Thinking about civilizations

Review of International Studies

Volumn 26, Issue SPEC. ISS., 2000, Pages 217-234

  Cox, Robert W ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 23044526370     PISSN: 02602105     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/s0260210500002175     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. Samuel P. Huntington, 'The Clash'of Civilizations?', Foreign Affairs, 72:3, 1993;
2. t he article was expanded into a book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
3. On the origins of the concept of civilization in the European tradition, see Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilizations, trans. Richard Mayne (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), pp. 3-8;
4. also Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995; originally published 1939).
5. On Herder, see Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder (London: Chatto and Windus, 1980).
6. Kinhide Mushakoji, 'Multilateralism in a multicultural world: notes for a theory of occultation', in Robert W. Cox (ed.), The New Realism: Perspectives on Multilateralism and World Order (London: Macmillan for the United Nations University, 1996).
7. Charles Morazé, Les bourgeois conquérants (Paris: Armand Colin, 1957).
8. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West one volume edn. (New York: Knopf, 1939). 'The system that is put forward in this work ... I regard as the Copernican discovery in the historical sphere in that it admits no sort of privileged position to the Classical or the Western Culture as against the Cultures of India, Babylon, China, Egypt, the Arabs, Mexico - separate worlds of dynamic being which in point of mass count for just as much in the general picture of history as the Classical, while frequently surpassing it in point of spiritual greatness and soaring power.' ( Introduction, p. 18.)
9. The American historian William H. McNeill, during the renewed Western euphoria following the defeat of Nazism in World War II, wrote The Rise of the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963),
10. subtitled A History of the Human Community, in self-conscious opposition to Spengler's thesis.
11. Some twenty-five years after this book's publication, McNeill reflected that 'its scope and conception is a form of intellectual imperialism'; and that 'my review of the whole of human history and the temporary world role played by the United States therefore operated, if it operated at all, entirely at a subconscious level for all concerned': 'The Rise of the West After Twenty-Five Years', Journal of World History I (1990). The article is reproduced in the 1991 edition of The Rise of the West.
12. Geoffrey Baraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1964) captures this moment well in ch. VI, 'The Revolt against the West. The Reaction of Asia and Africa to European Hegemony'.
13. For example, Gordon Childe, What Happened in History (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1957).
14. Huntington, in Clash of Civilizations, writes of 'fault lines' separating civilizations and he uses the geological metaphor of 'tectonic plates' colliding. For him, civilizations occupy a geographical sphere and they have a 'core state' as their centre. In fact, he represents civilizations as states writ large; and their relationships are conceived very much in line with neorealist international relations theory.
15. See, for example, David L. Miller, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), who writes: '... monotheistic thinking ... fails a people in a time when experience becomes self-consciously pluralistic ...'(p. 7); and '... polytheism is not a matter of some new theology, sociology, or psychology. It is rather a matter of many potencies, many structures of meaning and being, all given to us in the reality of our everyday lives.' (p. 65.)
16. Fritjof Kapra, The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems (New York: Doubleday, 1996), writes: 'Shallow ecology is anthropocentric, or human-centered. It views humans as above or outside of nature, as the source of all value, and ascribes only instrumental, or "use", value to nature. Deep ecology does not separate humans - or anything else - from the natural environment. It sees the world not as a collection of isolated objects, but as a network of phenomena that are fundamentally interconnected and interdependent. Deep ecology recognizes the intrinsic value of all living beings and views humans as just one particular strand in the web of life. '...the emerging new vision of reality based on deep ecological awareness is consistent with the socalled perennial philosophy of spiritual traditions, whether we talk about the spirituality of Christian mystics, that of Buddhists, or the philosophy and cosmology underlying the Native American traditions.' (p.7.)
17. Ronald J. Deibert, Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) argues compellingly for a nonreductionist theory of communication and civilizational change, developing the work of Harold Innis (see n. 10).
18. Susan Strange, 'The Name of the Game', in Nicholas X. Rizopoulos (ed.), Sea-Changes: American Foreign Policy in a World Transformed (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1990), pp. 260-73.
19. Robert W. Cox, 'A Perspective on Globalization', in James H. Mittelman (ed.), Globalization: Critical Reflections (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1996), p. 27.