Search

This article provides a critical reconstruction of Benjamin Nelson's work on the sociology of civilizations. His main concepts for civilizational analysis are located within the sociological tradition, in particular, the work of Durkheim, Mauss and their school and Max Weber. The article focuses especially on the historical, comparative and analytic value of Nelson's distinction among three types of structures of consciousness (sacro-magical, faith and rationalized structures), particularly the historical role of rationalized structures. It suggests how these concepts might be given both a fuller analytical differentiation and more detailed historical specification. The article emphasizes how intercivilizational encounters provide the settings for cultural innovations which serve as starting points for the later historical transformations of civilizations. Outcomes of civilizational encounters between Greece, Rome and Judaism in the Hellenistic era are given special attention. The article's main themes are illustrated throughout by reference to a variety of substantive issues and historical comparative civilizational contexts. These include the role of world religions, sciences, philosophies and other cultural forms in the ancient world, Western Europe, Russia and elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the first installment of Immanuel Wallerstein's work on the modern world system was published (Wallerstein, 1974), the perspective of "world systems theory" has become widely disseminated within the fields of history and sociology and has given rise to a substantial body of literature extending the theory's general propositions in new directions and applying it to a diversity of historical problems. This paper focuses upon one of the most innovative and suggestive works in this genre, Janet Abu-Lughod's recent book, "Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350." Although the book's impact and reception within the sociological profession have been immediate and favorable, this paper argues that closer inspection reveals all is not well with its theories, comparisons and implications. Moreover, such an examination suggests that little progress is likely in comparative, historical sociology unless the exclusivistic claims and limitations of world systems perspectives are overcome through the creation of a more inclusive comparative historical sociology of civilizations, one which does not reject the importance of fundamental economic and political processes, or even less the need for more global, systematic perspectives, but which places them within wider civilizational contexts and more complex systems of institutional and cultural mediation.

This article focuses on sects, churches and economic transformations in Russia and Western Europe. While the Protestant sects had a decisive impact on the social, economic and political rationalization and modernization of Western Europe and the United States, the historical development of sectarianism in the setting of Russian civilization resulted in a very different set of outcomes. Other transformations were also associated, if not with the sects in particular, then with the Protestant Reformation in general, including cultural interests in the institutionalization of scientific work more universalistic and impersonal ethical imperatives, new images of politics, law and social order and other important outcomes in political and social life. The central civilization traditions of classical antiquity, which had been fully transmitted to Western Europe and helped revolutionize that region from the 12th century forward, were almost wholly absent in Russia. Russia's failure from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries to create the groundwork for indigenous modernization set the stage for difficulties it subsequently faced as it autocratically imported foreign economic, technical and scientific advances into a society that was fundamentally unchanged in its social and cultural structures and institutions.

The Inquisition was a unique institution, specifically Western European in origin and character. Nothing quite like it is found in the history of other world civilizations. Its origin and subsequent history as a specialized and differentiated religious-juridical institution depended upon a peculiar combination of changes both at the level of the civilizational structures of Western Europe, as well as more local events and processes within the sociocultural settings of the various European nations. This paper will focus on the origins of the Inquisition, rather than its historical vicissitudes in various countries from the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Institutions derive their original contours from the rationales and ideas available in the civilizational environment. Once any institution has been established, it gains a permanent place among the "tools" available to a society and it can subsequently be put to new uses and adapted to new circumstances. It is therefore of particular interest to capture the institution at its point of original historical gestation and examine the reasons which initially bring it into existence. In particular, the present essay focuses upon the origins of the Inquisition viewed within the setting of and at the level of Western European civilizational rationales, structures of consciousness, and their related institutional orders.

This article focuses on the role played by key civilizational categories, especially images of "nature," "natural law," the "state of nature," and several related notions in the gestation of heterodox ideals and movements in different civilizations. It focuses on the tension and balances struck within the civilizational settings of Europe, China, and India between "major" (or orthodox) currents of ideas and institutions and "minor" (or heterodox) ones. The conflicting outcomes derived from Stoic-Christian natural law in Europe (as described by Troeltsch) are compared with the structurally similar, yet differently composed and articulated, tensions in China between Confucian and Taoist ideals, while the altogether different outcomes in India (noted by Weber) are used as a third negative reference point. Similar problems in the Russian setting are briefly discussed as a fourth point of comparison. This paper concludes with theoretical reflections drawn from Marx, Toennies, and the Durkheim school on the explanation of such intracivilizational structures and processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article talks about the civilization-analytic perspective in the study of cities, polities and ethnic communities. There are dimensions of the problem of the city as civitas, which refers to the associational and constitutional features of the city and its fundamental sociocultural structure as a community or polity, that emerge, such as cities as political communities in relation to more comprehensive civilizational definitions of polity, and their place within larger functioning political-administrative institutions. According to Max Weber, the notions of citizenship and an urban citizenry first developed in the cities of Greek and Roman classical antiquity and in the European medieval period.