University of Chicago Press

The forty-sixth president of the United States, like most of his predecessors, is an avid student of American history. In August 2022, Joe Biden met for the second time with a group of pre-eminent historians to discuss his presidency and the many threats facing American democracy. A month later, standing in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, he told the American people: ‘I know our history.’ Biden has, from the beginning of his campaign for the presidency, characterised his own period of American history as a ‘battle for the soul of the nation’, riffing off historian Jon Meacham’s book The Soul of America: The battle for our better angels (2018).

We all like to think of ourselves as civilised. Civilisation is like ethics: a concept and an underlying value system that seems impossible to oppose. Who, after all, could possibly be against civilisation? Who would want to take issue with the institutional stability, the democratic order and the standards of fairness, decency and culture we have come to see as hallmarks of a civilised life? Brett Bowden does. He does so in an ambitious and fascinating book that offers what could be called a genealogy of civilisation: an inquiry into the history, meaning and political impact of a concept.

At first sight, a genealogy of civilisation seems a rather dry and academic exercise. Bowden, a political scientist at the Australian Defence Force Academy, University of New South Wales, examines the political and cultural contexts in which the idea and the ideal of civilisation emerged. He locates the linguistic roots of civilisation in fourteenth-century French, but then focuses primarily on how the concept took on an increasingly important meaning in the French, English and German vocabulary during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although Bowden draws only on English-language sources, he still offers a sophisticated and remarkably wide-ranging discussion of how the concept of civilisation became central to philosophy, legal discourse, scientific progress, socio-political institutions and colonial ambitions.

Charles Bernstein, born in 1950, is a prolific poet and theorist of Language poetry, which arose in the 1970s in the wake of the anti-Vietnam War movement (or the American War, as the Vietnamese call it). As with similar movements in many countries, including Australia, this now semi-institutionalised poetry began as radical revolt against an established verse culture that preferred its poetry to be an easily palatable, Inauguration-worthy commodity. Instead, Bernstein and his colleagues variously practised a ‘multi-discourse text’ that chipped away at the boundary between poetry and critical theory. ‘Poetry is the aversion of conformity,’ Bernstein writes in an early essay, rephrasing Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is a site of perpetual enquiry rather than the expedient repose of fixed meaning.

About as eminent an academic philosopher as they come these days, Robert B. Pippin made his reputation with a sequence of brilliant studies rehabilitating the great names of German Idealism – Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel – for a (mainly) baby boomer American audience. In the wake of the path-breaking interventions of Wilfrid Sellars and Richard Rorty, Pippin, alongside such colleagues as Terry Pinkard, Robert Brandom, and John McDowell, has argued for a version of the essentially dialogic nature of all philosophy, which seeks to bring together metalogical ratiocinations and nitty-gritty semantic theories with reflections on the diversity of social interactions.

In his 1998 book, Japanese Literature as ‘fluctuation’ (‘Yuragi’ no nihon bungaku), Komori Yōichi deconstructs the concept of ‘modern Japanese literature’ by examining the Encyclopedia of Modern Japanese Literature (『日本近代文学大辞典』), an impressive work that, despite its six volumes ...

When Viktor Shklovsky, in his famous 1917 essay 'Art as Technique', asserts that the fundamental task of the poetic function is one of 'making strange' the reader's ...