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22.02.2017 | Symposium: Civilization and Its New Discontents

Civilization: “It Means Just What I Choose It to Mean”

verfasst von: Brett Bowden

Erschienen in: Society | Ausgabe 2/2017

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Abstract

Civilization is a complex and powerful word and idea that should neither be reviled nor revered, but it should be respected. It is said that the idea of civilization can be used simply to describe; but as a binary term, the ideal of civilization can be used to both to describe and evaluate; or pass judgement in the very act of describing. The nature of such concepts is that they can be used to either commend or condemn the actions or peoples they are used to describe.

Vorheriger Artikel “Civilization” and “Mission”

Nächster Artikel Are We Civilized Yet?

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Lucien Febvre, “Civilisation: evolution of a word and a group of ideas,” in A new kind of history: from the writings of Febvre, ed. P. Burke, trans. K Folca (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 219.

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), chapter 6 “Humpty Dumpty.” Emphasis in original.

Brett Bowden (ed.), Civilization: Critical Concepts in Political Science, 4 volumes (London and New York: Routledge, 2009).

Emile Benveniste, “Civilization: A Contribution to the History of the Word,” in Problems in general Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971), p. 289.

Niall Ferguson Civilization: The West and the Rest (New York: Penguin, 2011), and Ricardo Duchesne, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011). A more even handed approach to the subject is Roger Osborne, Civilization: A New History of the Western World (New York: Pegasus, 2006).

See for instance, J. M. Roberts, Triumph of the West (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1985), and Victor Davis Hanson, Why the West Has Won: Carnage and Culture from Salamis to Vietnam (London: Faber and Faber, 2002). A more measured rise and fall or bob of the head approach is taken by Ian Morris, Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).

See Brett Bowden, “The Thin Ice of Civilization,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 36, no. 2 (2011): 118–135.

Albert Schweitzer, The Decay and the Restoration of Civilization: The Philosophy of Civilization. Part I, trans. C. T. Campion, second edition (London: A. & C. Black Ltd., 1947), p. viii.

Albert Schweitzer, Civilization and Ethics, trans. C. T. Campion (London: Unwin Books, 1967), p. 20.

Schweitzer, The Decay and the Restoration of Civilization, p. ix.

Schweitzer, Civilization and Ethics, chaps. 21 and 22, “The Ethic of Reverence for Life,” pp. 212–231, and “The Civilizing Power of the Ethic of Reverence for Life,” pp. 232–244. See also Predrag Cicovacki, “Reverence for Life: A Moral Value or the Moral Value?,” LYCEUM, 9:1 (Fall 2007): 1–10.

Schweitzer, Civilization and Ethics, p. 215.

The claim is based on my book, Brett Bowden, The Empire of Civilization: The Evolution of an Imperial Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

Jean Starobinski, “The Word Civilization,” in Blessings in Disguise; or The Morality of Evil, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p.32.

Bowden (ed.), Civilization: Critical Concepts in Political Science.

Arnold J. Toynbee, Civilization on Trial (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948).

Starobinski, “The Word Civilization”, pp. 7–8.

Febvre, “Civilization”, p. 220.

Benveniste, “Civilization”, p. 292.

Quoted in Starobinski, “The Word Civilization,” p. 1. Emphasis in original.

Febvre, “Civilization”, pp. 220–21.

M. Boulanger Antiquité dévoilée par ses usages (Amsterdam, 1766), Vol. III, Book VI, Ch. 2, pp. 404–405. Quoted in Febvre, “Civilization,” p. 222. Emphasis in original

E.g. Philip Bagby, Culture and History: Prolegomena to the Comparative Study of Civilizations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959); Rushton Coulborn, The Origin of Civilized Societies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959); Carroll Quigley, The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis (New York: Macmillan, 1961); Pitrim A. Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1957), originally published in 4 vols., 1937–1941; and Matthew Melko, The Nature of Civilizations (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1969).

Samuel, P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (London: Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 41.

E. Durkheim and M. Mauss, “Note on the Notion of Civilization,” Social Research 38, no. 4 (1971): 811.

Arnold J. Toynbee, Civilization on Trial (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), p. 24.

Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, revised and abridged edn (London: Thames and Hudson, and Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 44–45.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C.B. MacPherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), Chap. 46, p. 683.

Anthony Pagden, “The ‘defence of civilization’ in eighteenth-century social theory,” History of the Human Sciences 1, no. 1 (1988): 39.

R.G. Collingwood, “Appendix 2: What ‘Civilization’ Means,” in The New Leviathan, David Boucher (ed.), Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992, pp. 502–508.

Collingwood, The New Leviathan, p. 283. Emphasis in original.

Georg Schwarzenberger, “The Standard of Civilisation in International Law,” in Current Legal Problems, ed. George W. Keeton and Georg Schwarzenberger (London: Stevens & Sons Ltd., 1955), pp. 212–234; Gerrit W. Gong, Standard of “Civilization” in International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).

See Gong, Standard of ‘Civilization’ in International Society, 14–15; and Brett Bowden, “In the Name of Progress and Peace: the ‘Standard of Civilization’ and the Universalizing Project,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 29:1 (2004), 43–68; Brett Bowden, “To Rethink Standards of Civilisation, Start with the End,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 42, no. 3, (2014): 614–631.

See Robert Wright, “The World’s Most Dangerous Ideas,” Foreign Policy, 144 (2004): 32–49.

John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (London: MacMillan, 1936), pp. 383–84.

Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 119.

Starobinski, “The Word Civilization,” p. 8.

Quentin Skinner, “Rhetoric and Conceptual Change,” Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought 3 (1999): 61; and Quentin Skinner, “Language and Social Change,” in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. James Tully (Cambridge: Polity), p. 122.

Skinner “Rhetoric and Conceptual Change,” p. 61.

Starobinski, “The Word Civilization,” p. 17. Emphasis in original.

Starobinski, “The Word Civilization,” pp. 17–18.

Starobinski, “The Word Civilization,” p. 18.

Starobinski, “The Word Civilization,” p. 31.

Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, chapter 6 “Humpty Dumpty.”

Titel: Civilization: “It Means Just What I Choose It to Mean”
verfasst von: Brett Bowden
Publikationsdatum: 22.02.2017
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Society / Ausgabe 2/2017
Print ISSN: 0147-2011
Elektronische ISSN: 1936-4725
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-017-0112-2

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