Civilization
Characteristics
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)
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]).13
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."
More Information
- see the book: Beyond Civilization