Antisemitism and the Constitution of Sociology

8. Civilization(s), Ethnoracism, Antisemitism, Sociology

8 Civilization(s), Ethnoracism, Antisemitism, Sociology ROLAND ROBERTSON In this chapter I undertake an interrogation of the principal uses of the concept of civilization. While this volume as a whole is primarily concerned with antisemitism and sociology, I attempt to frame this issue by consideration of a more encompassing theme, a theme in which I contend that the phenomenon of antisemitism and, more generally, ethnoracism can be fruitfully located. Nonetheless it has to be strongly emphasized that I am not in any way relativizing antisemitism, most certainly not the European Holocaust of the 1940s, as has increasingly become a political and intellectual habit.1 In other words, I have no wish to consider antisemitism as “just” one form of discrimination—more strongly, racism. Rather I wish to locate this phenomenon in the broadest and most useful context possible. It should also be noted that the word antisemitism was apparently not coined until the late nineteenth century.2 It is difficult to draw a definite line between relativization, on the one hand, and contextualization, on the other. In any case one can, with sufficient analytic penetration, combine the two.3 It has to be emphasized that the past few decades have seen a number of tragically cruel incidents of what has come to be called ethnic cleansing, such as those in the Balkans, various parts of Africa, and yet other places.4 Indeed Ahmed has posed the question as to whether ethnic cleansing is what he calls a metaphor for our time, while the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has spoken of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.5 Patricia Hill Collins has cogently illustrated the problems involved in treating race and ethnicity separately in a global perspective, particularly since different national sociologies have had different definitions of race and ethnicity and have varied in their attention to or neglect of both Cvilization(s), Ethnoracism 207 of these phenomena.6 The suggestion that ethnic cleansing is indeed a metaphor for the contemporary human condition casts some light on this particular problem. This is a perspective that will pervade the present discussion. In addition “ethnicity” and “race” are considered alongside “religion,” “culture,” “tradition,” and “nation.”7 Three Concepts of Civilization For many years—particularly during the decades of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s—the theme of civilization had been more or less dominated in various academic and intellectual circles by discussion of the work of Norbert Elias, in spite of other important contributions to what some have called civilizational analysis. The Eliasian trend was, however, interrupted by the publication of Samuel Huntington’s article on the clash of civilizations.8 The latter phrase was apparently borrowed explicitly from the historian of the Middle East Bernard Lewis,9 even though this general idea has had a very long history, going back at least as far as the Christian Crusades. The interruption came to a head—indeed a crash— with the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York and the attacks on the Pentagon in Washington DC and in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001. These resurrected the theme of civilization dramatically, although in a very different way to that which had been undertaken by Elias and his followers or indeed the (rival) practitioners of what has been called civilizational analysis or the forerunners of the latter, such as Toynbee and his epigones, most notably Carroll Quigley.10 For the most part the deployment of this theme in the writings of journalists and academics, not to speak of the pronouncements of politicians, became strikingly polemical in the aftermath of 9/11. In fact it quickly led to the so-called war on terror, involving the use of civilization in a highly normative sense.11 However, the novelty of this use of civilization should not be exaggerated , as the global trauma produced by 9/11 stood in a long line of deployments of this term to denote the Other. This has been particularly true of “European civilization” regarding Islam as the Other for many centuries, as well as viewing Islamic countries as potential or actual colonial possessions . There is also the case of the internal “Other,” as for example Jews and Freemasons. In fact the ancient Greeks used the word pharmakos , meaning “magician” or “poisoner,” to refer to the internal Other.12 Nonetheless it has been “the Turk” who has been the most continuous 208 Robertson and lingering Other for Europe. A parallel use of...