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

speaking, as the emphasis here is on how appeals to and efforts to reinscribe
civilizational boundary-lines work to promote various aims. Taking a cue from David
Campbell (1992), we might call this fourth approach “writing civilizations.” 6
As is usual in such exercises—indeed, as is usual in the ideal-typical elaboration
of distinctions in general—I have upheld the polite fiction that there is no middleground
between the commitments on each of the axes of my matrix. The whole point of
drawing sharp analytical distinctions is to clarify the abstract logic of each side of the
distinction in the kind of splendid conceptual isolation that one never finds in the
messy world of actual entities and actions. Once drawn, one could treat the matrix as a
map, and use it to place cases in relation to one another by assigning them to their
proper quadrant; this can disclose hitherto unacknowledged points of similarity and
dissimilarity between the cases, whether those cases are empirical research sites or, as
they are in this case, scholarly positions. But these insights come at a significant cost,
inasmuch as a map is a relatively static representation of an actual empirical situation—
useful for finding your way around, perhaps, but only inasmuch as the landscape
remains relatively unchanging. And static maps also have problems dealing with
ambiguous cases, cases that seem to fall someplace near the lines dividing the regions of
the map from one another—cases that display elements of more than one commitment. 7
6 This was, in point of fact, the original working title of (Hall and Jackson 2007). Unfortunately, given the matrix I’ve
been developing here, the published title of that edited volume associates the volume with a quadrant that many of the
authors in the volume spend much of their time critiquing and criticizing.
7 One obvious solution is to convert the discrete divisions of the matrix into continuous axes of variation, but that in
turn means abandoning much of the logical clarity that was achieved by treating the distinctions as logically pure in the
first place!
How to Think About Civilizations • P. T. Jackson • Page 27