A civilization (also spelled civilisation in British English) is any complex society characterized by the
development of the state, social stratification, urbanization, and symbolic systems
of communication beyond signed or spoken languages (namely, writing systems).[2][3][4][5][6]
Civilizations are organized around densely populated settlements, divided into more or less
rigid hierarchical social classes of division of labour, often with a ruling elite and a subordinate urban
and rural populations, which engage in intensive agriculture, mining, small-scale manufacture
and trade. Civilization concentrates power, extending human control over the rest of nature,
including over other human beings.[7] Civilizations are characterized by
elaborate agriculture, architecture, infrastructure, technological
advancement, currency, taxation, regulation, and specialization of labour.[5][6][8]
Historically, a civilization has often been understood as a larger and "more advanced" culture, in
implied contrast to smaller, supposedly less advanced cultures,[9][10][11][12] even societies within
civilizations themselves and within their histories. Generally civilization contrasts with non-
centralized tribal societies, including the cultures of nomadic pastoralists, Neolithic societies,
or hunter-gatherers.
The word civilization relates to the Latin civitas or 'city'. As the National Geographic Society has
explained it: "This is why the most basic definition of the word civilization is 'a society made up of
cities.'"[13] The earliest emergence of civilizations is generally connected with the final stages of
the Neolithic Revolution in West Asia, culminating in the relatively rapid process of urban
revolution and state formation, a political development associated with the appearance of a
governing elite.
History of the concept
The English word civilization comes from the French civilisé ('civilized'), from Latin: civilis ('civil'),
related to civis ('citizen') and civitas ('city').[14] The fundamental treatise is Norbert Elias's The
Civilizing Process (1939), which traces social mores from medieval courtly society to the early
modern period.[a] In The Philosophy of Civilization (1923), Albert Schweitzer outlines two opinions:
one purely material and the other material and ethical. He said that the world crisis was from
humanity losing the ethical idea of civilization, "the sum total of all progress made by man in every
sphere of action and from every point of view in so far as the progress helps towards the spiritual
perfecting of individuals as the progress of all progress".[16]
The End of Dinner by Jules-Alexandre Grün (1913). The
emergence of table manners and other forms of etiquette and self-restraint are presented as a
characteristic of civilized society by Norbert Elias in his book The Civilizing Process (1939).
Related words like "civility" developed in the mid-16th century. The abstract noun "civilization",
meaning "civilized condition", came in the 1760s, again from French. The first known use in French is
in 1757, by Victor de Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau, and the first use in English is attributed to Adam
Ferguson, who in his 1767 Essay on the History of Civil Society wrote, "Not only the individual
advances from infancy to manhood but the species itself from rudeness to civilisation".[17] The word
was therefore opposed to barbarism or rudeness, in the active pursuit of progress characteristic of
the Age of Enlightenment.
In the late 1700s and early 1800s, during the French Revolution, "civilization" was used in
the singular, never in the plural, and meant the progress of humanity as a whole. This is still the case
in French.[18] The use of "civilizations" as a countable noun was in occasional use in the 19th century,
[b]
but has become much more common in the later 20th century, sometimes just meaning culture
(itself in origin an uncountable noun, made countable in the context of ethnography).[19] Only in this
generalized sense does it become possible to speak of a "medieval civilization", which in Elias's sense
would have been an oxymoron. Using the terms "civilization" and "culture" as equivalents are
controversial and generally rejected so that for example some types of culture are not normally
described as civilizations.[20]
Already in the 18th century, civilization was not always seen as an improvement. One historically
important distinction between culture and civilization is from the writings of Rousseau, particularly
his work about education, Emile. Here, civilization, being more rational and socially driven, is not fully
in accord with human nature, and "human wholeness is achievable only through the recovery of or
approximation to an original discursive or pre-rational natural unity" (see noble savage). From this, a
new approach was developed, especially in Germany, first by Johann Gottfried Herder and later by
philosophers such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. This sees cultures as natural organisms, not defined
by "conscious, rational, deliberative acts", but a kind of pre-rational "folk spirit". Civilization, in
contrast, though more rational and more successful in material progress, is unnatural and leads to
"vices of social life" such as guile, hypocrisy, envy and avarice.[18] In World War II, Leo Strauss, having
fled Germany, argued in New York that this opinion of civilization was behind Nazism and
German militarism and nihilism.[21]