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The word civilization comes from the Latin civilis, meaning civil, related to the Latin civis, meaning citizen, and civitas, meaning city or city-state.[5] Adjectives such as English "civility" developed from this root, but during the 18th century Enlightenment a verb "civilize" came to be commonly used, leading to a new word "civilization" to describe the result. This was used first by authors writing about national and personal improvement such as Victor Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau in France, and Adam Ferguson in Scotland who in his 1767 Essay on the History of Civil Society wrote that, "Not only the individual advances from infancy to manhood, but the species itself from rudeness to civilisation."[6]" The word was therefore opposed to barbarism or rudeness, but the thinking behind the new word was connected to modernism's active pursuit of progress and enlightenment. As such it has always been coloured by Social Darwinist assumptions about superiority and inferiority. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, both during the French revolution, and in English, "civilization" was referred to in the singular, never the plural, because it referred to the progress of humanity as a whole. This is still the case in French.[7] More recently however, "civilizations" (the plural) is sometimes used as a synonym for the broader term "cultures" (defined as "the arts, customs, habits... beliefs, values, behavior and material habits that constitute a people's way of life") in both popular and academic circles.[8] Using the terms "civilization" and "culture" as equivalents is controversial and not generally accepted, so that for example some types of culture are not normally described as civilizations. Already in the 18th century civilization was not always seen as an improvement. One historically important distinction between culture and civilization stems from the writings of Rousseau, and particularly his work concerning education, Emile. In this perspective, civilization, being more rational and socially driven, is not fully in accordance with human nature, and "human wholeness is achievable only through the recovery of or approximation to an original prediscursive or prerational natural unity". (See noble savage.) From this notion, a new approach was developed especially in Germany, first by Johann Gottfried Herder, and later by philosophers such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. This sees cultures (plural) as natural organisms which are not defined by "conscious, rational, deliberative acts" but rather a kind of pre-rational "folk spirit". Civilization, in contrast, though more rational and more successful concerning material progress, is seen as un-natural, and leads to "vices of social life" such as guile, hypocrisy, envy, and avarice.[7] During World War II, Leo Strauss, having fled Germany, argued in New York that this approach to civilization was behind Nazism and German militarism and nihilism.[9] In his book The Philosophy of Civilization, Albert Schweitzer outlined the idea that there are dual opinions within society: one regarding civilization as purely material and another regarding civilization as both ethical and material. He stated that the current world crisis was, then in 1923, due to a humanity having lost the ethical conception of civilization. In this same work, he defined civilization, saying that it "is the sum total of all progress made by man in every sphere of action and from every point of view in so far as the progress helps towards the spiritual perfecting of individuals as the progress of all progress." |
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