How to Think About Civilizations - The Watson Institute for ...

supplementing the Weberian definition with additional primary properties like
“sovereignty” and “having a society” (Wendt 1999:201-202), we would generate a
different catalog of existing states. But the point is that the grounds for saying that a
state exists involve the empirical identification of certain properties, which might or
might not be possessed by the potential state under investigation.
Attribute-ontology is quite prominently on display in the scholarly conversation
about civilizations in world politics. Huntington’s own civilizational essentialism is a
potent instance of this scientific ontology, as he proposes a definition of a civilization as
involving commonalities in the spheres of “blood, language, religion, [and] way of life”
(Huntington 1996:42-43) and then proceeds to identify a number of actually-existing
civilizations on that basis. But a similar gesture can be found whenever an analyst asks
a question about whether a particular civilization exists and then proceeds to adduce
empirical evidence either supporting or refuting a conjectured answer to the question.
This is perhaps most powerfully illustrated when the candidate civilization is not
widely acknowledged to be a civilization, as when Oswald Spengler devotes a
substantial portion of his magnum opus The Decline of the West to establishing the
existence of a “Magian” or “Arabian” Culture 3 that lives historically between the
decline of the Classical and the rise of the Western. For Spengler, the central property of
Culture is a “prime symbol”—“a common world-feeling and a common world-form
3 Spengler’s terminology is somewhat unique among civilizational scholars. For Spengler, the entities that others call
“civilizations” are known as “the higher Cultures,” and what he calls “civilization” represents a distinct phase in the life
history of one of the higher Cultures. David Leheny touches on this particularly Germanic paring of “culture” and
“civilization” in his chapter above; see also (Bowden 2004; and Jackson 2006:84-86).
How to Think About Civilizations • P. T. Jackson • Page 12