commercial flows, and the crystallization of elites, i.e. at the level of the everyday

life of the social actors, the ‘commoners’. On the other hand, traditions are neither

power-neutral nor blind. They inevitably provide orientation to the shaping of power patterns and legitimacy by the ruling class. The principled openness of tradition vis-à-vis power creates occasions for contesting authority. The common practitioners of a tradition might protest the extent to which power is not endorsed by legitimate authority, or authority is usurped via the sheer exercise of untamed power.

Most crucially, the main theoretical issue underlying civilizational analysis, the

thematization of the relation of culture and power, is often explicitly framed within discursive traditions, though it is more often latent in their symbolic premises. Civilizations primarily differ as to the way this relation is articulated.

Religion is therein not an autonomous sphere, but rather a meta-institutional

source for channelling human power and an arena where patterns of authority

are constructed and contested.

Yet in the long-term formation of a Western civilization, the ongoing, civilization-

building tension between culture and power produced the winning formula for promoting a singular type of internalized and civilized power. Here is it where the approaches of Elias on the civilizing process and of Foucault on the building of modern subjectivities and disciplines seem to converge in reinforcing the Weberian argument on the uniqueness of the West. We need hereto discuss a specific intervention unveiling some key traits of the exceptional character of the cultural construction of power within the Western European civilization in a way that can illuminate, by reflex, Islam’s ‘normality’ as the transcivilizational ecumene that provided a deeper level of connectedness to the dynamics of the Afro-Eurasian civilizational realm. Matching by contrast Hodgson’s view of Islamdom as a kind of transcivilizational ecumene endowed with a synthetic vocation and facing the much more self-contained civilizations of the Old World (China, India), Rémi Brague has highlighted the process of formation of an increasingly conscious European identity that developed ‘eccentrically’ with regard to its two ‘axial’ sources, represented by Greek philosophy and Hebrew prophecy. The originality of Brague’s argument consists in his emphasis on the ‘Roman road’ as the cultural pathway to the long-term construction of a European identity. It offers us insights that can counterbalance the bias of Weber’s culturalist focus on the ‘Protestant ethic’ as a key engine of Western

modernity (though one not limited to ‘the spirit of capitalism’) via an equally

accentuated culturalist interpretation.

Though one cannot underwrite an excess of culturalism within civilizational analysis, unlike other comparable views Brague’s contribution is particularly