For the Last Time: Civilizations

Abstract

This article is a critique of the development of civilizational thinking contemporaneous with the growth in power of the globalizing empire of capital. The central proposition is that the arguments developed by Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, Alan Bloom and others are a defense mechanism in reaction to the speed of demographic change in the USA, itself a barometer for universal changes caused by migration of labor around the world. Such migration radically altered the presumed stability of national cultures and their putative civilizational borders. A reaffirmation of civilizational thinking today is not only conservative but retrograde, the result of the clash between ideological power and seismic changes in the material basis of cultural formations.

Keywords

civilizational thinking Enlightenment modernity globalization Orientalism western civilization

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References

Barzun, Jacques (2000) From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life. New York: Harper Collins.

Frye, Northrop (1974) 'The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler', Daedalus 'Twentieth Century Classics Revisited', Winter: 1-13.

Shayegan, Daryush (1997) Cultural Schizophrenia: Islamic Societies Confronting the West. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.