On Giants' Shoulders: 1961 Salzburg Meeting of the ISCSC
2010; International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations; Volume: 62; Issue: 62 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0733-4540
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics
Resumodwarf on a giant's shoulders sees farther of the two. George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum, 1651. Descartes did was a good step.... IfI have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants. Sir Isaac Newton, letter to Robert Hooke, February 5, 1676. Preliminary As Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest, what's past is prologue (II.i.253). In 2011, the 50th anniversary of the founding of the ISCSC will be upon us. It may therefore be instructive to begin to think about both our past and our present as prologue. We have an extensively documented point of origin: an extraordinary meeting that took place in October 1961 in Salzburg, Austria, a city more usually identified with music and Mozart than with the comparative study of civilizations. What can we learn from this meeting? What resonance does it have with my own presidency of the ISCSC, which began 25 years after the Salzburg meeting, and with the present work of the Society, now almost 50 years later?1 The tenor and progress of the discussions during those six days in October of 1961 reveal a Zeitgeist which is useful to keep in mind as we consider that meeting. The participants in the 1961 meeting all had strong memories of the Second World War, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and of the Holocaust. In 1961, they were living and working under that sword of Damocles we know as the Cold War, with the tension between the United States and the Soviet Union at a high point. Its attendant threat of instant annihilation either through an act of national hubris or revenge, or through a technological or human mistake, was on all the participants' minds. Speaker after speaker referred to this historical context. The common experience of living on the brink lent an air of urgency to the meeting, a seriousness that - due as well to the subject itself, civilizations, - was deeper than that which normally obtains at scholarly conferences. But, then, theirs was no ordinary conference. It was a meeting of giants, on whose shoulders the ISCSC has stood for the past half century. From the day I joined the ISCSC, I heard of that legendary meeting in Salzburg, where titans like Pitirim Sorokin and Arnold J. Toynbee clashed, where Roger Wescott and Rushton Coulborn roamed the halls, where Othmar Anderle held forth, where scholars from many parts of the world had come together to found and shape the Society which was to cross the Atlantic to be revived and reshaped by scholars like Roger Wescott, Benjamin Nelson, Vytautas Kavolis, David Wilkinson, and Matthew Melko. The main body of evidence for that 1961 meeting is in its proceedings, a volume entitled The Problems of Civilizations (Anderle, O. F. and Sorokin, P. A. 1964). In some 460 tightly printed pages of position papers, speeches and conversations in three mostly untranslated languages - primarily German, followed by English and French - 26 of the perhaps 200 attendees debated the main issues of our field2. There is also some additional evidence about the conference in the archives of UNESCO, in William McNeill's biography of Toynbee (McNeill 1989) and in Sorokin's aubiography, A Long Journey (Sorokin, P. A. 1963). The proceedings contain some surprises. The first is that Sorokin and Toynbee did not really clash - in fact, rather the opposite. They seemed to have been already familiar with each other's work and respected it. In 1950, Sorokin had published a book on the comparative study of civilizations which included many pages on Toynbee (Sorokin, P. A. 1950). And in 1958, on a Pan-American flight from Boston to Nurnberg, they apparently met for the first time and had a long conversation. We have Sorokin's account ofthat encounter.3 The impression from the transcripts of the 1961 Salzburg meeting is that Toynbee and Sorokin, who were both 72 at the time, conducted themselves like two venerable and confident lions of the savannah. They surveyed and protected their respective domains, returning repeatedly to their favorite formulations, intelligible fields of study, for example, in Toynbee's case and sensate culture and supersystems in Sorokin's. …
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