Crisis or Fluidity? Florian Znaniecki’s Theory of Civilization

The preoccupation with the processes of globalization, which has become a key concept in the analysis of the sociocultural condition of postmodernity, has led to a decreased interest in the theory of civilization. The ideological burden of the concept of civilization and its stigmatization by critics of post-Enlightenment modernity also contribute to this current state. However, issues associated with the processes of civilization have once again come to the fore, as shown by the reconstruction of threads associated with civilization in social theory, including sociological works. The views on civilization presented by Weber, Durkheim and Mauss, by their successors Sorokin, Elias and Nelson, down to the contemporary publications of Huntington and Eisenstadt are widely known, whereas works published on this subject in Polish by Florian Znaniecki are not. On a backdrop of the genesis of civilization-associated discourse and its antinomy as regards religion, the article presents Znaniecki’s concept of civilization processes as the social integration of culture, developed on the basis of his theory of cultural and social systems. Two types of human participation in culture are significant here: cultural communities and social groups which create a cultural bond. The de-civilizing processes which Znaniecki described are shown. The article analyzes Znaniecki’s idea of a fluid civilization and the conditions which are necessary for its existence, in the shape of reflexive cultural knowledge as the answer to a cultural crisis. The new type of cultural crisis stems from cultural innovations. The article shows the differences between Znaniecki’s concept of fluidity and Bauman’s liquid modernity. It presents the concept of “civilization of the future” as a pan-human civilization, which requires the formation of a new type of cultural community – the world culture society.

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