The revival of civilizational analysis is closely linked to a broader cultural turn

in the human sciences. Comparative civilizational approaches accept the

primacy of culture, but at the same time, they strive to avoid the cultural

determinism familiar from twentieth-century sociology, especially from the

Parsonian version of functionalism. To situate this twofold strategy within

contemporary cultural sociology, it seems useful to link up with the distinction

between a strong and a weak program for the sociological analysis of

culture, proposed by Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith. The strong program,

also described as cultural sociology, stresses the constitutive role of culture

in all domains and across the field of social life; the weak program, more

precisely the sociology of culture, treats culture as a variable factor among

others, and in some important respects subordinate to others. From this

point of view, civilizational analysis is, first and foremost, a particularly

ambitious version of the strong program: its emphasis on different cultural

articulations of the world, as well as on the large-scale and long-term socialhistorical

formations crystallizing around such articulations, adds new dimensions

to the autonomy of culture. It also reinforces the hermeneutical stance

of cultural sociology and cautions against the acceptance of mainstream

explanatory models. On the other hand, the civilizational perspective highlights

the variety of interconnections between culture and other components

of the social world, and thus takes into account some of the themes

favoured by the weak program.