Civilization History

Historians became interested in other cultures during the Age of Enlightenment. The development in the 18th century of a secular point of view and principles of rational criticism enabled the French writer and philosopher Voltaire and his compatriot the jurist and philosopher Montesquieu to transcend the provincialism of earlier historical thinking. Their attempts at universal history, however, suffered from their own biases and those prevalent in their culture. They tended to deprecate or ignore irrational customs and to imagine that all people were inherently rational beings and therefore very much alike.

Early in the 19th century, philosophers and historians identified with the romantic movement criticized the 18th-century assumption that people were the same everywhere and at all times. The German philosophers Johann von Herder and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel emphasized the profound differences in the minds and works of humans in different cultures, thereby laying the foundation for the comparative study of civilizations.

According to modern historians of civilizations, it is impossible to write a fully intelligible history of any nation without taking into consideration the type of culture to which it belongs. They maintain that much of the life of a nation is affected by its participation in a larger social entity, often composed of a number of nations or states sharing many distinctive characteristics that can be traced to a common origin. It is this larger social entity, cultural rather than political, that such historians consider the truly meaningful object of historical study. In modern times, the existing civilizations have impinged more and more upon one another to the point that no one civilization pursues a separate destiny anymore and all may be considered participants in a common world civilization.

Some historians see striking uniformities in the histories of civilizations. The German philosopher Oswald Spengler, in The Decline of the West (1918-1922), described civilizations as living organisms, each of which passes through identical stages at fixed periods. The British historian Arnold Toynbee, although not so rigid a determinist as Spengler, in A Study of History (1934-1961) also discerned a uniform pattern in the histories of civilizations. According to Toynbee, a civilization may prolong its life indefinitely by successful responses to the various internal and external challenges that constantly arise to confront it. Many historians, however, are exceedingly skeptical of philosophies of history derived from an alleged pattern of the past. They are particularly reluctant to base predictions about the future on such theories.