Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-18T21:24:58.885Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘Civilization’ and its subalterns

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 September 2017

Julian Go
Julian Go*
Affiliation:
Professor, Sociology, Boston University
*
* Correspondence to: Julian Go, Department of Sociology, 96 Cummington Mall, Boston, MA 02215, US. Author’s email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article reviews Andrew Linklater’s Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems. Focusing upon the book’s explanation of the ‘European civilizing process’ in the modern era, it suggests that the account is limited by ‘civilizational isolationism’ and ‘metrocentric diffusion’. These analytic operations serve to minimise the agency and contributions of non-Western, colonial, and postcolonial actors to the global civilizing process. The occlusion of such agency and contributions, however, are not specific to this work, but reflect broader limitations in historical sociology writ large.

Keywords

CivilizationsNorbert EliasHistorical International RelationsHistorical SociologyEmpireHarm Conventions
Type
Articles
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , October 2017 , pp. 612 - 620
Copyright
© British International Studies Association 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Linklater, Andrew, Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. xii Google Scholar.

2 Ibid., p. 441.

3 Ibid., p. 444.

4 Ibid., p. 456.

5 Ibid., p. 466.

6 Eisenstadt, S. N., ‘Cultural orientations, institutional entrepreneurs, and social change: Comparative analysis of traditional civilizations’, American Journal of Sociology, 85:4 (1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, pp. 840–69; Bhambra, Gurminder, Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dirlik, Arif, ‘Global modernity? Modernity in an age of global capitalism’, European Journal of Social Theory, 6:3 (2003), pp. 275–292 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Seidman, Steven, ‘The colonial unconscious of classical sociology’, Political Power and Social Theory, 24 (2013), p. 46 Google Scholar

8 Linklater, Violence and Civilization, pp. 189, 464.

9 Ibid., p. 464.

10 Ibid., p. 463.

11 Ibid., p. 441.

12 Ibid., p. 442, emphasis added.

13 Buzan, Barry and Lawson, George, The Global Transformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Goody, Jack, The Theft of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 173 Google Scholar.

15 Linklater, Violence and Civilization, p. 227.

16 Wallerstein, Immanuel, The Modern World-System Ii: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600–1750 (Boston: Academic Press, Inc., 1980)Google Scholar.

17 Mann, Michael, The Sources of Social Power, Volume I: A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012 [orig. pub. 1986]), pp. 1–3 Google Scholar. See also Mann, Michael, The Sources of Social Power Volume 4: Globalizations, 1945–2011 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

18 Linklater, Violence and Civilization, p. 218.

19 Bhambra, Rethinking Modernity, pp. 56–7; Go, Julian, Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 109–110 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 On this point, see Go, Julian, ‘For a postcolonial sociology’, Theory & Society, 42:1 (2013), pp. 25–55 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Hobson, John M., The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Branch, Jordan, ‘“Colonial reflection” and territoriality: the peripheral origins of sovereign statehood’, European Journal of International Relations, 18:2 (2012), pp. 277–297 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 As quoted in Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation, p. 11.

24 Linklater, Violence and Civilization, p. 466.

25 Ibid., pp. 463–4.

26 Ibid., pp. 266–7.

27 Dubois, Laurent, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

28 James, C. L. R., C. L. R. James and Revolutionary Marxism: Selected Writings of C. L. R. James, 1939–1949 (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1994), p. 77 Google Scholar.

29 Go, Julian, Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688–Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 147–158 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Jensen, Steven, The Making of International Human Rights: The 1960s, Decolonization, and the Reconstruction of Global Values (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 7 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Jensen, The Making of International Human Rights, p. 277.

32 Cooper, Frederick, ‘Postcolonial studies and the study of history’, in Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty (eds), Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 401–422 (p. 413)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Linklater, Violence and Civilization, p. 257.

34 Ibid., p. 445.

35 Jensen, The Making of International Human Rights, p. 279.

36 Go, Julian, ‘A global-historical sociology of power: On Mann’s concluding volumes to the Sources of Social Power’ [Review Essay], International Affairs, 89:6 (2013), pp. 1469–1477 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Elias, Norbert, The Civilizing Process (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 1968), p. 261 Google Scholar.

38 Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus and Nexon, Daniel, ‘Relations before states: Substance, process and the study of world politics’, European Journal of International Relations, 5:6 (1999), pp. 291–332 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.