The title of the book was chosen due to inspiration from Nietzsche’s famous book ‘Beyond good and Evil’, which has marked an unprecedented turning point in the history of philosophy. Hence, the book titled ‘Beyond Civilization and History’ is intended to outline the politico-historical debate, since the dawn of the 20th century. The discussion in the book will cover pre-modern, modern and post-modern discourse of the history of civilizations. The debate mainly focuses on the modernist and post-modernist historical context especially (...) surrounding the writings of Oswald Spengler, Norman Angell, Arnold J. Toynbee, and Alexander Dugin. (shrink)

This paper focuses on evaluating Odera Oruka’s role as an expert witness in customary law for the Luo community during the Nairobi, Kenya-based trial in 1987 to decide on the place of the burial of S.M. Otieno. During that trial, an understanding of Luo burial and widow guardianship (ter) practices was essential. Odera Oruka described the practices carefully and defended them against misunderstanding and stereotype. He revisited related topics in several delivered papers, published articles, and even interviews and columns in (...) the Kenyan newspapers. The paper will raise the questions: How does Odera Oruka’s role as expert on Luo customs fit in with his sage philosophy project? In his testimony at the trial and subsequent public addresses and published work, does he accomplish two important goals, the first being defending African traditions against prejudice and anti-African bias, and secondly, does he champion reform of traditions when reform is needed? And, can Odera Oruka’s participation in the famous trial avoid seeming ethnic chauvinism and marginalization of women? My conclusion is that he achieves the first goal, but some problems remain in the achievement of the other goals. While he often asserted the need to evaluate traditions and to jettison those that have become unhelpful, in this context he evaluated traditions so strongly that the need for evaluation and possible change was muted. (shrink)

This article questions the popular assumption that the concept of civilization that entered public discourse in a grand way with Samuel P. Huntington’s sensational article on a ‘clash of civilizations’ refers to any meaningful historical formations that can be identified across time and space in plural manifestations, apparently withstanding collapse, disintegration and a final withering away. Contrasting Huntington’s rather stable universe with A. J. Toynbee’s and Eric Voegelin’s radically different perspectives on an open-ended dynamics of civilizational processes makes it possible (...) to recognize that the sequence of institutional cycles and the succession of universes of symbolic meaning that accompany them may be limited. Civilizations are not natural phenomena but human constructs and have therefore limited timelines. Toynbee and Voegelin were facing an end of the history of traditional civilizations and all their pseudo-morphed variations. They envisioned something new would emerge out of the wasteland of meaning without clearly knowing what it would be. The political economy of globalization has certainly accelerated the terminal conditions of traditional civilizations that Toynbee and Voegelin had anticipated long before this modern endgame began. The signs of decay and death are overwhelming while the quests for a new universe of meaning are still in their infancy. (shrink)

The attempts to interpret Russian and Southeast European history in light of a Byzantine background tend to focus on traditions of political culture, and to claim that patterns characteristic of the late Roman Empire have had a formative impact on later developments. But the effects attributed to political culture presuppose a civilizational framework, and arguments on that level must come to grips with evidence of historical discontinuity, during the Byzantine millennium as well as in later centuries and on the periphery (...) of the Byzantium cultural world. The path to a historically grounded civilizational analysis is, however, obstructed by persisting images of Byzantium as a stagnant culture, immobilized by a complete fusion of secular and sacred authority. The article discusses and criticizes some of the most influential versions of this view. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article discusses some common narratives found in discourses on national identity in Russia and Japan, and their temporal transformations reflecting the needs of a nation as it becomes a colonial empire. National identity discourse is examined from the viewpoint of national antagonism arising from an external threat. Russian and Japanese intellectuals, with their vastly different historical and cultural heritage, have dwelled upon similar issues pertaining to modernization of the state and adoption or rejection of foreign ideas and ways of (...) life. There are several themes in Russian and Japanese discourses on national identity that share a significant overlap, particularly themes of national uniqueness and a ‘special path’, deterministic worldviews, imperial cosmopolitanism/messianism and criticism of ‘Western’ philosophical systems and concepts. This article elucidates the shared aspects of these narratives and philosophical inquiries in Russia and Japan and puts them into a historical context. (shrink)

This article explores the impact of the new communications technologies on the generation born in the 1980s, the first to grow up under the dominance of the computer. It considers some of the parameters for discussing the close of one era and the beginning of another and draws on the writings of major civilizationist historians and futurologists, including Jacques Ellul, Samuel Huntington, and Romano Guardini.

It took a long time for humanity to know about biogenetics. And yet its role as a determinant in the living system was not proven until the twentieth century when DNA was discovered. Similarly, it took a long time for humanity to know about culture and civilization. And yet until now there is neither definite standards for differentiating them nor a definition that is commonly acceptable. By taking an evolutionary pluralism as ontology framework and the transdisciplinary research method of the (...) systems science, we have in the new social system model discovered the central rules that govern the social?cultural heredity: Culture?Production?Civilization. The relationship between culture and civilization is exactly that of genotype and phenotype. Culture is the S-cDNA within the social system while civilization is the social phenotype. Culture is a determinant that ultimately determines the existence, stagnation, change, and evolution of the social system. (shrink)

In this article, following an indication of Meijer C. Smit, I make a basic distinction between the first and the second history. By the first history I mean history as we experience it from within on the basis of personal interest and active involvement in our historical past. The second history is history as academics construct it on the basis of critical research into historical facts. The central question that arises is that of how these two paradigms of history are (...) related. I discuss commemoration as one of the most telling expressions of our involvement in the first history. I analyze it as a hermeneutic, dialogical, and anamnetic experience contrasting anamnetic and academic history as experienced versus constructed history: is the latter value-free? I conclude with the question whether we must regard commemoration as serviceable to the project of academic history or the latter as serviceable to commemoration. (shrink)

Farrenkopf argues that Western triumphalism, precipitated by the crisis of Communism, is symptomatic of the failure in the U.S. to reflect upon the prospects for ameliorating the tragic nature of international political developments in the twentieth century.

Sociology can be free from appraising value judgments, but characterizing value judgments are inseparable from it. It is thus a science that deals with the same questions as ideology reckons with, although in a purely characterizing way. Part of its concern is to judge cultures and it does this by measuring properties inherent in them. A culture is an ordering of symbols for a meaningful, dignified life. The dimensions for measuring any culture are (1) the sufficiency of its symbols, (2) (...) their attractive power through meaningful inclusion in coherent wholes, (3) their consistency through absorption into a single reference system and (4) their appositeness to human needs. (shrink)