Theoretical Perspectives of Civilizations
Discussion
Mariana Barbosa
"In his book, In Search of Civilization: Remaking a Tarnished Idea, John Armstrong writes that “with the possible exception of God, Civilization is the grandest, most ambitious idea that humanity has devised” (Armstrong, 2011). Samuel Huntington defines it as “the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural labeling people have” (Huntington, 1993a, p.24).
He defines a ‘civilization’ by its language, history, religion, institutions and people’s self -identification and also considers that a civilization might ‘rise and fall’ and ‘divide and merge’ as it is a dynamic entity (Huntington, 1993, p.24).
However, Huntington was not the first to define and use the concept of ‘civilization’ as a way to understand the divisions of the world’s population. The concept of ‘civilization’ did have a mystifying history and its true meaning and correct application was studied by many authors in the past (Werner, 1962, p.95).In the 19th Century Max Weber, Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee and Piritim Sorokin were some of the authors already discussing the true meaning of ‘civilization’.
Alfred Weber, a German economist, geographer, sociologist and theoretician of culture, had a profound influence in this area, by contributing with theories of social change analysis in Western civilization. He tried to restore the concept of civilization in the sociologists and anthropologists’ vocabulary, not by reducing “ social change to the process of urbanization, but rather [by isolating] the sociological element which makes for social change with- in the supersession of familial by a territorial society, wherever it occurs” (Werner, 1962, p.94) Oswald Spengler, a German academic, on the other hand, saw ‘civilizations’ as isolated entities animated by a dominant notion of the world. He would call the ‘civilization phase’ of a culture to its phase of fulfillment (Stockton, 2004). His comparative approach to independent civilizations was later followed by Arnold Toynbee, a British historian. Both grew apart from the conception that civilization and culture are always related to classic civilization.
Toynbee, in his book A Study of History , identified 21 main civilizations, which included Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin America and African (Huntington, 1993a, p.25). Similarly to Spengler, Toynbee had an apocalyptic vision of the world and saw ‘civilization’ as the last phase of culture.
Finally, also in the 19th Century, Pitirim Sorokin, a Russian sociologist, came with a very different idea of ‘civilizations’. He saw
them as mere “locations within which universal processes of socio-cultural change occur” (Kavolis, 2006, p.1). However, according to Edward Tiryakian, Sorokin’s discourse has the same core problem as Toynbee’s, Weber’s and even Spengler’s, as he seeks “to relate within the focus of sociocultural change the inner dynamics of civilizational complexes to transformations of structures of consciousness” (Tiryakian, 1974,p.124).In the 20th Century, Norbert Elias, Carroll Quigley and Shmuel Eisenstadt were some of the authors who continued the search for the right meaning of ‘civilization’ in a sociological context.
According to Dr. Frank W. Elwell, a German sociologist, Norbert Elias followed some of Weber’s notions in his work. Both Weber’s and Elias’ conceptualizations have “ similar origins in the changing character of interactions between social structure and individual personality” (Elwell, 2009). Similarly, Carroll Quigley, an American historian and theorist of the evolution of civilizations, was not totally innovative in his conception of ‘civilization’. As Elias and even Toynbee, he saw civilizations as social modalities centered on urban forms of living, based on its resources, its elites and its space for reflection (Katzenstein, 2010, p.4). Finally, Shmuel Eisenstadt, an Israeli sociologist, viewed “civilizations in terms of multiple modernities” (Katzenstein, 2010, p.3).
Huntington’s way of classification “while different in several respects from those of his illustrious predecessors, also identifies determinants on a grand scale by ‘civilizations’” (Weeks, 1993, p.68)"