[발췌] Civilizations in History and Today

자료: The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order ,
(공)저: Samuel P. Huntington

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Chapter 2. Civilizations in History and Today

The Nature of Civilizations

Human history is the history of civilizations. It is impossible to think of the development of humanity in any other terms. (...)Throughout history civilizations have provided the broadest identifications for people. As a result, the causes, emergence, rise, interactions, achievements, decline, and fall of civilizations have been explored at length by distinguished historians, sociologists, and anthropologists including, among others, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, (...) Fernand Braudel, William H. McNeill, (...). Differences in perspective, methodology, focus, and concepts pervade this literature. Yet broad agreements also exists on central propositions concerning the nature, identity, and dynamics of civilizations.

First, a distinction exists between civilization in the singular and civilizations in the plural. The idea of civilization was developed by 18th-century French thinkers as the opposite of the concept of "barbarism." Civilized society differed from primitive society because it was settled, urban, and literate. To be civilized was good, to be uncivilized was bad. The concept of civilization provided a standard by which to judge societies, and during the 19th century, Europeans devoted much intellectual, diplomatic, and politicl energy to elaborating the criteria by which non-European societies might be judged sufficiently "civilized" to be accepted as members of the European-dominated international system. At the same time, however, people increasingly spoke of civilizations in the plural. This meant "renunciation of a civilization defined as an ideal, or rather as the ideal" and a shift away from the assumption there was a single standard for what was civilized, "confined," in Braudel's phrase, "to a few privileged peoples or groups, humanity's 'elite.'" Instead there were many civilizations, each of which was civilized in its own way. Civilization in the singular, in short, "lost some of its cachet," and a civilization in the plural sense could in fact be quite uncivilized in the singular sense.[주2]

Civilizations in the plural are the concern of this book. (...)

Second, a civilization is a cultural entity, outside GErmany. 19th-century German thinkers drew a sharp distinction between civilization, which involved merchants, technology, and material factors, and culture, which involved values, ideals, and the higher intellectual artistics, moral qualities of a society. This distinction has persisted in German thought but has not been accepted elsewhere. Some anthropologists have even reversed the relation and conceived of cultures as characteristic of primitive, unchanging, nonurban societies, while more complex, developed, urban, and dynamic societies are civilizations. These efforts to distinguish culture and civilization, however, have not caught on, and outside Germany, there is overwhelming agreement with Braudel that it is "delusory to wish in the German way to separate ^culture^ from its foundation ^civilization^."[주3]

Civilization and culture both refer to the overall way of life of a people, and a civilization is a culture writ large. They both involve the "values, norms, institutions, and modes of thinking to which successive generations in a given society have attached primary importance."[주4] A civilization is, for Braudel, "a space, a 'culture area,'" "a collection of cultural characteristics and phenomena." Wallerstein defines it as "a particular concentration of worldview, customs, structures, and culture (both material culture and high cultrue) which forms some kind of historical whole and which coexists (if not always simultaneously) with other varieties of this phenomenon." A civilization is, according to Dawson, the product of "a particular original process of cultural creativity which is the work of a particular people," while for Durkheim and Mauss, it is "a kind of moral milieu encompassing a certain number of nations, each national culture being only a particular form of the whole." (...) 

Third, civilizations are comprehensive, that is, none of their constituent units can be fully understood without reference to the encompassing civilization. Civilizations, Toynbee argued, "comprend without being comprehended by others." A civilization is a "totality." Civilizations, Melko goes on to say, 

have a certain degree of integration. Their parts are defined by their relationshop to each other and to the whole. If the civilization is composed of states, these states will have more relation to one another than they do to states outside the civilization. They might fight more, and engage more frequently in diplomatic relations. They will be more interdependent economically. There will be pervading aesthetic and philosophical currents.[주8]

Fifth, since civilizations are cultural not political rentties, they do not, as such, maintain order, establish justice, collect taxes, fight wars, negotiate treaties, or do any other things which governments do. The political composition of civilizations varies between civilizations and varies over time within a civilization. A civilization may thus contain one or many political units. Those units may be city states, empires, federations, confederations, nation states, ... As a civilization evolves, changes normally occur in the number and nature of its constituent political units. At one extreme, a civilization and a political entity may coincide. (...)