“Hoping for a big tent in which it is understood that disagreement is the price to be paid for exploring important ideas.”
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Saturday 15 February 2025 is the 214th anniversary of the birth of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (15 February 1811 – 11 September 1888), who was born in Carrascol, a suburb of San Juan, in north central Argentina, on this date in 1811.
Sarmiento was the seventh president of Argentina and the author of one of the great works of Latin American prose, Life in the Argentine Republic in the days of the Tyrants; or, Barbarism and Civilization. For Sarmiento, cities were the bastion of civilization and the countryside of barbarism, and the Argentine tyrant Juan Manuel de Rosas had risen up from rural barbarism to threaten civilization in Argentina. I examine some of Sarmiento’s presuppositions about the relation of the countryside to civilization.
Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/
Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/dMh0_-/
Text post: https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/sarmiento-on-the-conflict-between
Video: https://youtu.be/GJy2t9kRpno
Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3L6V7L5eDYX7rhhj0XRRmG?si=TsmRqrSeSXaxEcNVq8QSjw
Episode: S02EP11
In this first thought experiment of the series, I imagine the possibility of a science of civilization getting its start during the Enlightenment by a gentleman amateur who, inspired by the Grand Tour and the scientific spirit of the age, lays the foundations of an early modern science of civilization. I also consider further variations on the theme of this thought experiment, such as a medieval science of civilization.
Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/
Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/dMh0_-/
Video: https://youtu.be/qC_ixoSpZ7w
Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/63Xp0DVOpJQJo0fpaOMFKm?si=_21nMoK8Qni9IINK0P2C5w
Episode: S02EP07
In this introductory episode to a series within a series (Thought Experiments in Civilization will be a series within the larger series of Today in Philosophy of History) I discuss the role of folk concepts in pretheoretical thought, thought experiments as a method of conceptual clarification, expanding the scope of our conceptual framework, the definitional question, and some of the problems involved in laying the foundations of a new science.
Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/
Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/dMh0_-/
Video: https://youtu.be/Ud_KcLOYQXA
Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0Tj6Xbn8Qyzn7rLykvoKSs?si=ye2aYxuGTKGfiDBD5wVwFw
Episode: S02EP06
Saturday 07 December 2024 is the 152nd anniversary of the birth of Johan Huizinga (07 December 1872 – 01 February 1945), who was born in Groningen in the Netherlands on this date in 1872.
Huizinga’s The Autumn of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and the Netherlands in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries is a classic of medieval historiography, already translated three times into English. It presents a distinctive thesis about the nature of late medieval history as producing “overripe fruits,” which not every civilization endures long enough to produce.
Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/
Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/dMh0_-/
Text post: https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/huizinga-on-the-overripe-fruits-of
Video: https://youtu.be/CVyxZRWYucw
It is the 941st anniversary of the birth of Anna Komnene (in Greek: Ἄννα Κομνηνή, Romanized as Ánna Komnēnḗ; 01 December 1083 – 1153), who was born a true princess of the blood in the Porphyry chamber of the Great Palace of Constantinople on this date in 1083 AD.
Anna Komnene’s Alexiad is an account of her father’s reign as Byzantine emperor from 1081 to 1118. As a royal personage herself, Komnene had the opportunity for the best education, and her royal status gave her inside knowledge of the Byzantine court, both of which she employed in her unique history.
Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/
Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/dMh0_-/
Text post: https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/anna-komnene-an-historian-born-to
Video: https://youtu.be/uIsBxHsaX2g
Historical Inertia.—Kenneth Clark began his account of civilization with its collapse, so that he described the end of classical antiquity before describing the beginning the civilization that would arise, and which is continuous with our world today. He paused over the kind of historical inertia that can survive in small pockets even as the larger structures dissolve and disappear, writing, “…life must have gone on in an apparently normal way for much longer than one would expect. It always does… Civilisation might have drifted downstream for a long time…” There are at least two perspectives on this downstream drift of history. Those inside the surviving pocket, isolated from the outside world, go about the ordinary business of life as best as can be, making do as necessary to compensate for its changed and failing relationships with the outside world. The making do becomes a peculiarity that separates them from others; their peculiar identity incrementally marks them as different, and the different reinforces their isolation. Those outside the surviving pocket survive also, but they survive by changing as world changes, infrequently in contact with those in the isolated pockets, keenly aware of their alienation from an increasingly changed and changing world. The small pockets get smaller and smaller, and one by one they dissolve and disappear in their turn. Their dissolution is scarcely noticed by the outside world, which had long left them behind. The wider world, well on its way to becoming something very different from what it was, no longer takes its measure by the standards once maintained in the surviving pockets of a now-lost world, which were once the standards everyone maintained everywhere. Some of the remnants of that former world remain undisturbed, and while the world, on its present trajectory, has no interest in these fragments, their preservation through neglect will be someday understood as fortunate accident.
The Institution of the Mind.—The strangeness of visiting foreign places is the lingering strangeness of another civilization just beneath the superficial trappings of modernity, which any culture can adopt without being threatened in its essence, because its essence is untouched by the ephemeral borrowed achievements of technology and industry. This strangeness has as its counterpart the familiarity of even distant and elusive manifestations of the civilization from which we ourselves have descended. What the Annalistes called mentalities have a longue durée of their own, and these mentalities runs so deep that we have more of an affinity for the distant past of our own civilization than for the present iteration of some other civilization. Clive Bell made this argument in his Civilization: An Essay, when explaining his choice of paragons, all taken from the history of Western civilization. He was right to do so. Bell’s exemplars—“Fifth and fourth century Athens, then, Renaissance Italy, and France from Fronde to Revolution”—are all distant and unrecoverable for us, but they have left a permanent imprint on the world the we Westerners today accept as our own. Historians tell us how incomprehensible we today would find the world of ancient Greece, and they are right, but, for all its strangeness, it would not be as alien as India or China today, which one could visit, even immerse oneself in, but without comprehension beyond the most rudimentary activities that we would share with peoples before civilization, and even with other species. Our own history is intelligible to us, or can be made intelligible, but another tradition can, at best, be studied as one might study the structure of a flower—beautiful, fascinating in its own way, but not a part of ourselves.
Existential Security.—An Egyptian alive during the 13th dynasty of the Middle Kingdom found himself in a civilization already a thousand years old, and looking forward to another millennium or more. A Minoan of the Middle Minoan period similarly found himself in the midst of a thousand year old civilization, with another thousand years yet to go. These societies were permanent for all practical purposes. For as many generations as you might go back into the past, life would have been essentially the same, and for as many generations as you might go into the future, life would remain essentially the same. There were ups and downs, invasions and conquests, years of plenty and years of want, but one dynasty followed another in an orderly succession down through the centuries. Life had a perennial quality, much like life in hunter-gatherer bands for hundreds of thousands of years before civilization—a period much longer than that of all civilizations combined. This was the human condition, but it is no longer. We do not know what it is like to live in a stable, mature civilization; we do not know what it is like to live in a long-lived civilization; we do not know what it is like to have a tradition continuously observed over a thousand years, and which will continue after us for another thousand years. While civilization in some form or another has existed for ten thousand years on Earth, the rapid churning of recent history has left us without existential security, without the experience of a perennial way of life. This, as much as anything, accounts for our deracination, our disconnectedness from the mainstream of human life. The past is a foreign country because we are expatriates from the world that made us what we are.
Saturday 09 November 2024 is the 114th anniversary of the birth of Carroll Quigley (09 November 1910 – 03 January 1977), who was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on this date in 1910.
An influential teacher of many influential students, Quigley’s distinctive work on history and civilization build on the earlier work of Toynbee, but Quigley is explicitly and sharply critical of Toynbee, and explains how the framework he formulated is an improvement that offers a fruitful perspective for historical analysis and the study of civilization.
Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/
Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/dMh0_-/
Text post: https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/quigley-on-the-evolution-of-civilizations
Video: https://youtu.be/2Rtk9m9G6VI
The Limits of Idealization.—We are accustomed to the limited applicability of ideals to the world, even as a promise for the future, where an ideal judged beyond our ability of realization is characterized as utopian. Ideals are limited in another way, however, that is less familiar, and that is the scope of the applicability not of ideals to the world, but of the world to ideals. Which mundane phenomena can be framed as an ideal, and which cannot? This is a question of not what ideals can be made real, but what realities admit of an ideal. If we have any intuitions that bear upon this problem they are vague in the extreme, and not yet brought to consciousness—probably because there has been no circumstance that would have brought them to consciousness. But the question suggests to us the attempt to pin down any such fugitive intuitions and to make them explicit if we can. We begin this attempt with examples. Can there be an ideal civilization? This is not an especially difficult question. Imagining an ideal civilization does not seem to be beyond human capacity. We may dispute over an ideal civilization, what its exact constitution might be, but it does not strike us a paradoxical that there could be an ideal civilization. History is another matter. What would an ideal history be? It is difficult even to make heads-or-tails of the question. History is what it is, and, as it is, it is not ideal. To present it as ideal would be to falsify it. If we were to hazard some future formulation of ideal history, it would have to follow upon our actual history, and any actual history would not be ideal. The resulting historical sequence of actual followed by ideal history would incorporate the non-ideal prologue into itself, and the whole would thus cease to be an ideal except as an end. To elucidate the precise difference between civilization and history as ideals would be to clarify an implicit intuition that distinguishes the two.
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