Civilizational Analysis as a Mode of the Intercultural: Intercivilizational Encounters, the Intercultural and Contemporary Historical Sociology

ABSTRACT

Classical and contemporary civilizational analysis has not sat comfortably with theoretical constructions of the intercultural or their empirical applications. A ‘classical era’ of civilizations analysis generated a program of research problems that was productive in critical and multidisciplinary ways and limited in scope and vision in others, but this failed to generate a provisional notion of the intercultural. Contemporary civilizational analysis improves on this position significantly in respect of the intercultural, particularly in the development of a current around ‘intercivilizational encounters’. This essay examines this current especially in the work of Benjamin Nelson, Marshall Hodgson and Johann P. Arnason. Arguing that this approach represents vital advances for theoretical constructions of the intercultural in civilizational analysis and more generally in the human sciences, the essay also identifies limitations in latter-day approaches.

KEYWORDS:

• Intercultural
• civilizational analysis
• intercivilizational encounters
• historical sociology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 On the intercultural in general see (Xie 2014), Elias and Mansouri (2020), Mansouri and Modood (2021), Taylor (2012) and Zapata-Barrero (2019).

2 See also the special issue of Journal of Classical Sociology dedicated to Eisenstadt’s work (Volume 11, Number 3, 2011). The issue includes many interesting essays on Eisenstadt’s relationship to the modernization tradition.

3 Marotta notes that the sociology of strangers has moved beyond Simmel’s classical version to incorporate different dimensions of experiences and contemporary conditions of urban life (Marotta 2009, 2017: 23–30, 43–44). This stranger is an ‘in-between’ actor, on his account,

4 Rundell distinguishes Simmel’s and Elias’ strangers from the ‘contingent stranger’ (Rundell 2017, 48–60). The latter exists in a less ontologically bordered condition produced by the hyper-migration of the global age. The life of the contingent stranger strongly contrasts the mobile as against the fixed, the abstract as against the concrete (Rundell 2017: 12) and does not bear the stamp of familiarity and strangeness characteristic of Simmel’s stranger. Both are creative of the imaginaries of modernity, but Rundell’s contingent stranger is arguably more prominent in a late modernity of globalism.

5 Kavolis emphasises this aspect of Nelson’s contribution to civilizational analysis (Kavolis 1985).

6 On philosophical formulations of the intercultural in Arnason, see Adams (2009). Adams discusses Árnason’s articulation of alienness and the heterogeneity of the intercultural in intercivilizational encounters. Identifying these with his phenomenology of the world, she relates his project of civilizational analysis to the philosophical component of his work.

7 See also the special edition of European Journal of Social Theory on Arnason’s work (‘Encounters and Interpretations’) edited by Suzi Adams, Karl E Smith and George Vlahov (Volume 14, Number 1, 2011) and the Festschrift on Arnason’s work (‘Johann Arnason’s Social Theory: Horizons of Modernity and Civilizations’ in International Journal of Social Imaginaries, Volume 2, Number 1, 2023).