ABSTRACT
As John Rundell and Stephen Mennell observe, in common usage the terms civilization and culture are “often used interchangeably,” usually to refer to a “particular level[s] of material and intellectual development and artistic expression” (Rundell and Mennell, 1998, p. 2); it is, however, the use of the first of these terms in the plural, that is, civilizations, that is of concern here, and in the sense of a set of normative principles, values, and ideas, rather than in its meaning as a developed material infrastructure (such as roads and cities). For, as they suggest, its use in this context emphasizes the multiplicity of different developed human communities, rather than the general contrast between civilization and barbarism. Why this is significant is that it relates to the difficulty faced by the sociologist who is interested in cultural change concerning what to take as the principal unit of study. At the micro level this is not an especially difficult problem since it is still possible to discern what are labelled subcultural entities such as youth groups, or even the cultures of class and ethnic communities. But when attention is turned to the larger cultural units of which these are but components, the problem becomes more intractable. For the nation-state no longer appears to correspond very closely (if indeed it ever did) to a clearly defined cultural unit. Today cultural material of all kinds, whether it consists of news and current affairs or relates to fashion, sport, films, music, or even science and religion, spreads rapidly via a global system of near-instant communication, from country to country and from continent to continent. This makes it difficult to take national units as one’s point of reference, pointing instead to supranational units and, among these, those that because of the deeply ingrained and shared nature of the cultural presuppositions that delineate them, ones that are not so easily affected by this rapid and ever-increasing global flow of information, ideas, and opinion. The concept of civilization tends to meet this requirement since it corresponds to differences in cultural meanings that are formulated at the highest level of generality, entities that can be described as worldviews. For attachment to such overarching systems of meaning is not normally confined to those people who live within given state or national boundaries, nor are they usually the specific possession of any one given linguistic or ethnic group. At the same time they are not spread universally around the globe as the common possession of all mankind, but are still connected, via an acknowledgment of a common history and shared cultural heritage, to specific, if sometimes rather vague, geopolitical entities. In that respect the term civilization tends to correspond to the most general cultural grouping one can identify short of that comprised by the human race as a whole. Such a definition certainly appears to fit that civilization known as the West, which although now found in various parts of the globe (mainly as a result of conquest and colonization), is still
generally considered to have its principal location in Europe and North America. Consequently the position adopted here is that outlined as long ago as 1978 by Franklin L. Baumer, the historian of ideas, who observed that it was no longer possible to take the nation as the unit of historical study for this was “part of a much larger cultural whole” (Baumer, 1978, p. 9), and that while national cultural differences among Europeans and North Americans were real enough, they all participated nonetheless “in a wider cultural community traditionally known as the West.” Consequently he concluded that “the West then is our unit of historical study” (ibid.). Baumer then proceeds to identify and describe the central features of this civilization in some detail. Given that this is no simple task, this is a topic that is best deferred until later (see the discussion in chapter 3). However, since the term the West has a widespread popular currency, being commonly encountered in the media, it is necessary to say something about this matter here in the introduction. This is because acquaintance with this popular usage could easily lead the reader to have serious misconceptions concerning what precisely might be included (and consequently excluded) from this work. It is therefore necessary to stress that the manner in which the term the West is employed in the pages that follow is rather different from that in popular usage.
