On the History of 'Western Civilization', Part 1

This picture is used on a lot of sites and stories about 'western civ'
NOTE: here is a link to some recent updates from my research (these are discussions cut from a forthcoming article). 

In a recent tweet thread, I brought together a small number of the early 20th century sources on the concept of 'western civilization'. These sources are some of the earliest--the term doesn't appear as far as I and other scholars have been able to discern, before the 1840s. This is, of course, interesting given how many people who are wedded to the idea of 'western civ' and the classics as its foundation present it as a natural and somewhat 'eternal' identity for Europe and European colonized places, like the US, Canada, and Australia (especially when it gets pushed back to Mesopotamia and Egypt!). As we have heard others state, 'western civ' is a construct. Well, yes. Of course it is. All identities are constructs. Saying it is a construct gets us to point A on the map. In the next few posts, I'd like to get us to points B and C.

What matters is to recognize that neither it nor others are 'natural', that there is no biological claim to any culture(s) based on this constructed identity, and--most importantly--it is necessary to understand how and why it was constructed. This is important especially given that there are people in our world who are willing to kill in the name of 'saving' 'western civilization' from 'white genocide'.

'Western Civ' is, to borrow a term from Benedict Anderson, an 'imagined community'. It is a concept that binds together individuals on three continents who share in 1. settler-colonialism, 2. Christianity (preferably protestant), and 3. whiteness.  These things combined form the foundation of a 'western' identity that claims to have its roots in antiquity, but really only has its roots in the last few centuries. The concept of 'western civ' itself doesn't emerge until the late 19th century. And when it does, it is explicitly white supremacist. As I will show below, this was the point and no one was trying to hide it.

This 'western' identity is, as are all imagined communities according to Anderson, a form of nationalistic identity (a 'white nationalist' identity, as we will see) and created through media-- [great] books and works of art and architecture that allow the people so constituted within the identity to project that identity back into antiquity and forge a linear (imagined) line of descent that is grounded in the equally imaginary foundation myth--sometimes rooted in ancient Mesopotamia, but more frequently in the cultures of ancient Hellas and Rome. By imagining their roots in these ancient societies, they create a bridge between themselves and those peoples through appropriations and receptions of these cultures.

It is because this identity is imaginary, I believe, that people cling to it so fiercely. Without it, there really is nothing that binds together northern Europeans, North Americans, and Australians and New Zealanders of European descent except that the latter are former settler-colonies of the first and a belief in the inherent superiority of ourselves over indigenous peoples. But before we get there (which will be a different post), we need to make sure we understand the nature of the term itself, how it came to be, what the construct contains, and a bit about why it formed. We can then as a community consider more seriously how classics became yoked to the concept and whether we still want to let our discipline be used for promoting ideas of white supremacism (which is NOT just extreme manifestations of racism).

An important point to emphasize: one can have histories of antiquity, of Europe, of the US, without recourse to the imaginary identity of 'western civilization'. There are more programs in the US today (classics and history) that don't use the term 'western civilization' than do and still teach the histories of these regions and people. And the histories are still fascinating. What removing the language of western civilization does is allows these histories to exist more so on their own terms than tied to an artificial justification of white superiority. It also exposes the reality that modern white Americans (among others) are no more or no less the heirs of the ancient Greeks than they are the heirs of ancient China. There are no trajectories prior to the emergence of the western civ narrative in the 19th century that give us priority ownership over the ancient peoples of any place. And we should not need to ground our identity in these myths in order to exist and be healthy and happy.

In this post, I will provide an outline of the development of the concept prior to World War II only. Part of my reconstruction is based upon research of early uses. I also draw from Alastair Bonnett's The Idea of the West (2004). The next post will take up the Cold War reconfiguration (NOTE: who are we kidding. I have yet to get around to this. However, you can read Weller, R. Charles.“’Western’ and ‘White Civilization’: White Nationalism and Eurocentrism at the Crossroads.” In R.C. Weller (ed.) 21st-Century Narratives of World History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 35-80). I will also only deal here with its meaning among Anglophone groups.

***

Let's start with a Google ngram. It isn't a definitive statement on the uses of the term, but it does accurately represent the trends visible with deeper research. I've made it case insensitive so we can get different norms in capitalization. Below, I'll fill in the details with representative samples, but I think the spike between roughly 1940-1965 tell us what we would expect--the term is strongly associated with the Cold War and Civil Rights movement (with a small spike during the Culture and Canon Wars), though its initial rise is clearly linked, as we shall see, with the development of scientific racism. 


If I was a big data person looking to score a publication in a top journal, I'd stop here, but I'm a historian, so let's dig into some specific examples.

1840s-1880s: The earliest use of the term 'Western Civilization' I've been able to find is from 1844 in the annual report of the Society for the Promotion of Collegiate and Theological Education.  The term does NOT refer to some anglo-european culture rooted in antiquity. It refers to the world of the American frontier--at risk for falling into barbarism if Christianity cannot be injected into it through newly established 'western' colleges (like Beloit and Wittenburg--my home university isn't mentioned here but it was established at the same time by Baptists, so maybe?):



Although this is NOT our contemporary meaning of 'western civ', the idea that "A Civilization without Christianity" is defective sticks into future uses. This use of the term 'civilization' here is what Maximus Planudes has referred to as 'civilization 1.0' in the previous post on this blog. Civ 1.0 can only appear in the singular and is in opposition to barbarism and savagery. It is explicitly linked to progress or evolution. You can move up on the ladder of civilization and those with a higher level of civilization are, of course, superior. This idea of 'civilization' may be 1.0, but it remains popular throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The idea of 'western', however, doesn't yet have the vague reference point of anglophone former settler colonies from northern Europe (mostly England). In this 1844 usage, it refers to the direction from the vantage point of the original US states on the Atlantic coast. 


When do we see the shift in the use of 'western' to refer not to an internal continental direction, but to an idea? An 1846 review of fine literature discussing Paget's Hungary and Transylvania uses the geographic 'west' that we are familiar with from the division between western and eastern Europe that dates back to Diocletian. Hungary, here, is the 'connecting link' between east and west, 'like Poland'. This paragraph--the only one that uses the phrase 'western civilization'--is of potential interest for us:



The text goes on and you can see here that 'west' means western Europe, while 'east' means across the Danube. Civilization is also still in its 1.0 guise:



BUT! As the paragraph continues, we see some of the outlines of what will become the future values attached to 'western civ': freedom and against (not yet called 'eastern') barbarism and despotism. 


This 1863 book on Poland and western civ gets us into what will become some of the most important aspects of the Cold War narrative (seems early, I know!). The author, H. Forbes is most likely a Scotsman who participated in the 1848 revolution with Garabaldi in Italy and in Sicily again in 1859. In between, he journeyed to the US as an emigre and hired himself out as a soldier of fortune during the Civil War (see Ch 2 of Lause 2011 A Secret Society History of the Civil War, though this article from 1859 connecting him to Harper's Ferry is revealing--he's kind of the one who told everyone about John Brown's plans). Russia and the Czars are the 'eastern other', the destroyers of civilization. Mr. Forbes here is calling for British support of Poland as a firewall against Czarist autocracy and manifest destiny moving further into western Europe:



 
Czarist Russia is the destroyer of constitutions, the Czar is the 'Autocrat' or the 'Emperor Demagog'. His goal is to foment 'discord, hatred, and bloodshed.' We see 'western civilization' taking shape--it is 'free', 'constitutional', and Christian--but the right kind of Christian; at one point, Mr. Forbes says "yes, I know the Poles are Catholics, but at least they aren't Orthodox!" The centering of Poland in a discourse of 'western civ' shouldn't surprise us either. It will happen again and again.  

Also, importantly, this idea of 'western civilization' in this particular book and later, is explicitly connected to nationalism (the 'present struggle' being the January Uprising):




So, by the mid-1860s, we see the links forging--'western', at least in Anglo-European authors, is connected to western Europe (not the US frontier, as continues into the 1880s in US authors), to superior culture (in opposition to savagery and barbarism, with Christianity as a key element of civilization), about constitutionalism and 'freedom' (in opposition to autocracy and despotism), and it is linked to the idea of the nation-state and national sovereignty. 

What we don't see here are direct appeals to the Greco-Roman past as foundation (though I imagine Forbes' work on Garibaldi may have had some ancient Rome references). We do see in our example discussing Hungary the clear influence of a classical education on the author, of course. I will need to look at Johanna Hanink's The Classical Debt  again to see if we have 'western civ' in the mid 19th century discourse surrounding Greece and the Ottomans because I'm not seeing it in the texts I've found. 

What we also don't see is an explicit connection to whiteness, though the discourse of the American frontier is loaded, of course, with white supremacism as the civilization narrative for the 'west' is about cleansing it of 'savage' and 'barbarous' indigenous peoples and resettling it with properly Christian and 'civilized' white people.

Things change between 1890 and the 1930s. We can take it in chunks.


1890s-1900s: In this period, ‘western civ’ emerges both within discussions of how to deal with imperial possessions by the British, French, and US and it begins to take shape as an alternative to ‘white’ that 1. can encompass an identity beyond national boundaries, and 2. can hide the explicit racism and classism of ‘whiteness’. Alastair Bonnett is good on this material. I will just highlight some of it and contextualize the classical within it, because this is when we start seeing the connections that have yoked the Greco-Roman world and classics as a discipline to the narrative of 'western civ' as we understand it today.

This period of the 1880s-90s is of particular interest in terms of the development of “western civilization” in both the university and popular media with classics at its root. In the US, during this period, we see the move away from Greek and Latin requirements (Columbia University, for example, cut its Greek requirement and reduced the Latin one in 1897) and the appearance of new ‘practical’ programs like anthropology and the physical sciences. At the same time, this idea of a shared ‘white civilization’ that was ‘western’ and linked aggressively to the classical past was popularized through world’s fairs (the Chicago 1893 expo is a great example as is the 1904 St Louis fair ‘The Coronation of Civilization scheduled to coincide with the Olympics in St Louis also) and the development in the US of large public museums.


The entry gate to the 'Creation' exhibition on the Pike at the
1904 St. Louis World Expo.
In other words, as Classics was decentered at the university for science (which included anthropology), it became a vehicle for public dissemination of the same science in support of racism.

This change coincides in the US with the continued expansion of the US westward and the displacement of indigenous populations to ‘reservations’, those, of course, who were not killed as the army preceeded settlers west in battles like Little Big Horn (1876) and Crow Agency (1887). This was also the era of Reconstruction and the installation of Jim Crow and the nationalization of southern segregationism and the wars of US expansion into what had been Mexican territory in what is now the US southwest. It was the golden age of American imperialism and settler colonialism and the whitening of the North American continent. It is also when ‘whiteness’ began to expand beyond its Anglo-Saxon Protestant core and incorporated the French (French Catholics, in particular) and Irish--it would not be until the 1940s that Spaniards, Greeks, Italians, eastern Europeans, and Jews (after WW2) were granted this ‘honor’. It was as if the wounds of the Civil War were being healed by uniting the former white adversaries through their whiteness, a whiteness explicitly defined through the Classical as the root of their shared identity.


Here's an example of how 'western civ' appears in use from 1898: its sounds about like we expect it to sound--evolutionary, with this thing called 'western' as the culmination of millenia of progress (pg 7-9 from the introduction). The great ancient civilizations all get an appearance here, it seems--at least the ones claimed for 'whiteness':





Of course, as soon as 'western civilization' comes into existence, it is doomed (from 1907's aptly titled The Doom of Western Civilization by James Stanley Little). He does not mention Greece once, but refers to Rome, appropriately, since, of course, it is frivolous wealth and dedication to MONEY that will doom the West:


The 1901 "Propaganda of Civilization" by British Prime Minister JR MacDonald and delivered to the West London Ethical Society is one that Bonnett discusses quite a bit. I'll just post some shots. The issue of 'western civilization' is explicitly here mentioned in relation to governing the empire (with a hard dose of Christianity):



One final trend from this period I will note: we begin to see an obsession with the issue of white, i.e. 'western' birth rates and a yoking of a very deep misogyny to the need to perpetuate a pure white race. It is the stirrings of the US eugenics movement (the British had gotten an earlier start with good old Sir Francis Galton, who doesn't talk about 'western civ'). For example:

This 1907 gem in the American Journal of Sociology has lots of charts and serious concerns about the 'fecundity of the foreign-born element' (p2). But the bulk of the article seeks to explain why white people aren't having babies. Blame is set on class mobility, decay of religious values, and, of course, the ladies:

Now, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, because it's GOOD that the lower classes aren't having too many children and exploding the population, he says. There are benefits:


What are some of the 'disquieting effects'? I'll just give some fun quotations and we can move on:






1920s-1930s: The 1907 article above on birthrates which ended on such a racist high note seems to capture a trend for 'western civ' oriented writings We are still connected to debates about empire, but ‘western’ is also a new go-to term within the ‘white crisis’ literature emerging to deal with the various pressures of 1. fracturing of whiteness along class and religious lines and moves beyond the ‘Anglo-Saxon races’ to encompass Catholicism in addition to Protestantism, and 2. Continued fracturing of whiteness along national lines (and rankings of who is properly ‘white’).

The ‘Great Books’ programs at universities develop as a way to recenter classics despite reductions in the languages at universities--an elite discourse of whiteness separate from the ‘working class’ whites, a discipline to demonstrate elite status. But central to these developments, which Bonnett discusses at length, are the ‘white crisis’ authors, many of whom are part of the American Eugenics Movement which used classical sculpture as part of its demonstration of idealized whiteness. Here is one of the most well-known members of the movement,  Lothrop Stoddard, from The Revolt Against Civilization, 1922 (the less racist of his works):
“CIVILIZATION is the flowering of the human species. It is both a recent and a fragile thing. The first glimmerings of genuine civilization appeared only eight or ten thousand years ago. This may seem a long time. It does not seem so long when we remember that behind civilization's dawn lies a vast night of barbarism, of savagery, of bestiality, estimated at half a million years, since the ape-man shambled forth from the steaming murk of tropic forests, and, scowling and blinking, raised his eyes to the stars. Civilization is complex. It involves the existence of human communities characterized by political and social organization; dominating and utilizing natural forces; adapting themselves to the new man-made environment thereby created; possessing knowledge, refinement, arts, and sciences; and (last, but emphatically not least) composed of individuals capable of sustaining this elaborate complex and of handing it on to a capable posterity.”  
WHO IS LEFT OUT FROM CIVILIZATION? “Not all the branches of the human species attained the threshold of civilization. Some, indeed, never reached even the limits of savagery. Existing survivals of low-type savage man, such as the Bushmen of South Africa and the Australian "Black fellows," have vegetated for countless ages in primeval squalor and seem incapable of rising even to the level of barbarism, much less to that of civilization. It is fortunate for the future of mankind that most of these survivals from the remote past are to-day on the verge of extinction. Their persistence and possible incorporation into higher stocks would produce the most depressive and retrogressive results. Much more serious is the problem presented by those far more numerous stocks which, while transcending the plane of mere savagery, have stopped at some level of barbarism. Not only have these stocks never originated a civilization themselves, but they also seem constitutionally incapable of assimilating the civilization of others. Deceptive veneers of civilization may be acquired, but reversion to congenital barbarism ultimately takes place. To such barbarian stocks belong many of the peoples of Asia, the American Indians, and the African negroes.” 
 WHAT ABOUT OUR GREEKS & ROMANS? For the last eight or ten thousand years civilizations have been appearing all the way from Eastern Asia to Europe and North Africa. At first these civilizations were local—mere points of light in a vast night of barbarism and savagery. They were also isolated; the civilizations of Egypt, Chaldea, India, and China developing separately, with slight influence upon each other. But gradually civilizations spread, met, interacted, synthesized. Finally, in Europe, a great civilizing tide set in, first displaying itself in the "Classic" civilization of Greece and Rome, and persisting down to the "Western Civilization" of our own days.” 

Lothrop Stoddard, the author of these unpleasant quotations, was a Harvard trained historian, journalist, and prominent member of the mainstream American eugenics movement. He was well known enough to have been parodied in The Great Gatsby and to have served as a consultant for the Nazi high command.  And yet all of them, a part of the early adopters of the concept of ‘western civ’, use it in ways that are clearly meant to refer to a specific culture, a ‘west’, that is defined not by principles of ‘liberty’, ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, but through race, religion, and power. He isn’t alone. I can give you a dozen more such texts from 1900 to the 1990s that do the same thing.


Three other developments on the 'western civ' front I want to make note of in this post before recognizing that the post really has gone on too long: 1. I have only found one 1906 article that refers to something called 'eastern civilization' that serves as a parallel for 'western civ' (Bryan, William Jennings. Letters to a Chinese official: being a Western view of Eastern civilization. Harper, 1906). Eastern civ = China and it is a response to an earlier article offering a Chinese view of 'western civ'. The opening paragraph is about as fragile as you might expect it to be:


2. "Western Civilization" is sometimes used as translation for the German term"Europäisierung". As in this example from 1936:


So, western civ just means in this case making something European, "Europeanization". That is about as clear as one can be connecting 'western civ' to imperialism, colonialism, and appropriation of the past.


***

Conclusion to Part 1 of this history of the term 'western civilization':  
The historical development of the 'western civ' narrative is bound up to imperialism and colonialism, white supremacism, classism and exceptionalism—a whole range of -isms that position ‘western civilization’ as a ‘white’, Christian, elite culture that is somehow still ‘universal’ and superior to all others. As Alastair Bonnett has argued (quite persuasively, I think): “The term ‘western’ remained and remains racially coded, burdened with the expectation that the world will never be ‘free’, ‘open’ and ‘democratic’ until it is Europeanized” (The Idea of the West34).

It is a narrative premised on a world divided into ‘cultural’ (but really ‘racial’) groups that, as most famously formulated by Sam Huntington, clash and must be ranked against each other--Amartya Sen has said it well, I think: “Theories of civilizational clash have often provided allegedly sophisticated foundations of crude and coarse popular belief. Cultivated theory can bolster uncomplicated bigotry.” (A. Sen, Identity and Violence, 44). I think he has a point. But that's for the next post, because this one has already gotten too long.


The (Black)Faces of Aeschylus' Suppliants

A theatre group at the Sorbonne has been making headlines after a production of Aeschylus' Suppliants they were preparing for was shut down by protestors. What?! This sounds CRAZY! Were the protestors opposed to a possible message of the play as welcoming refugees and immigrants (as seems to have been the point with the Sicilian staging in 2015)? No. They were protesting the play as racist and they have a point.

Here's a picture of the performance (possibly last year's?). See if you can tell me why they might think something was awry:


Notice anything about the actors? Hint--this is a photograph, not a coloring book. That stuff on their skin is #blackface.

Since the protestors blocked the performance, there have been a series of statements from the uni and the director with excuses replete with condemnations of the protestors. John Ma sums it up on a Twitter discussion about it:


The most recent responses have the director saying that it was intended that the actors would wear masks (according to ancient Greek tradition) for the performance, not #blackface. And yet:


Last year's performance apparently had been done in #blackface and, really, do actors do dress rehearsals in #blackface if they are going to wear masks in performance? Why would they not practice instead in the masks and not go through all the time and effort of donning #blackface? And if the director was really interested in capturing the dynamics that emerge from remembering that the Danaids are in the play black-skinned, why not cast appropriately?

Because, one of the remarkable things about the play is that, although the Danaids explicitly refer to themselves as "black" ('black, sun-beaten people" μελανθὲς ἡλιόκτυπον γένος lines 154-5), it is not considered an important mark of their difference at all when they arrive in Greece from Egypt. When the Argive king Pelasgos first sees them, he thinks they look very foreign, but doesn't even notice their skin color:
This group that we address is unhellenic, luxuriating in barbarian finery and delicate cloth. What country do they come from? The women of Argos, indeed of all Greek lands, do not wear such clothes. It is astonishing that you dare to travel to this land, fearlessly, without heralds, without sponsors, without guides. And yet here are the branches of suppliants, laid out according to custom next to you in front of the assembled gods. This alone would assert your Greekness…(ll 245-54).
This play is one of many indicators from ancient Greece that skin color was not usually associated with prejudice. And yet this director managed to take this play and make it all about skin color and prejudice through the employing of a well known racist practice of #blackface--which, by the way, has a long tradition of being just as racist in France as it does in the US.

Additional irony? The thing that marks them as foreign in Aeschylus is their clothing. See anything in the pictures about their clothes? Yep--Greek-style. This director has reversed Aeschylus.

Of course, there is much else to be discussed concerning the reaction to the play. The protestors are reacting to the #blackface and placing it within the context of France's history of colonialism (and its 'official' state denial of racism as a phenomenon in France):



Over the last two weeks, I've given a series of talks on Aeschylus' play and asked myself the question of whether in its original context it was a play about welcoming refugees or about the benefits of the Athenian empire (and so 'colonialist propaganda), or if it was really about the threat and danger of immigrants to Athens. Because audiences aren't monolithic, I think it probably can legitimately be interpreted as all three, depending on who is in your audience.

I've been trying to think of the play within the context of Athens' descent in the 460s and 450s into anti-immigrant policies and strict monitoring of citizenship. The play was performed around 463 BCE, around the time that the new category of 'metic' (translated as 'immigrant' or 'resident foreigner') was created and only a decade before Athens began racializing its citizenship with the passage of the law requiring double Athenian parentage for citizenship and emphasizing its autochthonous birth.

In the play, the king initially rejects the supplication of the Danaids. And he does so based on reasons we all may find familiar--that the Danaids aren't really in danger at home (387-91) or, more importantly:
The case is not easy to judge: don’t choose me to judge it. I have already said I am not prepared to do this without the people’s approval, even though I have the power--if something rather bad should happen the people may end up saying “By giving privileges to foreigners you destroyed our city” (397-401).
And when he is finally convinced to take their petition to the assembly and it is approved and the Danaids enter the city? They bring a war to the city (the sons of Aegyptus invade!), the Argives lose, Pelasgos dies, and, by the end of the last play in the trilogy (our extant play is only the first in a three-play series), the city is under the foreign rule of one Aegyptids (Lynceus) and his wife, the only Danaid (Hypermnestra) who didn't kill her husband on his wedding night. So much for welcoming in refugees as a benefit to the city...

Wow. Hmmmm. I've clearly been feeling a bit cynical given the anti-immigrant, anti-refugee world we seem to have devolved into in recent years.

My point being, however, that the protestors of the Sorbonne production have every right to see the #blackface in this play as racist. They have every right to worry that the play is not being produced thoughtfully or with a message of empathy in mind. Maybe, with his costumes and #blackface, the director was trying to invoke the Ovadia Sicily production. But he failed to understand that France is not Sicily and protestors are well within their rights to sense that a poorly staged, colonialist version of this play could do more to engender prejudice than discourage it. And the director and performers should know better than to don #blackface in rehearsal or performance and then cry foul when they get called on it. 

Classics, Culture, Civilization, Oh My!

Very pleased to be hosting this guest blog post from Maximus Planudes on a history of the terms 'culture' and 'civilization' (in English, French, and German). It will serve as important background for understanding the concept of 'western civ', the history of which I am slowly working through my post(s) on. This is a discussion that bears directly on the history of classics and is well worth the deep dive. This is the first in a possible multi-part discussion. Here also is a collection of examples from the writings of those discussed below (and more!) on culture and civilization.




“It is never a waste of time to study the history of a word” — Lucien Febvre

If you happen to be old enough to remember the late 80s and early 90s, you might be feeling a sense of déjà vu. Didn’t we already fight a culture war where multiculturalism vanquished western civilization? Well, sort of. Just recently a conservative online magazine published a four-part(!) defense of Western Civilization and a scholar in the audience of a panel on the Future of the Classics asserted the importance of Western Civilization, before devolving predictably into racist insinuations. Against this view, Kwame Anthony Appiah, a few years back, devoted his final Reith lecture to the problems of the narrative of Western Civilization and there is at least one scholar who is tracing out the history of the term and its racist background. There is no real need, then, for me to weigh in on that debate, which is in fact not simply a repeat or continuation of the previous culture war. Previously we argued over what books should be taught; now we ask, “Is the concept of Western Civilization useful?” (Spoiler alert, the answer is ‘no’).

I want, instead, to explore the maddeningly elusive words ‘civilization’ and ‘culture’, and the related words in German and French: (Kultur, Zivilisation, Bildung, civilisations, culture). Here is a semantic field of some contemporary importance, but one with a more than usually complicated history (see the 4!! volumes on Civilization edited by Bowden). Moreover, in current usage, these words often occur in highly polemical political debates and with specialized senses in scientific discourse (particularly Anthropology and Sociology). The history is rather well documented, but the diversity of applications and contexts make a simple exposition impossible and, despite its length, this story is only partial.

I was into stashes before they were cool.
The first question is, I think, Why bother? Obviously (to me at least), Febvre is right: studying the history of words is never a waste of time. These words, moreover, not only play a foundational role in our own conceptualization of the field (Harvard teaches a course, Classical Studies 97b, titled “Roman Culture and Civilization”) but they also inform how others understand us. Neville Morley, for all his anti-badger rhetoric, rightly calls our attention to the persistence of concepts within the humanities. There is symmetry in Marc Bloch’s point that “history receives its vocabulary … already worn out and deformed by long usage; frequently, moreover, ambiguous from the very beginning” (The Historian’s Craft, p157).

It seems a worthwhile exercise, then, to explore the history and usage of important words, especially when they are often used as if they had some sort of clear and stable meaning. I will not offer fixed definitions and then explore how others misuse the words; instead, I will trace the ways the words are used. I’m following Nietzsche here, who asserted “only that which has no history can be defined.”

My goal is to make you as confused as I am. Let’s go.



Part 1: Two Ideas of Civilization


“It would be pleasant to be able to define to word ‘civilization’ simply and precisely” — F. Braudel.

Civilization (1.0) is singular, hierarchical and normative. Its significance arises from its use as an oppositional category to barbarism, savagery, primitive. JS Mill is the clearest exemplum of this idea, although it is baked into the word from the beginning (see Blouin): 
Whatever be the characteristics of what we call savage life, the contrary of these, or the qualities which society puts on as it throws off these, constitute civilization. (Civilization, 1836)
Mill’s discussion leans heavily on the idea of social cooperation and, in general, civilization (1.0) refers to complex social relations and their products.  As a universal quality, a society possesses a degree of Civilization (1.0) that places it in a hierarchy. For example, Europeans have a higher degree of Civilization (1.0), which is a good thing to have and better to share, especially at gunpoint. 

Civilization (2.0) seeks, not altogether successfully, to slough off its normative baggage to serve as a purely descriptive purpose. Civilization (2.0) “simply (sic!) refers to all the features that can be observed in the collective life of one human group, embracing their material, intellectual, moral and political life and, there is, unfortunately, no other word for it, their social life…It does not imply any value judgment on the detail or the overall pattern of the facts examined” (Febvre, Civilization). In Civilization (1.0), a group possess some degree of it; in the second, the group and its civilization are coterminous. Civilization (2.0) becomes much more common when people begin talking about civilizations in the plural (dated to 1819 by Braudel).

Although it might seem like civilization (1.0) and (2.0) do not really play well together, Toynbee was happy to have both, which he distinguished typographically: “civilizations have come and gone, but Civilization (with a big ‘C’) has succeeded”. This statement gives the impression that the two usages remain distinct; the two concepts, however, blend into each other in complex ways.  If Civilization (1.0) has pretensions to universalism, (2.0) tends towards essentialism. This multivalent civilization is associated by Bowden with Quentin Skinner’s discussion of ‘evaluative-descriptive’ terms.

Braudel: What would be
 the most French title?

Finally, it is a real curiosity, Braudel points out, that Voltaire did not use the word civilization since if anyone should have invented and used the term, it was Voltaire. Instead, he titled his book Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations. This title clarifies the idea that civilization (2.0) would translate ‘customs and spirit (in the French sense)’ of peoples. Civilization is tied to customs, traditions, ideas, to esprit, to Geist, to what we today call ‘culture’. This is a place where culture and civilization overlap.  This observation leads me to the next problem: culture.



Part 2: Culture, Kultur, and Zivilisation

“Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English Language” — Raymond Williams.

(Jane Fairfax's) heart and understanding had received every advantage
of discipline and culture.

Like Civilization (1.0), Culture (1.0) is singular, denotes a process and is used hierarchically. The established etymology derives culture from Latin cultura and especially from Cicero’s metaphor, cultura animi, which applied the idea of agricultural cultivation to individual self-improvement, using the expression “philosophy is the cultivation of the soul” (cultura enim animi philosophia est Cic. Tusc. II.17.3). This usage and idea returns in the humanist period and informs Francis Bacon and Montaigne at the beginning of the 17 century, where cultura becomes a way of talking about education. Cultura animi is something the individual pursues; it is not a characteristic of groups.

Important changes occurred in German, which borrowed Kultur from French. In part, Kultur retains its sense of cultura animi: it describes individual self-cultivation, serving as a synonym for Bildung. But it also is used, like Civilization (1.0), to talk hierarchically about groups, who possess a certain degree of culture. In the 18th century, Johann Gottfried Herder claimed that each Volk had its own Kultur. He was reacting to the universalizing history of the previous generation, for whom world history was a progression up the ladder of civilization (1.0). And yet, Herder did not use Kultur in the plural. Kultur was still one thing.

Elias: Culture is a cup of tea
and a good book/
Zivilisation, also deriving from French, enters the picture, and the words reshuffle. As Norbert Elias points out, Kultur and Zivilisation were often oppositional categories in Germany. Bildung retains its connection to individual self-actualization. Zivilisation takes on the sense of civilization (1.0) but with often a generally negative connotation, describing superficial manners, stifling bureaucracy, pretty much anything negative and homogenizing in the contemporary world. Indeed, it functions often like “globalization” today.

Spengler: Please tell me again how things
are improving?
Kultur was thus free for a new concept, already hinted at in Herder. As Nietzsche later puts it, “Kultur is, above all, the unity of artistic (künstlerischen) style in the life of a people (Volk). Kultur is the essential character of a people, a character that is expressed in the (typically intellectual, artistic) products of its society. For Christoph Meiners, a classical philologist of the late 18th century, Plato was less important as a philosopher than as an expression of the Athenian achievement. This tendency, to see Kultur as the expression of the unique, authentic spirit of a people, perhaps explains why Kultur can be opposed to the universalizing of Zivilisation

In a civilization (1.0) narrative, Plato status as a philosopher, his unique contribution to world progress, would be highlighted. According to Nietzsche: “Zivilisation has one aim, Kultur another, perhaps the opposite”. Spengler famously treated decline as the inevitable slide from Kultur to Zivilisation. Gyorgy Markus states that “the First World War was fought under the slogans of defense of Western civilization, on the one side, and defense of (German) culture against the deadening, materialist civilization of the West, on the other side.”

Of course, it’s not so simple. Other German writers (Hegel, for example) use the words interchangeably. Here is Freud, in the Future of an Illusion (1927): “Human Kultur — by which I mean all those respects in which human life has raised itself above its animal status and differs from the life of beasts (and I scorn to distinguish between Kultur and Zivilisation).” As if things weren’t bad enough, translators from German tend to use ‘civilization’ to translate ‘Kultur’. 

We have seen that Freud scorned the distinction, so the translation of his famous Das Unbehagen in der Kultur as Civilization and its discontents is perhaps no real problem. I’m less sure about the translation of Wilamowitz’ Geschichte der Philologie. Is the translation that “Greco-Roman Civilization … is a unity” the same as Die griechisch-römische Kultur…ist eine Einheit? And let’s not forget that we’ve been Kultur-waring at least since the late 19th century. All the confusion aside, the German use of Kultur in its oppositional sense to Zivilisation is important in the development of culture (2.0).



Part 3: Cultures

The change from culture (1.0) to (2.0) is often linked to E.B. Tayler’s Primitive Culture (1871): “Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”.

Tayler: Culture is measured in
beard length.
Tayler makes no distinction here between civilization and culture, but he is credited with the anthropological use of culture, or culture (2.0). In anthropological cultures (note the plural), all people are equally cultured because everyone is a product of their social environment. In Anthropology, culture (2.0) is “the system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts that the members of society use to cope with their world and with one another, and that are transmitted from generation to generation through learning.” Appiah contrasted Tayler’s culture (2.0) with Matthew Arnold’s culture (1.0, more or less cultura animi).

George Stocking, however, argued that despite the famous definition cited above, Tayler used culture primarily in the sense of civilization (1.0). What Tayler did was take civilization (1.0), expand the elements covered, and connect it to an evolutionary model: for Tayler, culture was singular and hierarchical. Tayler describes how over time different groups move up the scale of culture (towards, presumably, Tayler himself). For culture (2.0), Stocking points to the work of Franz Boas.

Boas: Dude, I was on the cover of
Time before it was cool.
Boas did not begin with a fully formed anthropological sense of culture. The following passage comes from his address to the anthropology section at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Brooklyn, 1894)
Was the culture attained by the ancient civilized people of such character as to allow us to claim for them genius superior to that of any other race? First of all, we must bear in mind that none of these civilizations was the product of the genius of single people. Ideas and inventions were carried from one to the other; and, although intercommunication was slow, each people which participated in the ancient civilization added to the culture of the others.
Although civilizations appear in the plural, culture remains singular. The language here reflects multiple uses of the words civilization and culture, as well as Kultur (‘genius of a single people’), while also linking the concept of race. In the development of anthropological culture, the ideas of civilizations, German Kultur and race come together. It is from Boas that culture (2.0) develops. The plural “cultures,” according to Stocking, finally appears in his students’ works. Since the mid 20th century, then, the concept of culture (2.0) explodes, being the motivating concept of anthropology, cultural studies, and Kulturgeschichte, and centrally informing many other disciplines, among them history, archeology, and classics.

The words continue to be used in a variety of ways, reflecting this history, but not always reconcilable. Pierre Bourdieu talks about the role of “cultural” capital and Palm Springs has an Institute for Cultural Advancement. Civilization is a video game, a PBS series, and Boston University has an Institute for the Study of the Origins of Civilization (note the singular). Culture can be appropriated or shared. “Culture” and “civilization” can be ways of talking about race, without using the word, as Steve King does.



Culture is also a way of talking about race, but from the perspective of inclusion, in this graphic from the blog of the Winters Group, a consulting group for diversity and inclusion, titled: "What is Diversity? — Part 6: It’s All About Culture".



The culture umbrella covers a lot, e.g. age = culture. Ok, that’s fine for Millennials, but not for Gen-X, whose culture is defined by its absence.


The umbrella reveals the close connection, which we’ve brushed up against a few times already, between culture, civilization, and identity. That is where I will go next, but this is enough for now.




Sources and Further Reading
  • Appiah, Kwame A. 2018 The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity.
  • Benveniste, Émile, “Civilization: A Contribution to the History of the Word,” in Problems in General Linguistics.
  • Blouin, Katherine. ‘Civilization: What’s up with that?’ Everyday Orientalism.
  • Bonnett, Alastair. 2004. The Idea of the West. Palgrave Macmillian.
  • Bowden, Brett, 2009. The empire of civilization: the evolution of an imperial idea Chicago.
  • -- -- -- (ed), 2009. Civilization (Critical Concepts in Political Science) 4 vol. 
  • Braudel, Fernand. 1987 (1963) History of Civilizations (Grammaire des Civilisations) tr. by Richard Mayne. Penguin.
  • Elias, Norbert. 1994 (1939) “Sociogenesis of the Antithesis Between Kultur and Zivilisation in German Usage” from The Civilizing Process (Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation). Tr. Edmund Jephcott. p.5ff.
  • Mantena, Karuna, 2010. Alibis of Empire. Princeton.
  • Pitts, Jennifer. 2018. Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire. Harvard.
  • Stocking, G. (1982), Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology.
  • Toynbee, Arnold. 1948. Civilization on Trial. New York.
  • Williams, R. 1976. “Culture” in Keywords