross-civilizational cultural research would explore such questions as: is there usually or always a dominant core culture in a civilization? How long does such dominance persist? How is it displaced and by what? When civilizations collide, how is the evolution of cultural dominance affected? Does second-order integration emerge, and at what time scales?
I would not want to assume that civilizations necessarily contain a dominant cultural system - the question of dominance is once again properly empirical - but would regard it as an empirical fact that most civilizations, most of the time, indeed contain dominant cultural cores, which have geographic locations and are frequently "dominant" in more ways than one: i.e. militarily, technologically, economically, and demographic-ally, as well as culturally.
The most striking effect of the new definition on accustomed lists of civilizations, as has been shown above, is that such familiar entities as classical/Hellenic/Graeco-Roman civilization, Hittite civilization, Arabian/ Magian/ Syriac/ Iranic/ Islamic civilization(s), Orthodox Christian civilization, Russian civilization, and even our own familiar Western civilization, must be reclassified either as episodes/of or as regions within a previously unrecognized social-network entity, by my definition both a civilized society and a world system, hence a single civilization. This civilization I have labeled Central civilization.2
Thus today there exists on the earth only one civilization, a single global civilization. As recently as the nineteenth century several independent civilizations still existed (i.e. those centered on China, Japan, and the West); now there remains but one. Central civilization.
The single global civilization is the lineal descendant of, or rather I should say the current manifestation of, a civilization that emerged about 1500 bc in the Near East when Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations collided and fused. This new fusional entity has since then expanded over the entire planet and absorbed, on unequal terms, all other previously) independent civilizations.
Central civilization was created in the Middle East during the second millennium bc by an atypical encounter between two pre-existing civilizations. Civilizations may coexist, collide, break apart or fuse; when they have fused, they have typically done so by an asymmetric, inegalitarian engulfment of one by the other. But the linking of the previously separate Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations through Syria was an atypical, relatively symmetric, and egalitarian "coupling" which created a new joint ***** network-entity rather than annexing one network as a part of the other entrained to its process time.
The Central city-network, in unbroken existence and process since its inception, has been atypical in another way: it has expanded, slowly by the reckoning of national and state turnover times, but quite rapidly by comparison to other civilizations, and in that expansion has engulfed all the other civilizational networks with which it once coexisted and later collided.
"Central" is a historical and positional nomenclature which deliberately avoids any specific geographic or cultural references, thereby indicating that this society is not to be characterized by references to a single river basin, and that its development has not been determined by that of a single culture, nation or people. It would be too parochial to label that civilization by the nomenclatures of any of the nations that have successively populated, of the states that have successively dominated, or of the regions that have successively centered it. At this moment, in this place, and in this culture, it seems not mistaken, and not too parochial, to call it Central civilization.
Central civilization is of course positionally "central" only in retrospect, by reason of its omnidirectional expansion: this network, originally Afro-Asiatic in being located where Asia and Africa meet, spread over time in all directions, encompassing the civilized networks of Europe, west Africa, and the Americas by moving west and those of south and east Asia by moving east, and thereby rendering itself historically "Central" as well.
The subsumption of a variety of putative civilizations under the single rubric of Central civilization is illustrated by Figure 7.1, which shows two such candidates, "Graeco-Roman" and "Western," as epochs of regional dominance within Central civilization; these dominant regions in fact constituted long-lived, but impermanent, cores of Central civilization. The Near Eastern, medieval, and global phases of Central civilization also possessed cores; but they were larger and less culturally homogeneous than the Graeco-Roman and Western cores. Another way of comprehending the subsumption is that what has in the past appeared to be the end of one civilization/world system and the beginning of another is easier to comprehend as a core shift within a single continuing civilization - a shift of military, political, economic and cultural domination from one region to another.
The taxonomic principles that yield Central civilization as a recognizable entity are three in number. First: any two "civilizations" that were always adjacent and vigorously politico-militarily interacting were ipso facto parts of a single civilization. In the medieval period of the northwest Old World (i.e. Europe, south-west Asia, north Africa) there were Western cities. Orthodox cities, Muslim cities; there was no Western civilization, no Orthodox, no Islamic civilization. There were civilized peoples and territories in the north-west Old World; they were members of a single civilization.
Second: any two historically autonomous civilizations which become adjacent and vigorously, continuously politicomilitarily interactive (through expansions or shifts) thereby become a single civilization. Either a new entity emerges (if they unite on relatively equal terms); or one of the old civilizations absorbs the other.
Third: any two alleged "civilizations" adjacent in time are but periods in one single civilization unless the earlier civilization's cities are entirely depopulated and abandoned (like those of Mississippian civilization). Unless a civilization's urban centers vanish, it does not fall. It may terminate by fission into two separate and more or less equal autonomous entities which cease to interact dynamically; it may terminate in fusion with some other civilization. Without fission, fusion, or fall there is no end to the civilization's system and process. If there is no end, there can be no succession.
Inasmuch as Central civilization combines from 4 to 14 of the civilizations discerned by more pluralist civilizationists using cultural criteria, it is to be expected that, and it is in fact the case that, Central civilization is not a language group, or a religious group, or a state group. Yet it is bonded, bonded oppositionally: for continuing warfare is a social bond, and continuing hostility is a cultural bond. Central civilization is a strongly bonded entity, even though it be a cultural potpourri. Central civilization is a conglomeration ofsociocultural phenomena, adjacent inspace and time, that is integrated by causal ties - including collision, warfare, and coevolution - and by quasi-meaningful ties of mutual consciousness, awareness of differences, and hostility.
Our time is unique in that only one civilization now exists on earth, of global Scope, without a periphery into which to expand further. Central civilization seems never yet to have been a "meaningful" but always a "causal" unity; but now that it has reached the limits of its oikumene, after having absorbed the whole human species and all other civilizations, there is a good chance that it will in the future evolve toward a recognizable "meaningful" unity.
Central civilization does however have a presently dominant culture within its polycultural mix. The dominant culture is what Sorokin labeled "Sensate" - and also theoretic, secular, Promethean, scientific, technological. I would additionally label it cosmopolitan, bourgeois, capitalist, liberal, democratic, and above all "modern." Sensate modernity's culture continues to expand against resistance while simultaneously generating internal schisms and coopting and incorporating external resistances in a manner which maintains both its variety and its dynamism. Being only dominant but not yet all-pervasive, Sensate culture, whose dynamic expansion is called "modernization," has not yet reached its full attainable social limits, and (consequently?) continues to expand savagely against savage resistance, as it has done within Central civilization for the past seven or eight centuries, even while Central civilization itself has been expanding to global dimension.
Sensate culture may well be dominant in the now global cultural field, but it is a near thing: there are enormous masses yet being culture-colonized against active or passive resistance. Such masses are to be found, e.g., among Africans and the Indians of the Americas; among non-Protestant Christians, and nonmainstream Protestants; among Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists; among still Marxist-ruled but non-Marxist populations (Chinese especially); among tribal peoples, peasants, and genuine proletarians (Servian, not Marxian - i.e. the urban homeless).
That Sensate culture has not expanded to its conceivable demographic and social limit, and that it continues to recruit and expand toward those limits, does not mean that it will get there. There are also signs both of Sensate disintegration and of the beginnings of many coumertrends. But the latter are neither integrated nor expansive, and their resistance thus far seems more like diehard reaction than like the genesis of a new counterculture."
(http://abuss.narod.ru/Biblio/WS/ws-5000_4.htm)
Status
Andrew Targowski:
"The study of civilization is about 150+ years old, marked by the contributions of such pioneers as Nikolay Danilevsky (1822-1885), Fukuzawa Yukichi (1867-1916), Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975), Feliks Koneczny (1862-1949), and Fernand Braudel (1902-1985), plus others. They built the foundation for the study of the concept and role of civilization in the development of the organized humans. After World War II, the study of civilization became more popular and somehow separated from the study of history. Civilization was conceived as a living organism (still showing active signals from the past millennia and centuries) in contrast to history, which is time passé. However, a civilization was perceived by many early scholars as a large culture -- mostly or especially by Pitirim Sorokin (1889-1968), Alfred Kroeber (1876-1960), Clyde Kluckhohn (1905-1960), and Lee D. Snyder (1933-2012). On the other hand, there have been recent scholars like Rushton Coulborn (1901-1968) and Carroll Quigley (1910-1977) who looked at a big-picture of civilization’s origin and evolution.
Eventually, the study of culture became widely implemented as the academic program, but the study of civilization landed on the waiting list in academia. This resulted in an impressive growth of scholarly research about culture. Since the number of different cultures is large, and there are at least about 100 dominant cultures one can investigate, the new knowledge about them is vast, dispersed and very often limited in conclusions with value for the current societies. On the other hand, there have been about 26 to 30 (depending on the author) major civilizations, but today there are only about eight or nine major civilizations, as the term will be characterized in this study. Furthermore, the impact of these civilizations on our current lives worldwide is much more aggressive and significant than the impact of some of those cultures. The International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations, since it was formed in 1961, has been filling this gap in studies on culture and civilization. This effort led to the extensive discussion of what is civilization, led by Mathew Melko, David Wilkinson, Steven Blaha, William McGaughey, Laina Farhat-Holzman, Andrew Targowski, and others (Targowski 2009b). At the beginning of the 21st century the idea of “civilization” becomes more popular as we are facing terrorism, which is de facto a war of civilizations. At the same time a concept of a “state” changes, when for the sake of globalization some states are ready to minimize their roles and look for to self-supporting citizens and growing business in a world without borders. Both of these factors emphasize the growing role of “civilization” in world affairs. To investigate the current state of affairs successfully a new approach is offered in academia: Big History, which is still time passé, but perhaps less polluted with peripheral events and leaders.
(https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2114&context=ccr)
History
A WORD AND ITS USES
By Krishan Kumar:
"It was the French who, by general agreement, invented the word, as they often claim to have invented the thing itself. It was in mid-eighteenth-century France that the word “civilisation” seems to have been coined, the substantive evolving out of the earlier verb civiliser and the earlier participle civilisé (the latter, in their turn, replacing the even earlier policie/police and policé).10 Since French was the international language of culture, it was not long before civilisation became naturalized in the various European languages, though with interestingly different shades of meaning. James Boswell seems to have been one of the first to naturalize the term in English, in his account of a conversation in March 1772 with Samuel Johnson while the latter was working on the fourth edition of his great dictionary. “He [Johnson] would not admit civilization, but only civility. With great deference to him I thought civilization, from to civilize, better in the sense opposed to barbarity, than civility; as it is better to have a distinct word for each sense, than one word with two senses, which civility is, in his way of using it” (1967 [1791]: I, 414).
Boswell's use of the new term was wholly consistent with its dominant meaning at the time of its origin. For most agree that in its earliest uses, “civilization” was almost wholly moral and prescriptive. It was tied to ideas of “progress” and betterment, and its referent was humanity as a whole, seen as a single developing entity. Its standard antonym was “barbarity” or “barbarism.” Progress was the movement from barbarism, the rude, uncultivated, uncivilized state of mankind, to the higher condition of refinement in thought and manners—in a word, to civilization. Here civilization showed clearly its derivation from the verb “to civilize” and the participle “civilized,” themselves cognate with such terms as police, politesse, and polished or “polite” society.
While civilization was soon to acquire the predominant meaning of a developed state or condition, in its earliest uses—following the verbal origin—it often carried the sense not of a condition or a finished state but of a process of becoming, a “civilizing process” (Febvre 1973: 232; Starobinski 1993: 4). While the processual meaning of civilization gradually gave way to its meaning as a particular condition or state of being, the earlier meaning never entirely disappeared. It is this tradition of use and this pattern of achievement that is explored at length in Norbert Elias's great work, The Civilizing Process (1994 [1939]).
It is important to note that this understanding of civilization as a characteristic of humanity as a whole—even though some parts were seen as more advanced than others—was perfectly compatible with a dislike, distrust, or even outright rejection of it.11 For some, such as Rousseau, the cultivation of manners and the increase of material well being associated with civilization were purchased at great moral cost. Civilization corrupted the simplicity and spoiled the spontaneity of the simple life of those reviled as “primitive” and “savage.” While there was, at least for Rousseau, no going back to the woods, there was every reason to be unsparingly critical of the moral condition into which so-called civilization had brought modern society.
This critical tradition, deriving from Rousseau, was to have a long life, and indeed it is by no means over today. It was continued by the Romantics of the early nineteenth century, who were inspired by works such as Rousseau's Emile. For the French poet Baudelaire, civilization was “a great barbarity illuminated by gas” (in Starobinski 1993: 26). Nor were the Romantic poets and artists the only ones to draw on Rousseau. Here is the early socialist Charles Fourier, on the evils bred by “civilization”: “All you learned men behold your towns peopled by beggars, your citizens struggling against hunger, your battlefields and all your social infamies. Do you think, when you have seen that, that civilization is the destiny of the human race, or that J.-J. Rousseau was right when he said of civilized men, ‘They are not men’?” (in Febvre 1973: 239). Civilization might for some be a heroic achievement of humanity; for others it was at the least a double-edged process, where the gains might easily be outweighed by the losses.
The idea of civilization as a moral condition towards which humanity was progressing underlay much of the social philosophy and social science of the nineteenth century. Whatever their differences, it was shared by such thinkers as Hegel, Comte, J. S. Mill, H. T. Buckle, and Herbert Spencer. But relatively early in its development the concept acquired a second meaning that was to accompany it for the rest of its history, even to some extent threatening to displace the earlier meaning. This was civilization in its ethnographic or purely historical guise, as a form that could and did take many shapes and styles. Hence one could speak not simply of civilization, in the singular, but of civilizations, in the plural. This shift to a more neutral, value-free, “scientific” concept of civilization seems to have taken place somewhere between 1780 and 1830, again first in France (Febvre 1973: 234; Starobinski 1993: 6). A particular impetus was given by the reports of travelers and explorers such as Bougainville, Cook, and Alexander von Humboldt, which described with scientific accuracy and vivid detail societies which seemed to be flourishing on the basis of quite different principles from those of Europe (Mazlish 2004a: 27–38). The effect was to relativize European or Western civilization, in both place and time. European civilization was not necessarily the apex or the end point of mankind's evolution; it was just one of many civilizations.
An important bridging role, to some extent linking the older moral to the newer sociological or anthropological usage, was performed by François Guizot's highly influential The History of Civilization in Europe (1997 [1828]), based on lectures delivered at the Sorbonne in that year. There was, Guizot affirmed, a distinctively European civilization, which despite the variety of its parts and incompleteness in any particular country, exhibits “a certain unity,” deriving from common origins and based on common principles, which “tend to produce well nigh everywhere analogous results” (ibid.: 10). While sure that Europe, with France at its heart, was in the van of progress, called upon to give the lead to the world, Guizot was at pains to paint civilization not simply as a moral achievement but as “a fact, like any other—a fact susceptible of being studied, described, narrated.” He declares, “for my own part, I am convinced that there is, in reality, a general destiny of humanity, a transmission of the aggregate of civilization; and consequently a universal history of civilization to be written” (ibid.: 11–12).
Civilization is here used mainly in its unitary sense, and the notion of progress is reaffirmed. But Guizot is aware that another history and study of civilization is possible, one that considers civilizations in the plural, one that sees them as distinct and competing entities. “Civilization,” he says a little later, “is a sort of ocean, constituting the wealth of a people, and on whose bosom all the elements of the life of that people, all the powers supporting its existence, assemble and unite” (ibid.: 13). This is a remarkably good description of what later came to constitute the idea of civilization in its ethnographic and historical sense, abstracted from any idea of progress or philosophy of history. It does indeed describe what Guizot goes on to do, here in the History of Civilization in Europe, and in its immediate successor, the History of Civilization in France (1829), also based on lectures at the Sorbonne.
Europe for Guizot is an identifiable and distinct civilization, and he describes its course and vicissitudes from the time of the fall of the Roman Empire to his own day. He distinguishes between civilization in its external aspect—the “development of the social state”—and in its internal one—“the development of the individual man.” Progress in both is necessary for the development of civilization. He shows European civilization's progress in both these spheres, with varying degrees of emphasis and creativity, here in Italy, there in England, yet again in France. He is happy to be able to show that civilization by his day has progressed considerably in Europe, but warns against complacency: “Civilization is as yet very young … the world has by no means as yet measured the whole of its career” (1997: 24).
At the same time as charting the course of European civilization, however, Guizot refers to other civilizations—Egyptian, Indian, Syrian, Phoenician, Etruscan, even Greek and Roman as separate civilizations (ibid.: 27–32). These are seen as usually characterized by the overwhelming predominance of one principle and one power, compared to the diversity and competition of principles and powers that characterize European civilization. Hence the facts of tyranny and eventual stagnation in the former, and liberty and progress in the latter. But the important thing, from the viewpoint of the concept of civilization, is the acknowledgment of the plurality of civilizations, that Europe, for all its achievements, is just one among the civilizations of the world. As Febvre suggests, we see in Guizot, “a delicate question solved by means of a skilful synthesis. There are such things as civilizations. And they need to be studied, analyzed, and dissected, in themselves and on their own. But above these there is indeed such a thing as civilization with its continuous movement onwards, though perhaps not in a straight line” (1973: 241).
Guizot therefore represents a halfway house in the development of the concept of civilization. The eighteenth-century meaning, predominantly moral, struggles with the increasingly historical, sociological, and anthropological nineteenth-century views of civilization. Something similar is found in H. T. Buckle's unfinished History of Civilization in England (1903 [1857–1861]), a work which enjoyed huge popularity on the European continent, more even than in Britain itself (Heyck 2004). Far more comprehensive than its title suggests, Buckle's work is a genuine comparative history, with comparisons not simply between the different nations of Europe but also between European and Asian civilizations. (In 1862, at the age of only forty-one, he died while on an expedition to the Middle East to obtain first-hand knowledge of its civilizations.) While Buckle argued, like Guizot, that there was indeed progress in civilization, seen in Comtean perspective as the movement from the reign of superstition to that of science and reason, he was much more open to the varying factors that hindered or retarded this development, and more cautious in his estimation of progress. In his use of the statistical method (Quetelet as well as Comte were among the thinkers he most admired), in his stress on environmental and geographical factors in the shaping of civilization, and on the fluidity of the interchange between different civilizations, Buckle offered a much more exact and scientific method for the comparative study of civilization.
With Buckle and others, the way was opened to treating civilizations as distinct historical entities with their own principles and varying courses of development. While the evolutionary framework of much nineteenth-century thought still kept alive the idea of progress, with the West leading the way, it became increasingly possible to dispute that approach by asserting the variety of civilizations, each with its different contributions—if one chose to see it this way—to world civilization.
A key moment in this development came with the equation between “culture” and “civilization” in the anthropologist E. B. Tylor's seminal Primitive Culture (1891 [1871]). “Culture or Civilization,” declared Tylor on the first page of his work, “taken in its widest 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” (ibid.: I, 1; see Hann 2011: 1). There it was: all civilizations were “cultures,” whole complexes which indeed were rarely completely autonomous or separated from each other, but which could and should be studied for their own sake's, and not simply as part of a broader story of the progress of humanity.12 Even as “civilization” fell into disfavor with many in the newly professionalized historical and anthropological disciplines, it was in essence kept alive by being transmuted into “culture.” When late in life the American anthropologist Alfred Kroeber began to compile a “Roster of Civilizations and Cultures,” he for all intents and purposes reverted directly to Tylor's conception, though Tylor's evolutionism was rigorously excluded:
The terms civilization and culture are used here not contrastively or exclusively, but inclusively as essential synonyms of sometimes varying accent. There is no difference of principle between the two words: they denote somewhat distinguishable grades of degree of the same thing. Civilization currently carries an overtone of high development of a society; culture has become the customary term of universal denotation in this range, applicable alike to high or low products and heritages of societies. Every human society has its culture, complex or simple. The word culture could therefore properly be used to include all the particular exemplars that will be listed; but for the larger and richer cultures the term civilization has current usage, and need not be quarreled with, on the understanding that no distinctions of kind between civilization and culture are implied (Kroeber 1962: 9; and see 1963 [1923]: 1–13, 69–73; 1975 [1957]).
Kroeber did not live to complete his work, though he did leave some tantalizing fragments, together with a sideswipe at Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, two practitioners of civilizational analysis from whom he had learned much but of whose “moralizing” approach he was highly suspicious (1962: 16). But while anthropologists were digesting civilization and regurgitating it as culture (Hann 2011), some sociologists were calling for a serious reengagement with it. Sociology's forerunners, including Montesquieu and the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, had had much to contribute to the early development of the concept of civilization. Later Comte, Spencer, and Buckle added their considerable weight, though not all of them were concerned to theorize the concept itself, or its applications. Nor were the immediate founders of the discipline, Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, especially interested in taking civilization as their unit of analysis—“society” became the almost universally preferred term in sociology, its implicit referent being nearly always the nation-state (“methodological nationalism”). But Weber's comparative studies of the world religions—Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Confucianism, together with his work on “the Protestant Ethic”—have been rightly seen as a form of civilizational analysis, with the “axial age” religions as “surrogates for civilization.” What Weber was attempting in these studies, says Edward Tiryakian, was a delineation of the main features of a distinctive “civilization of modernity” as it evolved in the West (2004: 35).
Durkheim may have preferred “society”—national society—to “civilization.” But in a number of places he, together with his nephew and collaborator Marcel Mauss, made the case for the study of civilization as an entity encompassing more than the “national life” found in the supposedly bounded society of the nation-state. “Social phenomena that are not strictly attached to a determinate social organism do exist: they extend into areas that reach beyond the national territory or they develop over periods of time that exceed the history of a single society. They have a life which is in some ways supranational” (Durkheim and Mauss 1971 [1913]: 810). These supranational elements form “systems of facts that have their own unity and form of existence,” and which require “a special name … Civilization seems to be the most appropriate name” (ibid.: 810–11.) The unitary, universal, concept of civilization is decisively rejected. But “if there does not exist one human civilization, there have been and there still are diverse civilizations which dominate and develop the collective life of each people” (ibid.: 812). Durkheim and Mauss instance “Christian,” “Mediterranean,” and “Northwest American” civilizations, all of whose constituent parts—nations—share common features and none of which can be reduced to any one part. “Without doubt,” they say, “every civilization is susceptible to nationalization; it may assume particular characteristics with each people of each state; but its most essential elements are not the product of the state or of the people alone.… A civilization constitutes a kind of moral milieu encompassing a certain number of nations, each national culture being only a particular form of the whole” (ibid.: 811; see Mauss 2004 [1930]: 28).
Neither Durkheim nor Mauss went much further than these brief indications, and sociology has for the most part been loath to take up the civilizational concept, seeing it as too vague, loose, and imprecise (e.g., Mills 1967 [1959]: 135). “Society” remained the master term, and society the basis of analysis. There were sociologists who valiantly fought to keep civilizational analysis at the forefront. Chief among these was Pitirim Sorokin, whose Social and Cultural Dynamics (1937–1941), in four volumes, was a heroic exercise in civilizational analysis. Another was Benjamin Nelson, who from the 1940s through the 1970s produced a stream of studies in the spirit of Weber, with an explicit plea for the study of “civilizational complexes” (1981). More recently, Shmuel Eisenstadt (2003), Edward Tiryakian (2004), and Johann Arnason (2003) have been energetic and tireless advocates of civilizational analysis.14
Perhaps most influential, at least most recently, was Norbert Elias, whose The Civilizing Process, first published in German in 1939, was rediscovered with the English translation of the 1970s and went on to have a spectacular career.15 Nonetheless, despite the reputation and accomplishments of these sociologists, it seems fair to say that for most sociologists, as for most anthropologists and historians, the case for civilization as a unit of analysis remains to be made. Skepticism abounds in the profession, abetted by a professionalism that looks askance at such an ambitious venture, involving as it does vast tracts of history and an extraordinarily wide range of societies in time and space.
Before we consider a justification for this undertaking through an examination of the work of Arnold Toynbee, it is important to mention two further, highly influential contributions to the civilizational idea.16 In 1930, Sigmund Freud published his Civilization and Its Discontents (1963 [1930]). With Freud, we have a concept of civilization that maintains the eighteenth-century idea of it as unitary and universal, but without the hope and optimism once attached to it (Rousseau et al. excepted). He pitilessly strips the concept of all glamour, of the hubris that has traditionally accompanied it. What he sees instead is a precariously achieved level of order and civility that has constantly to be on its guard against the instinctual forces of the Id that threaten to overwhelm it. That is civilization, according to Freud: a policeman watching over and repressing our unlawful and barbarous impulses. “Civilization … obtains mastery over the individual's dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city” (ibid.: 60–61). Eros, the “life instinct,” the civilizational principle, is engaged in a titanic struggle with Thanatos, the “death instinct,” which has as its unceasing aim the dissolution of all human community and civilization. “It is this battle of the giants that our nurse-maids try to appease with their lullaby about Heaven” (ibid.: 59). For Freud, civilization was and is always a hard won and painfully maintained cultural achievement, always threatened with being undermined by elemental biological forces.
Mohandas K. Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi, writing about the same time as Freud, has an even more jaundiced view of civilization, which he roughly equates with “modern civilization,” Western-style. While he maintains a concept of “true civilization,” which he identifies principally with traditional Indian culture and society, in his seminal work Hind Swaraj (2009 [1909]) he is mainly concerned to castigate what he sees as an almost universal acceptance—notably among educated Indians—of Western modernity as the only viable civilization for our times. The danger is that Indian nationalists, enamored of Western-style civilization, will in throwing off British rule simply continue and replicate the civilization through which the British have already ensnared and corrupted traditional India. In his “Introduction” to his translation of Tolstoy's Letter to a Hindu, Gandhi wrote: “It is for us to pause and consider whether, in our impatience of English rule, we do not want to replace one evil by another and a worse. India, which is the nursery of the great faiths of the world, will cease to be nationalist India, whatever else she may become, when she goes through the process of civilization in the shape of reproduction on that sacred soil of gun factories and the hateful industrialism which has reduced the people of Europe to a state of slavery, and all but stifled among them the best instincts which are the heritage of the human family” (Tolstoy 2009 [1909]: 3). This was also the message spelt out, bitingly and with much colorful detail, in Hind Swaraj (see especially Gandhi 2009: 33–37, 64–69, 105–9).
Freud and Gandhi both continue to some extent in the eighteenth-century tradition of treating civilization as a single thing. But the nature of their treatment reveals how difficult this exercise became, how hedged round with warnings and qualifications, once the concept was divorced from the idea of progress. Such a sobriety grew still more pronounced as Western society descended into the horror of the First World War, a triumph of barbarism over civilization if ever there was one. It was far safer to keep to the increasingly respectable plural use of civilization as propounded by the anthropologists and archaeologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries."
2. History of the Concept, by PAWEŁ SKRZYDLEWSKI:
"The term “civilization” appeared and spread in the Enlightenment and was understood as that which brings progress, material development, and spiritual development, which allows man to overcome contrary things coming from nature, from man himself, and from human society (Marie J. A. de Condorcet). An understanding of being a polished man who is formed in customs (Victor Riqueti de Mirabeau), in everything that primitive people do not experience, was associated with the term “civilization.”
This understanding corresponded to an earlier understanding of civilized man in the Renaissance that came from Erasmus of Rotterdam, i.e., a responsible citizen possessing social virtues and a necessary refinement of manners, and this understanding had a valuative character. For Stanisław Staszic, civilization is the socialization of man, the family, the nation, and other associations. During the Enlightenment, by civilization was understood that which permits man to build a new order of social life, different from the existing order that was shaped under the influence of Christianity. The foundations of civilization were thought to be in reason, in nature, in what is human, in what brings benefit and is pleasurable, in what is clear and evident. Civilization so conceived was inscribed into the context of utopian thought and in different, self-redeeming conceptions of humanity. In the Enlightenment, a different understanding and appraisal of civilization appeared, seeing in civilization the cause of the fall and enslavement of man (Jean-Jacques Rousseau) who by nature is good, perfect, and capable of self-realization.
According to Rousseau, civilization was the cause of man’s corruption and depravity, and therefore it deserves to be condemned and rejected, while man himself should return to a way of life in agreement with nature. Another meaning of the term “civilization” appeared in the works of Johann G. Herder and François Guizot, for whom civilization (like culture) is a synonym for moral and intellectual progress. According to Wilhelm von Humboldt, we should understand by civilization everything that facilitates people living together in harmony; civilization is manifested in technology, tools, law and customs, and in institutions. Civilization so conceived is externalized and incarnated in matter by culture. For Edward B. Tylor, civilization is the whole of culture produced by any given society from primitive times up to the present moment. Alfred L. Kroeber, like Robert Merton, understands civilization as that by which man and society influence the world of nature and as what man himself has incorporated in material reality. For many scientists and thinkers, the terms “civilization” and “culture” are strictly connected, since there is no culture without civilization, and no civilization without culture (Feliks Koneczny, Georg Simmel, Christopher Dawson, Thomas S. Eliot, Albert Schweitzer, Jacques Maritain, Jean Laloup, and Jean Néllis).
Modern times, due to the German subjectivist thought (Immanuel Kant), brought idealist current of ways of understanding culture as sharply contrasted with civilization. Civilization is what is outside man (his spirit, psyche), and what has being in matter as a product. Culture (Kultur), on the other hand, is a unique, internal, spiritual reality of man. It represents values (obligations) produced by man himself a rated from the external and real world (Georg W. Hegel, Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert, Wilhelm Dilthey, José Ortega y Gasset, Ernst Troeltsch, Benedetto Croce Meinecke, and Henri Berr). , Friedrich In the twentieth century, the problematic of civilization was raised in different domains of culture. In academia, Oswald Spengler, Arnold J. Toynbee, and Feliks Koneczny developed a specific understanding of civilization; in art (especially in science fiction literature), Herbert G. Wells, Stanisław Lem, Aldous L. Huxley, and George Orwell meditated on civilization; on the moral and religious plane, the question of civilization was taken up by Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II. Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, and Alvin Toffler with their publications had an important influence on the understanding of the theory of civilization in the twentieth century. Various reasons led people to take up the problematic of civilization (armed conflicts, the disintegration of man, society, and the state, social, cultural, and economic crises that posed a threat to man; social, cultural, technological, and scientific revolutions; attempts to find a definitive understanding and grasp of man’s history as a whole; questions concerning the identity and variety of cultures in the context of the truth about man and the truth revealed on the pages of the Gospel).
Civilization was considered in different disciplines, but the historical sciences, philosophy, and the social sciences with particular consideration of the political sciences had priority. The problems raised in studies of civilization were focused on the following questions: What are civilizations, and where should one seek the reason for their existence? Are we dealing with many different civilizations, or only one, and if there is a plurality of civilizations, what is the reason for this plurality, and how do civilizations differ? Are there rules and laws of the development of history (and if there are, what are they)? In what measure d o civilizations influence man and his human life? What is civilization? How and due to what does civilization develop? How do civilizations influence each other, and is a stable synthesis of civilizations possible? What role do the conditions of the natura l environment, natural resources, races, languages, religions, and customs perform in the shaping of civilization? What sort of knowledge are investigations of civilization?"
Source: This article is a part of The Universal Encyclopedia of Philosophy to be published by the Polish Society of Thomas Aquinas. It is a revised and translated version of the encyclopedia entry originally published in Polish as: Paweł Skrzydlewski, “Cywilizacja,” in Powszechna encyklopedia filozofii, vol. 2, ed. Andrzej Maryniarczyk (Lublin: PTTA, 2001). Reproduced in: Studia Gilsoniana 7, no. 4 (October–December 2018): 665–687
Discussion 1
Is There a Civilizational Paradigm?
Matthew Melko:
There does appear to be a civilizational paradigm. Possibly the science has become too normal. Perhaps the paradigm has been taken too much for granted. The International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations (ISCSC) moved from Austria to the United States in 1971. After a few years in which methods and theory papers predominated, papers presented at annual meetings covered a wide range of subjects involving comparisons of political, economic, social, cultural, aesthetic, religious, philosophical, literary and other aspects of civilizations; examinations of particular problems within a civilization, often Western; looking back to the civilizational roots; explorations of the primitive precursors of civilizations; and examinations of the interactions between civilizations. But the civilizationists who continued to be interested in the overall processes of civilizations — e.g. David Wilkinson, David Richardson, Roger Wescott, Gordon Hewes, John Hord, Lee Snyder, Corinne Gilb, Ross Maxwell — seemed to constitute just another aspect of the normal science, and they were not getting many books published on this subject, only papers and articles. The paradigm was sufficiently understood. We knew what we meant by civilizations, we used familiar examples. We compared philosophies and religions. When we did a session on Hadrian and I set out to look for the Chinese Hadrian (1996), I knew I was looking for an emperor who set limits on the expansion of the Han or Tang or Ming Empire, preferably one who traveled its borders. I didn't find him, but I would have recognized him if he existed.
...
Meanwhile, the World Historical Association came into existence and grew rapidly, meeting the needs, not only of researchers, but of the growing number of teachers of world history in undergraduate colleges and high schools in a time of increasing sensitivity to multiculturalism. World history text books tended to be divided into historical periods. Scholarly books, the sources for the text books, could take a section of period and area, more than a nation, less than the world, for instance considering the Asian world before industrialization [e.g. Chaudhuri, 1990], Another area of study with a world scope was initiated in the 1970's by the world systems analysts (wearing black hats). To a civilizationist, the analysis of macrosystems relationships might be perceived as a kind of intercivilizational encounter, but after it was introduced by Immanuel Wallerstein in 1974, it developed a life of its own. While world systems analysts could teach only college classes at the major or graduate level, they were spinning off a new research area, playing off one another. Their paradigm was tighter, more coherent than that of the civilizationists, and more focused on world economy. They were much more successful at getting books published and reviewed, and were pioneers of the Internet. A pair of well known debates occurred in the nineties between civilizationists and world systems analysts [Sanderson 1994, 1996], but the real focus of the debates was world systems, with the civilizationists serving as foils to criticize the world systems approach and set up rebuttals. The only major attention drawn to civilizations since the founding of the ISCSC was created by a civilizational outsider (though a political science insider), Samuel P. Huntington [1996], who got considerable attention by taking civilizational theory and applying it to the future, warning of potential major conflicts involving the West, Islamic Civilization, and China. While some civilizationists sniffed at Huntington's more popular approach and sometimes debatable conjectures, others acknowledged that he was doing what more civilizationists should be doing: applying the lessons of the past to the contemporary world and to the future [Drew, 2001]. So, yes, there is a civilizational paradigm. By 1970 the mapping was sufficient to allow civilizationists to take off in different directions.
...
What might be helpful now, it seems to me, is a reconsideration of the central problems dealt with by civilizationists, a firm (nay a dogmatic) statement of probability, and—instead of a debate about the superiority of civilizational study to anything else—a linking of civilization-al theory to world history and world systems analysis, perhaps under the generic heading preferred by Lee Daniel Snyder [1999]: Macrohistory."
(https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1551&context=ccr)
Who Are the Civilizationists?
Matthew Melko:
"Much begins with Oswald Spengler. He had his predecessors, but he put together the first civilizational theory. He stressed the plurality and autonomy of high cultures, which we now call civilizations. He placed great emphasis on what A. L. Kroeber would call style and David Richardson, worldview. And he perceived a pattern of rise and fall that would be accepted and modified by other civilizationists. He has been much maligned as a dogmatic, racist Nazi, but in Charles Atkinson's translation, his Decline of the West [1980, (1932)] still reads well and often leaves the reader saying, yes, that's how it is (not every reader in the same sections, of course). Recently, Spengler has been incisively reassessed by John Farrenkopf [2001],
Arnold J. Toynbee's famous (or infamous) Study [1934-1961] expanded and rounded off Spengler's ideas. He insisted that his approach was different, but civilizationists have linked the two. It could be said that most civilizationists who have written since Spengler have been expanding on or reacting to the perceptions of these two scholars. Toynbee wrote at great length and seemed to have had an aversion to editing. But his much amended list of civilizations comes closer to the lists we accept today, his theory of peripheral domination has proved valuable to civilizationists and world systems analysts alike, his concept of general war has invoked a lively sub-discipline in political science. His variations on Spengler's ideas, e.g. Times of Troubles and Universal States, seem to have been more acceptable to English writing succes-sors. Both Spengler and Toynbee, damned in their own time, seem to have provided fruitful hypotheses that are still being explored. While Pitirim A. Sorokin's Social and Cultural Dynamics (1937-41, 1957) strongly discounted the whole civilizational idea, much that he has written can be fitted into the civilizational paradigm.
Ironically, Sorokin first attempted to establish a paradigm [1963, (1950)], though it wouldn't have been so called at the time it was published, reviewing the work of authors who pursued broad social philosophies. His own basic model, however, provided a broader cyclical perception, a different macrohistorical interpretation. He did agree with Spengler that there were cyclical patterns in history, and that historical epochs, like Spengler's cultures, had distinctive characteristics. A. L. Kroeber, in Configurations of Culture Growth [1944], presented a cooler, less dogmatic approach to civilizational questions. His concept of pattern or style was closer to Spengler's presentation of cultural creativity, and he was interested in the rise and decline of such pat-terns. But he was less insistent on finding recurrent durations. Like Sorokin, he also wrote about what we would now call a paradigm of historical writing [1957]. Indeed, it could be argued that Kuhn's paradigm for science, which we all love to expand, is an example of a Kroeberian pattern, which the latter used to describe configurations of related work in art, literature and philosophy.
Carroll Quigley, intending to take a fresh and incisive approach to civilizational questions, also provided a brief and clear summary of civilizational problems. His answers, like Spengler's and Sorokin's, were dogmatic but clarifying. Probably his Evolution of Civilizations [1979 (1961)], which he said he thought about for 30 years and wrote in six weeks, is the best starting point for anyone who would like a readable introduction to the study of civilizations.
Rushton Coulborn, a student of Kroeber's and friend of Toynbee and Sorokin, applying Kuhn's idea of paradigm, in retrospect saw him-self as an early normal scientist focusing on the initial stages of civilizational development [1969]. But, like Quigley, he was also one of the paradigm creators [1956, 1958, 1966]."
(https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1551&context=ccr)
Are Civilizations Integrated?
Matthew Melko:
"It is difficult to develop a civilizational theory without civilizations. Spengler didn't use the term as we use it now, but it was central to his thesis that the "high cultures" he wrote about were very large, autonomous, durable societies that had their own histories. Toynbee agreed with Spengler about the identity of several of these societies, but he called them civilizations and that is the name that has come to be used. Toynbee agreed with Spengler, however, that these civilizations had considerable autonomy, lasted for many centuries, and had their own histories. Spengler was more insistent on this autonomy, arguing that once established, these societies were virtually impenetrable. Others have modified this, but the idea that a civilization maintains its identity over a long period of time, resisting or transforming external influences, is crucial to civilizational theory, and one area in which it is distinct from world systems analysis. Spengler, much more than Toynbee, saw the unity of a civilization formed around its soul, what later Kroeber would describe as pattern or style. It was this internal style that distinguished a civilization and gave it the power to resist the influence of others. If one civilization bor-rowed ideas from another, the borrowed idea or technology would be modified so as to fit the pattern of the borrowing civilization. If the boundaries of civilizations were not always clear, the styles were. The idea of individual civilizational styles suggests that civilizations have a degree of internal integration. This is perceived to be particularly strong in the early centuries of a civilization's development. Members of the civilization are ordinarily more influenced by the internal patterns of the civilization than they are by external events. As Toynbee put it, civilizations are institutions "that comprehend without being comprehended by others" [1934-61: I: 455 n. 1]. The extent and intensity of integration varies. In times of transition, the integration is looser, as change in core area requires change in other areas. Does the loosening follow change or does change follow loosening? This seems like a 19th Century question. Even if we could deter-mine the change that preceded others, this would not tell us whether it caused the loosening or was permitted by the loosening, not to mention that the determination of the precipitating event leading to the first change depends so much on the observer's theoretical framework. At all times, but especially when integration is tight, there tends to be a relationship of components. Aesthetics relate to one another, so that if forms of literature become freer, and more latitude is allowed in verse forms, this is likely to be reflected in art and music. Economic forms relate to political forms. If central government is powerful, economies are likely to be more tightly controlled, as are religions. If, like Southeast Asia and Europe, a civilization tends to be organized in state systems, it is likely to experience more organized internal wars [e.g. Melko, 2001a, Table 10], Sorokin's contention [1963: 209-217] that civilizations are mere congeries seems considerably exaggerated. These internal relationships become obvious when considered from the perspective of another civilization. The perception of a plurality of civilizations owes much to the integrating of internal relationships. Each civilization has a culture. Within the civilization are subcultures, French and German, or Hindu and Muslim, that will be perceived as cultures within the civilization, but appear as variants from without. Culture helps maintain integration and provides limitations on change. It is extremely powerful in a civilization, may seemingly disappear for decades, and then reemerge. as we have seen recently in the case of Russian Orthodox religion.
Worldview is an aspect of culture, and it can be said that each civilization has a worldview that is determined by that culture. Even political and economic choices are determined by culture. The Chinese worldview limited the capacity for trade in the Ming Empire. Even though the Chinese had ocean-going ships more than a century before the West, and even though they actually got to India rather than to islands off a continent in another hemisphere, the West and not China experienced a great burst of world trade. How deep into a civilization does culture penetrate? Quigley mentions that in the case of Classical civilization, only superficially, only to a small elite. It affected the upper classes who built the buildings and wrote the writings, but the peasants and proletariat, who cared about neither, were everywhere pretty much alike [1979: 276-278].
Does this apply to all civilizations? Certainly poverty and illiteracy continue to create a world population in the 21st century that has many features in common. But if comparative studies are made of peasant or poor rural populations, it becomes apparent that the peasants of one civilization do differ from those of another in many significant ways, and those ways usually relate to the respective integrations of the civilizations."
(https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1551&context=ccr)
Discussion 2
Did the Civilizational Systems Become Autonomous
(This is continuation of the the Characteristics of Civilization (see subsection above), quoted from Robert Bedelsky)
Robert Bedelsky:
"The governmental subsystem underwent vertical integration through planning, meritocracy, and rational administration, emerging as the sovereign nation-state by the nineteenth century, in command of economy and society. Occupying a demarcated and defended territory, worked and supported by citizens with allegiance to the nation, the state intervened in education, culture and a wide range of activities formerly social in scope. Alone among the other three subsystems, government (which later become the state) is non-globalist, characterized by jealous embrace of exclusive sovereignty. Sovereign governments, when transforming into states, have become powerful enough to dominate civilization and humanity’s legacy of society and civilization, taking them into forms yet unrealized.
The science/technology subsystem evolved into the Global SciTech Society, creating and leveraging materialist rationality into common property of all, but controlled by a highly specialized elite. In theory, it has erased boundaries, though nation-states guard their security-relevant innovations from transfer to other powers. It can be regarded as a “society” in that it has prospered through cooperative interaction and knowledge sharing. State subsidies have also nourished it as positive input for strengthening state dominance within society.
Nineteenth century international commerce, driven by industrialization, made states stronger and transformed empires into trading blocs. Banks lubricated business expansion while implicitly promising endless growth — an illusion that collapsed with two world wars and an intervening depression. Currency questions, postwar rebuilding, the gold standard, and other issues have driven horizontal integration on a global scale with the American dollar as reserve currency. The digital revolution has further accelerated the importance of international capital and loosening from state controls.
The last subsystem of civilization consists of things that cannot be proven — especially religion which has been vital in the formation and maintenance of all civilizations. It consists of innovations of the mind, expressed in images, visions, sounds (music and language) and belief in a transcendent afterlife. It is the subsystem based on nonmaterialism and exists chiefly in the minds and expressions of individuals. The nonmaterial knowledge subsystem cannot be planned or prognosticated by rational extrapolation. It is knowledge gained through organic means and provides transcendent meaning for individuals within a civilization. It has both global and national extent, and unlike Global SciTech Society, directly affects practically every individual directly, though unequally. It is the most human subsystem of the four and flourishes with imagination, vision, and tragedy.
These four subsystems comprised past civilizations and are now becoming autonomous systems in contrast to their integrated relationships within historical civilizations. The modern sovereign nation-state dominates in the disposition of capital and seeks ever more power over society. The Global SciTech Society claims or seeks supreme knowledge of climate, energy, medicine, and the universe. Collective knowledge of the material world is claimed and celebrated as answering the needs of humanity, mostly at the expense of the organic knowledge acquired in traditional civilizations. International capital has expressed its independence from subsystem status to become an autonomous system answering only to economic laws. Like the modern state and Global SciTech Society, its foundation in rational planning, calculation of costs and benefits and a presumption that organic knowledge is obsolete combine to detach it from traditional civilization."
(https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/ccr/vol87/iss87/7)
Core-Periphery Issues
David Wilkinson:
"CORE-PERIPHERY ISSUES
35 An ideal-type civilization/world system/macrosociety, because its characteristics are unequally distributed over space; and because they are distributed centrically; and because their unequal distributions overlap; and because the inequalities are connected intrinsically to its past history of expansion (for civilizations tend strongly to expand. Central civilization being an extreme rather than an exceptional case), characteristically pos-
(a) a core (central, older, advanced, wealthy, powerful);
(b) a semlpenphery strongly connected to the core (younger, fringeward, remote, more recently attached, weaker, poorer, more backward); and
(c) a weakly connected periphery (nomads; peasant subsistence producers not yet attached to a city; and other civilizations that trade but do not habitually fight or ally with the subject civilization).3
36 Civilizations usually begin in a geographically restricted area composed of cities and the hinterlands their fighters can aspire to control; this is surrounded by an area to which the new cities are politically irrelevant. We may call these zones the (initial) urban core, controlled or disputed semiperiphery, and uncontrolled periphery of the civilization.
37 Civilizations usually expand over time by raiding, invading, and conquering adjacent areas, by sending out colony-cities and military settlements and trading forts, by fascinating and addicting previously indifferent peripheral people to their products (gods, drugs, laws, weapons, music, ornaments, etc.). The territories affected by this civic expansion -whether the expansion be colonialist, imperialist, cultic, developmental -may be considered to have been incorporated by the civilization when their occupants - settlers or settlees - undergo urbanization and begin to interact politically on a regular basis - as subjects, allies, tributaries, enemies - with the civilizational core. This area of later expansion and control is the (enlarged) semiperiphery of the civilization.
38 Once a semiperiphery exists, and it comes to exist quickly, it also persists. Thus one of the main continuing patterns that reveals itself in the history of civilizations and world systems is that they-tend - not by definition, but empirically - to be markedly geographically tripartite. In the core, military force, political power, economic wealth, technological progress, cultural prestige, and theogony are concentrated. The periphery is far from the core in all senses, containing peoples and territories known but scarcely noted. The semiperiphery, more or less recently penetrated or engulfed, is a zone characterized by military subjection, powerlessness, relative poverty, technological backwardness, low cultural prestige.
39 But while the tripartition of a civilization is very durable, no area has permanent tenure in any role, and tenure of coredom is rather precarious. Cores are not eternal; civilizations can outlast their original cores. A history of cores must therefore be kinematic, describing their rises, shifts, and falls; a theory of cores must ultimately be dynamic, accounting for their motion and change.
40 A civilization's core may have any of several political forms. It may be a single state, as in Mesopotamian civilization, perhaps, during the rise and fall of Assyria, or as in Central civilization during the rise of Media and Persia and Rome, and the era of Justinian. The core may be the metropolitan region of a universal state, as in Central civilization during the Assyrian, Persian-Macedonian, and Roman empires. Or the civilization core may be a functionally divided set of areas in a universal state, as in Far Eastern civilization during the Qin-Former Han and in Japanese civilization during the Kamakura period. The core may contain several states, successively hegemonic: in Mesopotamian civilization, the Sumerian core c. 2500-2360 bc (Ur, Lagash, Umma). It may constitute several states simultaneously balanced, as in Central civilization between its universal empires, and for most of the time since the Roman empire's fracturing. The most frequent core forms are: the single dominant or hegemonic state; several competing states; and the universal-empire metropole.
41 Cores pulsate. Core areas enlarge and contract. Central civilization's core shifts - westward in the Graeco-Roman phase, eastward in the medieval phase, westward again in the Western phase - involved expansion at one edge synchronic with contraction at the other; the global phase saw core expansion east and west. Contractions are naturally enough associated with hegemonic struggles and universal-state periods, expansions with all-core epochs; but not perfectly.
42 Cores shift. Cores may move in a single general direction, or oscillate. The Central core half moved west, then east, then drifted west and north and west again. No signficant patterns are evident.
43 Cores decline and rise. Does past experience as a core preclude or assure return to core status? Apparently neither. Setting aside all the apparent civilizational-startup first-time cores (e.g. Central civilization's Penile Crescent + Nile valley), there are many cases in which a semiperipheral area, never before a core, rose to core status. In Central civilization, such first-time core entrants included Assyria, Persia, Greece (previously an Aegean core), Macedonia, Rome, Byzantium, western Europe, America, Russia. But there are several other cases in which a fallen core area hasreturned from semiperipheral status, or has regaia solitude it had lost to upstart sharers. In Central civilization: Abbasid Mesopotamia, and the classic case of Renaissance Italy. In the transition from semiperiphery to core, history seems somewhat more favorable to renaissance than to renaissance, but renaissances do happen.
44 Different areas may serve as military-political, economic, and cultural-religious cores, and core shifts may occur in these features at different times. The most notable discrepancies between Central civilization's economic-technical and politicomilitary cores are attested by being corrected: the shift from Rome to Constantinople, the Renaissance-ending invasions of Italy, the revolt of the Netherlands, the involvement of British finance and fleets in Continental wars, and the American entry into the world wars of the twentieth century. There is thus some tendency for geographically separated functions to be pulled together: the politicomilitary core may conquer the others (the post-Renaissance invasions of Italy), migrate to them (by a movement of the capital, e.g. to Constantinople or Lo-yang), or usurp them (by taxation and subsidy, e.g. Tokugawa Edo);
or economic cores may invest in politicomilitary potency (Dutch, British, American).
45 Are semiperipheries necessary? Apparently not, since civilizations are often all-core, i.e. lack a semiperiphery. Central civilization has always had a significant semiperipheral area. Semiperipheries exist more often than not, particularly in universal-empire periods when the metropole is especially favored, but they do not seem necessary features of a civilization: power, wealth, creativity, can all be rather widely dispersed, though dispersal usually alternates with concentration.
46 Tenure in the semiperiphery is more secure than core tenure (cores decline) or peripheral tenure (peripheries are devoured). But there is some upward mobility. A semiperipheral area remains semiperipheral as long as it is politically annexed to, urbanologically subordinate to, militarily dominated by, culturally provincialized by, economically outaccumulated by, technologically outcompeted by, cultically devoted to, the old core. When and where the semiperiphery acquires states as influential, forces as dangerous, cities as populous and wealthy, culture as attractive, technique as progressive, gods as efficacious as those of the core, that part of the semiperiphery becomes core; the core area expands to encompass it. And if the old core should peak and decline, be overtaken and passed in its military and political, demographic and economic, cultural and technical and theological development by its semiperiphery (or a pan of it), so that the old core becomes a historic backwater, becomes marginal to the affairs of the civilization, while the former semiperiphery becomes the new core, we may properly say that the core of the civilization has shifted. And cores do shift: witness Karnak, witness Babylon.
47 There is some relationship between the transition of a state from semiperiphery to core and its later ability to impose hegemony and universal empire over the states system. Recent arrivals to core status have some advantages in competitions to destroy states systems, but they are not overwhelming, nor entirely self-evident.
48 A theory of peripheries must largely account for their secular decline. Civilization as such - the sum of the territories and peoples of the various civilizations - has expanded continually since its origins, despite some regional setbacks and a single holocivilizational collapse (that of Mississippian civilization), by conquering and colonizing and assimilating its non-civilized peripheral peoples and territories. This contradicts the idea that civilizations rise and fall, rise and fall: they almost never fall. It also contradicts the image of peaceful, sedentary civilized peoples always threatened and occasionally overwhelmed by neighboring barbarians: most of the "overwhelming" has been inflicted by the civilized societies on their peripheral neighbors. When noncivilized peripheral peoples - usually nomads - attack and conquer civilized territory, the result has ordinarily been that they settle down, take over, enjoy ruling the civilization, and continue expanding it; on the whole, peripheral peoples have not developed a sense of peripheral identity and pride sufficient to impel them to destroy the civilizations they have sporadically conquered. Civilizations, on the contrary, strongly tend to destroy their peripheries, through incorporation.
49 "Coreness" and "semipherality" are multidimensional phenomena, but certainly have politicomilitary, economic, technological, demographic, religious, and cultural components. Politicomilitary driving variables seem more obvious and accessible to analysis than others, but are unlikely to function alone. Forces need to be posited to explain both the motions and changes of cores - formations, expansions, pulsations, shuttles, drifts, evaporations - and core persistence and stability.
50 Interesting speculative questions about core and periphery include: can an all-core global society evolve? Would it require a states system? Does the end of the periphery increase the chances for an all-core society? - or a freezing of current core-semiperiphery boundaries? - or a speedup in core shift? - or a narrowing of the core to a single hegemonic state or imperial metropole?"
(http://abuss.narod.ru/Biblio/WS/ws-5000_4.htm)
More Information
- see the book: Beyond Civilization
- check out David Wilkinson's thesis of a Central Civilization