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Chapter 5: Cultural-Historical Types and Some Laws of Their Movement and Development
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5 Cultural-Historical Types and Some Laws of Their Movement and Development Out past the waves Of the seas of your mind Is a land, on which shines Full of beauty most glorious An empire of new ideas. —Khomiakov1 I will start right off by explaining some general conclusions or laws of histori-‐‑ cal development, derived from the grouping of historical phenomena into cultural-‐‑historical types. Law 1. Any tribe or family of peoples characterized by a separate lan-‐‑ guage or group of languages with similarities that can be readily detected without deep philological investigation constitutes a distinct cultural-‐‑histori-‐‑ cal type, if it has already grown out of its infancy and is inclined toward and generally capable of historical development. Law 2. For the civilization of a distinct cultural-‐‑historical type to be born and develop, the peoples belonging to it must have political independence. Law 3. The principles of civilization for one cultural-‐‑historical type are not transferable to the peoples of another type. Each type produces its own, influ-‐‑ enced more or less by foreign civilizations preceding or contemporary to it. Law 4. The civilization of each cultural-‐‑historical type only attains full-‐‑ ness, diversity, and richness when its diverse ethnographic elements, inde-‐‑ pendent but not combined into a political whole, form a federation or political system of states. Law 5. The course of development for cultural-‐‑historical types closely re-‐‑ sembles that of perennial plants that bear fruit only once, whose period of growth is indefinitely long, but whose period of flowering and bearing fruit is relatively short and exhausts its vitality once and for all.2 The first two conclusions cannot be doubted and do not require much explanation. In fact, of the ten cultural-‐‑historical types whose development makes up the content of world history, three belong to tribes of the Semitic 1 Khomiakov, see Strakhov’s preface, n. 27. From the 1848 poem “K I. V. Kireev-‐‑ skomu” (To I. V. Kireevskii). 2 Danilevskii is describing monocarpic plants, like bamboo and agave. 5. CULTURAL-HISTORICAL TYPES 77 races, and each tribe characterized by one of the three Semitic languages— Chaldean, Hebrew, and Arabic—had its own distinct civilization. The Aryan languages, as is well known, subdivide into seven main linguistic families: Sanskrit, Iranian, Hellenic, Latin, Celtic, German, and Slavic. Of the tribes cor-‐‑ responding to these seven language families, five (Indian, Persian, Greek, Ro-‐‑ man or ancient-‐‑Italian, and German) were, or are, distinct cultural-‐‑historical types, developed within distinct civilizations. True, one tribe, the Celtic, did not constitute an independent type, but (combined with the decomposing ele-‐‑ ments of Roman civilization and under the influence of the German formative principles) ended up as ethnographic material within the Germanic-‐‑Roman cultural-‐‑historical type. But the Celts lost their political independence at an early stage. Although the Gauls and Britons had the instincts for distinctive development—both in peculiarities of national character and in an indepen-‐‑ dent religious and artistic worldview, as well as favorable conditions of the lands where they resided—all these instincts were crushed by Roman con-‐‑ quest. No civilization can be born and develop without political indepen-‐‑ dence, although once having attained a certain strength, a civilization can continue for some time after losing its independence, as we see in the example of the Greeks. This phenomenon from which there is not a single exception in history is perfectly clear in itself. What hinders the development of the person in slavery also hinders the development of a nationality lacking political inde-‐‑ pendence, since in both cases individuality, having its own goals, is turned into a servile instrument, the means for attaining the goals of others. If an individual or nationality falls into such circumstances at an early stage of development, then obviously its distinctiveness will die. Thus the Celts seem to present an exception from the first law of cultural-‐‑historical movement only because of what the second law requires. Outside the Semitic and Aryan tribes, two other distinct tribes—the Ham-‐‑ itic or Egyptian, and the Chinese—also formed distinctive cultural-‐‑historical types. All other tribes of any significance did not form distinct civilizations, either because like the Celts they were absorbed by other tribes and subordi-‐‑ nated to other cultural-‐‑historical types (such as the Finnic tribes, for example), or because from living in lands unsuitable for culture they did not leave the state of savagery or nomadism (such as the whole black race, and the Mongol and...