Rethinking Civilizational Analysis
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โฒIn 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 timeโฒ - Jeffrey Alexander, Professor and Chair of Sociology at Yale University
โฒThe 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 analysisโฒ - Piotr Sztompka, President, International Sociological Association
Although the concept of โฒcivilizationโฒ 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 โฒthe nation stateโฒ and โฒworld systemโฒ as the basic macro-units of social analysis because they do not get to grips with the โฒsoft powerโฒ 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:
ยท Civilizational analysis and social theory
ยท Global civilization and local cultures
ยท Civilizational forms
ยท Rationalization and Civilization
ยท Civilizations as zones of prestige
ยท Historical and comparative dimensions of civilization
ยท The clash of civilizations.
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Saรฏd Amir Arjomand (Ph.D, University of Chicago, 1980) has been at Stony Brook since 1978, and is currently the Editor of the Journal of Persianate Studies. Arjomand is the author of The Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam: Religion, Political Organization and Societal Change in Shiโฒite Iran from the Beginning to l890, the University of Chicago Press, l984; The Turban for the Crown. The Islamic revolution in Iran, Oxford University Press, 1988; and After Khomeini, Iran under his Successors, Oxford University Press, 2009. His article, "Constitutions and the Struggle for Political Order: A Study in the Modernization of Political Traditions," European Journal of Sociology/Archives europรฉennes de sociologie,, 33.4 (1992), won the Sectionโs Award for the Best Essay in Comparative and Historical Sociology in 1993. This was followed by "The Law, Agency and Policy in Medieval Islamic Society: Development of the Institutions of Learning from the Tenth to the Fifteenth Century," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 41.2 (1999). He had recently edited two books on comparative constitutionalism: Constitutionalism and Political Reconstruction, Brill, 2007, and Constitutional Politics in the Middle East, Hart Publishing, 2008. Professor Arjomand was the Crane Inaugural Fellow in Law and Public Policy at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University, and a Carnegie Scholar (2006 - 2008). Arjomand is concurrently Director of the Stony Brook Institute for Global Studies, guiding its project on the integration of social theory and regional studies, and has edited its first volume, Social Theory and Regional Studies in the Global Age, SUNY Press (forthcoming). He also helped organized the Thematic Plenaries on โWorlds of Differenceโ at the World Congress of Sociology in Gothenburg, Sweden, in July 2010, and is the co-editor of a volume under the same title to be published by Sage.
