DÜNYA MEDENİYETLERİNE GİRİŞ

According to Feliks Koneczny, the Triple Law differentiates civilizations;

• The first law; each civilization has a cause and purpose.

• The second law; to endure, each civilization must harmonize interrelations among categories of existence and laws. Otherwise, a civilization may vanish.

• The third law; mergers between civilizations lead to chaos, disintegration, and decay.

An English historian Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) believed that societies thrive best in response to challenges and that a society’s most important task is to create a religion. 

The correct answer is D.

A French historian Fernand Braudel (1902-1985) was a “structuralist” who perceived human development to occur in three historical structures (“measures of time”): the quasi-immobile structure (la longue durée), the intermediate scale of “conjectures,” (rarely longer than a few generations), and the rapid time-scale of events. In his book, A History of Civilizations (French edition 1987, American edition 1993), he assumes that the history of human development is the history of civilization. Civilization for him is a process rather than a temporarily stabilized construct. He perceives one civilization as a human continuum or, depending upon the context, he may recognize hundreds of civilizations (for example, “Roman Civilization” or “Industrial Civilization”). The correct answer is A.

David Wilkinson proposes to analyze only one Central Civilization, not several ones. For him, civilizations are not cultural groups but rather sociopolitical groups or polycultures. His civilizations are social units, larger than states integrated by political interest. The correct answer is B.

In most autonomous civilizations one can differentiate more than one culture, except for the Egyptian, Hittite, and Japanese Civilizations, which are monocultural

The first autonomous civilization was the Mesopotamian Civilization (including Sumerian), which emerged in the valley of Euphrates-Tigris rivers in the Middle East, about 4,000 BCE. In the Far-East, the first autonomous civilizations rose inland: Indus (Harrapan) about 2,500 BCE, and Sinic about 2,000 BCE. In Africa, the initial civilization was the Beriberi-Carthaginian Civilization around 600 BCE. In South America, early autonomous civilizations included the Andean Civilization that emerged about 1500 BCE. In Central America, the first autonomous civilization was the Mesoamerican Civilization which rose about 1000 BCE. Both civilizations fell about 1600 AD. The correct answer is E.

Ever since religion was transformed from beliefs in magic to beliefs in poly-gods and then to a monogod, the cultural civilization has applied religion as the main tool of cultural control. The cultural civilization evolves into a civilization with challenges generated by intracivilizational and inter-civilizational issues of war and peace. These types of issues have been managed by technological means of domination. We will call such a civilization the infrastructural civilization. The infrastructural civilization’s purpose is to expand spheres of influence with the means of technology. Technology drives the development of infrastructural civilizations. The prime target of technology applications has been a war machine which supports the main values of a given civilization. By-products of military applications of technology affect the civilian part of its infrastructure. Among eight infrastructural civilizations, one can recognize the Sinic Civilization 2000 BCE, the Hindu Civilization 600 BCE, the Japanese Civilization 650 CE, the Western Civilization 800 CE, the Eastern Civilization 350 CE, the Buddhist Civilization 600 CE, the Islamic Civilization 632 CE, and the African Civilization since 1847 CE. 

The correct answer is C.

Religion, Language, Art and Literature are components of culture while society is a human entity.

A hegemonic power is a state, which dominates the world politically, militarily, economically, and scientifically. 

An empire is a state of large size exercising political dominion over others, with or without latter’s consent.

A transnational community is a regional entity, which organizes itself against the challenges of the global economy

A political society is a multi-ethnic entity which evolves from a nation

A supra-national community is a crosswhole-national entity, which removes states’ borders in a formal sense and in a sense of economic and political barriers The correct answer is D.

In the 19th century, just after the American Revolution (1775-1783) and the French Revolution (1789-99), the concept of a nation began to emerge. A Frenchman and an American no longer served a king but the French or American “nation” (patrie). A nation is an entity which has a common language, culture, memory of historic events, and “national consciousness.” It does not mean that the nation must share a common territory. This condition is applied toward a state rather than toward a nation. In this model, a state is a category of a power infrastructure. However, the state creates the nation. It means that emigrants from the nation-state may claim the origin of their nationality from the nation-state, which may be thousands of miles away.

From studies of the fate of the world in the last 6000 years, three rather important laws result:

1.The First Grand Law of the World Civilization is the Ability of Man to Develop.

2. The Second Grand Law of the World Civilization is the Right of Man to Freedom and Reason

3. The Third Grand Law of the World Civilization is the Law of Conscious Historical Evolution

4. The Fourth Grand Law of the World Civilization is the Historical Success of a Country’s Harmony

A German philosopher Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) published a book on The Decline of the West, 1918-22, where he reflects the pessimistic atmosphere in Germany after World War I.

Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835-1901) in Japan, defined it as follows: “civilization comforts man physically and elevates him spiritually…Civilization advances the well-being and dignity of man, since man acquires these benefits through knowledge and virtue.”

An English historian Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) published his greatest work in the twelve-volume A Study of History (1934-1961). He compared the history of twentysix different civilizations, which everyone follows a similar pattern of evolution through a cyclical pattern of growth, maturity, and decay. He believed that societies thrive best in response to challenges and that a society’s most important task is to create a religion.

A Polish historian Feliks Koneczny (1862-1949) wrote three books on the theory of civilizations: On the Plurality of Civilizations (London 1962), For an Order in History, (only Polish edition, London 1977), and History Laws (only Polish edition, London 1982). He was an empirical theoretician who discovered (in contrast to Spengler’s a priori model) that there is no one linear history of Mankind.

A Russian-American Pitirim Sorokin (1889-1969), professor at Harvard, in his Social and Culture Dynamics (1937-41, four volumes) quantified all conceivable components of a culturefromGreco-Roman to Western. He collected data spanning a period of 2,500 years and discovered a pattern of recurrent fluctuation between “sensate” and “ideational” value systems.

An American anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber (1876-1960), the father of American anthropology, was (among other topics) interested in historical synthesis at the world scope level, particularly in the history of civilized societies, both ancient and modern. The basis of Kroeber’s point of view is about the natural history of culture, with strong emphasis on;
• Humanistic factors, particularly silent ones,
• Classification of cultures, 
• Cultural phenomenon