POSSIBILITY OF CONSTITUTION OF CIVILIZATION / CULTURE AS A COLLECTIVE SOCIО-HISTORICAL ACTOR

Abstract

. This article examines the possibility of constituting a civilization/culture as a collective socio-historical actor, primarily as an alternative between the conceptual extreme positions that we respectively call the realism and nominalism. It is important to find out whether the signifiers of “culture” and “civilization” can actually mark a real culture and civilization. Our principal question is examined within comparative consideration with the notion of the nation, and it is further tested against the question to display ability of practical, historical action. For this purpose, a number of different historical examples are considered, where civilization, in particular: European, could or could not appear as a collective actor. The result of the research is that due to their socio-psychological primacy, the national identifications have an advantage over wider and “more abstract” and remote – civilizational ones. Nevertheless, civilizational collective identification remains a permanent possibility of collective organization of social reality, when favorable historical conditions present.