The word civilization: on the border between civilization and culture

Abstract

If one asks what ‘civilization’, ‘culture’ and the Dutch word ‘beschaving’ are precisely, one has to answer that, on the whole, they are nothing other than words with a developmental history, through which one aims to convey that human beings in their social groups have taken on a particular attitude towards ‘nature’; one thus has to know their history in order to understand what they precisely represent. Norbert Elias’s book is so fascinating precisely because the writer follows these paths; we get here not a sterile scholastic debate around ‘this is culture and that is civilization’, but an almost playful and still completely academically rigorous study of the realities underpinning these nuanced concepts.