Abstract

In view of the popularity of scholarly books and academic courses on civilization, it is surprising that few scholars have given an explicit enumeration of the civilizations which are described and compared. Enumeration, already accomplished in biology and linguistics, is certainly also possible in history. The first step is to standardize the multifarious terminology used in the classification of civilizations. Nomenclatural harmony would enable comparisons of substance by removing the possibility that problems of wording would lead to conceptual mistakes. The typologies of some historians could be accounted for in terms of a "scale of cultural vitality," but such a schema is too reminiscent of the "Great Chain of Being," which became at best supplementary and at worst superfluous after the advent of Darwinian biology. Instead, a non-genetic hierarchy of five successively contained categories can accommodate all types of civilization