التوجه الثقافي والمقاربة الحضارية

That said, a few words should be added on the explanatory aspects of the

civilizational problematic. If the primary focus of historical and sociological

explanations is on actions and agencies, civilizational studies have, within this

broadly defined field, stressed the strategies of diverse elites and the changing

types of coalitions into which they enter (both themes are extensively discussed

in Eisenstadt’s work). Differences in these respects are linked to other civilizational

contrasts; in particular, the interaction between elites and coalitions on one hand, institutions and their variously interpreted specific webs of significance on the other, calls for analysis in explanatory terms. Whether such explanations are best understood as causal ones is another issue. It still seems useful to draw on G.H. von Wright’s classic discussion of explanation and understanding (1971), especially on his basic question about explanations in the human sciences: is the commonly used quasi-causal language translatable into a properly causal one, or should it be seen as a provisional account of less determinate connections? But this line of inquiry cannot be pursued without reference to philosophical considerations that would go far beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that civilizational perspectives add to the complexity of the field, and therefore to the prima facie plausibility of the second view, already favoured by von Wright.

Reconsidering the Weak Program

It remains to be seen whether the civilizational approach can bring new viewpoints

to bear on the ‘weak program’, as defined by Alexander and Smith, and thus perhaps make it a more integral part of the sociological discourse on culture.

This is less central to the questions raised at the beginning than are the above

reflections on the strong program; the following comments will only indicate a

few starting-points for further debate.

According to Alexander and Smith:

[To] speak of the sociology of culture [in the sense of the weak program, J.P.A.] is to

suggest that explanatory power lies in the study of the ‘hard’ variables of social structure,

such that structured sets of meanings become superstructures and ideologies driven by

these more ‘real’ and tangible social forces’; culture is ‘more or less confined to participating

in the reproduction of social relations. (Alexander and Smith, 2003: 13)

We can tentatively identify these supposedly more real factors as economic and

political. If the sociology of culture treats them as independent variables and

culture as a dependent one, it is as incompatible with the civilizational frame of

reference as it is with Alexander and Smith’s strong program. Cultural definitions

enter into the making of the economic and political spheres. But if we allow for

the possibility that some cultural definitions might be particularly compatible

with – or even conducive to – autonomous political and economic dynamics

(to which cultural conditions and resources are then to some extent subordinated),

a modified version of the weak program can be envisaged as a part of the

civilizational approach. There is, moreover, a classical precedent for this line of

Arnason The Civilizational Approach 79

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