Civilization And Its Contents - Brossura

Mazlish, Bruce

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0804750831 ISBN 13: 9780804750837

Casa editrice: Stanford Univ Pr, 2005

Riassunto

"Civilization" is a constantly invoked term. It is used by both politicians and scholars. How useful, in fact, is this term? Civilization and Its Contents traces the origins of the concept in the eighteenth century. It shows its use as a colonial ideology, and then as a support for racism. The term was extended to a dead society, Egyptian civilization, and was appropriated by Japan, China, and Islamic countries. This latter development lays the groundwork for the contemporary call for a "dialogue of civilizations." The author proposes instead that today the use of the term "civilization" has a global meaning, with local variants recognized as cultures. It may be more appropriate, however, to abandon the name "civilization" and to focus on a new understanding of the civilizing process.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Bruce Mazlish is Professor of History Emeritus at the Massachuset Institute of Technology and Founding Director of the New Global History Initiative.

Dalla quarta di copertina

“Civilization” is a constantly invoked term. It is used by both politicians and scholars. How useful, in fact, is this term? Civilization and Its Contents traces the origins of the concept in the eighteenth century. It shows its use as a colonial ideology, and then as a support for racism. The term was extended to a dead society, Egyptian civilization, and was appropriated by Japan, China, and Islamic countries. This latter development lays the groundwork for the contemporary call for a “dialogue of civilizations.” The author proposes instead that today the use of the term “civilization” has a global meaning, with local variants recognized as cultures. It may be more appropriate, however, to abandon the name “civilization” and to focus on a new understanding of the civilizing process.

Dal risvolto di copertina interno

Civilization is a constantly invoked term. It is used by both politicians and scholars. How useful, in fact, is this term? Civilization and Its Contents traces the origins of the concept in the eighteenth century. It shows its use as a colonial ideology, and then as a support for racism. The term was extended to a dead society, Egyptian civilization, and was appropriated by Japan, China, and Islamic countries. This latter development lays the groundwork for the contemporary call for a dialogue of civilizations. The author proposes instead that today the use of the term civilization has a global meaning, with local variants recognized as cultures. It may be more appropriate, however, to abandon the name civilization and to focus on a new understanding of the civilizing process.

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Civilization and Its Contents

By Bruce Mazlish

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2004 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5083-7

Contents

Preface.........................................................................ix1 The Origins and Importance of the Concept of Civilization.....................12 Civilization as Colonial Ideology.............................................203 Civilization as European Ideology.............................................494 The Civilizing Process........................................................735 Other Civilizations...........................................................916 The Dialogue of Civilizations in a Global Epoch...............................1127 Conclusions...................................................................138Notes...........................................................................165Index...........................................................................179

Chapter One

The Origins and Importance of the Concept of Civilization

1

In our contemporary world, the word "civilization" comes tripping off our tongues. It is used in innumerable settings. It is applied to all sorts of past societies, ranging from the Mesopotamian, the Roman, and the Aztec on up to contemporary Western society and its counterparts. We take it for granted that the word has been around since the dawn of-civilization. The extraordinary fact, however, is that the reified noun "civilization," with its accompanying spread as a concept, did not exist before the Enlightenment. It is a neologism of that period. Our first task, then, is to understand how and why this linguistic coinage came about and what the content that stands behind it is.

To do this means distinguishing between the adjective "civilized" and the noun "civilization." For millennia, peoples had differentiated themselves from "others," that is to say, barbarians, by proclaiming themselves civilized or polished. This proud and self-satisfied imaging seems a universal one. We can find it among primitive groups, although the terms "civilized" and "polished" may be missing. It is certainly present among what we have come to call great civilizations, such as the Chinese or the Egyptian. Some version of the dichotomy seems to be essential for peoples trying to mark off their own identity. The exclusion and disparagement of an "other" is a fundamental psychological mechanism by which to achieve this end. Civilization is a form of accomplishing that task.

The manner and times in which this universal piece of human behavior manifests itself is a subject for history. In terms of history, the Greeks are of critical importance for the emergence of the terms "barbarian" and "civilized." It seems that Homer, although he never used the term "barbarian," first made unique use of the epithet, speaking of "bar-bar" speakers, namely, ancient Carian barbarians who, to his ears, babbled. There is a nice irony, as we shall see, in this fact, for it appears that some form of history may be considered a defining quality of civilization. Even from the beginning, a sense of separating myth from history lurks in the background of the belief that one is civilized and thus apart from an earlier state. As we know, history as a "scientific" discipline, offering a sense of secular causality, emerges in the fifth century, with Herodotus. And the father of the new form of inquiry, historia, was himself not purely Hellenic, but had been born in Caria, within the province of Lydia, as a subject of the Persian Empire!

Such irony aside, the Greek view of us/them, civilized/barbarian solidified as a result of victory in the Persian Wars of 480-479 B.C. It drew insistently upon the notion of the polis, the city. It was only in the city that one spoke "in public," in a civilized manner, rather than babbling in an uncouth and impolitic tongue. The city, in turn, was based on an agricultural hinterland. The rural and the city thus go hand in hand in the early millennia of the civilized state. This synergy stood in opposition to the anti-Greek, such as the Scythian: nomadic, nonagricultural, nonurban, and uncivilized. Here was the "other" to the Greek, in his purest form.

To us today, the ancient Greek attitude to women, the "other" sex, does not seem very civilized. The female sex was disparaged, and they were lumped along with slaves and children as outside the circle of citizenship. In fact, the Greeks were ambivalent, and the male relation to mothers and wives was filled with tension. One need only think of the plays Lysistrata, Medea, and Antigone to break open the generalization. Still, overall, women in Greek life were backgrounded figures, inferior beings by essence. Having said this, however, we must add that fifth-century Athenians, for example, saw themselves as vastly superior in this respect to the barbarian others, who copulated promiscuously and openly, that is, in an uncivilized manner.

Historical awareness, agriculture, the polis, a more refined treatment of women, such are some of the attributes the Greeks allocated to themselves as "civilized" beings. These attributes become essential elements of the further development of the term and provide reasons for the later claim that ancient Greece was the cradle of Western civilization, when the noun enters common discourse. Their version of what we have come to call civilization rested on the attributes listed above and on possession of a common religion, the practice of shared rituals, and the claim to be one race, with a linguistically defined ethnicity. Looked at more closely, we see that the Greek gods, for example, were partly derived from Near Eastern mythology and philosophy, suitably transfigured and transformed by local usage. Here, at the very beginning, so to speak, we encounter the fact that civilization is always a matter of what, following the example of the term "acculturation," I shall call "accivilization" (using the Latin prefix ac-, signifying "toward"), that is, the borrowing of elements from "other" civilizations, while proclaiming one's unique, advanced state and status.

2

Before the arrival of the abstract noun "civilization," there lay at least two millennia of efforts by, in this case, Greeks, Romans, and medieval Europeans, to distinguish themselves from "barbarians" by verbs and adjectives referring to civility and cultivation. Fortunately, there are a number of major scholarly efforts delineating the subject and tracking the usage employed over the centuries in various parts of the emerging Western world. I shall rely heavily on these works, without repeating what they say, but referring the reader directly to them for this part of the history.

I shall instance here only one small part of that story. It concerns the Roman use of the terms cultus and cultura (it is noteworthy that the Greeks had no such term, referring only to paideia, or what would later be called Bildung in German). Culture is connected to agriculture, the cultivation of domestic crops. It is what the species wins from nature, thereby setting itself apart. In the process, mankind enters upon urban existence, the division of labor, the creation of a priestly class, and the "cultivation" of the arts and sciences. Written languages come into existence, supplementing the oral as the dominant means of communication. These are some of the characteristics that mark off "civilized" people from "barbarians." Implicit, of course, in this development is a future confusion between the terms "civilization" and "culture."

I want to argue that we must define civilization initially and mainly as a historical phenomenon, rather than seeking to treat the concept in an abstract fashion and then imposing it on the materials. We have to take on the Hegelian task of understanding how self-consciousness as to its own activity came into being. Such a procedure requires us to immerse ourselves in the history of humankind's reflections upon itself and its achievements. In undertaking this effort, I shall focus initially, as I indicated earlier, on the Western concept of civilization, and subsequently broaden my focus.

3

What primarily requires explanation is why the concept of civilization-as opposed to "being civilized" or "not being barbarian"-did not emerge until the late eighteenth century. When, exactly, did the reification take place, and why did it occur at that particular time? In his article in the volume Civilisation: Le Mot et l'ide, Lucien Febvre declares that he has found no usage of the term before 1766 in any French text. However, as both the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe and Jean Starobinski convincingly argue, the first usage in an accepted nonjuridical sense appears to be in 1756, by Victor Riqueti Mirabeau (the father of the French revolutionary politician) in his L'Ami des hommes. It is on this fact that I want to build my analysis of a changed consciousness.

It is puzzling, but little or no attention, as far as I can tell, has been paid to Mirabeau's intentions in using the word, or to the context in which he introduced it. In fact, he uses it only three times in the course of a book of well over 500 pages. In its first occurrence, we are told that "Religion is without doubt humanity's first and most useful constraint; it is the mainspring of civilization" ("La religion est sans contredit le premier et le plus utile frein de l'humanit: c'est le premier ressort de la civilisation"). Our initial surprise, then, is that in the supposedly secularizing Enlightenment, civilization is seen as resting on a religious basis. Our next surprise, on continued inspection, is that the word, attached as it is to religion, first occurs in a chapter on "Work and Money." Here we are told that religion, as opposed to cupidity and luxury, preaches fraternity and softens our hearts. It underlies sociability.

The second usage occurs many pages later. Increasing luxury, we are told, brings an increase in poverty and a decrease in population. "From there one can see how the natural circle leading from barbarism to decadence, by way of civilization and wealth, might be begun again by a clever and attentive minister, and the machine reactivated before coming to an end" ("De-la nitroit comment le cercle naturel de la barbarie la decadence par la civilisation et la richesses peut tre repris par un ministre habile et attentif, et la machine remonte avant d'tre sa fin.") Here, we are warned of the danger of civilization falling into decadence. The last usage says that "in financial affairs we can see this ghost or specter of barbarism and oppression weighing down on civilization and liberty" ("voyons dans les tats de finance ce revenantbon de la barbarie et de l'oppression sur la civilisation et la libert").

What are we to make of this birth of the reified term "civilization"? L'Ami des hommes itself was published anonymously, caught on immediately, went through a number of editions, and then sputtered out. It was written in haste-six months-and its prose is uninviting; Mirabeau himself boasts of his poor style as the sacrifice made for the truth, which speaks for itself. We must remember further that Mirabeau was one of the leading Physiocrats, and an emphasis on agriculture is the context in which to view his book and his notion of civilization. He was also heavily influenced by Montesquieu, and, as a member of the lesser nobility, was a supporter of the old "feudal" order against the encroachments of the centralizing monarchy.

What else does Mirabeau intend by the term? The subtitle of L'Ami des hommes is Trait de la population. Mirabeau is concerned with economics as much as morality in his book. He is perhaps the first to embrace the "social question" in its full extent: agriculture, industry, commerce, money, justice, police, manners, luxury, beaux-arts, the marine, colonies, war. Although these topics are treated in a disorderly fashion, the end result is an incipient definition of what constitutes a civilization. It entails a particular form of sociability, which favors increased population, liberty, and justice. Harking back to the original basis of civilization, agriculture, Mirabeau opposes civilization's roots in the city and its future in increased industrialization. In short, the term "civilization" enters the world looking back to an old order and not forward to the coming of the nation-state and commercialized society.

No matter. Mirabeau had loosed upon the world a new concept, which then took on a life of its own. Although the Dictionnaire universel franois et latin (or Dictionnaire de Trvoux) of 1743, speaks of civilisation as a "term of jurisprudence," where it designates a society in which civil law has replaced military law, it remained for Mirabeau to broaden the term so that it referred as well to a group of people who were polished, refined, and mannered, as well as virtuous in their social existence. Within a decade or so, the designation had swept over Europe and become a commonplace of Enlightenment thought. Increasingly, its religious basis was overturned and it became a secularized "apotheosis of reason" (to use Starobinski's term). As such, it also formed part of the idea of progress and became the third phase in conjectural history, signaling the last stage in the movement of humanity from savagery to barbarism and then to civilization. When Samuel Pufendorf, in his De jure naturae et gentium of 1672, offered the quintessential account of humanity's development out of barbarism, he did not have available the key word for his terminal point; now it existed, "civilization."

4

Now that we have a deepened idea of how the concept of civilization came into being, with Mirabeau, we can return to the question: why did the reified concept wait to emerge till 1756? The full answer to our question is necessarily overdetermined and multicausal. Moreover, as we have noted, civilization is not a static concept.

The roots of the concept are in the European expansion, starting in the fifteenth century and taking on new life in the eighteenth century with the South Seas explorations. The encounter with new world "primitives" and then Pacific Island peoples evoked the query: how did "civilized" man arise; and this, in turn, required renewed attention to the definition of civilization, as demarcating the last stage of mankind's development from an original barbarism and savagery. I shall go into detail about both the New World discoveries and the South Seas explorations in the next chapter.

Staying for the moment with the general, overall factors leading to the concept of civilization, I want at least to note the role of what can be called the Turkish Threat. For some, 1453, marking the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks, is more important than 1492 in causing the rise of reflectivity on the self and the other. By means primarily of travel reports, an "occidental anthropology," or ethnography, arose. It moved beyond the form of the medieval conflict, posed in terms of Christianity being the one true religion that must wipe out its Muslim opponent, to a description of Islam as a "thing," that is, a fact needing description and analysis in order for the West to defend itself against its onslaught. Furthermore, it sought to understand this other by means of categories, such as customs, agriculture, economy, government, and geography, alongside of religion. In short, it resorted to a new epistemology in order to objectify the other in whose light it could consolidate its own image as a Christian/ European civilized society.

Thus, for various scholars, the response to the Turkish Threat in the form of ethnography can be seen as a prime factor in preparing the way for the emergence of the reified term "civilization." This is an important argument. I wish to qualify it only by adding that the Ottoman encounter lacked two elements vital to the formation of a "European" identity. The first is that the Turkish capture of Constantinople was a land-based challenge that evoked a defensive posture also primarily on land, although great sea battles, such as that of Lepanto (1571), must also be noted. The New World explorations, in contrast, were maritime in nature, and it was as sea powers that the Atlantic nations defined their identity, which then merged with that of Central Europe as it attempted to oppose the Turks with a "European" identity. The second element emphasizes the expansionary nature of 1492 and its consequences. As expansionists, the Western nations could both define their own "civilization" and export it to uncivilized others. Thus, we must reckon with both defensive and triumphant elements as preparing the way for the emergence of the notion of Western civilization.

(Continues...)

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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Stanford Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2005
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0804750831
• ISBN 13: 9780804750837
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero edizione: 2
• Numero di pagine: 188
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile