The Lost Art of Civilization

Yeah.

Well, and so I think maybe we can pick up on this in terms of, you know, I think he's recognizing some of the problems that we see around us today.

Let's talk a little about civilization, because I think that's something that people don't talk about.

But today, I'm like, how is my civilization going today? It's not a point of conversation, but we are all part of a civilization.

And I think about civilization.

civilization in contrast to maybe barbarism, but that might not be the best contrast or the only one.

But maybe you could talk a little bit, Sam, about what was civilization? I mean, you spent a lot of time talking about the Scottish Enlightenment, so the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers had a lot to say about the development of societies from sort of tribal, agricultural, you know, or pastoral to a more commercial-based system.

And I think the subtitle of your last book is about the commercial republic or commercial society as the civilization we have.

But maybe you can just talk in broad swaths about like, well, what is civilization and why do we care about it?

So there's a couple of ways of talking about this.

One is the idea of civilization as reflecting a certain cultural trajectory.

So the West is one way we talk about civilization or Islamic civilization or Hindu civilization or Confucian civilization.

So The idea that this is a specific set of social, political, legal, economic settings that are characteristic of a particular type of society that has a very identifiable trajectory.

So we talk about Western civilization.

Most people have a sense of what that means.

So that's one way of talking about civilization.

And that's certainly how some mid-century classical liberal economists talked about civilization.

So Wilhelm Röpke, who I mentioned to Paul, pretty much understood civilization is Western civilization.

That was his view.

Hayek has a somewhat different view.

He doesn't deny that most of the norms, the institutions of the market economy and commercial society did emerge in its most mature form in the context of the West.

But he argues that there's universal features of this civilization that can go beyond Western societies.

Now, part of this is, firstly, he's drawing upon the Scottish Enlightenment thinking.

So he's talking about how people like Smith and other Scottish Enlightenment thinkers talked about society going from hunter-gatherer, to pastoral, to agriculture, until you finally get to commercial society.

And this is the civilizing process that goes on.