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

derived from it” (1926:174)—and wherever he can discern such a commonality of
world-feeling (especially in art, music, and architecture), he concludes that a separate
Culture exists. In this volume, Bruce Lawrence’s discussion of an “Islamicate”
civilization and James Kurth’s analysis of a US-led “Western” civilization illustrate this
gesture most clearly, seeking to identify a civilization through the empirical
enumeration of its core components.
Attribute-ontology is also implicated, perhaps even more clearly, when analysts
turn from the identification of existing civilizations to an explanation of their activities.
Again, the analytical parallels with explanation involving other social objects helps to
make the logic clear: as when applied to the explanation of state or individual action, an
attribute-ontology reasons from a set of properties possessed by an entity to that
entity’s activities. Thus, to pick a fairly prominent example from International Relations
scholarship, we have the claim that democracies are less prone to go to war with one
another than non-democracies (e.g. Russett 1993); the logic here runs from a property of
an entity (democracy) to an outcome (a democratic state not going to war with other
states sharing that property). Note that the basic logic is not at all affected if we make
the causal property “fuzzy” rather than “crisp” (Ragin 2000), and allow entities to differ
in their degrees of democracy-ness; we just get a more finely-grained association of a
property and an outcome. Along these lines, we have claims about what a state’s
relative endowment of assorted power-resources inclines it to do internationally, what
kinds of strategies an ethnic group’s internal organizational structure disposes it to
undertake, and what sorts of decisions are more or less necessitated by a particular set
How to Think About Civilizations • P. T. Jackson • Page 13