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

not for the purpose of selecting one over another, but instead for the purpose of
clarifying the issues at stake in the selection of any of these avenues of inquiry. In so
doing, I am not looking for points of agreement either conceptual or empirical; if
anything, my bias is in the opposite direction, towards points of disagreement. I do not
think that there is an implicit consensus position on civilizations lurking somewhere
behind the contributions of the various authors gathered in this volume, and I would
strenuously resist efforts to impose one. Rather, the only thing that unifies the
contributions to the volume—beyond their vague assent to the proposition that
civilizations and their dynamics are important to the study of contemporary world
politics—is that they disagree about roughly the same things.
This is an important point, so let me unpack it a bit. We spend altogether too
much time in our scholarly lives either looking for points of agreement between
ourselves and others, or regarding points of disagreement as occasions for a zero-sum
game in which we score points by dismantling the claims advanced by others. Lurking
not too far behind both of these scholarly practices, and implicit within them, is the
presumption that the goal of scholarship is consensus, and that the best way to build
reliable knowledge is through the steady accumulation of broader and broader
consensuses. The philosophical poverty of this brand of neopositivism—“neo” because
it embraces the post-Popperian methodology of falsification as an avenue to
constructing consensus by weeding out possible contenders, and “positivist” because it
continues to posit the production of globally unified knowledge as its goal—does not
seem to have affected everyday scholarly practice all that much, at least not in our field.
How to Think About Civilizations • P. T. Jackson • Page 3