Civilizational Patterns and Civilizing Processes

Abstract

The notion of civilization has from the outset had a double meaning: unitary and pluralistic. Both aspects were important to the development of the social sciences, but attempts to theorize them at the level of basic concepts are of relatively recent date and the results still controversial. While the idea of civilization in the singular found its most seminal expression in Norbert Elias's analysis of the civilizing process, classical sociology did not go beyond inconclusive reflections on civilizations in the plural, and a more explicit frame of reference for comparative analyses has only begun to take shape in the last few decades (most importantly in the work of S. N. Eisenstadt). This article outlines a provisional model of civilizational patterns and suggests ways of linking it to the study of civilizing processes. The main structural components to be noted are cultural interpretations of the world (understood as latent problematics, compatible with a variety of articulations); institutional constellations, with particular reference to the frameworks for political and economic life; and representative ideologies, linked to canonical texts and embodied in the strategies and self-images of sociopolitical elites. The dynamics of these interconnected factors must be analysed in several contexts: on the level of civilizational complexes which encompass whole families of societies; in the historical dimension, stretching across successive generations of societies; and with reference to regional configurations and their distinctive historical patterns. This conception of civilizations provides a background to the analysis of intercivilizational encounters, and a better understanding of the latter theme - on the whole neglected by civilizational theorists, with the notable exception of Benjamin Nelson - will in turn serve to develop a more interactionist theory of civilizing processes.