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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
collections of properties, but would instead analytically embed the existence of objects in an unfolding set of transactional mechanisms and relations that have the effect of reproducing the object from moment to moment. Instead of starting with substances in isolation, we begin with concrete connections and interactions: “The fact is that all we can ever detect about ‘things’ relates to how they act upon and interact with one another—a substance has no discernible, and thus no justifiably attributable, properties save those that represent responses elicited from its interaction with others” (Rescher 1996:48-49). So for example, instead of states with varying degrees of power and wealth, we would have a pattern of political and economic relations that is denser in some places (the “core”) and more diffuse in others (the “periphery”). State sovereignty, in such a conception, goes from being a stable property of a state to an ongoing practice of differentiation, whereby states and their boundaries are perpetually shored up and reinscribed (Mitchell 1991; Bartelson 1998). The emphasis moves from solid objects with discernible and stable qualities, to constellations and arrangements of fluctuating practices and historical patterns. The application of a process-ontology to civilizations is arguably the “mainstream” of contemporary civilization scholarship, at least outside of International Relations. As Peter Katzenstein’s opening chapter makes clear, the innovations introduced by Shmuel Eisenstadt and Norbert Elias clearly turn in a processual direction, emphasizing the extent to which a civilization is a complex arrangement of habits, principles, and historic traditions of action on which people may draw in a variety of ways. The notion that civilizations are internally pluralistic is more than a How to Think About Civilizations • P. T. Jackson • Page 15
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Page 45 and 46: Delanty, Gerard. 2003. “The Makin
Page 47 and 48: Mitchell, Timothy. 1991. “The Lim

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