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

is only to be expected, once we abandon the rather naïve belief in some kind of
“prediscursive providence which predisposes the world in our favor” (Foucault
1981:67). A scholarly conversation can at least offer the reader an informed choice
between equally imperfect alternatives.
Two Debates
In looking for a way to characterize the discussion of civilizations in world
politics, I have been guided by two striking facts. First, it has become quite common to
see a ritualistic denunciation of Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the
Remaking of World Order (1996) near the beginning of any scholarly article on
civilizations—almost as common as it once was to see ritualistic denunciations of
Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics (1979) near the beginning of any
scholarly article on the international system. Virtually no scholar of cultures and
civilizations, with the possible exception of Lawrence Harrison (2008), self-identifies as
a “Huntingtonian,” and virtually every contemporary scholar distances their work from
Huntington’s by critiquing Huntington’s conception of civilizations for being too static,
too fixed, too essentialist. Civilizations for Huntington might as well be big states, except
for the fact that they are states without central governments or authorized
representatives; civilizations have pretty firm borders, and relations between
civilizations look uncannily like the relations that structural realists expect to see
How to Think About Civilizations • P. T. Jackson • Page 7