Civilizational Analysis as a Mode of the Intercultural: Intercivilizational Encounters, the Intercultural and Contemporary Historical Sociology

ABSTRACT

Classical and contemporary civilizational analysis has not sat comfortably with theoretical constructions of the intercultural or their empirical applications. A ‘classical era’ of civilizations analysis generated a program of research problems that was productive in critical and multidisciplinary ways and limited in scope and vision in others, but this failed to generate a provisional notion of the intercultural. Contemporary civilizational analysis improves on this position significantly in respect of the intercultural, particularly in the development of a current around ‘intercivilizational encounters’. This essay examines this current especially in the work of Benjamin Nelson, Marshall Hodgson and Johann P. Arnason. Arguing that this approach represents vital advances for theoretical constructions of the intercultural in civilizational analysis and more generally in the human sciences, the essay also identifies limitations in latter-day approaches.

KEYWORDS:

• Intercultural
• civilizational analysis
• intercivilizational encounters
• historical sociology

Introduction

Since the early 1990s, civilizational analysis has revived in the humanities and social sciences, particularly in sociology, international relations and history. In the wake of widespread critique of the highly contentious ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, work by SN Eisenstadt and Peter J Katzenstein with their respective collaborators, along with others in comparative and world history created an environment in which, it has been argued, ‘civilization’ could be a relevant analytic in the humanities and social sciences differentiated from civilizational discourses used as ideological and political weapons in debates in the public sphere. The critical intellectual audience civilizational analysis enlarged at this time to a size not seen since the 1930s. Keenly aware of the colonialist connotations of the term ‘civilization’ and its historical development alongside of Western imperial power, a number of scholars shaped a critique of Eurocentrism as a response to the coterminous coalescence of post-colonial studies.

This context is a background to the present essay. This essay does not propose to reflect on the wider implication of the development of this field, nor any of the critical assessment of the field by post-colonial scholars, or rejoinders from proponents of civilizational analysis. I focus instead on one small part that is mostly neglected as an explicit problem in the field. The essay further examines this contextual background in order to define controversial points where civilizational analysis works as an intercultural mode of understanding.¹ Specifically, I examine one current in the field of study with greater awareness of the intercultural: the current that is framing and researching intercivilizational encounters. At the present-day end of this current is the work of Johann Árnason, which is considered at greater length in this essay due to his agenda of reconstructing civilizational analysis around a hermeneutics of ‘intercivilizational encounters.’ For another perspective, Simmel’s classical and foundational sociology of the stranger is brought in for comparison to provide another formative theory of the intercultural. With this second perspective, as a point of comparison, the essay explores the achievements, potential and limitations of formulations of the intercultural in civilizational analysis. I draw three provisional conclusions.

I structure this argument in three steps. In the opening section I briefly recount the revival of civilizational analysis of the last two decades. Second, I argue that there is one line of inquiry emerging from the current privileging intercivilizational encounters in its explanations that draws into relief the intercultural. This current includes Benjamin Nelson, Marshall Hodgson and Árnason, each of which I discuss in turn. Since Árnason pushes furthest in theorizing the intercultural, I focus on his work and its implication. Thirdly, the essay proposes to deepen the concept of intercivilizational encounters by putting an additional provocation: ‘intercivilizational engagement’ – a concept with the purchase to explores deeper levels of connectedness between civilizational constellations – can extend the mode of the intercultural present in Árnason’s version of civilizational analysis. With the concept of intercivilizational engagement, I suggest expanding the scope of civilizational analysis beyond conventional Eurasian civilizations to incorporate cases from Africa, the Pacific and the Western hemisphere. Both conceptions of relationality – intercivilizational encounters and intercivilizational engagement – form the ground for correctives to theory and enhancement of application of civilizational analysis. In the process, the essay argues that the intercultural can be more precisely brought into focus in a civilizational framework.

Civilizational Analysis as a Field

According to Arjomand and Tiryakian, the revival of civilizational analysis is part of the work of an ecumenical ‘third generation’ of comparative sociology (Arjomand 2010; Tiryakian 2004). Arjomand argues that civilizational analysis was interrupted by the post-war preoccupations of mainstream sociology. Only the near-invisible efforts of some ‘second generation’ scholars and a nascent International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations (formed in 1961) punctuated the low ebb in research on civilizations. The so-called third generation resumed research work in the mid-1980s, when scholars around Wolfgang Schluter and SN Eisenstadt renewed interest in researching in theoretical reconstruction of the classical foundations of sociological and anthropological knowledge (S N Eisenstadt and Schluchter 1998).² Newly emerging from neo-Weberian debates on modernity and modernization, the network around Eisenstadt turned to a defined empirical interest in civilizations of the Axial Age as a starting point (Eisenstadt 1986). Internally, the work of contemporary civilizational scholars re-examining classical sociology coincided with broader efforts with renewed energies in the human sciences at reinterpretation of classical social theories of Marx, Durkheim and Weber. Reflection on classical perspectives were producing fruitful questions and were still found to be fertile means of empirical discovery. The ‘third generation’ of comparative and historical sociologists were contributing to a wider dialogue with – and about – classical social theory.

Noting that classical social theories were themselves disjointed as well as productive in their formation of key civilizational concepts, Árnason argues that civilizational scholarship at this time had a further dimension: a deepening of pluralism which, we might add, is a pre-condition of intercultural perception and practice and a potential path to the intercultural (Árnason 2003: 67). Pluralism had been far more prominent in the human science of the early twentieth century than it had been in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. A century ago, the pluralist and unitary notions were deliberated upon together in social theory, anthropology, the social theory and philosophy of Durkheim and the Durkhemians, Marcel Mauss, Weber and Karl Jaspers, and in the world histories of Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee. Civilizational analysis of the third generation has largely retained this classical preference for pluralism. Today one might associate Fernand Braudel, Robert Bellah, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Eisenstadt, Nelson, or Hodgson with pluralism (Fernández-Armesto 2001; Braudel 1994; Nelson and Huff 1981; Hodgson and Burke 1993). Nelson, Hodgson and Árnason attribute to pluralism a high value. To honor that value in applied scholarship, they each engaged in different ways in empirical and historical investigation into intercivilizational encounters. Part of Árnason’s position in civilizational analysis is that this has unearthed previously overlooked dimensions of the intercultural relevant to the current essay and point to others yet to be considered and analyzed.

This is a suitable point in the essay to comment on the critical standing of civilizational analysis and the reason why the scholarship of intercivilizational encounters is privileged here. Elsewhere, I identify the current focused on intercivilizational encounters in its conception of civilizations (Smith 2017). This current has coexisted with the ‘multiple modernities’ paradigm pioneered by Eisenstadt (2002), which is also distinctly pluralistic. The controversial approach of multiple modernities have been widely debated and critiqued, particularly from post-colonial sociologists (Bhambra 2014; Patel 2013; Pieterse 2010; Gutíerrez Rodŕiguez et al. 2010). The literature claims unintended and implicit reproduction of Eurocentrism. The view taken here is that the field incorporates a counter-critique of Eurocentrism with degrees of nuance sometimes absent from post-colonial thought, particularly in its most explicitly post-structuralist versions (see Árnason 2003: 323–359). That critique of Eurocentrism in civilizational analysis is not discussed extensively by critics and it does distinguish the scholarship of the human sciences from more ideological (or ‘weaponized’) versions of civilizational thinking harnessed in civilizational discourses. Moreover, the post-colonial literature does not consider those civilizational scholars focused on intercivilizational encounters. From another angle, there are other problems associated with the multiple modernities strand of civilizational analysis from which, I argue, scholars examining intercivilizational encounters are largely free. To give an example pertinent to the current essay, a distinctive pluralism in multiple modernities was grounded in a decisive rupture with the metanarrative of modernization. However, the shift to multiple modernities and the rupture with modernization perspectives it realized has not unlocked patterns of interaction between societies to the extent that might be hoped for. Thus, the break made by scholars in the multiple modernities current leaves the intercultural as a problematic untouched. As multiple modernities has been the concern of one of the currents of contemporary civilizational analysis that has been regularly conflated with the whole field, I elect here to explore the alternative current focused on intercivilizational encounters in order to realize the overall argument about the intercultural.

Let us now take the next step. As the scholars of intercivilizational encounters are not purposefully explicit about the intercultural as such, I will touch on Simmel’s position on conceptions of interculturalism and the condition of the stranger. Simmel is an important reference point on the intercultural to when it comes to the civilizational scholars of interest here. There are two reasons for regarding his work as ‘classical’ in a meaningful sense and relevant to world problems of the twenty-first century.³ First, his work on strange-ness and the intercultural remains a source of productive reinterpretations relevant to the twenty-first century. This might include in civilizational analysis. Second, his sociology is still an abundant source of fresh questions on the qualitative features of interaction for contemporary urban studies, research on migration and the sociology of race and ethnicity.⁴

To begin with, note that Simmel brings an acute awareness of distinct cultures in coexistence to the study of urban social networks (Simmel 1976, 1950). In particular, the conditions of the stranger include those we might construe as the results of intercivilizational encounters and engagement. How might Simmel’s stranger generate such encounters and engagement? The stranger for Simmel is an outsider whose presence announces, as it were, the cultural difference that does not belong. The stranger’s presence reiterates that cultural difference. Strangers brought by trade and migration along the channels of intercivilizational interaction bear a remoteness or alienness in the places they inhabit. Strangers may stay, and often do (Simmel 1950: 402–404). However, their mobility means they may always leave also, whether they do or not. In the meantime, they foster the relationships they might need to stay. Their kin, their communities and even their ethnicity and religion are elsewhere, or at least from elsewhere. How strangers and outsider communities interact with their host society (or dwell amongst the resident) and how host cultures receive them pre-conditions the potential for intercultural exchange and the kinds of interculturalism that can operate in different specific contexts. To put this another way, the figurations of intercivilizational interaction (including trade and migration) that give rise to the presence of strangers emphasize commonality as well as distinction.

On Simmel’s account, intercultural interaction is possible because of this two-sided tension between the nearness and the remoteness of strangers (Simmel 1950: 407); in other words, an ambivalence in position they bring. Their ambivalent presence may preserve them from xenophobic ejection, although this too is contingent and can collapse. The optimal mode of intercultural interaction is animated by dialogical conditions, thereby situating strangers in a state of ‘dwelling amongst’ (Marotta 2009: 281). The ‘dwelling amongst’ gives off a situated-ness in two-way or multivalent engagement of others (see Marotta 2017, 2009). Such engagement may involve the physically and/or metaphorically new stranger (Marotta 2017: 34–35). Strangers bring to this engagement a keen awareness of other cultures, a state requiring of them capabilities in making cultural distinctions that arise from their relationship with host cultures in which they can detect difference and similarity. The relationality underpinning this awareness of distinction and the awareness itself makes the intercultural possible (Marotta 2009: 281), while also making strangers agents of intercultural relations. For the presence of strangers or stranger communities to produce intercultural interchange, engagement must entail dialogue, connections and relationships with others that one is amongst. The relationships and connections are important, but their intercultural character is emphasized in Simmel’s description of connection and separation (Simmel 1994). Such separation and connection, or closeness and distance, are two sides of relationality, which can be described as the dialectic in Simmel’s sociology of the stranger (Marotta 2017: 6). Moreover, the dialectic of connection and separation between people, elites and organizations embedded in intercultural relations produces ambivalence in such relations.

To sum up, if we accept Simmel’s premise that humans are relational animals and therefore inclined to connect what is separate and separate what appears continuous, then intercultural encounters would seem to be a special experience of connection of different and distinct elements of social life, one that brings its bearers a consciousness of distinction and potential for deeper relationships. The creation of intercultural relations is a result of intercivilizational engagement and encounters.

The Intercultural in Civilizational Analysis: Transitional Approaches

In this section, I give an outline of the development of a current of civilizational analysis concerned with intercivilizational encounters in earlier stages in order to explore attempts to elucidate the intercultural in civilizational analysis.

The exposition of intercivilizational encounters has had a strange journey in comparative historical sociology. Throughout the phase that Arjomand associates with a ‘third generation’ of historical sociologists, scholars of intercivilizational encounters exhibit a discerning awareness of cultural diversity and state, political and economic differentiation (Arjomand 2010; Šubrt 2023). Their discerning awareness sets them at a distance from the strongly essentialist conjugation of incompatible civilizational ‘units’ in models of mutual tension and conflict exercised in Huntington’s image of a world of potentially clashing civilizations (Huntington 1996) and opened a space for potential treatment of the intercultural. The first two of the three figures mentioned above – Benjamin Nelson and Marshall Hodgson – were transitional in the sense that their investigations point beyond the obstructions of the inherited image of self-contained civilizational entities. They demarcated conceptual boundaries and added a reconstructed notion of macro-sociological and micro-sociological interaction to a legacy of existing research. Their work is sketched in this section. Árnason, the third figure, integrates Nelson and Hodgson’s insights into a larger reconstruction of civilizational analysis and combines it with his assimilation of the hermeneutical turn in social theory. He names interaction as a problematic that has not received the attention it warrants and provided a theoretical frame for its elucidation (Árnason 2003; Arnason 2006; see also Adams and Arnason 2022b). Let us turn to a more detailed description of the intercultural constructs of Nelson and Hodgson, before examining Árnason’s perspective in more detail in the next two sections.

Nelson’s contribution began with the re-development of Weber’s comparative sociology. Some years before other comparativists began making innovative uses of Weber’s framework, he was marking out a distinct methodological path blending Weber with Durkheim’s theory and anthropology (Nelson and Huff 1981; Kavolis 1985). Alert to historical interactions, Nelson plotted intercivilizational encounters between Europe and Islamic traditions of philosophy, theology and science on a larger scale as well as regionally in Europe (see Arnason and Wittrock 2004). The results of his historical sociology of the impact of intercivilizational encounters on Europe pinpointed intercultural fusions informing the crystallization of scientific rationalism. Theoretical innovation came from his infusion of substantive studies of the previously underestimated connections between Europe and West Eurasia with new perspectives of his own time (in Hodgson, Joseph Needham, Clifford Geertz and Ernest Cassirer) and with readings of Louis Dumount and Mauss. In this regard, his was a project engaged with social theory, anthropology and the history of science as well as one of sociology.

Nelson’s own contribution was a historical sociology of the structures of consciousness in thirteenth century Europe and a fresh explanation of the so-called scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Linking the latter to the former, Nelson developed a vision of European science in which intercivilizational encounters were constitutive and not peripheral.⁵ The way this is conceived and developed keeps in sight the importance of contributions from other civilizations via longer-term cultural, theological and philosophical exchanges (see also Collins 2000). In Nelson’s historical sociology, we find traces of the intercultural in key episodes in the history of philosophical, theological and scientific thought. In his account, intercivilizational encounters were the pre-condition for the crystallization of what would become known as Western rationalism and science. As formative as his work was to contemporary civilizational analysis, note that the intercultural, though a visible problematic, is not prominent in Nelson’s hands. For instance, reflecting on how important civilizational analysis is to a picture of the global past, Nelson (with Kavolis) suggests that it provides:

… particularly valuable horizons for relating to actual cases of inter-civilizational relations and encounters. It is only as we see the civilizational complexes in the crucibles of intercultural process that we can perceive the distinctive thrusts and patternings of different civilizational and societal structures. (Nelson and Kavolis 2016: 22)

In fact, Nelson conflates the intercultural and intercivilizational at this macro-sociological level. This is distinct, however, from his treatment of meso-sociological and micro-sociological contexts and his awareness of the latter is clarified in his own introduction to his collective oeuvre:

Without at any time abandoning an interest in studying the fabrics and textures of institutions and interactions from so-called micro-sociological and micro-historical points of view, I have nevertheless become ever more aware as the years have passed of the critical importance of major processes and conflicts arising from inter-civilizational as well as intra-civilizational milieus for the general understanding of social action and cultural change. (Nelson and Huff 1981: 3, emphasis in original)

Turning to Hodgson, we encounter a scholar also concerned with Eurasia, but with Islam as the focal point. Hodgson’s geometric canvass of Eurasia located North-Western Europe on the periphery of world historical Eurasia. Unlike Nelson, he did not discuss ‘intercivilizational encounters’ explicitly in either his history of Islam (Hodgson 1974), or his general theories of interregional history (Hodgson and Burke 1993). However, a conception of the linkages of civilizational constellations across Eurasia is unmistakable in his histories. In his rendition of the Eurasian world, early modernity coalesced across a single world historical region centered on Islamicate civilization. With the ascendancy and expansion of the Ottoman Empire, a rapid cultural and institutional refinement of state power occurred bringing about new levels of interaction with other civilizations and states and a higher order of intercivilizational encounters (Hodgson 1974: 99–133). Significant expansion and strengthening came through warfare, occupation and trade. Ongoing cultural interaction with states, regions and civilizations on all sides – including Venetian, Safavid, Iraqi, Timurid Indian, Hungarian, Balkan and Russian powers – brought multidimensionality to the Ottomans’ all-round engagement. Both their seaborne and land-based relationships were part of an interregional circuit that integrated the Eastern Mediterranean, West Asia, the Red Sea and Persian Gulf trade and connection with India. The Ottomans entered a late but protracted decline that should be marked as the tail-end of the long decline of Islamicate civilization, on Hodgson’s account.

In accounting for the dynamics of this historical process, Hodgson tackled problems of Eurocentrism by tuning in to regional and interregional interconnections prior to 1800. The civilizational patterns Hodgson was able to discern balanced three levels: macro-regional trends, intercivilizational encounters and intra-civilizational dialogues and exchanges. The intercultural is far from subdued in his histories of exchanges within this larger civilizational composite. In particular, he highlighted how heightened interregional exchange across all spheres of life expanded the activity of identifiably intercultural agents such as missionaries and traders (Hodgson and Burke 1993: 117–122). The intercultural is brought to light in his detailing of developments around Europe as a Western promontory of Eurasia. Although Hodgson’s work is not beyond critical reception, for present purposes the main point is that he enlivened research towards intercivilizational interaction that Nelson was also following. Through this move, he also elaborated meso-sociological spaces of intercultural encounters in which European societies and Eurasia engaged each other. Distinct from a higher level of macro-sociological encounters of civilizations, the intercultural gains visibility Hodgson. Even so, interculturalism does not attract the attention it would receive in the work of the third historical sociologist that the present essay examines.

The Intercultural and Potential Pitfalls in Civilizational Analysis: Arnason’s Approach

Let us now turn to this principal concern. Árnason has over many years crafted a distinct version of civilizational analysis (Blokker and Delanty 2011; Dunaj et al. 2023). In continuing to advocate for interpretive and hermeneutical approaches to understanding civilizational patterns, he stands as a proponent of a particular position: civilizations are subject to interpretation and interpretive reconstruction (Árnason 2003, 2020). Being dynamic processes, interpretive reconstructions are subject to the force of intercivilizational encounters in their very creation and reproduction. Though he does not use the term ‘intercultural’ with great frequency, intercultural dynamics of the trans-subjective kind are clearly under consideration in his revision of Nelson’s notion of intercivilizational encounters (Árnason 2003: 149–157).⁶ In revising Nelson, Árnason distinguishes socio-culture from meaning considered in a deeper sense of Cornelius Castoriadis’ notion of the social imaginary significations indispenable to the imaginary institution of society (Castoriadis 1987). The latter infers ‘culture’ in a sense that Árnason is more interested in: culture as the broad frameworks of interpretation (see Adams and Arnason 2022a). One of the frameworks is a civilization’s orientation towards intercultural experience, which is at its most active in intercivilizational encounters that are of the ‘mutually formative’ kind (Árnason 2003: 112). The relationship between the two concepts is formed in Árnason’s engagement with Weber, Nelson and Hodgson, amongst others. Moreover, his reconstruction of the comparative scholarship of Hodgson, Sheldon Pollock, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, William McNeill, Jaroslav Krejci, Eisenstadt, Toynbee and Spengler draws into relief intercultural aspects of the relationship of past and present in political, theological and economic ideologies. When taken alongside of encounters of civilizations, such confrontations with traditions can occur variously as intercivilizational, or intra-civilizational, or intercultural, as each historical case may demand.

Intercivilizational encounters bring different ways of being in the world into contact with each other. Árnason finds Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s and Jan Patocka’s elucidation of the world more productive for civilizational analysis than Heidegger’s hermeneutics (Árnason 2003: 357; see also Adams and Arnason 2016). Merleau-Ponty’s definition of civilizations as varieties of articulations of the world resonates with Durkheim’s, Mauss’ and Eisenstadt’s pluralistic notions of civilizations (Árnason 2003: 220–222). But the emphasis on interpretation differentiates Merleau-Ponty from the ‘cultural premises’ argument that problematically sits at the heart of Eisenstadt’s civilizational analysis as a kind of culturalism impairing perception and understanding of cases of dynamic reinterpretation in civilizations. From Árnason’s interpretive point of view, civilizations don’t merely reproduce the core premises of their foundational formation, or at least they do so only in a limited number of instances. Instead, in Árnason’s constructions, civilizations are vibrant geo-cultural constellations, giving rise to a more varied range of formations, many of which are multi-societal. They are inseparable from ongoing processes of interpretative reconstruction, which entails both mutually formative engagement with other civilizations and own traditions that themselves will seem varied and often strange. The latter is the intercultural, as Árnason conceives it, promoting alienness ‘elemental to its own constitution as part of a broader cultural field and context in the world’ (Adams 2009: 250).

In taking a decidedly interpretive approach to the intercultural, Árnason pointedly aims to avoid two pitfalls: unjustified generalization, or over-generalization and cultural determinism. First, he cautions against facile constructions of a general theory prone to over-generalization, instead urging that civilizational analysis remain provisional in its conclusions and open to taking on board lessons of diverse historical experiences. The point warrants a lengthy quote:

(T)aking the pluralism of cultures seriously means toning down the claims to universality; the only viable goal is what Merleau-Ponty called lateral universality, where the world horizon is gradually opened up and expanded through the confrontation and comparison of cultures. This becomes even more pronounced if we add a third consideration, relating to the world-making capacities of cultures, and especially of those macro-cultural formations which some of us call civilizations. Patterns of interpretive and evaluative orientations add up to worlds of meaning that call for comprehensive understanding. The question of an ultimate common or converging experience of the world can only be posed in connection with comparative analysis; it is tempting to adapt Patočka’s reflections on “Welterfahrung und Weltform der Erfahrung” and to speak of the experience of the world and the world-form of culture. (Adams and Arnason 2016: 156)

The intercultural has a presence in this passage. The cultural unfolding of the world Árnason points to not only involves examination of intercivilizational encounters, but also the intra-civilizational cultural reconstructions underway. However, civilizational analysis is also influenced by the limitations Árnason deems essential for a theoretically and methodologically adequate comparative and historical social science. The processual tone of Árnason’s statement necessitates an indefinitely processual strategy for civilizational analysis. It can be argued, extending Árnason’s point, that remaining provisional in conclusion, civilizational analysis models a historical and cultural sensibility that can accommodate a diversity of modes of social life. In this way, intercultural understanding is, in the first instance, a hermeneutical explicans as a mode of analysis that adapts according to its own encounters with different cases. In the second instance, civilizational analysis can also be an explicandum in subject matter, a conclusion we can infer from Árnason’s suggestion above that the field remains unfinished and capable of absorbing lessons from comparative analysis. The provisional status is something for practitioners of civilizational analysis to reflect on and renew as a ‘check’ of sorts on the adequacy of the field to its self-limited parameters. Note that not only is the provisional status at the heart of the field, but also a pluralism that is obligatory for a comparative social science of civilizations. Elsewhere, Árnason writes that:

… the reconceptualization of culture in the context of civilizational theory is double-edged. On the one hand, it involves vastly enlarged horizons of intercultural understanding. Although some versions of civilizational theory are more open to hermeneutical self-reflection than others, comparative approaches must in principle be grounded in intercivilizational encounters: a pluralistic conception of cultural patterns is not synonymous with radical cultural relativism, but it must at least clarify the cultural preconditions of greater openness to other cultural worlds … On the other hand, the very broadening of the cultural frame of reference sets specific limits to understanding. The cultural orientations at the core of civilizational complexes do not crystallize into closed worlds, but they are – if the idea of civilizations in plural is to be applicable – reflected in comprehensive modes of thought and conduct, and mutual translation is always partial and contestable. Some interpretive frameworks entail a stronger emphasis on such limits than others, but they share the self-limiting logic of pluralistic theory. (Árnason 2003: 62, emphasis added)

His identification of the intercultural as a horizon of open-ness and limitation for civilizations under examination in their engagement with other formations articulates a specific place for the intercultural in civilizational analysis. No other thinker in the field has approached the intercultural to this extent and with this kind of depth.

Returning to Árnason’s hermeneutics, we find a second pitfall that he avoids. He conceptualizes processes of interpretation of the world as transformative in order to neutralize cultural determinism. Put differently, the manner in which Árnason privileges interpretation of the world effectively attributes to cultures self-transformative and non-essential qualities. Thus, in an early reading of Merleau-Ponty in relation to Weber’s notion of culture, Árnason argues that interpretations of basic meanings in political, religious and economic doctrines and ideologies reactivate and transform existing world horizons (Arnason 1993; see also Adams and Arnason 2016: 163; Árnason 2003: 205–206, 228–229). When considered from the point of view of Árnason’s later development of civilizational perspectives, his pairing of Merleau-Ponty and Weber makes sense as a theoretical articulation of the encounters of worlds. The cultural worlds in question, when they are recognizable civilizations, change in part through encounters with other civilizational complexes and in part internally through interpretive conflicts. Civilizational analysis must, on Árnason’s account, take each civilizational complex as a case, with its own experiences of encounters from which to learn. Self-limitation exercised in this vein can aim at no more than ‘lateral universality’ (in Merleau-Ponty’s terms) as the ‘viable goal’ for normative and comparative analysis (Adams and Arnason 2016: 156). At the same time, comparison of many cases continues to offer the different rigors of comparative history and social and political analysis. All these elements of Árnason’s approach add safeguards against cultural determininism to this version of civilizational analysis. They also add to the space in his articulation of civilizational analysis for the intercultural mode to florish further. I return to this below in a discussion of how the notion of ‘intercivilizational engagement’ might open this space up in the field.

The hermeneutical component of Árnason’s project brings him to explore interpretations across the cultural, political and economic domains of civilizational complexes that produce patterns of meaning, wealth and power (Árnason 2003: 287–294). The cultural is of the most interest to the present search for the intercultural. Árnason aims to focus attention on the unpredictability of the results of encounters (Arnason 2006). As stated above, encounters variously taken as intercultural or civilizational can only be fully understood in interpretive frameworks (Árnason 2003: 55–57). In other words, encounters informing the crystallization of collective identities, including its strangeness, involve ideological interpretations of the relationship of past and future with the present. The unpredictability arises from two factors in intercultural encounters: ‘cultural difference’ and ‘historical distance’ (Árnason 2003: 62). Both impact upon the interpretive dimension by fostering an intercultural effect on culture (or the pattern of meaning). Even when the civilizational encounter is with traditions of the same historical phase, there is engagement with the otherness of a distant historical world, albeit with one that is within local and civilizational traditions, i.e. is intra-civilizational. This matters in modernity too. Árnason suggests that the meta-societal principle of cultural change can be described as a creative process of transformation of earlier bodies of interpretation. It draws attention to pre-existing traditions, beliefs and ideologies, but equally highlights contingent active interpretation. In this manner, civilizational encounters not only induce intercultural confrontations with the otherhood of two or more civilizations, but they can also help heighten the otherhood of past traditions and practices within civilizations.

One of Árnason’s most interesting exemplars illustrates the point well. The three civilizations that coalesced in the wake of Roman Antiquity set in train new macro-regional dynamics (see Árnason and Raaflaub 2011). Over time, however, the West experienced phases of Renaissance in which cultural reconstruction of its internal relationship with its own traditions occurred in the context of extensive interactions with Byzantine and Islamic sources (Arnason 2000; Arnason et al. 2007). In this case, Árnason sets major episodes of the pre-history of Western expansion and colonialism against the backdrop of intercivilizational nexus that included intercultural meso-sociological and micro-sociological processes of absorption and reinterpretation. During such phases of cultural reconstruction, many traditions were involved in a process of cultural reinterpretation of the past in what many now recognize as a Western collective identity. Other cases are suggestive of intercultural revivals of the past. Of course, any discussion of cultural revival raises the question of how applicable the concept of ‘Renaissance’ is. For instance, Árnason’s discussion of Krejci’s six great Renaissances implies that the broader comparative framework of intercivilizational encounters can do more with rich historical insights (Árnason 2003: 188–193). But the main point about a dialogue of past, present and future still stands out as a central and shared conclusion about eras of vibrant reinterpretations which animate the intercultural as well as the intercivilizational.

Expanding the Scope of Civilizational Analysis: Responses to Arnason’s Work

From within the reception of Árnason’s work, those who treat his hermeneutical social theory voice support for the results of the engagement of philosophy and sociology that he undertakes (Dunaj et al. 2023; Adams and Arnason 2016; Knöbl 2011).⁷ The emphasis on contingency, cultural articulations of the world and intercivilizational encounters has generated a social theory with conceptual tools that can have several applications and uses. I argue here that a good number of these applications and uses fall within Árnason’s civilizational analysis. Not too many steps need to be taken from this point to enhance Árnason’s treatment of intercivilizational encounters as a more extensive mode of interculturality. Two are critically important. One step that is desirable from the present author’s perspective would be to reconceive ‘encounters’, which occur on a large scale and have durable cultural, economic and political impact, as intercivilizational engagement, which comprises sustained, routine contacts and connections found in daily life (Smith 2017). Where intercivilizational encounters involve the lasting impact of a larger-scale set of relationships between civilizations – such as British entanglement with India, engulfed as it was in colonial power (Arnason 2006) – intercivilizational engagement entails longer-term forms of connectedness between societies across civilizational boundaries. I see these falling into four classes:

1. Migration (family and village networks and diaspora created)

2. Economic relations (trade, commercial networks, investment, formal companies)

3. Cultural traffic (the exchange of artifacts and beliefs), doctrines of all kinds (theological, scientific, philosophical, artistic, artisanal and literary)

4. Political (components of polity such as techniques of governance, forms of bureaucratic organization, instruments of rule in taxation, municipal planning and census taking).

Two of these (economic relations and migration) are recognizably sites of the stranger, as Simmel conceived it, and therefore social spaces in which the intercultural also might be situated. Stretching the analytic of intercivilizational encounters to incorporate intercivilizational engagement would help bridge the gap between macro-sociological processes (intercivilizational encounters) and meso-sociological and micro-sociological ones (of intercivilizational engagement), and thereby bring the intercultural more fully into civilizational analysis. When Árnason places the ‘phenomenology of encounters’ (Arnason 2006: 32) alongside analysis of institutional figurations, the way is left open to an even greater variety of encounters. The phenomenology of encounters may well be the most relational moment in his elaboration of a historical sociology of civilizations (see Adams 2009: 259–260). Árnason’s rendition of civilizations as meaningful in their mutual formation makes encounters central to civilizational analysis in a way that incorporates the intercultural. Traversing the meso-sociological and micro-sociological in the manner suggested here would incorporate even intercultural kinds of relation, given that it is at the meso-sociological and micro-sociological levels that the relationality of the intercultural is most pronounced.

A second critical step in reconfiguring the relationship of civilizational analysis and the intercultural would be to expand the range of civilizations under consideration, Within the Árnason reception, sympathetic critics have noted the strain on civilizational analysis when it is applied to social formations outside of the regular list of civilizations that are the main foci: India, China, the West and others of Eurasia (Wagner 2011; Spohn 2011). On this basis, the breadth of civilizations under consideration can expand and could include normally precluded indigenous civilizations and the intercivilizational traffic of zones in the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. This would entail revisiting the conceptual apparatus of ‘civilizations’ in order to unlock the problematic of the intercultural as the intercivilizational paving the way for a fuller analysis of encounters in and with indigenous cosmologies and with achievements of indigenous, Pacific and Asian civilizations which are increasingly recognized. In other words, further consideration of research findings in contemporary history, archaeology and anthropology can induce further reconceptualization with civilizational analysis. Indeed, it is not hard to see this as a provisional and open paradigm of scholarship.

Let me rehearse this second critical point in slightly different terms. Situating the intercultural in intercivilizational encounters is a strength of Árnason’s theoretical articulation of the intercultural. How to apply those insights made at the macro-societal level historically and even empirically at a meso-sociological and micro-sociological level is far less clear. However, it is often at the latter two levels that the intercultural forms. The historical, historical sociology and empirical challenge is to research the intercultural at meso-sociological and micro-sociological levels in richly intercivilizational contexts. These are not always the more conventional Eurasian ones. Árnason himself has not been disposed to applications of civilizational analysis to the civilizational zones marginalized in the social sciences. Indeed, few others have conducted historical sociological research into non-Eurasian civilizations, a problem readily acknowledged by Árnason. Notwithstanding these two observations, his framework is clearly applicable and, furthermore, Árnason recognizes such potential in two major domains (Blokker and Delanty 2011: 127–128). First, the more flexible emphasis on interpretations and interpretive conflicts arising from encounters draws attention to the borderlands, overlaps, asymmetrical entanglements and combined formations – all spatial and relational figurations in which the intercultural can form. Such figurations are often in multi-civilizational zones. Second, civilizational formations neglected in comparative historical sociology can now be investigated. Specific among these are Africa and the Americas as multi-civilizational macro-regions to be brought into debate, each bearing their own premises and questions, in Árnason’s estimation:

Civilizational analysis has, first and foremost, dealt with Eurasian cultural worlds, and extending its scope to other regions is less straightforward. In the premodern world, the easiest cases outside Eurasia are perhaps the Meso-American and Andean cultural complexes; but although not much work in this vein has been done on Africa, I do not think there is any reason to doubt that further progress can be made. (Adams and Arnason 2022b: 348)

To Árnason’s list, I would add the Pacific and its regional context. Arguably more could be done on South-east Asia, as Árnason has himself highlighted (Arnason 1997).

Conclusion

At this stage of the essay, let us sum up four points from Árnason’s work. Extending the investigation of the intercultural to civilizational models, I have argued that Árnason’s propositions around the intercultural apply in the civilizational aspect of his work. Taken with his emphasis on interpretation, Árnason’s understanding of civilizations as ‘circumscribed universes of meaning’ (Árnason 2003: 206) instituted over a long period of time through encounters looks like a perspective focused on intercultural relationships, not only relationships with others, but also with histories and traditions. Within the spectrum of encounters Árnason reconstructs, I detect two kinds of interculturality. This is my first conclusion. The first kind of interculturality refers to a horizon of mutual understanding evident in many civilizations that is a habitus of learning and absorbing. Counterexamples of obstructions to learning and exchange illuminate how powerful such orientations have been. The first kind of interculturality is accompanied by a second kind – interaction itself which is ‘mutually formative’ of civilizations that encounter and confront each other (Árnason 2003: 287). An arc of encounters spans from complete conquest through to benign contact between approximately balanced societies. Few societies and civilizations have been so remote as to remain untouched by connections with any civilizational constellation or other societies. But intercivilizational encounters of the kind Árnason theorizes and explores are much more specific relationships that produce a lasting mutual legacy of impact on the civilizations involved.

To Árnason’s innovative civilizational analysis of intercivilizational encounters, I bring two correctives, both intended to throw the intercultural into relief. They are the second and third conclusions of the essay. First, a notion of intercivilizational engagement incorporating meso-sociological and micro-sociological levels of analysis can serve to illuminate the zones of interaction between societies and civilizations in which the intercultural is often situated. Migration and economic engagement are specific zones in which this may occur. Second, expansion of the scope of civilizational analysis to include the new worlds of the Atlantic and the Pacific, and the indigenous civilizations encountered and engaged – asymmetrically and often violently through conquest to be sure – can bring other contexts of the intercultural into the frame. By necessity, this forces a revision of the terms of recognition of civilizational processes. Complex indigenous cosmologies are an important, necessary and even integrating feature of these regional contexts, especially in the case of the Pacific. A renewed civilizational research agenda of this kind can realign intercivilizational interaction – whether in encounters or engagement, as I cast it – and intercultural analysis in historical sociology.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 On the intercultural in general see (Xie 2014), Elias and Mansouri (2020), Mansouri and Modood (2021), Taylor (2012) and Zapata-Barrero (2019).

2 See also the special issue of Journal of Classical Sociology dedicated to Eisenstadt’s work (Volume 11, Number 3, 2011). The issue includes many interesting essays on Eisenstadt’s relationship to the modernization tradition.

3 Marotta notes that the sociology of strangers has moved beyond Simmel’s classical version to incorporate different dimensions of experiences and contemporary conditions of urban life (Marotta 2009, 2017: 23–30, 43–44). This stranger is an ‘in-between’ actor, on his account,

4 Rundell distinguishes Simmel’s and Elias’ strangers from the ‘contingent stranger’ (Rundell 2017, 48–60). The latter exists in a less ontologically bordered condition produced by the hyper-migration of the global age. The life of the contingent stranger strongly contrasts the mobile as against the fixed, the abstract as against the concrete (Rundell 2017: 12) and does not bear the stamp of familiarity and strangeness characteristic of Simmel’s stranger. Both are creative of the imaginaries of modernity, but Rundell’s contingent stranger is arguably more prominent in a late modernity of globalism.

5 Kavolis emphasises this aspect of Nelson’s contribution to civilizational analysis (Kavolis 1985).

6 On philosophical formulations of the intercultural in Arnason, see Adams (2009). Adams discusses Árnason’s articulation of alienness and the heterogeneity of the intercultural in intercivilizational encounters. Identifying these with his phenomenology of the world, she relates his project of civilizational analysis to the philosophical component of his work.

7 See also the special edition of European Journal of Social Theory on Arnason’s work (‘Encounters and Interpretations’) edited by Suzi Adams, Karl E Smith and George Vlahov (Volume 14, Number 1, 2011) and the Festschrift on Arnason’s work (‘Johann Arnason’s Social Theory: Horizons of Modernity and Civilizations’ in International Journal of Social Imaginaries, Volume 2, Number 1, 2023).