In CIVILIZATION AND ITS CONTENTS, Bruce Mazlish, who intends the pun on Freud's work, seeks to chart the reification--his leitmotiv--of the word, thus the concept, `civilization' from its origins in the middle of the French Enlightenment to the post 9/11 era and the call of the United Nations for a dialogue among civilizations. This elegantly-written, but idiosyncratic essay attempts, sub rosa, to debunk the notion of a `clash of civilizations', explicitly attributable to Samuel P. Huntington. (First in an article in 1993 then more expansively in 1996 in THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS AND THE REMAKING OF THE WORLD ORDER, Huntington replaces the bipolarity of the Cold War with the bipolarity of the West against the Islamic world, the new Soviet Union.) Mazlish makes his readers question the utility of the very word `civilization', freighted as it is with notions of ethnocentrism, cultural superiority, and racism. Throughout his chapters, Mazlish relentlessly develops his argument "it is in terms of historical development that we can understand the idea of civilization" (14). He begins with the first usage of the word `civilization' by Victor Riqueti Mirabeau in L'Ami des hommes in 1756, and he contextualizes the work as a critique of French absolutism. Mazlish then concentrates on how the word `civilization' took on a life of its own in the context of European expansion. `Civilization', of which culture is a part, but to which it is oppositional, becomes an ideology of domination. At first, in the middle to late 18th century, he calls it a "benign" colonial ideology that is classificatory and superior, but does not preclude seeing the value of other civilizations, and he uses rather interesting authors to support his argument--Captain James Cook, Georg Forster, and Lord Macartney. In the 19th century, however, Mazlish argues `civilization' comes to connote European superiority, not only in cultural and scientific terms, but also racial terms. It allows white Europeans the right, if not the destiny, to rule over inferior, colored races--inferiority being determined here by skin color. He enlists support from François Guizot, Arthur Gobineau, and Charles Darwin. Mazlish does flip the coin over to discuss European critics of `civilization'; these critics demonstrate both a European self-reflexivity--how do we relate to other civilizations?--and a universal civilizing process--the subsuming of the barbarian other. He cites John Stuart Mill, Sigmund Freud, and Norbert Elias. He moves then to a consideration of how other, in this case, Asian, civilizations, responded to the European notion of `civilization': in his view, the Chinese toss the concept aside until such time as they try to adapt, the Japanese adopt what they need to create a distinct Japanese identity, and the Thais modify the concept to maintain their independence. From there, he turns his attention in the last third of the essay to the concept of dialogue between "civilizations" as mandated by the United Nations and intellectuals from around the global. (It is here he most shoots down Huntington's idea of religion as a monolith and the decline of the West as a bad thing.) In his conclusion, he summarizes his position: we (scholars at least) have outgrown the term `civilization'. In the age of globalization, he opts instead for a "civilizing process", (much as he does a globalizing process), a concept drawn here from Elias, very much Mazlish's hero. While Mazlish pursues a logical line of argumentation, he does so in too narrow a fashion: too focused on the reification of a word without concomitant consideration of the thing. In addition, he's much too modern and sees European too exclusively in terms of British, French, and German thought, something one can observe in his idiosyncratic choices of representative texts. One can see all these flaws in his discussion of European racism. Mazlish argues that `civilization' can only be discussed as a term since Mirabeau's coinage of the word, but Mazlish then turns to Captain Cook's journals to indicate that one need not use the word to articulate an idea of `civilization'. (Cook's journals are too problematic a source, for they were heavily edited by others for publication; Mazlish acknowledges the issue then dismisses it.) In the 16th century, the Spanish couched their discussions of whether the Native Americans were human or natural slaves in term of Spanish culture and ancient Greek philosophy recaptured by the Renaissance. Furthermore, while Mazlish articulates a 19th century racism perceived in terms of biology, eugenics, and skin color, he fails to note the 16th century Spanish and Portuguese legally enshrined the blood-borne inferiority of Jewishness in the limpieza de sangre (a purity of blood which also barred any Muslim taint). Racism in the 19th and 20th centuries was not an exclusively European phenomenon. One of the most virulently racist countries in the western hemisphere was and is the United States, which maintained an institutionalized, legal racism--Jim Crow--well after Europe had destroyed such legally-enforced racism at home--the Nuremburg Laws--and the majority of their colonies had attained independence. It should be noted, too, the United States holds to and speaks of a notion of its own `unique' civilization. While these weaknesses could open the door to teaching, the book itself remains too abstract and intellectualized essay to be of much value to any one other than a literature specialist--and a postmodernist one at that.

This book, on the history of the concept of "civilization" (not the history of civilizations as such), is a delightfully conversational read. Mazlish writes with simplicity and good sense as he traces how what we understand today to mean by civilization in fact derives from eighteenth-century European discourses about the structure of social systems in a globalized world. With regard to his topic, Mazlish aims to be neither comprehensive nor didactic but simply informative, recognizing the need to clarify the history behind recent usages of civilization in heated political and cultural debates. While his readings of the likes of John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud are not exactly "new," together they give the average reader a fine sense of how "civilization is a trope filled with ambiguities, many of them of a political nature" (147). Civilization, in other words, is not an "innocent" concept. But Mazlish intuits that if we are to contest the dubious claims made by some about our current geopolitical climate, we need to understand why the so-called "clash of civilizations" is too obtuse and historically inaccurate a formulation to realize a more responsible "dialogue of civilizations" or (given the realities of economic and cultural globalization) a "global civilization." My sole reservation about this book is its rather perfunctory treatment of gender issues. Mazlish acknowledges that "women have been seen widely...as the measure of civilization" but doesn't go on to ask why, and to what ends, this might be so (158). If civilization is at times most profoundly construed as a question of "women's worth" in society, then it seems Mazlish should devote more time to the issue as it amplifies across the texts he's chosen to analyze.