Civilization
blogWords respond to needs. The Austrailian aboriginals required words for only a few numbers (one, two, and then many); by way of contrast, in 1674, the word quintillion (1 followed by 30 ciphers) entered the English language. The lifetime of Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866) was exceptionally fertile in neologisms (itself a neologism of the era) and new meanings: ‘intellectual, autobiography, rationalism, humanitarian, utilitarian, public opinion, romanticism, ideology, primitive, decade, progressive, modernize, contemporary, antiquated, journalist’ are those Roy Porter collates from the Enlightenment; to which Eric Hobsbawm, writing about 1789 to 1848, adds ‘industry, industrialist, factory, middle class, working class, capitalism, socialism, aristocracy, railway, liberal, conservative, nationality, scientist, engineer, proletariat, economic crisis, statistics, and sociology.’ I would add classification, civilization and taxonomy, although this is by no means exhaustive. What these lists show is that, not only do words act as silent witnesses to history, but they also mark an attempt to reconfigure historical perspectives. By applying new vocabulary to history we shape it in our own image. Thus, in order to understand the concept of civilization it is necessary to acknowledge its origins and the path to its establishment.
Dr. Johnson, for instance, would not allow the word civilization into the fourth edition [1772] of his dictionary. He did not think it ‘legitimate English’ and had, in his original preface to the dictionary, worried about the potential of translated terms to ‘reduce us to babble a dialect of France.’ Instead, he had included civility to mean both politeness (in the sense of individual behaviour) and the state of being civilized (in the wider sense, as opposed to barbarity). Boswell objected, stating that ‘it is better to have a distinct word for each sense;’ he thought that civilization would better serve this latter connotation. Despite Johnson’s injunction its use soon became widespread, responding to the intellectual demands of a revolutionary era.
Norbert Elias locates the original use of the French word civilisation in the 1760s, with the works of the Physiocrat, the elder Mirabeau, for whom it represents all the surface politesse of the aristocracy: ‘the mask of virtue and not its face, and civilization does nothing for society if it does not give it both the form and the substance of virtue.’ Like Rousseau, Mirabeau contrasts the old ideas of the superiority of courtly civilité against the ‘ideal of virtue’ through which the middle classes ‘legitimized themselves.’ The term became common currency in France around 1774, the year Louis XV died, being stabilised by usage in works by Raynal and Holbach. The latter incorporated in his Système sociale the enlightened reformist ideas of civilization which Elias calls ‘a half-affirmation and half-negation of the existing order’:
‘Human reason is not yet sufficiently exercised; the civilization of peoples is not yet complete; obstacles without number have hitherto opposed the progress of useful knowledge, the advance of which alone contribute to perfecting our government, our laws, our education, our institutions, and our morals.’
The concept of Civilization, says Elias, ‘expresses the self-consciousness of the West.’