Civilization and its Sources

Abstract

This article provides a conceptual and historical analysis of the term 'civilization'. It argues that in substantive terms, the core meaning of civilization is the limiting of violence in inter-human relations, while in terms of historical methodology, the rise of 'civilization' is to be connected to periods of dissolution of order. Such periods are conceptualized using the work of Victor Turner on liminality, and of René Girard on the sacrificial mechanism. On the basis of these findings, the article proceeds to thematize the 'civilizing process', using the concepts of brotherhood, institutionalization, asceticism, charisma and parrhesia (the frank practice of truth-telling, based on Foucault's unpublished lectures). It argues that a core idea of the European civilizing process, the revelation of the persecuting crowd, can be found not simply in the works but the lives and deaths of its two major founding figures, Socrates and Jesus. In its concluding pages, the article argues that 'globalization' thus has two main driving forces: the 'spirit' of capitalism, that Weber traced back to the 'Protestant ethic', but also the Gospel story in which, in a Girardian reading of Elias, the European 'civilizing process' can be rooted.