It is necessary to distinguish between civilization as a sociocultural complex on the one hand, and civilization as a process, on the other. This is illustrated by invoking the work of Norbert Elias. For Elias, the civilizing process consisted in the way in which what were, historically, constraints on human behaviour became internalized, and is a process that takes different forms in different cultures. On the other hand, at the centre of civilization as sociocultural complex was the question concerning the (...) attributes of a human being, crystallizing as clear-cut criteria for adjudging the degree to which the people occupying a particular territory were or were not civilized. The conception of civilization as a complex has become contemporary via Huntington's ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, and is indicative of the way in which the very word ‘civilization’ now carries with it a considerable ideological baggage. This article argues that the ideological use of civilization and the wider discourse of the war against terror involves the fusion, or conflation, of civilization as process and civilization as complex. (shrink)

Scholars have paid great attention to the neo-Darwinism of Ronald Fisher. He was one of the founding fathers of the modern synthesis and, not surprisingly, his writings and life have been widely scrutinized. However, less attention has been paid to his interests in the human sciences. In assessing Fisher’s uses of the human sciences in his seminal book the Genetical Theory of Natural Selection and elsewhere, the article shows how Fisher’s evolutionary thought was essentially eclectic when applied to the human (...) context. In order to understand how evolution works among humans, Fisher made himself also a sociologist and historian. More than a eugenically minded Darwinist, Fisher was also a sophisticated scholar combining many disciplines without the ambition to reduce, simplistically, the human sciences to biology. (shrink)