Rethinking Civilizational Analysis (review)

This book is rich in concepts, ideas, and intellectual challenges. It originated in a happy meeting of colleagues at a World Congress of Sociology in Montreal in 1998, when it was planned to publish a special issue of the journal, International Sociology, devoted to rethinking civilizational analysis. The publication of a double issue devoted to that topic in International Sociology occurred in September 2001 — that theme-setting month of the 21st century. After another World Congress symposium on the same topic of civilizational analysis, held in Brisbane, Australia, in 2002, four additional chapters were added to produce this volume of 18 chapters.

It is subdivided into sections on the Intellectual Background (2 chapters), Theoretical Essays (8 chapters), Historical and Comparative Essays (4 pieces), and Critical Essays, another quartet. The editors have also provided the reader with a very useful Introduction that both extrapolates major conceptual issues and provides a synopsis of each of the chapters.

At the center of this collective effort is the question of how sociology can appropriate or reappropriate the concept of "civilization" and "civilizational analysis." Editors Arjomand and Tiryakian seem to be persuaded that the conceptual openings to civilizational analysis set forth by Benjamin Nelson in the 1970s are well worth returning to and building upon. In the meantime, several authors in this collection provide short excursions on the origins of the word and the concept of civilization. Those who review this literature note that the idea of "civilization" in the past was often contrasted with "culture," and such usage was employed to discriminate between those who were thought to be "civilized" and those who were not (themes explored by Mazlish, Levine, Schafer, and others). Wolf Schafer's essay returns to the critical departure of Alfred Weber (Max's brother) who began to see that civilizations are higher level entities that subsume and incorporate particular (and smaller) cultural configurations. The young Robert Merton also contributed to the clarification of this distinction. In the writings of Benjamin Nelson, this conceptual notion that several cultures (and sometimes even whole societies) are found within a particular civilization is persuasively articulated. Nelson's thinking along these lines borrowed deeply from Durkheim and Mauss, and this thematic is picked up several times in these essays (on which more below).

In his theoretical essay on civilizational analysis, Edward Tiryakian puts contemporary sociologists in a potential third generation of civilizational analysts. The first generation included Max Weber, Emile Durkheim and his nephew Marcel Mauss. A translation of a selection from Mauss' thinking about the concept of civilization is also included here. Regrettably, the more famous "Note on the Notion of Civilization" by Durkheim and Mauss of 1913 that Nelson translated and published in Social Research (1971) is not included in this volume, though it is referred to by both Donald Nielsen and John Rundell.¹ It was in that essay that Durkheim and Mauss articulated the seminal idea that certain social phenomena exist that have a remarkable "coefficient of expansion and internationalization" (Durkheim and Mauss 1971: 812) that gives rise to civilizations and "civilizational complexes." That is, cultural or symbolic phenomena exist that have the capacity to expand beyond local, regional, and national borders and which generate civilizations — that is, entities transcending local culture(s). Max Weber was particularly interested in the great "world religions" precisely because they had this ability to transcend the cultural and ethnic particularities of their origins, and hence to shape life and social process in distant places. The same could be said about major systems of law.

In any event, according to Tiryakian's classification, Pitirim Sorokin, Norbert Elias, and Benjamin Nelson constitute the second generation of major civilizational analysts. For many decades Elias' work was largely ignored outside of Europe, and that I believe is because Elias' conception of the "civilizing process" is a throwback to the provincial concept that served to separate the "civilized" and the non-civilized. Such a conception had no place in Nelson's, Merton's or Max...