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

of beliefs or pattern of information. In all cases, what matters here is a kind of reasoning
that Andrew Abbott refers to as “general linear reality” (1988): the presence or absence,
and perhaps the degree of intensity, of some property of an object leads more or less
inevitably to an observed outcome.
This aspect of attribute-ontology is also clearly present in the scholarly
conversation about civilizations. The logic of properties need not take the form of
Huntington’s bold claim that “Islam has bloody borders” (1996:258), a stark example of
essentialist reasoning inasmuch as responsibility for conflict is transferred to a deep
dispositional characteristic of Islam per se. Instead, what we most commonly see is a
form of reasoning from properties to outcomes that, much like a great deal of
constructivist scholarship in International Relations, emphasizes how ideas and
meanings and beliefs held by actors lead to particular courses of action. In this volume,
the clearest example is Emanuel Adler’s identification of a new self-identity for
European countries—“Normative Power Europe”—that informs a variety of decisions
and strategies. The shift of empirical attention from “material” characteristics to
“ideational” self-identification does not affect the explanatory logic in any significant
way, whatever implications it might have for the mutability of the property causing the
outcome (Tilly 1998). To say that how the members of a civilization understand
themselves as a civilization leads to their doing certain things rather than others is not,
at least not necessarily, to step outside of an attribute-ontology.
The alternative to an attribute-ontology would be a process-ontology (Emirbayer
1997; Jackson and Nexon 1999). Such a scientific ontology would not regard objects as
How to Think About Civilizations • P. T. Jackson • Page 14