Civilization

Civilization

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A Latinate word civilization ranks among the master concepts in the history of modernity. As such, it bears enormous semantic and historical density and has important relations with other master concepts of the modern, such as history (in the modern sense of a collective singular totality), progress, development, culture (in both the high and low senses), and modernity itself. The earliest recorded use of the term civilization in English dates from the first decade of the eighteenth century, though it appeared in a strictly legal context, referring to the conversion of a criminal matter to a civil one; this meaning is now obsolete (even as a juridical dimension extends into present usage). In its relevant modern sense, civilization was established in the second half of the eighteenth century—especially in the wake of the French Revolution (1789–1799)—and was further consolidated through the nineteenth century as a comparative and hierarchizing metahistorical, meta-anthropological concept. The term has since experienced a complex trajectory, shot through with ethico-political moment, always with the Euro-American world (especially the habits and ideologies of its elite classes) as the critical reference point.

The noun civilization built on the seventeenth-century verb civilize to indicate both the process of uplifting to a higher state of humanity and of subjection to law, as well as the denouement of such development. Civilization was thus understood to be simultaneously the process and the end state of progress. This process was further understood to be stadial, progressing from savagery through barbarism to civilization, a schema that was variously rearticulated and nuanced over the course of the nineteenth century. Though other civilizations were recognized (e.g., ancient Egypt)—typically state-based and stratified societies of imperial reach, with major cities, monumental architectural features, and significant written literatures—these were found to be lacking in some aspect of leading contemporary Western societies and were considered to that extent barbaric.

The semantic elements of civilization correspond closely with features of the European historical horizon in which the term emerged and matured. This horizon, extending from circa 1500 onward, includes: colonialism (co-emergent with the Renaissance, but accelerating from the second half of the eighteenth century through the nineteenth); the intensification of urbanization and the eventual emergence of major European capitals; the interrelated processes of the marginalization of the Catholic church in the European state system, the emergence of Protestant sects, and the spiritualization of strands of Christian theology; the monopolization of violence by the absolutist state, and the related development of courtly manners; the achievement of a law-governed European inter-state system (first through the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, and then the 1815 Congress of Vienna); the spread of disciplinary institutions and technologies of the self; the global rise of European capital, and the correlative emergence and consolidation of European bourgeois classes and consumerism; the development of private property from the late seventeenth century and accelerating from the second half of the century (e.g., in England with the enclosures movement); the interrelated development of parliaments, national polities/states, and electoral democracy (beginning in the seventeenth century in England for the propertied classes and extending both horizontally and vertically throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries to universal adult franchise, excluding the non-European colonies); and of course the development of the arts, sciences, and technology, especially at an accelerated pace since the Enlightenment (i.e., roughly the eighteenth century).

Thus, the significations accruing to civilization have been the following: European/Western; urban and urbane; secular and spiritual; law-abiding and nonviolent (i.e., limited to legalized violence, both within and between states); polished, courteous, and polite; disciplined, orderly, and productive; laissez faire, bourgeois, and comfortable; respectful of private property; fraternal and free; cultured, knowledgeable, and the master of nature. The uncivilized conversely are: non-Western; rural, or worse, savage; idolatrous, fanatical, literalist, and theocratic; unlawful and violent (i.e., given to violence outside juridical procedure); crude or rude; lazy, anarchic, and unproductive; communistic, poor, and inconvenienced or beleaguered; piratical and thievish; fratricidal (or, indeed, cannibalistic) and unfree; uncultured, ignorant, illiterate, superstitious, and at nature’s mercy. Given this stark set of binaries, it is not surprising that the civilizing mission (a related concept that emerged in the nineteenth century) has often been the ideological counterpart of projects of colonial domination and genocide, especially in the non-Western world, but also in the European hinterland and vis-à-vis European minorities and subaltern classes.

Marginal to the main thrust of the concept’s history, critiques of civilization have accompanied it throughout, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) in the mid-eighteenth century through Romanticism to anarchoprimitivist strands in the contemporary antiglobalization movement (Zerzan 2005). These critiques, especially in German lands in the nineteenth century (Elias 2000), have often relied on the concept of culture as a more local, authentic, egalitarian, and communitarian alternative, though just as often culture has been co-opted by nationalist projects. There is ultimately much slippage between culture and civilization. This slippage is evidenced in Samuel Huntington’s much discussed book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), where the concept of civilization appears to be just culture on a grand scale—which is moreover decoupled from the now largely archaic concept of civility: Would it be possible to imagine a “clash of civilities”?

The first recorded use of the word civilization in its relevant, modern, as opposed to the archaic juridical sense, points toward another semantic element that has received remarkably little attention given its extraordinary significance. It is now accepted that the term was first used in 1756 in L’ami des hommes (The Friend of Man) by Victor de Riqueti (1715–1789), the marquis de Mirabeau, an important physiocrat. In this work, Mirabeau asserts: “Religion is without doubt humanity’s first and most useful constraint; it is the mainspring of civilization” (cited in Mazlish 2004, p. 5). The close association in Mirabeau between religion and civilization (at a time when the term religion was all but synonymous with Christianity, non-Christian peoples being found to be either lacking religion, or possessing more or less pale approximations or deviations of Christianity) surprises only because of the inherited dogma that the civilizational process coincides with the vanishing of religion (in which direction the first step is the avowed rationalization of religion, that is, the emergence of the Protestant sect). In fact, civilization has been coupled with Christianity and (Western) Christendom throughout its career (Perkins 2004), and missionaries have been key and continuing agents of the civilizing mission. Even today, a measure of merely the iceberg’s tip in this regard is the character of debates on the accession of Turkey to the European Union, as well as the statements of prominent Western opinion makers and leaders in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001 (most explicitly U.S. president George W. Bush and Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi). Even in high scholarship, an important sociologist of religion, Rodney Stark, published a book in 2005 under the title The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success.

Given the historicist character of civilization, this coupling is inevitable: If civilization arose, or developed its standard form, in Christendom, how can the latter not continue to be credited and effectively associated with its achievement? Relatedly, if secularism (an important constituent of civilization) emerged out of the Protestant Reformation—as is frequently avowed, especially in the United States—how can the latter not be so accredited and effectively linked? The same can be said for the origi-nary relationship between capitalism and civilization, a view registered in the cold war perception of the Soviet Union as an example of barbarism and “Asiatic despotism.” This view is no doubt also indebted to the shifting cartography of the “uncivilized” Orient, which has often extended into eastern Europe (or even central Europe, as during the Third Reich), not to mention the enduring if older legacy of the secession of the Eastern Church from Rome.

In charting the trajectory of civilization, contemporary scholars often index and discuss attitudes of superiority in premodern and non-Western contexts (e.g., the old Chinese binary of “kaihua/wenming versus fan,” which roughly corresponds to “civilized versus barbarian”). But it is important to keep the following in mind: It is no doubt the case that all human collectivities have ways of distinguishing themselves from others, and this process takes on an increasingly hierarchical accent in large stratified collectivities. With stratification, moreover, come concepts that discriminate between members of various levels and groups within. However, both the flexibility and form of the inside-outside distinction, as well as the forms of internal hierarchy, vary widely, and are in each case specific, even if dynamic. For the exercise to have any meaning, therefore, it is critical that analysis stays with this specificity. The surest guide in this regard is the material language of the concept in its discursive trajectory, that is, the Latinity of civilization. Furthermore, the non-Latinate analogs that have emerged since the mid-1800s (e.g., the Japanese bunmeikaika, coined circa 1880) are translations carried out in a highly asymmetrical historical context dominated by the Latinate, and are thus both defensive and derivative. Indeed, the force of Eurocentric civilizational discourse has been such that anticolonial ideologies have attempted to claim the origins of “civilization” for themselves, as in the Afrocentric scholarship of Cheikh Anta Diop. However, if other conceptions of civilization did hold out some hope in the first half of the twentieth century, as anticolonial movements highlighted the inconsistencies between the theory and practice of European civilization, and attempted to imagine alternatives—exemplified by Mohandas Gandhi’s (1869–1948) famous quip about Western civilization that “it would be a good idea”—at the beginning of the twenty-first century, civilization appears to function as the master concept for the legitimation of elites everywhere.

SEE ALSO Culture; Diop, Cheikh Anta

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Diamond, Stanley. 1974. In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

Diop, Cheikh Anta. 1991. Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology. Trans. Yaa-Lengi Meema Ngemi. Eds. Harold J. Salemson and Marjolijn de Jager. New York: Lawrence Hill.

Elias, Norbert. [1939] 2000. The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. Rev. ed. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell.

Febvre, Lucien. [1930] 1973. Civilisation: Evolution of a Word and a Group of Ideas. In A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre, ed. Peter Burke, trans. K. Folca, 289–296. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Huntington, Samuel. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Mazlish, Bruce. 2004. Civilization and Its Contents. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Perkins, Mary Anne. 2004. Christendom and European Identity: The Legacy of a Grand Narrative Since 1789. New York: de Gruyter.

Starobinski, Jean. 1993. The Word Civilization. In Blessings in Disguise, or, The Morality of Evil, 1–35. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity.

Williams, Raymond. 1983. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Rev. ed. London: Fontana.

Zerzan, John, ed. 2005. Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections. 2nd ed. Los Angeles: Feral House.

Nauman Naqvi