View source for David Wilkinson's Views on the Other Civilizational Analysts


= David Wilkinson's proposes the existence of a single [[Central Civilization]].


=Discussion=

David Wilkinson:


Toynbec. I draw very heavily on Toynbee, both in agreement and in
opposition, but almost exclusively on his extensively revised model of 1961,
from Reconsiderations, rather than on the much better-known earlier volumes
of A Study of History. My definition of a civilization/world system takes
off from his rethinking (1961 :278-87). My roster is based on a critique of
his list and Quigley's. In an empirical test of his civilizational kinematics
(phase transition sequence), original and revised versions, vs. those of
Spengler, Philip Bagby (1958), Melko, and Quigley, my data fit the
expectations of his revised theory perfectly; those of his original theory came
in next best (Wilkinson, 1986:29). Toynbee is however seduced by the
mythos of cultural coherence - not entirely, no one is, and he provides a
useful model of cultural contradiction and connict, but he relates it integrally
to breakdown. He is replete with fertile notions, and, I believe, is the most
liberal of civilizationists, in the oldest sense ofthat word; an excellent teacher.
Quigley. Carroll Quigley provides a single, powerful, illuminating
insight into the dynamics of civilizations, the concept of the instrument of
expansion, which I view as a nonpartisan and nonsupersessionist
empiricization of the Marxian "mode of production," and as such an
improvement, with extensive research and practical implications. Some hint
of the latter can be found, on suitable occasions, in the kaleidoscopic
consciousness of Quigley's one-time student, William Jefferson Clinton.
Where many if not most civilizationists have centrally focused on culture,
Quigley focuses centrally on economics, and will probably be easiest for the
world-systems tradition to come to grips with. However, after spending some
time tryi ng to validate his proposition that growing civilizations are pervaded
by a single instrument of expansion, I judged that I had disconfirmed it
instead, gave up expecting macrosocieties to display much institutional
coherence, and began to consider the structure of their incoherence. In that
incoherence, I think that many of Quigley's propositions will be partially
confirmed, and that the location and limits of their application will be
significant.
Spengler. Spengler is the Antaeus of civilizationists, brilliantly,
perversely, powerfully wrong in more ways than any two others combined.
Spengler's kcy proposition, to the effect that each civilization develops a
single prime symbol, an all-pervasive style, is especially brilliantly wrong
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(the Gramscian doctrine of cultural "hegemony" being less so, except insofar
as it is doctrinaire, an answer instead of a question), and should point us to
the study ofthe failure of repeated attempts in that direction, and the resilience
of deviant, oppositional, variant, heretical, inverted, oppressed symbols, as
thematic of polycultural history. Is this failure correlated with the failure to
develop a single prime mode of production, class struggle, durable world
state and cosmopolis? I suspect so.
Melko. Melko accepts that today many civilizations coexist, and objects
to the idea that the only way we can study contemporary civilization
comparatively is to do so by reference to history. That is indeed the logical
consequence of my acceptance that today only one civilization exists. Our
respective rosters are properly derived from different definitions; we can
agree on some phenomena common to the civilizations that appear on both
our rosters. However, while he, like Spengler (1926: Table III), sees a feudal
state-imperial polity sequence (1969:101-32), I perceive no
holocivilizational feudal phase. Feudalism does indeed appear in
semiperipheries, with regard to which I find Rushton Coulborn's arguments
(1956:364-66) about feudalism as "a mode of revival of a society whose
polity has gone into extreme disintegration" in marginal regions - religion
being the general and core-area recovery modality - quite convincing. As
for states systems and empires, I find not a supersession but an alternation,
following Toynbee's Helleno-Sinic model, in which, consistent with Robert
Wesson's work (1967,1978), the states-system phase is more robust.
Melko is also doubtful, as is Chase-Dunn, about my admission to
civilizational status of very small-scale societies, with only one or two cities
- Melko questions my "Chibchan" civilization, Chase-Dunn my "Irish."
More recently - since I have responded only by accepting even smaller
civilizations into my roster (Wilkinson, 1993, 1994), Melko has suggested
that I will have to locate still others, for example, in Central Asia. My point
(10) above concurs with him. I hadn't closed my roster of civilizations in
1982 or 1987 (Wilkinson, 1980-1982, 1987b), and I am not ready to close
it now. Current candidates not treated then include several African
possibilities, and a second (!) Colombian candidate, Tairona "civilization."
Hord. I view all of John Hord's papers (q.v.) with great interest. Our
definitions of "civilization" are irreducibly different, but I believe that the
relatively homogeneous political-cultural entities he studies under that label
are genuine, and his understanding of them creative and novel. The
persistence and the fissility of his constitutional traditions has helped to
persuade me that (my) civilizations are characteristically, not just
incidentally, polycultures.
Sorokin. I have discussed Sorokin more fully elsewhere (forthcoming,
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1995). In brief: I concur with Sorokin's powerful critique (1950:113-20,
206-17; 1956: 163-64; 1963:413-19; 1966: 121-22,548-49) of civilizationists
- Spengler, Nikolai Danilevsky (1920), and especially Toynbee - who
observed social groups and thought they observed cultural groups. Sorokin
however resolves the difficulty by refusing the analytic concept of
"civilization." I resolve it by treating civilizations as social groups and not
as cultural groups, each, just as Sorokin complained (1950:213), "a cultural
field where a multitude of vast and small cultural systems and congeries -
partly mutually harmonious, partly neutral, partly contradictory - coexist."
Huntington. Sorokin's comment is worth recalling in another context.
Samuel P. Huntington has lately (1993) brought a political scientist's
perspective to the study of civilizations. He defines civilizations as cultural
groupings and cultural identities, accepts the plurality of contemporary
civilizations, presents a largely Toynbeean civilizational roster (23-25), and
hypothesizes that in the next phase of world politics "the fault lines between
civilizations will be the battIe lines of the future" (22). His argument is
detailed and provocative. I believe Sorokin would rightly contend that
Huntington's "major civilizations"-"Western, Confucian, Japanese,
Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and possibly African
civilization" (25) - are "cultural fields" rather than either systems or
potential actors. I would add that they are cultural subfields in the global
cultural field of a single civilization, a social and not a cultural entity. I
consequently doubt the hypotheses that "conflict between civilizations will
supplant ideological and other forms of conflict as the dominant global form
of conflict" and that "international relations ... will increasingly ... become a
game in which non-Western civilizations are actors ... " (48). More likely,
nostalgic ideologies of lost civilizational isolation and cultural status will
be used to mobilize support for struggles for power and prestige within a
solitary, incoherent civilization in which the ideologues have neither the
capacity nor the intention to creat~ a coherent cultural system, let alone a
culture capable of functioning as an actor.
Melko has objected to my schema (which describes the general course
of macrosocial history as the fusion of many small civilizations into the one
contemporary global civilization) on the grounds that it destroys the
possibility of a comparative study of civilizations, except so far as that study
is also historical. That is indeed its logical consequence. But those who
nonetheless wish to examine dialogically Huntington's contention that the
next stage in global political conflict will be a conflict of civilizations can
still do so perfectly well, but employing the different (and to my mind more
precise) locution "conflict of cultures within a single civilization." We can
then proceed to use for our historical analogs not the past collisions and
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fusions between civilizations, but the more frequent, more complex and
delicate (and, I suspect, more dialogic and perhaps even less violent) interplay
of the parts of a single society's polyculture. As a first approximation, on
account of the analogy I consider appropriate I am probably a bit more
sanguine about the outcome of such a conflict, even while being less sure
of its coming rise to prominence, than Huntington.
Chase-Dunn and Hall vs. Frank and Gills. On the issue of whether there
are many different precapitalist world-systems with different modes of
production (Chase-Dunn and Hall, 199Ia:23), or a single SOOO-year worldsystem with a single developmental logic (Frank and Gills), I partly split the
difference and partly disagree with both. (I) I don't use the term
"precapitalist" to describe any empirical civilization/world system; while
capitalist (and socialist) ideals, ideologies, and utopias are rather recent, their
accumulative and distributive practices are very old, possibly both
contemporaneous with the startup of civilization. (2) I find many different
world-systems (like Chase-Dunn and Hall), but of such unequal size, duration
and terminus that one ofthem (essentially that focused on by Gills and Frank)
eventually engulfed the others; this is the political!civilizational structure I
call Central Civilization. (3) In consequence of not finding one pervasive
Quigleyan "instrument of expansion" in any civilization, I don't use the term
"mode of production" in any world-system-Icvel application, except as a
hypothesis I don't expect to see confirmed. Each of the civilizations is
heterogeneous, polycultural, incoherent with respect to its politico-economic
patterning; though at some times in each some new or reinvented form has
looked like it would spread throughout and extirpate all others, it is
"institutionalized" (in the Quigleyan sense, i.e., detlectcd and corrupted) and
reaches a limit well short of that. This pattern of failure is as interesting as
the variety of forms and their mutual displacement processes, and should
keep a generation or so of macrosocial theorists productively employed in
verifying, describing, and explaining it. 


Chase-Dunn. Since the 1970s I have held that all civilizations are world
systems; but since the 1960s I have accepted that there are some world
systems which are not civilizations, that is, very small, nonurban
polycultures. Christopher Chase-Dunn is now in the lead on this line of
research, which should help to detail the differences between the smallest,
city less, world systems and the next level larger, the one- and two-city
protocivilizations, of which I now believe several, probably many, more
must have existed (most only briefly, "abortive" in a sense analogous to
Toynbee' s) than have as yet been found. One appropriate line of comparativecivilizational fieldwork for the future will, with luck, be the search for lost
and forgotten cities, carried on with new and superior technical means
afforded by aerial and satellite photography, with searches for patterned,
centric, and radial disturbances of soil and vegetation, showing the patterns
of points and lines that usually represent civilizational geometry. The first
fruitful zone for such exploration will I think be the forested areas of Africa
south of the Sahara.
On another issue (not yet discussed in print), Chase-Dunn is
considerably more skeptical, and I considerably more receptive, to the socialphysics or complex-systems-physics ideas of Arthur S. Iberall, which I have
found productive of useful hypotheses (as to, for example, why and how the
several early-born civilizations initially formed near simultaneously (lberall
and Wilkinson, 1986); the relation of polyculturality to civilization (Iberall
and Wilkinson, 1993); what might be the order of magnitude of the number
of cities and civilizations "missing" from current records and to be searched
for (Wilkinson, 1994, forthcoming).
Gills and Frank. Currently the best short compilation of their
contentions, examined at length in Frank and Gills (1993), is Frank's five
propositions (1993:2). (I) The "existence and development of the present
world system stretches back at least 5000 years": I date its existence back
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3500 years, when there was a critical fusion of its predecessors or roots,
which go back at least 5500 years; in essence we concur. (2) The "same
process of capital accumulation has played a, if not the, central role in the
world system for several millennia": I say "a, but not the" central role, in
this and all other civilizational world systems (but not in the nonurban world
systems Chase-Dunn studies). (3) The "Center-Periphery Slructure .. .is also
applicable to the world system before 1492": having accepted Quigley's
(1961) argument on this point when he made it, I more than agree; the
structure is applicable to all civilizations, that is, to all civiJizational world
systems (but not necessarily to nonurban world systems); I have provided a
more detailed account (Wilkinson, 1991). (4) Hegemony "and rivalry for
the same a!so mark world system history long before" 1492: I agree as to
rivalry, extending my agreement to the other world systems; but there is a
lot less hegemony achieved than is believed, and most of the best-known
"hegemons" (e.g., 19th-century Britain, the United States after World War
II) simply aren't. (5) The "world system cycle" of A phases and B phases
extends back many centuries before 1492: I agree fully, and have confirmed
this independently (Wilkinson, 1992, 1993), for other world systems as weIl. 

(https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1312&context=ccr)