calhoun civil society public sphere history of concept

Neocleous M 1996 Administering Ciil Society: Towards aTheory of State Power. MacMillan, London

Offe C 1987 Challenging the boundaries of institutional politics:Social movements since the 1960s. In: Maier C (ed.) ChangingBoundaries of the Political: Essays on the Eoling BalanceBetween State and Society, Public and Priate in Europe.Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK

Pasquino P 1981 Introduction to Lorenz von Stein. Economy andSociety 10(1): 16

Reidel M 1984 Between Tradition and Eolution: The HegelianTransformation of Political Philosophy. Cambridge UniversityPress, Cambridge, UK

Richter M 1998 Montesquieu and the concept of civil society.The European Legacy 3(66): 3341

Rosanvallon P 1988 The decline of social visibility. In: KeaneJ (ed.) Ciil Society and the State: New European Perspecties.Verso, London

Smith A 1974 The Wealth of Nations. Penguin, Harmondsworth,UK

Trentmann F (ed.) 2000 Paradoxes of Ciil Society: NewPerspecties on Modern German and British History. Bergham,New York

Tribe K 1988 Goerning Economy: The Reformation of GermanEconomic Discourse, 17501840. Cambridge University Press,Cambridge, UK

H. Islamoglu

Civil Society/Public Sphere: History of the

Concept

The closely related concepts of civil society and publicsphere developed in the early modern era to refer tocapacities for social self-organization and influenceover the state. Civil society usually refers to theinstitutions and relationships that organize social lifeat a level between the state and the family. Publicsphere is one of several linked terms (including publicspace, simply public, and the German Or ffentlichkeit,or publicness) that denote an institutional settingdistinguished by openness of communication and afocus on the public good rather than simply compro-mises among private goods. Located in civil society,communication in the public sphere may address thestate or may seek to influence civil society and evenprivate life directly. Key questions concern the extentto which it will be guided by critical reason, and howboundaries between public and private are mediated.

1. Ciil Society and Self-organization

The distinction of civil society from the state took itsmodern form in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-turies. Prior to this separation, political and socialrealms were seldom clearly distinguished. When theywere, the social was exemplified by the family andoften subordinated as the realm of necessity or merereproduction to the broader public character andpossibilities for active creation that lay in the state.

The Greek conception of the polis, for example,usually referred to both, but when a distinction wasmade, it clearly favored the state.

Roman law contributed the idea of ciitas and astronger sense of relations among persons that wereneither narrowly familial nor specifically about consti-tuting the political society through the state. Medievalpolitical and legal theory developed this theme, es-pecially in relation to the freedoms claimed by medi-eval cities but also in relation to the Church. Somestrands juxtaposed the notion of legitimacy ascendingfrom the people to the eventually dominant idea ofdivine right of kings, with its notion of legitimacydescending from God. Also influential was the dis-tinction of civil from criminal law (in which the formergoverns relations formed voluntarily among indivi-duals and the latter the claims of the whole societyagainst malefactors). Nonetheless, it was only in thecourse of early modern reflection on the sources ofsocial order that civil society came to be seen as adistinct sphere.

A crucial step in this process was the affirmation ofordinary life (Taylor 1989). Whereas the Greekphilosophers had treated the private realmincludingeconomic activityas clearly inferior to the publicrealm associated with affairs of state, many modernsplaced a new positive value on family and economicpursuits. They argued that both privacy and civilsociety needed to be defended against encroachmentsby the state. In this context, it was also possible toconceive of a public sphere that was not coterminouswith the state but rather located in civil society andbased on its voluntary relations. In this communicativespace citizens could address each other openly, and inways that both established common notions of thepublic good and influenced the state.

Social contract and natural law theoriesespeciallyas joined in the work of John Lockecontributed tothis shift by suggesting ways in which the creation ofsociety conceptually preceded the creation of govern-ment. From this it was only a short step to say that thelegitimacy of government depended on its serving theneeds of civil society (or of the people). ThomasPaine and other advocates of freedom from unjust ruleadvanced an image of the freedoms of Englishmenwhich was influential not only in England and Ameri-ca, but in France, notably in Montesqueius accountof the spirit of laws which combined an appreciationof English division of powers with an older tradition ofrepublican (and aristocratic) virtue. From Rousseauthrough Tocqueville, Comte, and Durkheim, thisFrench tradition developed an ever-stronger accountof the autonomy of the social (resisting not only theclaims of the state but the Cartesian postulate of theprimacy of the individual subject).

A crucial innovation was to understand society as atleast potentially self-organizing rather than organizedonly by rulers. If there was a single pivotal intellectualsource for this, it lay with the Scottish moralists. In

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Ciil Society}Public Sphere: History of the Concept

Adam Smiths (1776) notion of the invisible hand, themarket exemplified this self-organizing capacity butdid not exhaust it. In his Essay on the History of CiilSociety (1767), Adam Ferguson presented humanhistory as a series of social transformations leading tomodern society. This prompted Hegel (1821) to treatcivil society as a field in which the universal andparticular contended; their reconciliation dependedon the state. The idea of civil society also shapedclassical political economy and ideas of social evol-ution, and informed Marxs account of the stages ofhistorical development as combinations of productivecapacity and (conflict-ridden) social relations. Marxalso challenged the notion that markets were neutrallyself-organizing, emphasizing the role of historicalaccumulations of power.

Though the actual analyses differed, what had beenestablished was the notion of society as a distinctobject of analysis, not reducible to either state orindividual. People formed society impersonally asactors in markets, more personally as parties tocontracts. The idea of civil society hearkened back tothe sort of social life that emerged among the freecitizens of medieval cities because this was largely self-regulatedas distinct from direct rule by ecclesiasticalor military authorities. It also suggested civility ininterpersonal relations. This meant not just goodmanners, but a normative order facilitating amicableor at least reliable and nonthreatening relationshipsamong strangers and in general all those who were notbound together by deep private relations like kinship.Equally important, the idea of civil society includedin some versionsthe notion that communicationamong members might be the basis for self-consciousdecisions about how to pursue the common good. Thisnotion is basic to the modern idea of public sphere.

2. The Idea of a Public Sphere

Rousseau (1762) famously sought to understand howsocial unity could result from free will rather thanexternal constraint. This depended, he argued, ontranscending the particular wills of many people witha general will that was universal. Kant admiredRousseaus pursuit of unity in freedom as distinctfrom mere social instinct (as in Aristotles notion of apolitical animal) or imposition of divine authority. Herelied implicitly on the idea of a collective conversationthrough which individual citizens reach commonunderstandings. Likewise the development of rep-resentative institutions in eighteenth century Englandinformed and anchored a public discourse directed atbringing the will and wisdom of citizens to bear onaffairs of state. Finally, the idea of the people as actingsubject came to the fore in the American and Frenchrevolutions. The idea of a public sphere anchoreddemocratic and republican thought in the capacity ofcitizens in civil society to achieve unity and freedomthrough their discourse with each other.

Kant, like many eighteenth-century philosophers,lacked a strong notion of the social. This Hegel (1821)supplied, rejecting social contract theory because evenin Rousseaus notion of a general will it suggested thatthe union achieved in the state depended not on itsown absolute universality but on a development out ofindividual wills. Nationalism also shaped ideas ofsociety and political community in holistic ways wellmatched to unitary states (Calhoun 1999). Marxs(1843, 1927) critique of politics based on bourgeoisindividual rights further challenged the adequacy ofcivil society as a realm of freedom and unity. WhereHegel thought that the state in itself might overcomethe tension between necessity and freedom and theclash of particular wills, Marx held that only atransformation of material conditions including theabolition of private property could make this possible.As a result, theories stressing stronger ideas of thesocial were apt to offer weaker notions of public life.The Marxist tradition denigrated mere democracy asan inadequate means of achieving either freedom orunity.

The ideas of public sphere and civil society de-veloped primarily in liberal theory. These were notalways seen in the manner of Hegel as merely edu-cative on the way to a more perfect latter unity. Norwas political unity necessarily left to the workings ofan invisible hand or other unchosen system, butfreedom was treated commonly as a matter of in-dividual rather than collective action. This accom-panied the rise of relatively asocial understandings ofthe market (Polanyi 1944). In addition, the emergingnotion of the public sphere was not clearly distinctfrom other usages of public. State activity, forexample, was sometimes described as public withoutregard to its relationship to democracy or its opennessto the gaze or participation of citizens. This usagesurvives in reference to state-owned firms as publicregardless of the kind of state or the specifics of theiroperation.

More important was the overlapping concept ofpublic opinion (see Public Opinion: Political Aspects).The dominant eighteenth-century usage emphasizedopen expression and debate, contrasting free publicopinion to absolutist repression. At the same time, itgenerally treated public opinion as a consensus formedon the basis of reasoned judgment. Opinion wassomething less than knowledge, but especially where ithad been tested in public discourse, it was not simplysentiment and it gained truth-value from reflexiveexamination. Various euphemisms like informedopinion and responsible opinion, however, reflectedboth a bias in favor of the opinions of elites and ananxiety about the possibly disruptive opinions of themasses. During the nineteenth century, this anxietycame increasingly to the fore. Tocqueville (1840) andMill (1859), thus, both contrasted public opinion toreasoned knowledge; Mill especially worried aboutcollective mediocrity in which the opinion of debased

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masses would triumph over scientific reason. Whileadvocates of the public sphere saw rational-criticaldiscourse producing unity, critics saw mass opinionreflecting psychosocial pressures for conformity. Im-plicitly, they associated reason with individuals ratherthan any collective process. The distinction betweenpublic and crowd or mass was lost in such views(Splichal 2000). Early positivist research into publicopinion approached it as explicable on the basis ofsocial psychology rather than as a species of reasonedargument. Toennies (1922) sought a way to discernwhen each approach ought to apply.

Conversely, in the late nineteenth and twentiethcenturies, a new field of public opinion researchdeveloped that approached public opinion as anaggregation of individual opinions. The shift wasbased largely on the development of empirical pollingmethods. It brought a renewal of attention to differ-ences within public opinion, and thus to the distinctionbetween public and crowd (Blumer 1948, Key 1961). Italso focused attention on patterns of communicationamong members of the public rather than the moregeneralized notions of imitation or emotional con-tagion. New mediafirst newspapers, and then broad-castfigured prominently in efforts to understandpublic communication. While Lippman (1960) and avariety of social psychologists worried that the newmedia would produce the descent to a lowest commondenominator of public opinion that liberals had longfeared, Dewey (1927) and other pragmatists defendedthe capacity for reason in large-scale communication.In this, they hearkened back to the eighteenth-centuryhopes of Kant and Rousseau.

Even before the apotheosis of the opinion poll,Cooley (1909) had argued emphatically that publicopinion ought to be conceived as no mere aggregateof individual opinions, but a genuine social product, aresult of communication and reciprocal influence. Akey question was whether this communication andreciprocal influence amounted to the exercise ofreason. Peirce (1878) had argued that among scientiststhe formation of consensus on the basis of opennessand debate was the best guarantee of truth. Could thisview be extended into less specialized domains ofpublic discourse? This has been an enduring focus forJurgen Habermas, the most influential theorist of thepublic sphere.

3. Habermas

In the context of some cynicism about democraticinstitutions, Habermas (1962) set out to show theunrealized potential of the public sphere as a categoryof bourgeois society. He challenged most directly thetendencies in Marxism and critical theory to belittledemocratic institutionsand also the collapsing ofpublic into state characteristic not only of Hegel but ofactually existing socialism. Habermas celebrated the

emancipatory potential of a collective discourse aboutthe nature of the public good and the directions ofstate action. This could be free insofar as it wasrationalbased on the success of argument andcritique rather than the force of either status orcoercionand could achieve unity by disregardingparticular interestslike particular statusesin favorof the general good. The best version of the publicsphere was based on a kind of social intercourse that,far from presupposing the equality of status, disre-garded status altogether. It worked by a mutualwillingness to accept the given roles and simultan-eously to suspend their reality (Habermas 1962, p.131).

The basic question guiding Habermas explorationof the public sphere was: to what extent can the wills oropinions guiding political action be formed on thebasis of rational-critical discourse? This is a salientissue primarily where economic and other differencesgive actors discordant identities and conflicting inter-ests. For the most part, Habermas took it as given thatthe crucial differences among actors were those of classand largely political-economic status; in any case, hetreated them as rooted in private life and brought fromthere to the public. He focused on how the nature,organization, and opportunities for discourse onpolitically significant topics might be structured sothat class and status inequalities were not an in-superable barrier to political participation. The firstissue, of course, was access to the discourse. This wasnot so simple as the mere willingness to listen toanothers speech, but also involved matters like thedistribution of the sorts of education that empoweredspeakers to present recognizably good arguments.Beyond this, there was the importance of an ideo-logical commitment to setting aside status differencesin the temporary egalitarianism of an intellectualargument.

The public sphere joined civil society to the state byfocusing on a notion of public good as distinct fromprivate interest. It was however clearly rooted in civilsociety and indeed in the distinctive kind of privacy itallowed and valued.

The bourgeois public sphere may be conceivedabove all as the sphere of private people comingtogether as a public; they soon claimed the publicsphere regulated from above against the publicauthorities themselves, to engage them in a debateover the general rules governing relations in thebasically privatized but publicly relevant sphere ofcommodity exchange and social labor. The medium ofthis political confrontation was peculiar and withouthistorical precedent: peoples public use of their reason(Habermas 1962, p. 27).

This public use of reason depended on civil society.Businesses from newspapers to coffee shops, forexample, provided settings for public debate. Socialinstitutions (like private property) empowered indivi-duals to participate independently in the public sphere;

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forms of private life (notably that of the family)prepared individuals to act as autonomous, rational-critical subjects in the public sphere. But theeighteenth-century public sphere was also distin-guished by its normative emphases on openness andrational political discourse. Habermas concern focus-ed on the way later social change brought these twodimensions into conflict with each other.

The idea of publicness as openness underwrote aprogressive expansion of access to the public sphere.Property and other qualifications were eliminated andmore and more people participated. The result was adecline in the quality of rational-critical discourse. AsHabermas later summed up:

Kant still counted on the transparency of a surveyable publicsphere shaped by literary means and open to arguments andwhich is sustained by a public composed of a relatively smallstratum of educated citizens. He could not foresee thestructural transformation of this bourgeois public sphere intoa semantically degenerated public sphere dominated by theelectronic mass media and pervaded by images and virtualrealities (Habermas 1998, p. 176).

While Habermas account of the continuing valueof the category of public sphere evoked by theeighteenth-century ideal set him apart from Hork-heimer and Adorno (1944) and their pessimistic turnin critical theory, he largely incorporated their critiqueof mass society as administered society into hissurvey of twentieth-century developments and with itmany of the fears of nineteenth-century liberals. Heheld that the public sphere was transformed not onlyby simple increase of numbers but by the success ofvarious new powers at re-establishing in new form thepower to manage public opinion or steer it fromabove. Public relations agents and public opinion pollsreplaced rational-critical debate; electronic mediaallowed openness but not the give and take con-versation of the eighteenth-century coffee houses. Atthe same time, rising corporate power and statepenetration of civil society undermined the distinctionof public and private, producing a refeudalization ofsociety.

4. Arendt

Hannah Arendt also focused on the problem ofcollapsing distinctions between public and private.Arendt emphasized the capacity of action in public tocreate the world that citizens share in common. Theterm public, she wrote, signifies two closely inter-related but not altogether identical phenomena: Itmeans, first, that everything that appears in public canbe seen and heard by everybody and has the widestpossible publicity. Second, the term public signi-fies the world itself, in so far as it is common to all ofus and distinguished from our privately owned placein it (Arendt1958,pp. 50, 52).Public action,moreover,is the crucial terrain of the humanly created as distinct

from the natural world, of appearance and memory,and of talk and recognition. Such action both requiresand helps to constitute public spacesspaces heldin common among people within which they maypresent themselves in speech and recognize others.Public action is thus a realm of freedom from thenecessitynotably of material reproductionthatdominates private life.

Arendts usual term, public space, leaves theshape of public life more open than the phrase publicsphere. Public action can create institutions, as in thefounding of the American Republic, but as action it isunpredictable. Its publicness comes from its perform-ance in a space between people, a space of appearances,but it is in the nature of public action to be alwaysforming and reforming that space and arguably thepeople themselves. This conceptualization offers clearadvantages for thinking about the place of plurality inthe public sphere. As Arendt wrote of America, sincethe country is too big for all of us to come together anddetermine our fate, we need a number of public spaceswithin it (1972, p. 232).

Arendt saw this plurality threatened not just bymass conformity but by the reduction of publicconcerns to material matters. A focus on sex as muchas on the economy threatens the publicprivate dis-tinction. It not only intrudes on intimacy and privatelife but impoverishes public discourse. Arendt (1951)saw this problem as basic to totalitarianism, whichcould allow citizens neither privacy nor free publicdiscourse. Totalitarianism is distinguished from meretyranny by the fact that it works directly on private lifeas well as limiting public life. This is not just a matterof contrasting intentions, but of distinctively moderncapacity. Modern sociological conditions offer rulersthe possibility to reach deeply into the family inparticular and personal life in general, to engineerhuman life in ways never before imagined.

This potential for collapsing the public and privaterealms is linked to Arendts unusually negative view ofcivil society. Society, she writes, is that curious andsomewhat hybrid realm which the modern age inter-jected between the older and more genuine realms ofthe public or political on one side and the private onthe other (1990, p. 122). Civil society is first andforemost a realm of freedom from politics. But publicfreedom is freedom in politics. This calls for actionthat creates new forms of life, rather than merelyattempting to advance interests or accommodate toexisting conditions. This distinguishes Arendts view,and republicanism generally, from much liberalthought: Thus it has become almost axiomatic even inpolitical theory to understand by political freedom nota political phenomenon, but on the contrary, the moreor less free range of nonpolitical activities which agiven body politic will permit and guarantee to thosewho constitute it (1990, p. 30).

The founding of the United States was a favoriteexample of such action for Arendt. The American

1900


Founders imagined and created a new kind of society,a new set of institutions. This relied on citizens publiccommitments to each other rather than assumptionsabout human nature or mere external application oflaw. The Founders knew that whatever men might bein their singularity, they could bind themselves into acommunity which, even though it was composed ofsinners, need not necessarily reflect this sinful sideof human nature (1990, p. 174). Arendts vision ofpublic life as central to a moral community sharesmuch with a republican tradition that deplores themodern decline of the public spheregenerally as-sociated with the rise of particular interests at theexpense of concern for the general good, the de-terioration of rational public discourse about publicaffairs, or outright disengagement of citizens frompolitics (see Public Sphere: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century History). Republican accounts of thepublic sphere place a strong emphasis on the moralobligations of the good citizen; recent scholarship hasoften questioned whether citizens lived up to signifi-cantly higher standards in earlier eras (Schudson1998).

5. Differentiation in the Public Sphere and CiilSociety

Habermas account of the public sphere has beenenduringly influential (see Calhoun 1992). Its delayedtranslation into English in 1989 ironically contributedto an invigorating new reading shaped by both the fallof communism and widespread projects of privatiza-tion in the West. Critics within communist societieshad revived the notion of civil society (as distinct fromsimply society) in order to speak of the realm outsidestate control and its relative absence in communistsocieties. Likewise, transitions away from right-wingdictatorships were often treated in terms of a return ofcivil society (Perez-Diaz 1993). In the US, the idea ofcivil society was linked not only to democracy but toreliance on voluntary organizations and philanthropy(Powell and Clemens 1998, Putnam 2000).

What civil society signifies in contemporary politicalanalysis is the organization of social life on the basis ofinterpersonal relationships, group formation, andsystems of exchange linking people beyond the rangeof intimate family relations and without reliance ondirection by the government. As a number of scholarsof Africa have noted, it incorporates an unfortunateunderstanding of family privacy that underestimatesthe positive and supraprivate social roles that Africankin organizations can play (see essays in Harbeson etal. 1994). Even more basically, references to civilsociety often fail to distinguish adequately betweensystemic capitalist economic organization and muchmore voluntary creation of social organizationthrough the formation of civic associations, interestgroups, and the likea distinction Habermas has

sought to stress. This has sometimes been a source ofconfusion in use of the public sphere concept toanalyze distinctive institutional developments in di-verse political and cultural settings (Calhoun 1993).

Civil society has been important to defenders of freemarket economics because it suggests the virtues of aneconomy in which participants choices are regulatedby their interests rather than their official statuses. Inprinciple, such an economy is able to effectivelyproduce and circulate goods on the basis of pricesrather than government direction. Civil society hasbeen equally important to advocates of democracybecause it signifies the capacity of citizens to createamongst themselves the associations necessary tobring new issues to the public agenda, to defend bothcivil and human rights, and to provide for an effectivecollective voice in the political process. This involvesboth a free press and political mobilization on thebasis of parties and interest groups (see Cohen andArato 1992 for the most detailed review; also Chand-hoke 1995, Seligman 1992, Alexander 1998, Keane1999). Habermas (1992, p. 367) summarizes the recentusage: civil society is composed of those more or lessspontaneously emergent associations, organizations,and movements that, attuned to how societal problemsresonate in the private life spheres, distill and transmitsuch reactions in amplified form to the public sphere.The core of civil society comprises a network ofassociations that institutionalizes problem-solving dis-courses on questions of general interest inside theframework of organized public spheres. Habermaswork more generally, however, reveals this to be aminimally theorized as well as optimistic usage. Ithighlights one aspect of civil society but does not makeclear the most basic issue.

While part of the heritage of the idea of civil societyhas been the effort to organize society through publicdiscourse, an equally influential part has been theclaim to privacy, the right to be left alone, theopportunity to enter into social relations free fromgovernance by the state or even the public. The idea ofbusiness corporations as autonomous creatures ofprivate contract and private property thus reflects theheritage of civil society arguments as much as the ideaof a public sphere in which citizens joined in rational-critical argument to determine the nature of their livestogether. Civil society refers to the domains in whichsocial life is self-organizing, that is, in which it is notsubject to direction by the state. But this self-organiza-tion can be a matter of system function or of consciouscollective choice through the public sphere (Calhoun2001).

Habermas account of the public sphere drew avariety of important critical responses. One of the firstfocused on the extent to which he focused on thebourgeois public sphere and correspondingly neglect-ed nonbourgeois public life and failed to clarify someof the conditions built into the bourgeois ideal. Negtand Kluge (1972) responded with an account of the

1901


proletarian public sphere. Clearly, workers have atmany points built their own institutions, media, andnetworks of communication, and entered into con-tention with bourgeois elites and other groups over thecollective good. But if this is a discursive competi-tionthat is, if workers and bourgeois argue overwhat constitutes the collective good rather than onlyfighting about itthen this implies an encompassingpublic sphere, albeit an internally differentiated one.

Nancy Fraser (1992) has influentially emphasizedthe importance of subaltern counterpublics such asthose framed by race, class, or gender. Some pub-licseven very partial onesmay claim to representthe whole; others oppose dominant discursive patternsand still others are neutral. Not all publics that aredistinguished from the putative whole are subaltern.As Michael Warner (2001) has suggested, the de-ployment of claims on an unmarked public as thepublic sphere is also a strategy, generally a strategy ofthe powerful. Yet, it is important to keep in mind boththat the existence of counterpublics as such presup-poses a mutual engagement in some larger publicsphere and that the segmentation of a distinct publicfrom the unmarked larger public may be a result ofexclusion,not choice.Feminist scholars especiallyhavedrawn attention to both the gender biases withinfamily life that disempower women and the historicallystrong gender division between public and privaterealms on which male political freedom has generallyrested (Elshtain 1993, Young 2000).

6. Conclusion

Theories of civil society focus on the capacity for self-organization of social relations, outside the control ofthe state and usually beyond the realm of family. Thebasic question posed by theories of the public sphere isto what extent collective discourse can determine theconditions of this social life. Contemporary researchon civil society and the public sphere turns on thebreadth of political participation, the extent to whichcapitalist markets limit other dimensions of self-organization in civil society, the existence of multipleor overlapping public spheres, the impact of newcommunications media, and the quality of rational-critical discourse and its relationship to culture-forming activities. These issues also inform discussionsabout international civil society and its public sphere.

The concepts of civil society and public sphere tookon their primary modern dimensions in the lateeighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in WesternEurope and to a lesser extent the United States. Theyhave become important in a variety of other settings,including in conceptualizing social autonomy in re-lationship to communist and authoritarian states.They inform democratic projects as well as academicresearch in a variety of settings and are in turnthemselves informed by cultural creativity and socialaction.

See also: Citizenship and Public Policy; Civil Society,Concept and History of; Democracy; Individual}Society: History of the Concept; Public Good, The:Cultural Concerns; Public Sphere: Nineteenth- andTwentieth-century History; State, History of

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C. Calhoun

Civilization, Concept and History of

The concept of civilization is inextricably connectedwith the conditions of its emergence, most notablywith the rise of historical consciousness in Europe inthe eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as theglobalisation of this form of historical understandingand correlative forms of intellectual practice. Theconcept is complex and imprecise in its definition, butubiquitous in its uses, and inextricably imbricated withother categories by which historical materials areorganized, such as culture, nation, and race. Apart

from designating certain morphological features ofhuman society, particularlywith reference to urbanismand urbanity, civilization has been a schema forhistorical categorization and for the organization ofhistorical materials. Here it has generally taken twoforms, the universalist evolutionist, and the romanticparticularist. The latter was tending to regain, in theascendant context of identity politics, a certain he-gemonic primacy worldwide at the close of thetwentieth century. In all, the concept of civilizationforms a crucial chapter in the conceptual, social, andpolitical history of history; it, or its equivalents arepresupposed, implicitly or explicitly, in the construaland writing of almost all histories.

1. Pre-History

1.1 The Past Continuous

The mental and social conditions for speaking aboutcivilization in a manner recognizable in the year 2000were not available before the middle of the eighteenthcentury. Hitherto, in Europe as elsewhere, large-scaleand long-term historical phenomena, which later cameto be designated as civilizations, had been categorizedin a static manner that precluded the consciousness ofdirectional or vectorial historicity as distinct from themere register of vicarious change.

Hitherto, the succession of large-scale historicalphenomena, such as Romanity or Islam, had beenregarded (a) typologically, most specifically in thesalvation-historical perspective of monotheistic re-ligious discourse, in which successive events are takenfor prefigurations and accomplishments of each other;(b) in terms of the regnal succession of world-empires;(c) in the genre of regnal succession, which started withthe Babylonian king-lists and the earliest stages ofChinese historical writing, and culminated in medievalArabic historical writing. Not even the schema of statecycles evolved by the celebrated Ibn Khaldun(d. 1406), where civilization (umraW n) was quasi-sociologically identified with various organizationalforms of human habitation and sociality, could mean-ingfully escape from this finite repertoire of possiblehistorical conceptions.

In the perspective of typology, the continuity ofhistorical phenomena was expressed in the repetitionof prophecies successively reaffirming divine intentand inaugurating a final form of order whose teloswould be the end of time. Thus the Jewish prophetsrepeat each other and are all figures for Abraham;Jesus is at once the repetition and termination of thisunique cycle of terrestrial time and is prefigured inJewish prophecies; Muhammad is the final accom-plishment and the consummation of earlier propheticrevelations, prefigured in Jewish and Christian scrip-tures; his era inaugurates the consummation of timewith the Apocalypse. The structure of time in theTalmud, in the Christian writings of Eusebius (d. 339),

1903

Ciilization, Concept and History of

Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences ISBN: 0-08-043076-7

calhoun civil society public sphere history of concept

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