Three Waves of Civilizational Analysis in Sociology

The article provides a comprehensive analytical reconstruction of the formation and evolution of the civilizational approach in the context of the intellectual and institutional history of sociology. Three waves of civilizational analysis are highlighted, coinciding with three stages of sociology’s disciplinary development: pre-disciplinary, disciplinary and post-disciplinary. The first wave includes the development of the unitary-linear concept of civilization in the middle of the 18th century, its reception in early sociology, and its total marginalization in the late 19th century with sociology’s entry into the classical period. The second wave began in the first two decades of the 20th century, marked by the development of pluralistic theory and comparative history of civilizations in the works of M. Weber and E. Durkheim with M. Moss. It continues in the interwar period, when — with the general decline of sociology’s interest in macro-historical topics — N. Elias and P.A. Sorokin created their theories of civilizational dynamics, and culminates in the critical reception of the meta-historical theories of local civilizations during the two and a half decades following the war. The third wave, which continues to the present day, was driven by the civilizational turn in the mid 1970’s, initiated by B. Nelson and S.N. Eisenstadt. It combines the tendency for civilizational analysis to embed itself in the sociological tradition with the intention to renew and consolidate its research program, represented by four main models: processual, configurational, interactive, and relational. J. Arnason carried out the most ambitious project of theoretical integration in the field of civilizational analysis on the basis of the concept of mutual constitution of culture and power. The internal division of the pluralist approach into meta-historical and sociological directions is just as important as its opposition to the unitary approach. The first formulations of both versions of the pluralist approach were made independently of each other during the decade-long period between 1869 and 1879 in Russia by N.Y. Danilevsky and N.I. Khlebnikov.