'At last, a volume on civilization that truly reflects the complexity of multiple civilizations. The wealth of contributions Arjomand and Tiryakian have assembled demonstrates the value of an old concept for understanding the awful dilemmas confronting human kind in the global age. Its thoroughgoing renewal here establishes this book as the essential benchmark for future scholars of civilization' - Martin Albrow, Founding Editor of International Sociology and author of The Global Age - winner of the European Amalfi Prize, 1997 'In (...) our tension filled world, many are heralding, and others fearing, a"clash of civilizations." The contributors to this volume provides a healthy and persuasive argument about why this clash need not, and certainly should not, take place. They do so, moreover, not by rejecting the concept of civilization, but by developing a less primordial, homogenous, and essentialist concept of it. An important collection that provides illumination in this sometimes frighteningly dark time' - Jeffrey Alexander, Professor and Chair of Sociology at Yale University 'The concept of civilization may well replace the notions of globalization and identity as the core component in the vocabulary of 21st century sociology. The authors contribute a great deal to the clarification of fashionable controversies around the "clash of civilizations" and "multiculturalism". They go a long way toward purging the concept of civilization of its ideological overtones, and they suceed admirably in turning it into powerful analytic tool of an emerging fleld of macrosociology, known already as civilizational analysis' - Piotr Sztompka, President, International Sociological Association Although the concept of 'civilization' has deep roots in the social sciences, there is an urgent need to re-think it for contemporary times. This book points to an exhaustion in using 'the nation state' and 'world system' as the basic macro-units of social analysis because they do not get to grips with the 'soft power' variable of cultural factors involved in global aspects of development. Also, globalization requires us to reconsider the link between civilization and a fixed or given territory. This book focuses upon the dynamic aspect of civilizations. Among the topics covered are: · Civilizational analysis and social theory · Global civilization and local cultures · Civilizational forms · Rationalization and Civilization · Civilizations as zones of prestige · Historical and comparative dimensions of civilization · The clash of civilizations. (shrink)

Since neither of these two inordinately long responses deals seriously with what I said in “An Ideology of Difference” , both the Boyarins and Griffin are made even more absurd by actual events occurring as they wrote. The Israeli army has by now been in direct and brutal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza for twenty-one years; the intifadah, surely the most impressive and disciplined anticolonial insurrection in this century, is now in its eleventh month. The daily (...) killings of unarmed Palestinians by armed Israelis, soldiers and settlers, numbers several hundred; yesterday two more Palestinians were killed, the day before four were killed. The beatings, expulsions, wholesale collective punishments, the closure of schools and universities, as well as the imprisonment of dozens of thousands in places like Ansar III, a concentration camp, continue. A V sign flashed by a young Palestinian carries with six months in jail; a Palestinian flag can get you up to ten years; you risk burial alive by zealous Israel Defense Forces soldiers; if you are a member of a popular committee you are liable to arrest, and all professional, syndical, or community associations are now illegal. Any Palestinian can be put in jail without charge or trial for up to six months, renewable, for any offense, which needn’t be revealed to him or her. For non-Jews, approximately 1.5 million people on the West Bank and Gaza, there are thus no rights whatever. On the other hand, Jews are protected by Israeli law on the Occupied Territories. In such a state of apartheid—so named by most honest Israelis—the intifadah continues, as does the ideology of difference vainly attempting to repress and willfully misinterpret its significance. Edward W. Said is Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry is “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors”. (shrink)

At this point I should say something about one of the frequent criticisms addressed to me, and to which I have always wanted to respond, that in the process of characterizing the production of Europe’s inferior Others, my work is only negative polemic which does not advance a new epistemological approach or method, and expresses only desperation at the possibility of ever dealing seriously with other cultures. These criticisms are related to the matters I’ve been discussing so far, and while (...) I have no desire to unleash a point-by-point refutation of my critics, I do want to respond in a way that is intellectually pertinent to the topic at hand.What I took myself to be undertaking in Orientalism was an adversarial critique not only of the field’s perspective and political economy, but also of the sociocultural situation that makes its discourse both so possible and so sustainable. Epistemologies, discourses, and methods like Orientalism are scarcely worth the name if they are reductively characterized as objects like shoes, patched when worn out, discarded and replaced with new objects when old and unfixable. The archival dignity, institutional authority, and patriarchal longevity of Orientalism should be taken seriously because in the aggregate these traits function as a worldview with considerable political force not easily brushed away as so much epistemology. Thus Orientalism in my view is a structure erected in the thick of an imperial contest whose dominant wing it represented and elaborated not only as scholarship but as a partisan ideology. Yet Orientalism hid the contest beneath its scholarly and aesthetic idioms. These things are what I was trying to show, in addition to arguing that there is no discipline, no structure of knowledge, no institution or epistemology that can or has ever stood free of the various sociocultural, historical, and political formations that give epochs their peculiar individuality. Edward W. Said is Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry is “An Ideology of Difference”. (shrink)

Philosophers and geographers have converged on the topic of public space, fascinated and in many ways alarmed by fundamental changes in the way post-industrial societies produce space for public use, and in the way citizens of these same societies perceive and constitute themselves as a public. This volume advances this inquiry, making extensive use of political and social theory, while drawing intimate connections between political principles, social processes, and the commonplaces of our everyday environments.

Derrida and Foucault are opposed to each other on a number of grounds, and perhaps the one specially singled out in Foucault's attack on Derrida—that Derrida is concerned only with "reading" a text and that a text is nothing more than the "traces" found there by the reader—would be the appropriate one to begin with here.1 According to Foucault, if the text is important for Derrida because its real situation is literally an abysmally textual element, l'écriture en abîme with which (...) criticism so far has been unable really to deal,2 then for Foucault the text is important because it inhabits an element of power with a decisive claim on actuality, even though that power is invisible or implied. Derrida's criticism therefore moves us into the text, Foucault's in and out of it. · 1. Michel Foucault's attack on Derrida is to be found in an appendix to the later version of Folie et déraison: Historie de la folie à l'âge classique , pp. 583-602; the earlier edition has been translated into English: Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard .· 2. Jacques Derrida, La Dissémination , p. 297. Edward W. Said, Parr Professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, is the author of Orientalism and The Question of Palestine, along with numerous publications on literature, politics, and culture; his Beginnings: Intention and Method received the first annual Lionel Trilling Memorial Award. "The Problem of Textuality" will appear in a slightly different form in his Criticism between Culture and System. (shrink)

I do not want to be misunderstood as saying that the cultural situation I describe here caused Reagan, or that it typifies Reaganism, or that everything about it can be ascribed or referred back to the personality of Ronald Reagan. What I argue is that a particular situation within the field we call "criticism" is not merely related to but is an integral part of the currents of thought and practice that play a role within the Reagan era. Moreover, I (...) think, "criticism" and the traditional academic humanities have gone through a series of developments over time whose beneficiary and culmination is Reaganism. Those are the gross claims that I make for my argument.A number of miscellaneous points need to be made here. I am fully aware that any effort to characterize the present cultural moment is very likely to seem quixotic at best, unprofessional at worst. But that, I submit, is an aspect of the present cultural moment, in which the social and historical setting of critical activity is a totality felt to be benign , uncharacterizable as a whole and somehow outside history. Thus it seems to me that one thing to be tried–out of sheer critical obstinacy–is precisely that kind of generalization, that kind of political portrayal, that kind of overview condemned by the present dominant culture to appear inappropriate and doomed from the start.It is my conviction that culture works very effectively to make invisible and even "impossible" the actual affiliations that exist between the world of ideas and scholarship on the one hand, and the world of brute politics, corporate and state power, and military force, on the other. The cult of expertise and professionalism, for example, has so restricted our scope of vision that a positive doctrine of noninterference among fields has set in. This doctrine has it that the general public is best left ignorant, and the most crucial policy questions affecting human existence are best left to "experts," specialists who talk about their specialty only, and–to use the word first given wide social approbation by Walter Lippman in Public Opinion and The Phantom Public–"insiders," people who are endowed with the special privilege of knowing how things really work and, more important, of being close to power1.1. See Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century , pp. 180-85 and 212-6. (shrink)

A searing portrait in words and photographs of Palestinian life and identity that is at once an exploration of Edward Said's own dislocated past and a testimony to the lives of those living in exile.

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 seems to have broken, for the first time, the immunity from sustained criticism previously enjoyed by Israel and its American supporters. For a variety of reasons, Israel’s status in European and American public life and discourse has always been special, just as the position of Jews in the West has always been special, sometimes for its tragedy and horrendous suffering, at other times for its uniquely impressive intellectual and aesthetic triumphs. On behalf of (...) Israel, anomalous norms, exceptional arguments, eccentric claims were made, all of them forcibly conveying the notion that Israel does not entirely belong to the world of normal politics. Nevertheless, Israel—and with it, Zionism—had gained this unusual status politically, not miraculously: it merged with a variety of currents in the West whose power and attractiveness for supporters of Israel effaced anything as concrete as, for example, an Israeli policy of rigid separation between Jew and non-Jew, or a military rule over hundreds of thousands of Arabs that was as repressive as any tyranny in Latin America or Eastern Europe. There are any number of credible accounts of this, from daily fare in the Israeli press to studies by Amnesty International, to reports by various U.N. bodies, Western journalists, church groups, and, not least, dissenting supporters of Israel. In other words, even though Israel was a Jewish state established by force on territory already inhabited by a native population largely of Muslim Arabs, in a part of the world overwhelmingly Muslim and Arab, it appeared to most of Israel’s supporters in the West that the Palestinian Arabs who paid a large part of the price for Israel’s establishment were neither relevant nor necessarily even real. What changed in 1982 was that the distance between Arab and Jew was for the first time perceived more or less universally as not so great and, indeed, that any consideration of Israel, and any perception of Israel at all, would have to include some consideration of the Palestinian Arabs, their travail, their claims, their humanity.Changes of this sort seem to occur dramatically, although it is more accurate to comprehend them as complex, cumulative, often contradictory processes occurring over a long period of time. Above all else, however, no such process can be viewed neutrally, since for better or for worse there are many interests at work in it and, therefore, many interests also at work whenever it is interpreted or reported. Moreover, while it is worthwhile and even possible to reduce and curtail the gross pressure of those interests for the purpose of analysis or reflection, it is useless to deny that any such analysis is inevitably grounded in, or inevitably affiliated to, a particular historical moment and a specific political situation. Edward Said, Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, is the author of, among other works, The Question of Palestine , The World, the Text, and the Critic , and After the Last Sky . He will give the 1985 T. S. Eliot Lectures, on Culture and Imperialism, at the University of Kent later this year. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry include “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community” and “On Professionalism: Response to Stanley Fish”. (shrink)

Media coverage of the recent explosion of violence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is so thoroughly biased in favor of Israel, argues Edward Said, that Israel itself is made to appear as the victim, despite the fact that it is using missiles, tanks, and helicopter gunships against stone-throwing civilians rebelling, in their own towns, against their continued oppression. American Zionism is so successful, Said adds, that it has rendered impermissible any public discussion of Israeli policy, making this (...) the last taboo in American discourse, which allows for the burning of the American flag, but not for criticism of Israel. (shrink)

At one point Fish says that a profession produces no “real” commodity but offers only a service. But surely the increasing reification of services and even of knowledge has made them a commodity as well. And indeed the logical extension of Fish’s position on professionalism is not that it is something done or lived but something produced and reproduced, albeit with redistributed and redeployed values. What those are, Fish doesn’t say. Then again he makes the rather telling remarks that he (...) is “turning everything into professionalism” —an instance of overstating and overinsisting at a moment when what he is really arguing for can neither be formulated nor defended clearly. To turn “everything” into professionalism is to strip professionalism of any meaning at all. For until one can define professionalism—and the particular values associated with it—there is very little value in going on about the incoherencies of antiprofessionalism. Fish resorts to the reductionist attitude of telling us that professionalism is what is, and whatever is, is more or less therefore right, which by only the slightest extension of its logic is a view no less applicable to antiprofessionalism.On the other hand, Fish does say that the profession has changed, that new ways of doing things have emerged, that values are contested within and without the profession. Those kinds of observations, however, have to be pursued, made me more concrete, put in specific historical contexts, one of which is the fact that professions are not natural objects but concrete, political, economic, and social formations playing very defined, although sometimes barely visible, roles. Unfortunately, Fish commits the lobbyist-s error by obscuring and being blind to the sociopolitical actualities of what he lobbies for even as he defends its existence. Thus when Fish alleges that the reason most literary professionals “exist in a shamefaced relationship with the machinery that enables their labors” is because of their damaging antiprofessionalism , he is making an observation whose form is assertive but whose sense is tautological since he neither defines the professional and professionalism nor specifies “machinery” and “labors” with any precision at all. For if you take the extraordinary step of reducing everything to professionalism and institutionalism as Fish does, then the very possibility of talking about the profession with any intelligibility is negated. Few would dispute Fish’s important point, that all interpretive and social situations are in fact already grounded in a context, in institutions, communities, and so forth. But there is a very great difference between making that claim and going on to say that so far as the literary profession is concerned, “the profession” is the context to which “everything” can be related. Edward W. Said’s most recent work is The World, the Text, and the Critic. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “The Problem of Textuality: Two Exemplary Positions” and “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community”. (shrink)

In this chapter, Said argues that in the case of the Palestinians and Israelis, histories and cultures are inextricably linked ‘contrapuntally’ in symbiotic rather than mutually exclusive terms. When this understanding of circumstances occurs, it no longer seems viable to eliminate the opposition because there will always be a tomorrow in which retribution will be demanded by those who feel that an injustice had been forced upon family members or previous generations. Said emphasizes the need to think about (...) and resolve two histories that have become interwoven, despite the fact that many have tried to define the other in contradictory terms. Part of arriving at a Just Peace entails recognizing a shared identity and common history even if this approach highlights differences. This might be a monumental task considering the trials and tribulations that have often come to pass in a conflict, but for Said, an ‘abridged memory’ is not an option that will lead to Just Peace. (shrink)

This paper explores how to deliberate about food choices from a Stoic perspective informed by the value of environmental sustainability. This perspective is reconstructed from both ancient and contemporary sources of Stoic philosophy. An account of what the Stoic goal of “living in agreement with Nature” would amount to in dietary practice is presented. Given ecological facts about food production, an argument is made that Stoic virtue made manifest as wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance compel Stoic practitioners to select locally (...) sourced, low resource input, plant-based foods whenever circumstances allow. (shrink)

This paper explores sustainable fashion choices from a Stoic philosophical perspective. Ancient Stoic teachings can help us reexamine our relationship with clothes in the 21st century and provide direction for the considerable number of people that are influenced by contemporary Stoicism. Stoicism provides a clear justification for sustainable living, given its call to live in harmony with Nature. Given the environmental facts, contemporary Stoics would do well to reduce the size of their wardrobe to what is necessary and functional. They (...) should mindfully select clothing made of organic natural fibers, which are of sufficient quality as to reduce wasteful practices. (shrink)

Kai Whiting, Aldo Dinucci, Edward Simpson, and Leonidas Konstantakos ABSTRACT: In Stoic theology, the universe constitutes a living organism. Humankind has often had a detrimental impact on planetary health. We propose that the Stoic call to live according to Nature, where God and Nature are one and the same, provides a philosophical basis for re-addressing ….

By any measure, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., led a full and remarkable life. He was tall and exceptionally attractive, especially as he aged, with piercing eyes, a shock of white hair, and prominent moustache. He was the son of a famous father, a thrice-wounded veteran of the Civil War, a Harvard-educated member of Brahmin Boston, the acquaintance of Longfellow, Lowell, and Emerson, and for a time a close friend of William James. He wrote one of the classic works of (...) American legal scholarship, The Common Law, and he served with distinction on the Supreme Court of the United States. He was actively involved in the Court's work into his nineties. In Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, G. Edward White, the acclaimed biographer of Earl Warren and one of America's most esteemed legal scholars, provides a rounded portrait of this remarkable jurist. We see Holmes's early life in Boston and at Harvard, his ambivalent relationship with his father, and his harrowing service during the Civil War. White examines Holmes's curious, childless marriage and he includes new information on Holmes's relationship with Clare Castletown. White not only provides a vivid portrait of Holmes's life, but examines in depth the inner life and thought of this preeminent legal figure. There is a full chapter devoted to The Common Law, for instance, and throughout the book, there is astute commentary on Holmes's legal writings. Indeed, White reveals that some of the themes that have dominated 20th-century American jurisprudence--including protection for free speech and the belief that "judges make the law"--originated in Holmes's work. Perhaps most important, White suggests that understanding Holmes's life is crucial to understanding his work, and he continually stresses the connections between Holmes's legal career and his personal life. For instance, his desire to distinguish himself from his father and from the "soft" literary culture of his father's generation drove him to legal scholarship of a particularly demanding kind. White's biography of Earl Warren was hailed by Anthony Lewis on the cover of The New York Times Book Review as "serious and fascinating," and The Los Angeles Times noted that "White has gone beyond the labels and given us the man." In Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, White has produced an equally serious and fascinating biography, one that again goes beyond the labels and gives us the man himself. (shrink)

This topically organized, interdisciplinary anthology provides competing perspective on the claim that western culture faces a moral crisis. Using clearly written, accessible essays by well-known authors in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities, the book introduces students to a variety of perspectives on the current cultural debate about values that percolates beneath the surface of most of our social and political controversies.