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

distinctions rather than treating them as the absolute boundaries of a fixed conceptual
territory. To identify a given piece of scholarship as supervening on an attributeontology
and the scholarly specification of social objects is, in this rendering, to
implicitly compare the piece of scholarship with others by comparison with which it
engages in the scholarly specification of essential attributes and conducts its
explanations in terms of interests. I have placed Huntington in the upper left-hand
corner of my matrix; my doing so is a reflection of my judgment that in any comparative
context involving civilizational scholarship and scholars, Huntington will occupy the
relatively interest-based position. And since my starting-point for this analysis—indeed,
the conceptual starting-point for the volume as a whole—was a rejection of
Huntingtonian essentialism, treating Huntington as the relatively fixed point of
reference against which to define alternatives is simply a reflection of the empirical
character of the scholarly discussion itself.
Graphically, we might imagine my two-by-two matrix replicating itself within
each cell of the original matrix, which would yield 4 x 4 = 16 different positions that
civilizational scholarship might in principle occupy. As a first benefit, this allows much
more fine-grained specifications of where scholars fall in relation to one another. For
example, consider a further internal division of the “structural context” quadrant:
How to Think About Civilizations • P. T. Jackson • Page 29