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

terms on which states and their representatives consider one another to be part of a
larger whole; Adler’s chapter, along with some of his earlier work on the subject (Adler
and Barnett 1998), inclines the most clearly in this direction.
Finally, a post-essentialist “writing civilizations” take on the subject would
highlight the kinds of civilizational strategies that states undertake in their efforts to
relate to one another; elements of this approach can be glimpsed in the chapters by
Rudolph and Leheny. Much as Rodney Bruce Hall (1997) does with moral authority,
civilizational post-essentialism converts civilizational notions into power resources that
states and their representatives can deploy more or less strategically. Among other
things, this would provides a less Huntingtonian way to read the kind of civilizational
leadership that Kurth identifies as constitutive of American global political action—it
would shift the focus from the (likely unanswerable) question of whether or not the
secularized Protestantism of the American Creed and the global civilization that Kurth
identifies as emanating from it actually is a kind of pre-Axial Age paganism, and
instead focus attention on the claims about ‘Western’ or ‘global’ civilization and the
efficacy of those claims in bringing about distinct outcomes. Where Kurth’s analysis
suggests that the success or failure of American global leadership depends on
dispositional qualities out of the control of any political actor—in short, that a clash
between the pre- or post-Axial Age social arrangement exemplified by the United
States, and the various Axial Age social arrangements on offer in the rest of the world,
is more or less inevitable—a post-essentialist perspective suggests, to the contrary, that
what happens in the relations between civilizations depends on how those civilizations
How to Think About Civilizations • P. T. Jackson • Page 41