Alessandro Stanziani
Senior researcher at the CNRS (National Center of Scientific Research).
Alessandro Stanziani has worked on: history of statistics and statistical knowledge, Russia, Europe, 19th-20th century; history of labour, serfdom and slavery in Russia and Central Asia, Europe and the Indian Ocean (17th-20th centuries); history of competition and markets in France and the West; history of the formation of imperial states in Eurasia; social history of historical knowledge. Author of 14 individual books, 9 edited books, 11 special issues of journals, 74 articles in peer review journals.
Reflections Upon “Civilizationisms”
Is civilization an Eurocentric term?
The identification of civilization reflects the interconnection between the social politics of knowledge and epistemological boundaries between history writing, philosophy, and social sciences. Many authors have accused the Enlightenment as a whole of Eurocentrism; in fact, different European authors adopted an Eurocentric posture and spoke of one single civilization, with “late comers” obliged to follow the path of most advanced countries, while many others stressed the diversity of human paths. The writing of history in its relationship with social sciences reflected these different attitudes, in particular the tensions between anthropology, philosophy and history. The 19th century, in particular in its positivistic orientation chose the first attitude, identifying a clear hierarchy between people with and people without history. Paradoxically, not only history (Ranke) but also sociology, and political economy (liberal as well as Marxist) encouraged this attitude, which ultimately took a dramatic turn after WWI when “the decline of Europe” went along with increasingly fixed classifications of “civilizations” in plural (Toynbee, Spengler, down to Braudel). This was a major departure from previous orientations (one civilizations, one universal time) and crystallized orientalisms both in Europe and in the USSR. After WWII, civilization became a tool to discuss apparently three different, in fact one single epistemic approach to history and social sciences, that is: the Holocaust, decolonization, and the European construction within the cold war context. Identification of area studies as civilizational archetypes now reflected not just multiple orientalisms, but also broader geopolitical stakes. These roots help understanding why, after initial enthusiasm in global markets in the 1990s, “the end of history” and the collapse of the USSR, turned after 2001 and the financial crises of 2008-11 into the “the end of Europe” and of “the West” more generally. Political turmoil was mirrored into the raise and dismiss of both global history and globalization, with a revival of area studies and the emergence of multiple “isms” across the globe. Political and social action require a radical epistemological reorientation willing at decentralizing social sciences while questioning the fixed boundaries of area studies as one and single movement.