A Note on Civilizations and Economies (original) (raw)
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The geospace stratification substantiate and its spatial differences reveal based on the analysis of the economic growth dynamics. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the slowdown in economic growth confirmed and its negative consequences for the investment sphere clarified, because the ability of countries to respond adequately to these processes is different. It has been determined that under the globalization influence, the world acts as a single whole, and the core of developed countries and the periphery is formed as well as local civilizations are transformed. Attention focuses on the research of the values problems that determine the state of society development. The research of the essential characteristics of civilizations carried out and the ideas of the main European civilizational schools characterized. Based on M. Rokeach’s concept, the features that characterize values are determined. It confirmed the values that dominate in society are the main element of culture. ...
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Comparative Civilizations Review, 2017
In Part I of this essay, I sketched an overview of several contrasting approaches to civilizational analysis. I also pointed out that Europe from the twelfth century onward underwent a revolutionary transformation that set it apart from all other civilizations. The present discussion presents the analysis that follows from that background and the insights of Max Weber's "Preface" to his Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion (1920). It assumes the plural conception of civilizations pioneered by Durkheim, Mauss, and Benjamin Nelson.1 The intent of the discussion is to show how very different civilizational development turned out in three civilizations, even with the mediating intervention of direct encounters.The first encounter was between Byzantium (Greek/Roman) civilization and Islamic civilization during the 8th and 9th centuries; the second encounter focuses on the 12th century interaction between Islam and the West; and the third, the 17th century encounter...
Cornelius Castoriadis and Radical Democracy, 2014
This chapter starts with a summary of Castoriadis's perspective, moves to Arnason, and then highlights the regime of growth in Japan and contemporary traditions that limit expansion. Castoriadis and the imaginary significations of capitalism For Castoriadis, the social imaginary generates core social imaginary significations of the unlimited extension of rational mastery which seem after the fact to be 'the spirit of the system' (1987, p.46). Castoriadis's conception of imaginary significations of infinite rational mastery at this point in his work substitute for attempts at finely-grained multicausal theorisation. This includes the conceptual apparatus of modern capitalism as: …a new "idea", the idea that the unlimited growth of production and of the productive forces is in fact the central objective of human existence. This "idea" is what I call a social imaginary signification. To it correspond new attitudes, values, and norms, a new social definition of reality and of being, of what counts and what does not count. (1991, p.184). The hubristic and elusive goal of mastery is aided by the expansion of calculability in all spheres of social life (Castoriadis, 2007a). Rationality of this kind confers on capitalist operations the imagination of knowable regularities. The internal and self-evident consistencies of rationality represent a way of thinking, perceiving and believing in which the capitalist organisation of social life is pictured as inescapably rational. In the nineteenth century, political
GJ #2019, 1, Civilizations for Global Society, by V. Cotesta
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the Soviet Union created an effect comparable to culture shock in worldwide public opinion. These events were interpreted as an epochal change: a political revolution that opened a new era of human history. In the 1990s, various theories of global society were proposed. These theories also open news paths for social and political analysis. Viewed with unprejudiced eyes, history does not seem to have reached its fulfillment and turns out to be more complex than a bipolar structure (the democratic and capitalistic Western World vs. the anti-democratic and totalitarian Communist world) or tri-polar structure (the First, Second and Third worlds) of the "Cold War" period. By discussing some of these interpretations through the intertwining of the concepts of "civilization" and "globalization" and through a comparison with non-Western or non-Modern frameworks of civilization, this essay underlines that every civilization has its own idea and its own project for a global society: comparative analysis shows the possibility of dialogue and, at the same time, the risks of conflict.
International sociology, 2001
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. keywords: asceticism ✦ civilizing process ✦ liminality ✦ mimesis ✦ parrhesia ✦ sacrifice 'Civilization' is a complex, multilayered, controversial term. One must start by clarifying its meaning. The first question concerns the nature of the 'entity' denoted. This immediately leads to a paradox. It seems that this term, and its adjective, work at two very distinct levels. On the one hand, civilization refers to very large entities, encompassing a number of other macro-units like nations or societies. There is something 'ultimate' in the term at this level. It is in this sense that Toynbee considered civilizations as the proper units
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2014
For those unhappy with the status quo, Ellen Meiksins Wood's eloquent explanation of the origin of capitalism embodies hope for a future beyond the system that is so often taken for granted. By walking the reader through a comprehensive and thorough account of relevant European history, this book demonstrates why the transition to capitalism could not have been a natural or inevitable process. What she proposes seems so logical and uncontroversial that it is initially hard to grasp the significance of her argument -if capitalism is manifested in very specific social relations of production, it is thereby possible to deconstruct and abolish.