LA TROBE UNIVERSITY, MELBOURNE/CHARLES UNIVERSITY, PRAGUE

porary, have insisted on this aspect. Weber’s ‘cultural worlds’, Durkheim’s civilizational clusters of basic concepts that serve to structure the world, and Eisenstadt’s ‘cultural ontologies’ are, in that sense, variations on the same theme. But

the specific twofold activity of grasping and forming the world (‘saisie du monde’

and ‘mise en forme du monde’ are the expressions coined by Merleau-Ponty) has

been explored more extensively from philosophical angles, external to the sociological tradition, and civilizational analysis can in turn draw on these sources –

which cannot be discussed at length here – to distinguish its frame of reference

from more widely used sociological models. If we adopt the phenomenological

notion of the world as an ultimate, open and enigmatic horizon of meaning, the

concept of a cultural problematic will seem more adequate than that of a cultural

program. The latter is frequently used in Eisenstadt’s writings; the former

suggests a less determinate framework, compatible with different levels of elaboration and more open to divergent interpretations. These connections correspond

precisely to points that have proved important to the analysis of cultural

patterns on a civilizational scale. As for the underlying constellations of meaning

that in the last instance set cultural problematics apart from each other, they are,

as I have argued elsewhere (Arnason, 2003) best understood in terms of imaginary

significations. Castoriadis introduced this notion as an antidote to all kinds

of structural and functional reductionism, Marxist and non-Marxist; although

not presented as such in its original formulation, it signals a particularly radical

version of the cultural turn, and it has proved eminently adaptable to civilizational

levels of analysis.

One further implication of the hermeneutical relationship between culture

and the world should be noted. The multiplicity of world perspectives translates

into a plurality of socio-cultural spheres, each of which crystallizes around a

cluster of meanings, distinctive and cohesive enough to constitute world-forming

patterns – microcosms of meaning – in their own right. This view suggests a

model of differentiation, very unlike the more widely accepted conception of

subsystems; it has not been elaborated by sociological theorists, but the most

interesting classical adumbrations can be found in Max Weber’s reflections on

the ‘world orders’ (Weber, 1982). In this short but wide-ranging and still not

fully appreciated sketch, Weber analyzes the major domains of social life as

frameworks of meaning, with an inbuilt tendency to become self-contained

worlds, but also coexisting, competing and sometimes colliding within a broader

field. The argument applies to core institutional complexes, such as the economic

and the political sphere, but also to the religious one, which comes closest to the

role of a meta-institution, as well as the intellectual and the aesthetic one, where

the institutional aspects are less structured. Weber’s account of the world orders

leaves much to be desired, but in view of the broader context, it seems clear that

he was not referring to specifically modern developments. The text in question

is a digression inserted between detailed analyses of China and India, and at least

implicitly related to the claim that Indian traditions went further than Chinese

ones in distinguishing between different domains of human life and spelling out

their organizing principles. Rather than translating Weber’s analyses into the