Civilization and its Contents (review)

Until Sept. 11, 2001 the concept of "civilization" was in a gentle dormant state as far as the social sciences were concerned. The multicultural debates of the preceding decade regarding the hegemony of "Western civilization" as canon in teaching university students standards of humanistic good taste and peaks of knowledge did not arguably disturb the peace of sociology, economics or political science. But the past five years have changed the world, much stemming from challenges to Western civilization: a very violent political challenge from radical Islam, and increasingly strong economic challenges from two civilizations that Weber thought had fatal flaws in the quest for modernity: China and India. Add to this that in the past two decades the social sciences have become increasingly aware of the dynamics of change of the transformations of the world order from an order of nation-states to something called "globalization", forcefully real but lacking a center, and one has all the ingredients necessary to seek a new integrative conceptual framework, a new cognitive vision or road map that might put in play "civilization" and "globalization" into a paradigm for the 21^st century.

It is for this playing field, I imagine, that Bruce Mazlish, an intellectual historian noted for his earlier interpretive study of the birth of sociology, takes up the challenge of "deconstructing" civilization as discourse, its origins, vision and interconnections from its 18^th century Enlightenment context to the present. The result, somewhat like Russian matryoshka nesting dolls, is an engaging, polished study which reads easily with minimal jargon. (He can be forgiven for trying to advance as a concept "accivilization.")

In reaching for the origins and later modern development of the concept, the range is broad, from its initial coinage by the fiery orator Mirabeau, whose Enlightenment vision of civilization was in universalistic terms as a collective achievement of mankind, to the more restrictive and even racialist exclusionist perspective in the 19^th century used as justification for imperial conquest and domination (sometimes idealized as a "mission civilisatrice"). The notion got new analytical and historical terrain in the 20th century by two persons Mazlish thinks highly of: Freud, whose shadow from his Civilization and its Discontents hovers over Mazlish's title, and Elias, with the latter's secularist treatment of civilization as an ongoing historical process having a paramount function of curbing violence for state and elite domination.

It is in the first five chapters that Mazlish is at his best; the subsequent chapters on "other civilizations" and "dialogue of civilizations in a global epoch" offer little insight or substance. It is nice to hear "if the notion of civilization continues to have meaning, it will be in terms of a global civilization and local cultures," but the trail stops cold after the statement "There is also the possibility of empirical research into their actual interactions."(p. 160) The author's ambivalence to "civilization" brings him to conclude that the concept's usefulness is at an end and that we need to expand our notion of what it means to be "civilized."

Chapter Five opens up a needed dialogue between Western/European and "other civilizations," but no mention is made of the fruitful pioneer work of Benjamin Nelson on "intercivilizational encounters" (in Nelson's posthumous On the Roads to Modernity, 1981). That might have come in handy in extending Mazlish's focus on Egyptian civilization and its attraction for the West, if he had shown awareness of the powerful attraction of late 18^th century speculative Freemasonry for Egypt as a cradle of masonry (indicated in the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States).

After Egypt, Mazlish proceeds to the encounter of Japan with the West, and the very successful adaptation ("accivilization") of Japan to become "part of European civilization," though the historical record was not one of contributing "a separate and equal form of the civilizing process." (p. 106) A broader discussion of civilizational interchange should have included the great importance of Japanese aesthetics and art forms coming...