Witnessing the growing semantic amorphousness of the term “civil society,” we can understand why it is difficult to conceive of a clash of civil societies, but not difficult to envision clashes between civilizations. Civilization retains its denotative character, pointing to communities that possess certain qualities of development and pursuing distinctly formed purposes. These purposes sometimes stand opposed to others. History abounds in such conflicts: Egypt and Babylonia, Greece and Rome, Catholic Spain and Protestant North Europe. Samuel Huntington attempted to theorize these recurring conflicts in his The Clash of Civilizations (1996), but failed to grasp the differences between cultures and civilizations. For a neoconservative, he is unusual in believing that an incommensurability of values exists among cultures. He fails to recognize the pragmatics of global exchange in values and goods now operating even among enemy states.

This is an excerpt from David S. Shields’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (pp 47-48).