Search results

The author probes deep into the concept of Eurasianism, the subject of heated discussions interpreted as an integration attempt in the post-Soviet expanse. He looks at the idea of Eurasianism as a civilizational project designed to unify all entities of the geostrategic expanse into a single whole. This multilayered problem cannot be exhaustively analyzed in one or even several dozen articles. Nevertheless, the subject deserves clarification as a target of analysis. The political and economic vs. civilizational discourse looks very much like the chicken or the egg dilemma. The author prefers a civilizational discourse, although many will probably disagree with him.

The revival of civilizational analysis is closely linked to a broader cultural turn in the human sciences. Comparative civilizational approaches accept the primacy of culture, but at the same time, they strive to avoid the cultural determinism familiar from twentieth-century sociology, especially from the Parsonian version of functionalism. To situate this twofold strategy within contemporary cultural sociology, it seems useful to link up with the distinction between a strong and a weak program for the sociological analysis of culture, proposed by Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith. The strong program, also described as cultural sociology, stresses the constitutive role of culture in all domains and across the field of social life; the weak program, more precisely the sociology of culture, treats culture as a variable factor among others, and in some important respects subordinate to others. From this point of view, civilizational analysis is, first and foremost, a particularly ambitious version of the strong program: its emphasis on different cultural articulations of the world, as well as on the large-scale and long-term social-historical formations crystallizing around such articulations, adds new dimensions to the autonomy of culture. It also reinforces the hermeneutical stance of cultural sociology and cautions against the acceptance of mainstream explanatory models. On the other hand, the civilizational perspective highlights the variety of interconnections between culture and other components of the social world, and thus takes into account some of the themes favoured by the weak program.

Although there is an outcrop of theories in social and human sciences, none of them is adequate to explain the reality of the fast-changing and vastly complex world of today, primarily because, in spite of the pretentious labels they bear and the seemingly conflicting ideologies they espouse, they are all moored to one particular civilizational perspective (that of the West). The author argues that the only meaningful theory can be one that is cross-civilizationally comparative, because such a theory alone can mediate the conflictual restructuring of world power, now unmistakably under way.

Much of the literature on September 11 focuses on bin Laden as a terrorist or on the idea of a clash of civilizations. In criticizing both, this paper instead conceptualizes bin Laden as a "civilizational revolutionary." As a revolutionary, bin Laden has sought to topple moderate regimes in the Middle East and to reestablish the caliphate. In contrast with most other national or transnational revolutionaries, however, he has emphasized culture—militant Islamism. Nevertheless, as the literature on social revolutions suggests, bin Laden has used the big strategy of most other revolutionaries in "externalizing" regional conflicts with his attacks on the United States. But his tactic of apocalyptic terrorism has made him unique as a revolutionary.

These considerations of civilizational and ethical aspects of environmental safety start by a reference to the conceptual determination of this safety, and its foundation on a conception of the Planet Earth as a political and geological space, originating in the development of life forms. In this sense, the author understands the structures of the Earth's ecosystem, its unity, and the disruption of this unity with consequences for its survival and the survival of the human civilization itself. In the context of this approach, the author points to the need to preserve the environmental safety from the standpoint of equality and justice, stressing that justice is a legal category, especially when it is associated with the laws of nature, laws which are also associated with man as a natural being.

The article discusses the problems of forming a new type of civilizational devel­opment, analyzes the features and new technologies for updating life's meanings and basic values. Characteristics and growth points are revealed where "world­view universals" (according to V.S. Styopin) act as some sort of basic genes of a different type of sociality. Just like the origin of new types of organisms is impossible without genetic transformations changing the organism genome, the emergence of new types of society and new types of sociality are impossible without updating fundamental life meanings and basic values. Today's actuali­zation of the phenomena of culture as an object of transferring historical and national legacy is connected with an attempt to imagine it as the genome of civilization's development. Mostly on this way the strategies compete which pre­serve basic values of the previous type of development with innovational inten­tions focused on searching for new life meanings and on renewing the content of modern reality values. New values are generating within the old culture, and the humanity is interested in these seeds of the future to grow into new civiliza­tion. The author shows that the formation of a new value matrix and the renewal of vital meanings is a condition for the transition to a new type of civilizational development, which grows within modern civilization. The information revolu­tion in the field of communication is radically changing the nature of civiliza­tional development, it is one of the factors affecting the renewal of basic values and life meanings.

Huntington's clash of civilizations thesis considers interstate and intrastate conflicts between groups of different civilizations to be more frequent, longer, and more violent than conflicts within civilizations. The clash of civilizations should be the principal issue in world politics after the end of the Cold War, and it should especially shape the relationship between the West and Islam. This article examines Huntington's hypotheses on the basis of a dataset derived from the Uppsala Conflict Data Project. A new research design uses conflict-years in order to deal with conflicts both between and within states. It also tries to find the 'core' intercivilizational conflicts. The analyses distinguish three periods after World War II, and each of them is characterized by a higher number of intercivilizational conflict-years than the previous one. There are two points of transition, in the 1960s and 1980s, but the trends in the clash of civilizations seem to be unaffected by the end of the Cold War. The relationship between civilizational difference and duration of conflict is not statistically significant. Conflicts within civilizations are less likely to escalate into war during the post-Cold War period than during the Cold War period, while the intensity of conflicts between civilizations remains as high as in the Cold War. The majority of intercivilizational conflict-years during the post-Cold War period have involved Islamic groups. Nevertheless, the frequency of conflict between the Islamic and Sinic (Confucian) civilizations and the West remains marginal.

Intro -- CONTENTS -- Preface -- SECTION I: The Fewish Historical Experience in the Civilizational Framework -- CHAPTER ONE: The Format of Jewish History: Some Reflections on Weber's Ancient Judaism -- CHAPTER TWO: The Jewish Historical Experience in the Framework of Comparative Universal History -- CHAPTER THREE: The Jewish Experience in the Modern Era -- SECTION II: The Zionist Movement and Israeli Society -- CHAPTER FOUR: Did Zionism Bring the Jews back to History? -- CHAPTER FIVE: Change and Continuity in Israeli Society -- CHAPTER SIX: The Mahapakh of 1977 and the Transformation of Israeli Society -- CHAPTER SEVEN: Israeli Identity: Problems in the Development of the Collective Identity of an Ideological Society -- CHAPTER EIGHT: Israeli Politics and the Jewish Political Tradition: Principled Political Anarchism and the Rule of the Court -- CHAPTER NINE: Two New Democracies, the U.S. and Israel: Some Comparative Remarks -- SECTION III: The Fewish Experience in the Contemporary Era -- CHAPTER TEN: The American Jewish Experience and American Pluralism: A Comparative Perspective -- CHAPTER ELEVEN: Patterns of Contemporary Jewish Identity -- CHAPTER TWELVE: The Jewish Experience in the Contemporary Era: Some Concluding Observations -- Selected Bibliograhy -- General Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.