Abstract
Postmodernists caution us about the inevitable indeterminateness of language and concepts, and, to be sure, social scientists have to wrestle with more than our share of weasel words: state,1 nation, culture, society, class, democracy, globalization. Yet it is perhaps correct to suggest that few terms are quite so murky and recently controversial as “civilization,” to such a degree that it is tempting to agree with Fernández-Armesto’s comment (quoted in the introduction to this volume) that it may be impossible to restore any useful meaning at all in the term. So why not forget it? The answer, of course, is, like Everest, civilization as a notion is “there” and, moreover, thanks to Huntington and the current Bush administration, it looms larger than ever and thus is increasingly hard to ignore.
Keywords
- Central Bureaucracy
- Imperial Court
- Islamic Fundamentalism
- Contemporary Globalization
- Latin American Civilization
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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© 2007 Martin Hall and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson
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Ferguson, Y.H. (2007). Pathways to Civilization. In: Hall, M., Jackson, P.T. (eds) Civilizational Identity. Culture and Religion in International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230608924_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230608924_14
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-4039-7546-1
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