ABSTRACT
At times of extraordinary change new words enter languages, concepts arise in clusters, and old words acquire fresh meanings. “Civilization,” was a word used for juridical purposes in French and English in the early eighteenth century, and it had also been understood as the core of the “civilizing process” in the Americas.2 But, during the pivotal decades between the 1750s and the 1790s, when every familiar aspect of the known world was recast through revolutions and war, a spectrum of new ideas were attached to “civilization.” Its meaning and associations changed dramatically from its juridical moorings. Conjunctionally, until 1789, the word “Revolution” with a capital “R” had been used only for the English Revolution of 1688. After 1789, Revolution required the prefix of either the American, or more directly, the French. Without the article and proper noun, Revolution acquired new significance. As its first use in English in 1796 noted, “Rebellion is the subversion of the laws and Revolution is that of tyrants.”3 The politics leading to the recasting of “civilization” as autochthonous religio-cultural space existing from time immemorial, I suggest, remain inseparable from the possibilities raised by Revolution. I begin here with the historical juncture that imparted such evocative powers to the concept of civilization and then explore the particulars of the invention of the civilizational model of world history including its resuscitations at present when the idea of revolution to change a social system has all but disappeared from the horizon of our imaginaries.4
