CIVILIZATION

1 R C I V I L I Z A T I O N D A V I D C A N N A D I N E On 23 March 1772, James Boswell made an entry in his diary. That morning, he had found his friend Samuel Johnson working on a revised edition of his celebrated Dictionary, and they had discussed a new word by then in circulation that the ‘‘great lexicographer ’’ had been considering for possible inclusion, but which he had on reflection decided to reject. ‘‘He would,’’ Boswell regretfully noted, ‘‘not admit civilization, but only civility’’; yet with ‘‘great deference’’ to Johnson, Boswell ‘‘thought civilization, from to civilize, better in the sense [that it was] opposed to barbarity, than civility.’’ Samuel Johnson may have rejected the word civilization , but it soon received a kind of formal recognition in the pages of Ash’s Dictionary, in 1775. By then, civilization was being freely used in polite and educated circles in England and Scotland, both as a description of the highest state to which society might aspire and as a collective identity opposed to the more venerable solidarity of barbarism. From the outset, civilization as a noun, a concept, and an identity had behind it what Raymond Williams termed ‘‘the general spirit of the Enlightenment.’’ It had come into common currency in France at an even earlier date, and its subsequent adoption 2 C A N N A D I N E Y seems to have been a clear example of British cultural borrowing, so it was scarcely surprising that the patriotically insular Dr. Johnson was not exactly enamored of it. But even without his enthusiasm for the term, civilization soon became established as part of the everyday vocabulary on both sides of the Channel, and in France as in Britain it was often deployed to indicate the highest stage of collective human identity, development, and achievement , not only in politics but also in culture and society. Yet in the German-speaking lands of Europe, where the word Zivilisation also came into use at this time, it did not signify such an exalted state of existence or group identity: it was a ‘‘second-rank term,’’ referring to external appearances and superficialities, which were subordinate to the more weighty German concept of Kultur. So while the British and the French might see themselves as the embodiment of a cosmopolitan European civilization, German speakers knew better; and while the British and the French (and later the Italians) came to contrast the accomplishments and identities of their civilization with barbarism, the Germans related to both of these concepts and identities rather di√erently and more circumspectly. This Enlightenment antithesis, between the embattled collectivities of civilization and barbarism, was historically asymmetrical , for while ‘‘civilization’’ was a relatively recent concept, the term barbarism, to which it was now contrasted, had been common currency on the Continent for more than two millennia. It had originally been used by the ancient Greeks to describe and deride those alien inferiors who spoke some other language: indeed , barbarian was an onomatopoeic rendering of what sounded to the Greek ear as their inane babbling (bar bar); and barbarian was taken up in due course by the Romans to identify those savage unfortunates who resided outside their empire and did not speak Latin. Thereafter, the word was employed as a commonplace derision by Western Christians who regarded themselves as cultivated, superior, and refined, in contrast to those aliens beyond their ken whom they loathed as crude, violent, heathen, inferior, and illeducated ; and it was in this sense that barbarian was widely used in medieval and early modern Europe, when it was variously applied to the Slavs, Magyars, Vikings, Saracens, Arabs, Tartars, and Turks. It was later adopted by the ruling elites of Renaissance C I V I L I Z A T I O N 3 R Italy, who saw themselves as the heirs of Imperial Rome, to denounce the ‘‘northern barbarians’’ invading from France and Germany during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. (The sack of Rome by the German soldiers of Emperor Charles V in 1527 was likened to the alleged fall of the city to...