Tareas

Chapter 2 – Civilizations in History and Today
The Nature Of Civilizations

p. 40Human history is the history of civilizations. It is impossible to think of the development of humanity in any other terms. The story stretches through generations of civilizations from ancient Sumerian and Egyptian to Classical and Mesoamerican to Christian and Islamic civilizations and through successivemanifestations of Sinic and Hindu civilizations. Throughout history civilizations have provided the broadest identifications for people. As a result, the causes, emergence, rise, interactions, achievements, decline,
and fall of civilizations have been explored at length by distinguished historians, sociologists, and anthropologists including, among others, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Oswald Spengler,Pitirim Sorokin, Arnold Toynbee, Alfred Weber, A. L. Kroeber, Philip Bagby, Carroll Quigley, Rushton Coulborn, Christopher Dawson, S. N. Eisenstadt, Fernand Braudel, William H. McNeill, Adda
Bozeman, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Felipe Fernández-Armesto.[1]These and other writers have produced a voluminous, learned, and sophisticated literature devoted to the comparative analysis of civilizations.Differences in perspective, methodology, focus, and concepts pervade this literature. Yet
broad agreement also exists on central propositions concerning the nature, identity, and dynamics ofcivilizations.

First, a distinction exists between civilization in the singular and civilizations in the plural. The idea of civilization was developed by eighteenth-century French thinkers as the opposite ofthe concept of “barbarism.” Civilized society differed from primitive society because it was settled, urban, and literate.

To be civilized was good, to be uncivilized was bad. The concept of civilizationp. 41provided a standard by which to judge societies, and during the nineteenth century, Europeans devoted much intellectual, diplomatic, and political energy to elaborating the criteria bywhich non-European societies might be
judged sufficiently “civilized” to be accepted as members of the European-dominated international system. At the same time, however, people increasingly spoke of civilizations in the plural. This meant “renunciation of a civilization defined as an ideal, or rather as the ideal” and a shift away from the
assumption there was a single standard for what wascivilized, “confined,” in Braudel’s phrase, “to a few privileged peoples or groups, humanity’s ‘elite.’ ” Instead there were many civilizations, each of which civilization in the plural sense could in fact be quite uncivilized in the singular sense.[2]

Civilizations in the plural are the concern of this book. Yet the distinction between singular and plural retains relevance, and the idea ofcivilization in the singular has reappeared in the argument that there is a
universal world civilization. This argument cannot be sustained, but it is useful to explore, as will be done in the final chapter of this book, whether or not civilizations are becoming more civilized.

Second, a civilization is a cultural entity, outside Germany. Nineteenth-century German thinkers drew a sharp distinctionbetween civilization, which involved mechanics, technology, and material factors, and culture, which involved values, ideals, and the higher intellectual artistic, moral qualities of a society. This distinction has persisted in German thought but has not been accepted elsewhere. Some anthropologists have even reversed the relation and conceived of cultures as characteristic of primitive, unchanging,nonurban societies, while more complex, developed, urban, and dynamic societies are civilizations. These efforts to distinguish culture and civilization, however, have not caught on, and, outside Germany, there is overwhelming agreement with Braudel that it is “delusory to wish in the German way to separate culture
from its foundation civilization .”

Civilization and culture both refer to the...