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Volume 3, Number 1, 1997
Stephen K. Sanderson, ed. Reviewed by W. Warren Wagar At the tender age of 22, I gave my first public lecture, a paper for my graduate history club on the cyclical theory of history delineated in the first ten volumes of Arnold J. Toynbee's A Study of History. (In that distant era, there were still only ten.) Now I find myself reviewing Stephen K. Sanderson's symposium Civilizations and World Systems, the same Stephen K. Sanderson who reports in his Preface that "at the tender age of 20 and while still an undergraduate student...I gave a long oral presentation on the work of Arnold J. Toynbee" (p. 9). My encounter with Toynbee helped inspire my second book, The City of Man: Prophecies of a World Civilization in Twentieth Century Thought (1963). Sanderson's encounter with Toynbee surely helped inspire his also recently published Social Transformations: A General Theory of Historical Development (1995). Cyclical theory, it seems, may apply to persons as well as to civilizations. [Page 230] Civilizations and World Systems: Studying World-Historical Change is, like Social Transformations itself, a formidable achievement, bringing together 14 contemporary exponents of comparative civilizations and world-systems theory. The volume originated as a special issue of Comparative Civilizations Review, published in 1994, but only three articles from that special issue survive into the present work. Four other previously published articles and six newly written pieces round out the symposium, together with four illuminating introductory essays by Sanderson, two of these in collaboration with Thomas D. Hall. Sanderson's strategy has been to present the two major current approaches to the study of world-historical change, the "civilizationist" school and the "world-systems" school, and then to explore how these disparate approaches may (or may not) complement one another, in the unconcealed hope that they will eventually fuse into a super-theory of world history. Cyclical, evolutionary, and systemic analysis all enter into the big picture he seeks to draw. The articles in the first part of the symposium make the case for the civilizationists. Matthew Melko discusses "The Nature of Civilizations," comparing and contrasting the definitions and lists of civilizations furnished by Spengler, Toynbee, Kroeber, Bagby, Coulborn, and Quigley. Melko concludes by likening civilizations to symphonies: both have themes that pass through stages of development, from beginning to end. David Wilkinson follows with an essay on his thesis that a "Central Civilization" was created about 1500 B.C. by the fusion of the ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations. Over the centuries this Central Civilization engulfed all the others, and its "current manifestation" is the single global civilization in which everyone on earth, willy-nilly, now dwells. The final piece in the first part, by the late William Eckhardt, offers what he terms a dialectical evolutionary theory of the relationship between civilizations, empires, and wars. Wealth, power, and conquest, he argues, are directly correlated. Civilizations with surplus wealth produce empires that win wars, but a point is always reached when costs exceed gains, leading to the loss of wars, the collapse of empires, and the unraveling of civilizations. Wars serve as "both midwives and undertakers in the rise and fall of civilizations" (p. 91). [Page 231] In the second part of Sanderson's symposium, world-systems theorists take their turn, after a lengthy introduction by Sanderson and Hall devoted chiefly to Immanuel Wallerstein's founding theory. Christopher Chase-Dunn and Hall lead off with an essay comparing world-systems over the past 10,000 years by such measures as size of population, spatio-temporal boundaries, cycles of rise and fall, and settlement systems. Barry K. Gills takes a similarly long view in the next chapter, "Capital and Power in the Processes of World History," an exposition of the work that he and Andre Gunder Frank have done to demonstrate the antiquity of cumulative capitalist development and its integral relationship to the wielding of political power. Gills rejects the "conventional dichotomies" of premodern versus modern, whether applied to economies or to polities. A vast capitalist Eurasian world-system has existed in various forms for 5,000 years. Frank adds an essay of his own sharply critical of the alleged Eurocentric bias of Braudel and Wallerstein. Two other chapters, by Albert Bergesen and Andrew Bosworth, furnish additional support for the Frank-Gills approach to world-systems theory. Bergesen even recommends that we "let go" of the old models altogether, scrapping the notion of a plurality of systems and civilizations, and building a new model of world-historical development that will encompass all of world history from earliest times. The last two parts of Civilizations and World Systems feature five essays that address the prospects for a synthesis of civilizationist and world-systems approaches. Now that both sides have had their say, can they find common ground? Is there hope for a super-theory of world-historical change? [Page 232] Wallerstein is skeptical. In "Hold the Tiller Firm: On Method and the Unit of Analysis," he chides both camps for succumbing to methodological temptations that, in his opinion, place the whole enterprise of world-historical analysis in jeopardy. Many world-systems theorists, he contends, are either too eager to generalize and posit laws (the nomothetic temptation) or too eager to deny the possibility of discovering meaningful generalizations (the idiographic temptation). Chase-Dunn's comparative approach illustrates the former, Frank's single world-system approach illustrates the latter. Holding the tiller firm, for Wallerstein, means the negotiation of a pragmatic balance between these two extremes. As for the civilizationists, their original sin is to succumb to the temptation to reify, to assume that civilizations are real-life organisms, rather than concepts useful for the purposes of sociohistorical analysis. The remaining four essays strike a more optimistic note. Wilkinson returns for an encore triumphantly entitled, "Civilizations are World Systems!" His formula for consensus is quite simple. Civilizationists must agree that the many local civilizations of the past have evolved into the single global civilization of our own time. World-systematists must agree that the global world system of our own time emerged from a plurality of past world systems. And both must agree that past civilizations and urbanized world systems were, and today's global civilization and world system are, "identical" (p. 248). The body of Wilkinson's article consists of brief but incisive dialogues with Toynbee, Quigley, Spengler ("brilliantly, perversely, powerfully wrong," p. 253), Melko, Hord, Sorokin, Huntington, Chase-Dunn, Hall, and Gills and Frank, in which Wilkinson outlines his areas of agreement and/or disagreement with each. Then Sanderson himself weighs in with a chapter critical of the idealist bias of civilizationists and suggesting that the concept of "expanding world commercialization" may provide a bridge between the two perspectives. Next, Victor Roudometof and Roland Robertson contribute a provocative essay arguing for a transcendence of the struggle between idealism and materialism in world-historical analysis. Refuse to privilege either ontology, they recognize that civilizations are networks of political, economic, and cultural-ideological forces. [Page 233] The concluding chapter, by the only historian in the volume, William H. McNeill, consists of an unsparing autocritique of his best-known work, The Rise of the West. McNeill concedes that his book, published in the halcyon days of the early 1960s, should be seen today "as an expression of the postwar imperial mood in the United States" (p. 303). Residual Eurocentrism blinded McNeill, he confesses, to the primacy of China in the period from 1000 to 1500 A.D. More importantly, his civilizationist bias led him to represent the span of world history only as a series of cultural efflorescences, first here, then there, without regard for the ecumenical processes leading to the emergence of the modern world system. Implicit in McNeill's repentance is the possibility of a much improved method of reading world history that combines civilizationist and world-systems analysis. What impresses me most about this symposium, and has always impressed me most about the principal figures in both civilizationist and world-systems research, is the willingness of all concerned to listen, contend with, and learn from one another. This is only as it should be, but one of the many reasons why another recent scholarly endeavor with which I fellow-travel, the study of alternative world futures, has fallen so short of its early promise is that futurists, by and large, do not listen, do not contend with, and do not learn from one another. (Of course shutting one's ears is a vice by no means unique to futurists!) In any event, just like Sorokin and Toynbee before them, as evidenced in Sorokin's Social Philosophies of an Age of Crisis (1950) and Toynbee's response to his critics in the last volume of A Study of History (1961), contemporary civilizationists and world-systems theorists do engage in meaningful dialogue. Nowhere is that dialogue more forcefully evident than in Sanderson's symposium, a deliberate effort to bang heads together and strive for consensus. What impresses me almost as much as this symposium's dialogue, however, is the persistence of an antediluvian modernist social-scientific hubris that almost totally ignores the subjectivity of all scholarly enterprises. Each of Sanderson's contenders is willing to listen, but they rarely descend to irony or relativism. Each wise man appears convinced that he (they are all "he's") carries his own sack of Truth thickly lined with confirming data. If only the various sacks can be combined into a larger one, a super-sack, then perhaps the world-historical- theoretical millennium will have arrived. We will boast the very best and finest model of world history, and then turn our attention to other challenges. Perhaps it is my own idiographic bias as a historian, but I find such expectations more entertaining than inspiring, just as I used to chuckle over the efforts of Sorokin and Kroeber to strain the "facts" of various encyclopedias through the elaborate sieves of their theoretical kitchenware. Is it not possible (and desirable) to take ourselves a little less seriously? [Page 234] I have one final, and more serious, thought: Sanderson is convinced, as he tells us elsewhere (Sanderson, Social Transformations: A General Theory of Historical Development, Blackwell, 1995, p. 380), that the "capitalist-sensate" culture of our time is doomed to self-destruct in a generation or two or three. "A major economic, demographic, and ecological crisis, or possibly even a nuclear holocaust, will not be avoided. …It is our fate. It is our destiny." I agree, although I make no scientific claims for the veracity of this forecast. But if modern civilization does live under sentence of death, then applying whatever finite and fallible wisdom we can gather about the trends, cycles, and intersections of world history to the most rigorous possible study of the future should be our greatest task - either to understand why we are doomed, or somehow to dodge that doom, or to ensure that a remnant of humankind rises from the ashes. Not only should civilizationists and the various breeds of world-systems theorists try to bridge the gaps that separate them; they owe their progeny an effort still more strenuous to build bridges to the future. Meanwhile, Civilizations and World Systems is a lucid introduction to the other great issues at stake in the analysis of world-historical change, both for practitioners striving to remain au courant and for their graduate and undergraduate students, who could ask for no better textbook. It deserves many readers. [Page 235] |
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