Cultural Concepts: A Critical Review of Definitions

C U L T U R E
A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions

CULTURE
A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions
by A. L. K R O E B E R
and C L Y D E K L U C K H O H N
with the assistance of W A Y NE U N T E R E IN E R
and appendices by A L F R E D G. M E Y E R
V I N T A G E B O O K S
A Division of Random House
N E W Y O R K

V IN T A G E BOOKS
are published by Alfred a . knopf, in c.
and RANDOM HOUSE, INC.
Originally published in 1952 as Vol. X L V II— No. 1 of the Papers
of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology,
Harvard University.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copy
right Conventions. Published in New York by Random House,
Inc., and in Toronto, Canada, by Random House of Canada,
Limited.
Reprinted by arrangement with the Peabody Museum of American
Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AM ERICA

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
W e are indebted to Professor Robert Bierstfcdt for access
to his master's thesis, only a small portion of which has
been published. His extensive bibliography through 1935
greatly lightened our task, and his text was also suggestive
to us at many points. W e have also benefited from the
memoranda and records, largely unpublished, of the Com
mittee on Conceptual Integration of the American Socio
logical Society (Albert Blumenthaï, Chairman) of which
one of us (C. K.) was a member in its later stage. Dr.
Alfred Meyer was very helpful, especially with the German
materials. To Professor Leslie W hite we owe several refer
ences that we probably would not have discovered our
selves. Professor Jerome Bruner has made clarifying sug
gestions. Dr. Walter Taylor and Paul Friedrich kindly
read the manuscript and made suggestions.
Wayne Untereiner, Richard Hobson, Clifford Geertz,
Jr., Charles Griffith, and Ralph Patrick (all graduate stu
dents in anthropology at Harvard University) have not only
done unusually competent work as research assistants; each
has made significant criticisms of content and style. W e
have placed the name of Mr. Untereiner on the title-page
because he made major contributions to our theoretical for
mulations. W e are also grateful for the scrupulously careful
work of Hermia Kaplan, Mildred Geiger, Lois Walk, Mu
riel Levin, Kathryn Gore, and Carol Trosch in typing vari
ous versions of the manuscript, and to the four first-named
in collating bibliographical references and editorial check
ing and to Cordelia Galt and Natalie Stoddard who edited
the monograph.
We thank the following publishers for permission to
quote from copyrighted materials:
Addison-Wesley Press, Inc.: G. K. Zipfs Human Behavior and
the Principle of Least Effort ( 1949).
Applcton-Ccntury-Crofts, Inc.: A. A. Goldenvveisefs Anthro
pology (1937).

vi Acknowledgments
The Century Co.: C. A. Ellwood's Cultural Evolution (1927).
Cohen & West, Ltd. (British Edition) and The Free Press
(American Edition): E. E. Evans-Pritchard's Social Anthro
pology (1951).
Columbia University Press: Abram Kardiner's The Individual
and His Society (1939) and Ralph Linton's The Science of
Man in the World Crisis (1945).
E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.: Alexander Leighton's Human Relations
in a Changing World (1949).
Farrar, Straus, and Young, Inc.: Leslie White's The Science of
Culture (1949).
The Free Press: S. F. Nadel's The Foundations of Social Anthro
pology (1950).
Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.: A. L. Kroeber's and T. T.
Waterman's Source Book in Anthropology (19 3 1), Kroeber's
Anthropology (1948), and Lewis Mumford's The Culture of
Cities (1938).
D. C. Heath and Company: Franz Boas and others' General
Anthropology (1938).
The Hogarth Press: Geza Roheim's The Riddle of the Sphinx
( i 934)-
A. A. Knopf, Inc.: M. }. Herskovits' Man and His Works ( 1948),
and A. A. Goldenweiser's History, Psychology and Culture
(19 33).
The Macmillan Company: G. P. Murdock's Social Structure
(1949).
McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc.: Ellsworth Faris's The Nature
of Human Nature (19 37), Talcott Parsons' The Structure of
Social Action (19 37), and W . D. Wallis's Culture and Prog
ress (1930).
Methuen & Company: R. R. Marett's Psychology and Folklore
(1920).
Oxford University Press: Meyer Fortes' The Web of Kinship
Among the Tallensi (1949 ).
Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd.: Raymond Firth's Primitive
Polynesian Economy (1939).
University of California Press: Edward Sapir’s Selected Writings
of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture, and Personality (edited
by D. G. Mandelbaum) (1949).
The Viking Press, Inc.: W . F. Ögbum's Social Change (1950).
Watts & Company: Raymond Firth's Elements of Social Organ
ization (19 5 1).
Yale University Press: C. S. Ford's “A Simple Comparative
Analysis of Material Culture," and G. P. Murdock's Editorial
Preface, both of which appear in Studies in the Science of
Society Presented to Albert Galloway Keller (19 37).

C O N T E N T S
Acknowledgments v
Introduction 3
P A R T 1 : G E N E R A L H I S T O R Y O F T H E
W O R D C U L T U R E
1. Brief survey 11
2. Civilization 15
3. Relation of civilization and culture 19
4. The distinction of civilization from culturein American so
ciology 20
5. The attempted distinction in Germany 25
6. Phases in the history of the concept of culture in Ger
many 30
7. Culture as a concept of eighteenth-century general his
tory 31
8. Kant to Hegel 42
9. Analysis of Klemm’s use of the word “Cultur” 44
10. The concept of culture in Germanysince1850 47
11. “Kultur” and “Schrecklichkeit” 52
12. Danilevsky 53
13. “Culture” in the humanities inEnglandandelsewhere 54
14. Dictionary definitions 62
15. General discussion 66
Addendum: Febvre on civilisation 70
P A R T 11 : D E F I N I T I O N S
Introduction 77
Group A: Descriptive 81
Broad definitions with emphasis onenumeration of content:
usually influenced by Tylor 81
Comment 85

viii Contents
Group B : Historical 89
Emphasis on social heritage or tradition 89
Comment 92
Group C: Normative 95
C-I. Emphasis on rule or way 95
Comment 98
C-II. Emphasis on ideals or values plus behavior 101
Comment 102
Group D: Psychological 105
D-I. Emphasis on adjustment, on culture as a problem-solving
device 1 05
Comment 108
D-II. Emphasis on learning 111
Comment 113
D-III. Emphasis on habit 115
Comment 116
D-TV. Purely psychological definitions 116
Comment 117
Group E: Structural 118
Emphasis on the patterning or organization of culture 118
Comment 120
Group F : Genetic 125
F-I. Emphasis on culture as a product or artifact 125
Comment 128
F—
II. Emphasis on ideas 130
Comment 132
F-III. Emphasis on symbols 137
Comment 13 8
F-IV. Residual category definitions 139
Comment 139
Group G : Incomplete Definitions 141
Comment 141
Indexes to Definitions 143
A: Authors 243
B : Conceptual elements in definitions 1 45
Words not included in Index B 154

Contents ix
P A R T I 1 1 : S O M E S T A T E M E N T S A B O U T
C U L T U R E
Introduction 157
Group a: The Nature of Culture 159
Comment 176
Group b : T he Components of Culture 182
Comment 186
Group c: Distinctive Properties of Culture 19 1
Comment 194
Group d: Culture and Psychology igy
Comment 212
Group e: Culture and Language 224
Comment 242
Group f: Relation of Culture to Society, Individuals,
Environment, and Artifacts 245
Comment 259
Addenda 274
Index to Authors in Part III 278
P A R T i v : S U M M A R Y A N D C O N C L U S I O N S
A: Summary 283
Word and concept 283
Philosophy of history 284
Use of culture in Germany 285
Spread of the concept and resistances 286
Culture and civilization 288
Culture as an emergent or level 289
Definitions of culture 291
Before and after 1920 292
The place of Tylor and Wissler 295
The course of post-1920 definitions 297
Rank order of elements entering into post-1930 defini
tions 300
Number of elements entering into single definitions 302

x Contents
Final comments on definitions 303
Statements about culture 309
B : General Features of Culture 311
Integration 311
Historicity 312
Uniformities 319
Causality 325
Significance and values 338
Values and relativity 344
C: Conclusion 355
A final review of the conceptual problem 355
Review of aspects of our own position 365
References 377
Appendices 401
a p p e n d i x a : Historical Notes on Ideological
Aspects of the Concept of Culture in Germany and
Russia, by Alfred G. Meyer 403
a p p e n d i x b : The Use of the Term Culture in
the Soviet Union, by Alfred G. Meyer 414
Index of Names of Persons 425

I N T R O D U C T I O N
The “ culture concept of the anthropologists and sociolo
gists is coming to be regarded as the foundation stone of
the social sciences.” This recent statement by Stuart Chase1
will not be agreed to, at least not without reservation, by
all social scientists,1
2 but few intellectuals will challenge
the statement that the idea of culture, in the technical
anthropological sense, is one of the key notions of contem
porary American thought. In explanatory importance and
in generality of application it is comparable to such cate
gories as gravity in physics, disease in medicine, evolution
in biology. Psychiatrists and psychologists, and, more re
cently, even some economists and lawyers, have come to
tack on the qualifying phrase “ in our culture” to their gen
eralizations, even though one suspects it is often done
mechanically in the same way that mediaeval men added a
precautionary “ God Willing” to their utterances. Philoso
phers are increasingly concerned with the cultural dimen
sion to their studies of logic, values, and aesthetics, and in
deed with the ontology and epistemology of the concept
itself. The notion has become part of the stock in trade of
social workers and of all those occupied with the practical
problems of minority groups and dependent peoples. Im
portant research in medicine and in nutrition is oriented in
cultural terms. Literary men are writing essays and little
books about culture.
The broad underlying idea is not new, of course. The
Bible, Homer, Hippocrates, Herodotus, Chinese scholars of
the Han dynasty— to take only some of the more obvious
examples— showed an interest in the distinctive life-ways
1 Chase, 1948, 59.
9Malinowski has referred to culture as “ the most central problem
of all social science” (1939, 588)* Curiously enough, this claim
has also been made by a number of sociologists— in fact, by more
sociologists than anthropologists, so far as our evidence goes.

of different peoples. Boethius' Consolations of Philosophy
contains a crude statement of the principle of cultural rela
tivity: 'T h e customs and laws of diverse nations do so
much differ that the same thing which some commend as
laudable, others condemn as deserving punishment." W e
find the notion in more refined form in Descartes' Dis
course on Method:
. . . W hile traveling, having realized that all those
who have attitudes very different from our own are not for
that reason barbarians or savages but are as rational or more
so than ourselves, and having considered how greatly the
self-same person with the self-same mind who had grown
up from infancy among the French or Germans would be
come different from what he would have been if he had
always lived among the Chinese or the cannibals . . . I
found myself forced to try myself to see things from their
point of view.
In Pico della Mirandola, Pascal, and Montesquieu one can
point to some nice approximations of modern anthropolog
ical thinking. Pascal, for example, wrote:
I am very much afraid that this so-called nature may
itself be no more than an early custom, just as custom is
second nature . . . Undoubtedly nature is not altogether
uniform. It is custom that produces this, for it constrains
nature. But sometimes nature overcomes it, and confines
man to his instinct, despite every custom, good or bad.
Voltaire's* "Essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations" is
also to the point. To press these adumbrations too far,
however, is like insisting that Plato anticipated Freud's
crucial concept of the unconscious because he made an in
sightful remark about the relation between dreams and
suppressed desire.
By the nineteenth century the basic notion was ready to
crystallize in an explicit, generalized form. The emergence
of the German word, Kultur, is reviewed in the next sec
tion, Part I. In developing the notion of the “ super
• Cf. Honigsheim, 1945.
4 Culture

organic/' Spencer presaged one of the primary anthropo
logical conceptions of culture, although he himself used
the word “ culture” only occasionally and casually.4 The
publication dates of E. B. Tylor's Primitive Culture and
of Walter Bagehot's Physics and Politics are 1871 and
1872. Bagehot's “ cake of custom” is, in essence, very simi
lar to Tylor's “ culture.” The latter slowly became estab
lished as the technical term because of the historical asso
ciations of the word and because Tylor defined its generic
implications both more sharply and more abstractly.
Even in this century after “ culture” was fairly well es
tablished in intellectual circles as a technical term, certain
well-known thinkers have not used the word though em
ploying highly similar concepts. Graham Wallas, while
familiar with anthropological literature, avoids the term
“ culture” (he occasionally uses “ civilization”— without
definition) in his books, The Great Society (1914) and
Our Social Heritage (19 2 1). However, his concept of “ so
cial heritage” is equivalent to certain definitions of cul
ture:
Introduction 5
Our social heritage consists of that part of our “ nur
ture” which we acquire by the social process of teaching
and learning. (19 21, 7 )
The anthropologist, M. F. Ashley-Montagu, has recently
asserted that Alfred Korzybski's concept of time-binding
(in Manhood of Humanity, 19 21) “ is virtually identical
with the anthropologist's concept of culture.” (19 51,
251)
The editorial staff of the Encyclopaedia of the Social
4 In a secondary source we have seen the following definition of
culture attributed to Spencer: “ Culture is the sum total of human
achievement.” No citation of book or page is made, and we have
been unable to locate this definition in Spencer's writings. Usu
ally, certainly, he treats culture in roughly the sense employed by
Matthew Arnold and other English humanists. For example,
“ taken in its widest sense culture means preparation for complete
living” (1895, 514). Cf. George Eliot's Silas Marner, Chapter I:
“ . . . Silas was both sane and honest, though, as with many
honest fervent men, culture had not defined any channels for his
sense of mystery, and it fsic] spread itself over the proper path
way of inquiry and knowledge.”

6 Culture
Sciences (vol. I, p. 202) in their article on “ W ar and Re
orientation” correctly describes the position reached by the
anthropological profession at about 1930:
The principal positive theoretical position of the
early decades of the 20th century was the glorification of
culture. The word loomed more important than any other
in the literature and in the consciousness of anthropolo
gists. Culture traits, culture complexes, culture types, cul
ture centers, culture areas, culture circles, culture patterns,
culture migrations, cultural convergences, cultural diffusion
— these segments and variants point to an attempt to grap
ple rigorously with an elusive and fluid concept and suggests
incidentally the richness of such a concept. Concern was
rife over the birth of culture, its growth and wanderings
and contacts, its matings and fertilizations, its maturity and
decay. In direct proportion to their impatience with the
classical tradition anthropologists became the anatomists
and biographers of culture.
To follow the history of a concept, its diffusion between
countries and academic disciplines, its modifications under
the impact of broader intellectual movements, is a charac
teristically anthropological undertaking. Our purpose is
several-fold. First, we wish to make available in one place
for purposes of reference a collection of definitions by an
thropologists, sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, and
others. The collection is not exhaustive, but it perhaps
approaches exhaustiveness for English and American so
cial scientists of the past generation. W e present, thus,
some sources for a case study in one aspect of recent
intellectual history. Second, we are documenting the grad
ual emergence and refinement of a concept we believe to
be of great actual and still greater potential significance.
Third, we hope to assist other investigators in reaching
agreement and greater precision in definition by pointing
out and commenting upon agreements and disagreements
in the definitions thus far propounded. Considering that
the concept has had a name for less than eighty years and
that until very recently only a handful of scholars were in
terested in the idea, it is not surprising that full agreement

and precision has not yet been attained. Possibly it is in
evitable and even desirable that representatives of differ
ent disciplines should emphasize different criteria and uti
lize varying shades of meaning. But one thing is clear to us
from our survey: it is time for a stock-taking, for a com
paring of notes, for conscious awareness of the range of
variation. Otherwise the notion that is conveyed to the
wider company of educated men will be so loose, so dif
fuse as to promote confusion rather than clarity.5 More
over, as Opler has pointed out, the sense given the con
cept is a matter of considerable practical importance now
that culture theory underlies much psychiatric therapy as
well as the handling of minority problems, dependent
peoples, and even some approaches in the field of interna
tional relations:
The discovery and popularization of the concept of
culture has led to a many-sided analysis of it and to the
elaboration of a number of diverse theories. Since aber
rants and the psychologically disturbed are often at logger-
heads with their cultures, the attitude toward them and to
ward their treatment is bound to be influenced by the view
of culture which is accepted . . . it is obvious that the re
actions which stem from different conceptions of culture
may range all the way from condemnation of the unhappy
individual and confidence in the righteousness of the cul
tural dictate, to sharp criticism of the demanding society
and great compassion for the person who has not been able
to come to terms with it. (1947, 14)
Indeed a few sociologists and even anthropologists have
already, either implicitly or explicitly, rejected the concept
of culture as so broad as to be useless in scientific discourse
5One sometimes feels that A. Lawrence Lowell's remarks about
the humanistic concept of culture is almost equally applicable to
the anthropological: “ . . . I have been entrusted with the diffi
cult task of speaking about culture. But there is nothing in the
world more elusive. One cannot analyze it, for its components are
infinite. One cannot describe it, for it is a Protean in shape. An
attempt to encompass its meaning in words is like trying to seize
the air in the hand, when one finds that it is everywhere except
within one’s grasp.” (1934, 1 15)
Introduction 7

8 Culture
or too tinged with valuations. The German sociologist,
Leopold von Wiese, says “ . . . the word should be avoided
entirely in descriptive sociology . . (1939, pp. 593-94).
Lundberg characterizes the concept as “ vague” (1939, p.
179). In the glossary of technical terms in Chappie and
Coon's Principles of Anthropology the word “ culture” is
conspicuous by its deliberate absence.® Radcliffe-Brown and
certain British social anthropologists influenced by him
tend to avoid the word.
W e begin in Part I with a semantic history of the word
“ culture” and some remarks on the related concept “ civili
zation.” In Part II we then list definitions, grouped ac
cording to principal conceptual emphasis, though this ar
rangement tends to have a rough chronological order as
well. Comments follow each category of definitions, and
Part II concludes with various analytical indices. Part III
contains statements about culture longer or more discur
sive than definitions. These are classified, and each class is
followed by comment by ourselves. Part IV consists of our
general conclusions.
6 Except that on p. 695 two possible deletions were overlooked,
and on p. 580 the adjective cultural survived editing.

General History
o f the Word Culture

G E N E R A L H I S T O R Y O F T H E
W O R D C U L T U R E
l. Brief Survey
As a preliminary to our review of the various definitions
which have been given of culture as a basic concept in mod
ern anthropology, sociology, and psychology, we submit
some facts on the general semantic history of the word
culture— and its near-synonym civilization— in the period
when they were gradually acquiring their present-day, tech-
nical social-science meaning.
Briefly, the word culture with its modern technical or
anthropological meaning was established in English by
Tylor in 1871, though it seems not to have penetrated to
any general or “ complete” British or American dictionary
until more than fifty years later— a piece of cultural lag
that may help to keep anthropologists humble in estimat
ing the tempo of their influence on even the avowedly liter
ate segment of their society. Tylor, after some hesitation
as against “ civilization,” borrowed the word culture from
German, where by his time it had become well recognized
with the meaning here under discussion, by a growth out
of the older meaning of cultivation. In French the modern
anthropological meaning of culture1 has not yet been gen-l
l Tonnelat (Civilisation: Le Mot et Vidée, p. 61. See Addendum,
pp. 37-38, of this monograph) says of the development of the
more general sense of culture in French: . . il faudrait dis
tinguer entre l'emploi du xvii® siècle et celui du xviii®: au xvii®
siècle, le mot ‘culture'— pris dans son sens abstrait— aurait tou
jours été accompagné d’un complément grammatical désignant
la matière cultivée: de meme que l’on disait ‘la culture du blé,’
on disait ‘la culture des lettres, la culture des sciences.’ Au con
traire, des écrivains du xviii® siècle, comme Vauvenargues et Vol
taire, auraient été les premiers à employer le mot d’une façon en
quelque sorte absolue, en lui donnant le sens de ‘formation de
l’esprit.’ Voltaire, par exemple, écrit dans La Henriade, en parlant
de Charles IX:

12 Culture
erally accepted as standard, or is admitted only with re
luctance, in scientific and scholarly circles, though the ad
jective cultural is sometimes so used.2 Most other Western
languages, including Spanish, as well as Russian, follow the
usage of German and of American English in employing
culture.8
Jan Huizinga says:4
W hat do we mean by Culture? The word has ema
nated from Germany. It has long since been accepted by
the Dutch, the Scandinavian and the Slavonic languages,
while in Spain, Italy, and America it has also achieved full
standing. Only in French and English does it still meet
with a certain resistance in spite of its currency in some
Des premiers ans du roi la funeste culture
N'avait que trop en lui combattu la nature."
Febvre (1930, discussion on Tonnelat, p. 74) remaries: “ La no
tion allemande de Kultur enrichit et complète la notion française
de civilisation.” In the same discussion Saen adds: “ Le mot cul
ture, dans l'acception de Herder, a passé en France par l'inter
médiaire d'Edgar Quinet. Cependant Condorcet a déjà propagé
en France des idées analogues à celles de Herder."
‘ The French Academy's Eighth or 1932 edition of its Dictionary
gives “ l'application qu’on met à perfectionner. . . then:
“culture générale, ensemble de connaissances. . . and finally:
“ par extension de ces deux derniers sens, Culture est quelquefois
maintenant synonyme de Civilisation. Culture gréco-latine. . . ."
Today many of the younger French anthropologists use the word
as freely as do English and American.
‘ Tonnelat (Civilisation: Le Mot et Vidée, p. 61. See Addendum
to our Part I) says that Kultur is “ certainement un calque direct
du français culture.” Febvre (1930, pp. 38-39) takes a similar
view, citing especially the parallels between the 1762 definition
of the Academy's dictionary and that in Adelung’s (1793 edi
tion). The present authors agree that both civilization and cul
ture were probably used in French before they were used in
either English or German. Our main point here is that for the
generalized concept— sometimes called the ethnographic or an
thropological sense, which did not emerge until the nineteenth
century— the French came to use the word Civilization, the Ger
mans Cultur and later Kultur, and that English usage divided,
the British unanimously employing Civilization until Tylor, and
in part thereafter to Toynbee, but Americans accepting Culture
without reluctance.
4Huizinga, 1936, pp. 39-40. Huizinga does not proceed to a
systematic definition of his own.

well-defined and traditional meanings. At least it is not
unconditionally interchangeable with civilization in these
two languages. This is no accident. Because of the old
and abundant development of their scientific vocabulary,
French and English had far less need to rely on the Ger
man example for their modern scientific nomenclature than
most other European languages, which throughout the
nineteenth century fed in increasing degree on the rich
table of German phraseology.
According to German Arciniegas, Paul Hazard observes
that the German word Kultur does not occur in 1774 in the
first edition of the German dictionary, but appears only in
the 1793 one.5 For some reason, Grimm's Deutsches
Wörterbuch5 does not give the word either under “ C ” or
“ K” in the volumes that appeared respectively in i860 and
1873, although such obvious loan words as Creatur and
cujoniren are included, and although the word had been
in wide use by classic German authors for nearly a century
before. Kant, for instance, like most of his contemporaries,
still spells the word Cultur, but uses it repeatedly, always
with the meaning of cultivating or becoming cultured—
which, as we shall see, was also the older meaning of civili
zation.
The earlier usages of the word culture in German are
examined in detail below.
The ethnographic and modern scientific sense of the
word culture, which no longer refers primarily to the proc
ess of cultivation or the degree to which it has been carried,
but to a state or condition, sometimes described as extraor-
ganic or superorganic, in which all human societies share
5Arciniegas, 1947, p. 146. “ Le mot 'Kultur'— qui, en allemand,
correspond en principe à 'civilisation' . . The 1774 and 179*
dictionaries are presumably Adelung’s. He spells Cultur, not Kul
tur. His definition is given below.
“ Grimm, i860, contains curios as well as Creatur. In the lengthy
introduction by J. Grimm there is nothing said about deliberate
omission of words of foreign origin (as indeed all with initial “ C "
are foreign). There is some condemnation of former unnecessary
borrowings, but equal condemnation of attempts at indiscriminate
throwing out of the language of well-established and useful words
of foreign origin.
General History of the W ord Culture 13

even though their particular cultures may show very great
qualitative differences— this modern sense we have been
able to trace back to Klemm in 1843, from whom Tylor ap
pears to have introduced the meaning into English.
Gustav E. Klemm, 1802-67, published in 1843 the first
volume of his Allgemeine Culturgeschickte der Mensch
heit, which was completed in ten volumes in 1852. In 1854
and 1855 he published Allgemeine Culturwissenschaft
in two volumes. The first of these works is a history of Cul
ture, the latter a science of it. The first sentence of the
1843 work says that his purpose is to represent the grad
ual development of mankind as an entity— "die all
mähliche Entwickelung der Menschheit als eines Individu
ums/' On page 18 of the same volume Klemm says that
"it was Voltaire who first put aside dynasties, king lists,
and battles, and sought what is essential in history, namely
culture, as it is manifest in customs, in beliefs, and in
forms of government." Klemm's understanding and use of
the word "culture" are examined in detail in t q of
Part I.
That Klemm78influenced Tylor is unquestionable. In his
Researches, 1865, at the end of Chapter I on page 13, Ty-
lor's references include "the invaluable collection of facts
bearing on the history of civilization in the 'Allgemeine
Cultur-geschichte der Menschheit/ and 'Allgemeine Cul
turwissenschaft/ of the late Dr. Gustav Klemm, of Dres
den." In his Researches Tylor uses the word culture at
least twice (on pages 4 and 369) as if trying it out, or feel
ing his way, though his usual term still is civilization (pp.
1, 2, 3, 4, etc. . . . 36 1).
The tenth volume (1920) of Wundt's Völkerpsycholo
gie8 is entitled "Kultur und Geschichte," and pages 3-36
14 Culture
7An evaluation of Klemm’s work is given by R. H. Lowie, 1937,
pp. 11-16 .
8Not to be confused, of course, with his one-volume Elemente
der Völkerpsychologie, 19 12, which on account of its briefer com
pass and translation into English is often mis-cited for the larger
work. This latter is described in its subtitle as: An Inquiry into
Laws of Development; the shorter work as: Outline of a Psycho
logical History of the Development of Mankind. The one-volume
work is actually an evolutionistic quasi-history in the frame of

are devoted to The Concept of Culture. Wundt gives no
formal definition, but discusses the origin of the term and
the development of the concept. The word is from colere,
whence cultus, as in cultus deorum and cultus agri, which
latter became also cultura agri. From this there developed
the mediaeval cultura mentis;® from which grew the dual
concepts of geistige and materielle Kultur. Wundt also
discusses the eighteenth-century nature-culture polarity
(l'homme naturel, Naturmensch); and he finds that the
historian and the culture historian differ in evaluating
men’s deeds respectively according to their power or might
and according to their intellectual performance— which
last seems a bit crudely stated for 1920; however, it is clear
that in actually dealing with cultural phenomena in his ten
volumes, Wundt conceived of culture in the modern way.1®
2. Civilization
Civilization is an older word than culture in both French
and English, and for that matter in German. Thus,
W undt11 has Latin civis, citizen, giving rise to civitas, city-
state, and civilitas, citizenship; whence Mediaeval civitabi-
lis [in the sense of entitled to citizenship, urbanizable],*
1
0
four stages— the ages of primitiveness, totemism, heroes and gods,
and development to humanity.
•Actually, Cicero (Tusculan Disputations, 2, 5, 13) wrote ‘‘cul
tura animi philosophia est/’ Cultus meant “ care directed to the
refinement of life” and was also used for “ style of dress,” “ ex
ternal appearance and the like.”
10 In the remainder of the section on The Concept of Culture,
Wundt discusses nationality, humanity, and civilization. Here he
makes one distinction which is sometimes implicit as a nuance in
the English as well as the German usage of the words. Culture,
Wundt says, tends to isolate or segregate itself on national lines,
civilization to spread its content to other nations; hence cultures
which have developed out of civilizations, which derive from
them, remain dependent on other cultures. Wundt means that,
for instance, Polish culture which in the main is derivative from
European civilization, thereby is also more specifically derivative
from (“ dependent on” ) the French, Italian, and German cul
tures.
u Wundt, 1910-20, vol. 10, ch. 1, § 1.

i6 Culture
and Romance language words based on civilisation Accord
ing to Wundt, Jean Bodin, 1530-96, first used civilization
in its modern sense. In English, civilization was associated
with the notion of the task of civilizing others. In eight
eenth-century German,13 the word civilization still empha
sized relation to the state, somewhat as in the English verb
to civilize, viz., to spread political [sic] 14 development to
other peoples. So far Wundt.
Grimm's Wörterbuch gives: civilisieren: erudire, ad hu-
manitatem informare, and cites Kant (4:304): “ W ir sind
. . . durch Kunst und Wissenschaft cultiviert, wir sind
civilisiert . . . zu allerlei gesellschaftlicher Artigkeit und
Anständigkeit . . .” (W e become cultivated through art
and science, we become civilized [by attaining] to a variety
of social graces and refinements [or decencies] ).
If Kant stuck by this distinction, his cultivated refers to
intrinsic improvement of the person, his civilized to im
provements of social interrelations (interpersonal rela
tions). He is perhaps here remaining close to the original
sense of French civiliser with its emphasis on pleasant
manners (cf. poli, politesse) and the English core of mean
ing which made Samuel Johnson prefer “ civility" to civili
zation.
The French verb civiliser was in use by 1694, according
to Havelock Ellis,15 with the sense of polishing manners,
rendering sociable, or becoming urbane as a result of city
hfe.
According to Arciniegas, the Encyclopédie Française
says: “ Civiliser une nation, c'est la faire passer de l'état
primitif, naturel, à un état plus évolué de culture1® morale,
intellectuelle, sociale . . . [car] le mot civiliser s'oppose
“ To which Huizinga, 1945, p. 20, adds that the French verb
civiliser preceded the noun civilisation— that is, a word for the
act of becoming civilized preceded one for the condition of being
civilized.
13 However, we find that the 1733 Universal-Lexicon aller Wissen
schaften und Künste, Halle und Leipzig, has no articles on either
civilization or culture.
14 Governmental control as a means to Christianity, morality,
trade?
15 Ellis, 1923, p. 288.
13 In the sense of cultivation, cultivating.

à barbarie/'17 As to the noun civilisation, Arciniegas says
that the dictionary of the French Academy first admitted
it in the 1835 edition. C. Funck-Brentano makes the date
1838 for French "dictionaries/' but adds that there is one
pre-nineteenth-century use known, Turgot's: "Au com
mencement de la civilisation." M
W e find in the Encyclopédie1® only a juristic meaning
for Civiliser, namely to change a criminal legal action into
a civil one. The following article is on civilité, politesse,
a ffabilité. Incidentally, culture appears as a heading only
in culture des terres, 20 pages long. In the French of
the nineteenth century, civilisation is ordinarily used where
German would use Kultur. One can point to a few exam
ples of the use of culture like Lavisse's: "leur culture était
toute livresque et scolaire;" 2
0 but it is evident that the
1TArciniegas, 1947, pp. 145-46. He does not state under what
head this quotation is to be found, and we have not found it—
see next paragraph.
18 Funck-Brentano, 1947, p. 64. Both Arciniegas and Funck-
Brentano are in error as to the date— it was the 1798 edition;
Turgot did not use the word; and there was not only one in
stance but many of pre-nineteenth-century French usage of civili
sation. The history of the French word has been most exhaustively
reviewed by Lucien Febvre in his essay “ Civilisation: Evolution
d'un Mot et d'un Groupe d'idées," forming pages 1-55 of the
volume Civilisation: Le Mot et Vidée, 1930, which constitutes
the Deuxième Fascicule of the Première Semaine of Centre Inter
national de Synthèse, and which presents the best-documented
discussion we have seen. W e summarize this in an Addendum to
the present Part I. On pages 3-7 Febvre concludes that Turgot
himself did not use the word, that it was introduced into the
published text by Turgot’s pupil, Dupont de Nemours. The first
publication of the word civilisation in French, according to
Febvre, was in Amsterdam in 1766 in a volume entitled L'An
tiquité Dévoilée par ses Usages. Febvre also establishes by a
number of citations that by 1798 the word was fairly well estab
lished in French scholarly literature. Finally (pp. 8-9), he makes
a case for the view that the English word was borrowed from the
French.
19 W e had available the 1780-82 edition published in Lausanne
and Berne. Civiliser is in vol. 8. According to Berr’s discussion
on Febvre, 1930 (as just cited in full in our note 18 ), p. 59, the
participle from this verb is used already by Descartes (Discourse
on Method, Part II).
"Lavisse, 1900-11, vol. VII, I, p. 30, cited by Huizinga, 1945,

i8 Culture
meaning here is education, German Bildung, not culture
in the anthropological sense.
The English language lagged a bit behind French. In
1773, Samuel Johnson still excluded civilization from his
dictionary. Boswell had urged its inclusion, but Johnson
preferred civility. Boswell*
21 notes for Monday, March 23,
1772:
I found him busy, preparing a fourth edition of his
folio Dictionary. He would not admit “civilization,” but
only “ civility.” With great deference to him, I thought
“ civilization” from “ to civilize,” better in the sense op
posed to “ barbarity,” than “ civility/9
This seems indicative of where the center of gravity of
meaning of the word then lay. John Ash, in his 1775 dic
tionary, defines civilization as “ the state of being civilized,
the act of civilizing/' Buckle's use of the noun in the title
of his History of Civilization in England, 1857, might still
be somewhat ambiguous in implication, but Lubbock's
(Avebury's) The Origin of Civilization, 1870, which dealt
with savages and not with refinement, means approxi
mately what a modern anthropologist would mean by the
phrase.*2 Neither of these titles is referred to by the Ox
ford Dictionary, though phrases from both Buckle and
Lubbock are cited— with context of Egypt and ants! It
must be remembered that Tylor's Researches into the
Early History and Development of Mankind was five years
old when Lubbock published. The Oxford Dictionary's
own effort— in 1933!— comes to no more than this: “A
developed or advanced state of human society; a particular
stage or type of this/'
Huizinga2
3 gives a learned and illuminating discussion of
the Dutch term, beschaving, literally shaving or polishing,
p. 24. The reference is to the seventeenth-century “ noblesse de
robe."
21 Quoted in Huizinga, 1945, p. 21; also in New English (Oxford)
Dictionary, vol. 2, 1893, “ Civilization," under “ 1772— Boswell,
Johnson, X X V ."
22 For instance, Goldenweiser, Early Civilization, 1922.
23 Huizinga, 1945, pp. 18-33. Dante’s Civiltà, p. 22.

and of its relations to civilization and culture. Beschaving
came up in the late eighteenth century with the sense of
cultivation, came to denote also the condition of being
cultivated, blocked the spread of civilisatie by acquiring
the sense of culture, but in the twentieth century was in
creasingly displaced by cultuur.
Huizinga also points out that Dante, in an early work,
"II Convivio," introduced into Italian civiltà from the
Latin civilitas, adding a new connotation to the Latin
original which made it, in Huizinga's opinion, a "specific
and clear" term for the concept of culture.
3. Relation of Civilization and Culture
The usage of "culture" and "civilization" in various lan
guages has been confusing.2
4 Webster's Unabridged Dic
tionary defines both "culture" and "civilization" in terms
of the other. "Culture" is said to be a particular state or
stage of advancement in civilization. "Civilization" is
called an advancement or a state of social culture. In both
popular and literary English the tendency has been to treat
them as near synonyms,2
6 though "civilization" has some
times been restricted to "advanced" or “ high" cultures.
On the whole, this tendency is also reflected in the litera
ture of social science. Goldenweiser's 1922 introduction to
anthropology is called Early Civilization and all index
references to "culture" are subsumed under "civilization."
Some writers repeatedly use the locutions "culture, or
civilization," "civilization, or culture." Sumner and Kel
ler follow this practice, but in at least one place make it
plain that there is still a shade of difference in their
conception:
The adjustments of society which we call civiliza
tion form a much more complex aggregation than does the
culture that went before . . . (1927, 2189)
u For a thoughtful discussion, see Donnes, 1942.
25This statement, of course, does not apply to one popular usage,
namely that which identifies “ culture" with “ refinement," “ so
phistication," “ learning" in some individuals as opposed to otheja.

20 Culture
Occasional writers incline to regard civilization as the
culture of societies characterized by cities— that is, they
attempt or imply an operational definition based upon ety
mology. Sometimes there is a tendency to use the term civ
ilization chiefly for literate cultures: Chinese civilization
but Eskimo culture— yet without rigor or insistence of de
marcation.
4. The Distinction of Civilization from Culture
in American Sociology
Certain sociologists have attempted a sharp opposition be
tween the two terms. These seem to have derived from
German thought. Lester Ward writes:
W e have not in the English language the same dis
tinction between civilization and culture that exists in the
German language. Certain ethnologists affect to make this
distinction, but they are not understood by the public. The
German expression Kulturgeschichte is nearly equivalent
to the English expression history of civilization. Yet they
are not synonymous, since the German term is confined to
the material conditions [sic!], while the English expression
may and usually does include psychic, moral, and spiritual
phenomena. To translate the German Kultur we are obliged
to say material civilization [sic!]. Culture in English has
come to mean something entirely different, corresponding
to the humanities [sic]. But Kultur also relates to the arts
of savages and barbaric peoples, which are not included in
any use of civilization since that term in itself denotes a
stage of advancement higher than savagery or barbarism.
These stages are even popularly known as stages of culture,
where the word culture becomes clearly synonymous with
the German Kultur.
To repeat again the definition that I formulated twenty
years ago: material civilization consists in the utilization of
the materials and forces of nature. (1903, 18)
In a book published two years later, Albion Small ex
presses himself along not dissimilar lines:

What, then, is “ culture” (Kultur) in the German
sense? To be sure, the Germans themselves are not wholly
consistent in their use of the term, but it has a technical
sense which it is necessary to define. In the first place, “ cul
ture” is a condition or achievement possessed by society.
It is not individual. Our phrase “a cultured person” does
not employ the term in the German sense. For that, Ger
man usage has another word, gebildet, and the peculiar
possession of the gebildeter Mann is not “ culture,” but
Bildung. If we should accept the German term “ culture”
in its technical sense, we should have no better equivalent
for Bildung, etc., than “ education” and “ educated,” which
convey too much of the association of school discipline to
render the German conception in its entire scope. At all
events, whatever names we adopt, there is such social pos
session, different from the individual state, which consists
of adaptation in thought and action to the conditions of
life.
Again, the Germans distinguish between “ culture” and
“civilization.” Thus “civilization is the ennobling, the in
creased control of the elementary human impulses by so
ciety. Culture, on the other hand, is the control of nature
by science and art.” That is, civilization is one side of what
we call politics; culture is our whole body of technical
equipment, in the way of knowledge, process, and skill for
subduing and employing natural resources, and it does not
necessarily imply a high degree of socialization. (1905,
59-60)
Another American sociologist, writing some twenty-five
years later, seizes upon an almost opposite German concep
tion, that developed primarily by Alfred Weber in his Prin
zipielles zur Kultursoziologie. MacIver thus equates “ civ
ilization” with means, and “ culture” with ends:
. . . The contrast between means and ends, be
tween the apparatus of living and the expressions of our
life. The former we call civilization, the latter culture. By
civilization, then, wc mean the whole mechanism and or
ganization which man has devised in his endeavor to con
trol the conditions of life . . . Culture on the other hand

22 Culture
is the expression of our nature in our modes of living and
thinking, in our everyday intercourse, in art, in literature,
in religion, in recreation and enjoyment . . . The realm
of culture . . . is the realm of values, of styles, of emo
tional attachments, of intellectual adventures. Culture then
is the antithesis of civilization. (19 31, 226)2
0
Merton has criticized Maclver's position, provided a re
statement of Weber, and supplied some refinements of his
own:
. . . The essential difficulty with such a distinction
[as Maclver’s] is that it is ultimately based upon differences
in motivation. But different motives may be basic to the
same social activity or cultural activity . . . Obviously, a
set of categories as flexible as this is inadequate, for social
products tend to have the same social signiffcance whatever
the motivation of those responsible for them.
Weber avoids this difficulty. Civilization is simply a body
of practical and intellectual knowledge and a collection of
technical means for controlling nature. Culture comprises
configurations of values, of normative principles and ideals,
which are historically unique . . .
Both these authors [Maclver and A. Weber] agree in
ascribing a series of sociologically relevant attributes to
civilization and culture. The civilizational aspects tend to
be more accumulative, more readily diffused, more sus
ceptible of agreement in evaluation and more continuous
in development than the cultural aspect . . . Again, both
avoid a narrow determinism and indicate that substantial
interaction occurs between the two realms.
This last point is especially significant. For insofar as he
ignores the full significance of the concrete effects of such
interdependence, Weber virtually reverts to a theory of
progress. The fact which must be borne in mind is that
accumulation is but an abstractly immanent characteristic
of civilization. Hence, concrete movements which always
involve the interaction with other spheres need not embody
“ This conception is followed also in The Modern State and in
articles by Maclver, and is modified and developed in his Social
Causation 1942, which we have discussed in Part III, Group t.

such a development. The rate of accumulation is influenced
by social and cultural elements so that in societies where
cultural values are inimical to the cultivation of civilization,
the rate of development may be negligible . . .
The basis for the accumulative nature of civilization is
readily apparent. Once given a cultural animus which posi
tively evaluates civilizational activity, accumulation is in
evitable. This tendency is rooted deep in the very nature of
civilization as contrasted with culture. It is a peculiarity of
civilizational activities that a set of operations can be so
specifically defined that the criteria of the attainment of
the various ends are clearly evident. Moreover, and this is
a further consideration which Weber overlooks entirely,
+he “ ends” which civilization serves are empirically attain
able” . . .
Thus civilization is “impersonal” and “ objective.” A
scientific law can be verified by determining whether the
specified relations uniformly exist The same operations
will occasion the same results, no matter who performs
them . . .
Culture, on the other hand, is thoroughly personal and
subjective, simply because no fixed and clearly defined set
of operations is available for determining the desired result
. . . It is this basic difference between the two fields which
accounts for the cumulative nature of civilization and the
unique (noncumulative) character of culture. (1936,
109-12)
Among others, Howard Odum, the well-known regional
sociologist, makes much the same distinction as Merton
(cf. e.g., Odum, 1947, esp. pp. 123, 281, 285). To him
also civilization is impersonal, artificial, often destructive
of the values of the folk. Odum was heavily influenced by
Toennies.
However, the anthropological conception, stemming
back to Tylor, has prevailed with the vast majority of
American sociologists as opposed to such special contrasts
between “ culture” and “ civilization.” Talcott Parsons— 1
7
17 [Merton's footnote! This fundamental point is implied by Mac-
Iver but is not discussed by him within the same context.

also under the influence of Alfred and Max Weber—
still employs the concept of “ culture" is a sense far more
restricted than the anthropological usage, but, as will be
seen in Part II, almost all of the numerous definitions in
recent writings by sociologists clearly revolve about the an
thropological concept of culture. This trend dates only to
the nineteen-twenties. Previously, culture was little used
as a systematic concept by American sociologists.2
8 If it ap
peared in their books at all, it was as a casual synonym for
“ civilization” or in contradistinction to this term.
Ogburn’s Social Change: With Respect to Culture and
Original Nature (1922) seems to have been the first major
work by an American sociologist in which the anthropologi
cal concept of culture was prominently employed. Ogburn
studied with Boas and was influenced by him. He appears
also to have been cognizant of Kroeber's The Superorganic,
19 17. He cites Kroeber’s The Possibility of a Social Psy
chology (19 18 ). The appearance of Lowie’s little book,
Culture and Ethnology (19 17 ), and Wissler’s Man and
Culture (19 23), seems to have made a good deal of dif
ference. At any rate, the numerous articles2
8 on culture
and “ cultural sociology” which make their appearance in
sociological journals in the next ten years cite these books
more frequently than other anthropological sources, al
though there is also evidence of interest in Boas and in
Wissler’s culture area concept.
8
8Chugerman (1939) in his biography of Lester Ward states that
Pure Sociology (1903) marks Ward's transition from a natural
istic to a cultural approach. C. A. Ellwood and H. E. fensen in
their introduction to this volume also comment, “ In effect, Ward
holds in Pure Sociology that sociology is a science of civilization
or 'culture' which is built up at first accidentally and uncon
sciously by the desires and purposes of men, but is capable of
being transformed by intelligent social purposes" (p. 4). But the
anthropologist who reads Pure Sociology will hardly recognize the
concept of culture as he knows it.
“ See Bernard (1926, 1930, 19 3 1); Case (1924b, 19 27); Chapin
(19 25); Ellwood (1927a, 1927b); Frank (19 3 1); Krout (19 32);
rrice (1930); Smith (1929); Stern (1929); Wallis (1929); W il
ley (1927a, 1927b, 19 3 1). Abel (1930) views this trend with
alarm as does Gary in her chapter in the 1929 volume Trends in
American Sociology. Gary cites Tylor's definition and one of
Wissler's.
24 Culture

To summarize the history of the relations of the con
cepts of culture and civilization in American sociology,
there was first a phase in which the two were contrasted,
with culture referring to material products and technology;
then a phase in which the contrast was maintained but the
meanings reversed, technology and science being now
called civilization; and, beginning more or less concurrently
with this second phase, there was also a swing to the now
prevalent non-differentiation of the two terms, as in
most anthropological writing, culture being the more usual
term, and civilization a synonym or near-synonym of it. In
anthropology, whether in the United States or in Europe,
there has apparently never existed any serious impulse to
use culture and civilization as contrastive terms.
5. The Attempted Distinction in Germany
This American sociological history is a reflection of what
went on in Germany, with the difference that there the
equation of culture and civilization had been made before
their distinction was attempted, and that the equating us
age went on as a separate current even while the distinc
tion was being fought over. The evidence for this history
will now be presented. W e shall begin with the contrast of
the two concepts, as being a relatively minor incident
which it will be expedient to dispose of before we examine
the main theme and development of usage in Germany.
The last significant representative known to us of the
usage of the noun culture to denote the material or tech
nological component is Barth.3
0 He credits Wilhelm von
Humboldt, in his Kawisprache, 1836,81 with being the first
to delimit the "excessive breadth” which the concept of
culture had assumed. Humboldt, he says, construed cul
ture as the control of nature by science and by "Kunst”
(evidently in the sense of useful arts, viz., technology);
whereas civilization is a qualitative improvement, a
"Veredelung,” the increased control of elementary human
9
0Barth, 1922.
“ Barth, 1922, vol. I, p. xxxvii.

26 Culture
impulses (Triebe) by society. As a distinction, this is not
too sharp; and Humboldt's own words obscure it further.
He speaks of civilization as “ die Vermenschlichung der
Völker in ihren äusseren Einrichtungen und Gebräuchen
und der darauf Bezug habenden Gesinnung." This might
be Englished as “ the humanization of peoples in their
outer [manifest, visible, tangible, overt?] arrangements
[institutions] and customs and in their [sc. inner, spirit
ual] disposition relating to these [institutions]."
Next, Barth cites A. Schaeffle, 187 5-78,32 who gives the
name of “ Gesittung" to what eventuates from human so
cial development. There is more connotation than deno
tation in this German word, so that we find it impossible
to translate it exactly. However, a “ gesitteter" man is one
who conducts himself according to Sitte, custom (or
mores), and is therefore thoroughly human, non-brutish.
The word Gesittung thus seems essentially an endeavored
substitution for the older one of culture. Schaeffle then
divides Gesittung into culture and civilization, culture be
ing, in his own words, the “ sachliche Gehalt aller Gesit
tung." “ Sachlich" varies in English sense from material
to factual to relevant; “ sachliche Gehalt" probably means
something close to the “ concrete content" of “ Gesittung."
Schaeffle’s “ civilization," according to Barth, refers to the
interior of man, “ das Innere des Menschen"; it is the “ at
tainment and preservation of the [cultural] sachliche
Gehalt in the nobler forms of the struggle for existence."
This is as nebulous as Humboldt; and if we cite passages
of such indefiniteness from forgotten German authors, it is
because it seems worthwhile to show that the culture-
civilization distinction is essentially a hang-over, on both
sides of the argument, of the spirit-nature dichotomy—
Geist und Natur—which so deeply penetrated German
thought from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.
Hence the ennoblements, the inwardnesses, the humaniza
tions as opposed to the factual, the concrete, and the
mechanical arts.
Barth also reckons on the same side Lippert— whose
Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit, 1886, influenced Sum-
**Bau und Leben des sozialen Körpers.

ner and Keller— on the ground that he postulates “ Lebens
fürsorge” as “ Grundantrieb” (subsistence provision con
stituting the basal drive), and then derives from this pri
mary impulse tools, skills, ideas [sic], and social institu
tions.3
8
Barth's own résumé of the situation is that “ most
often” culture refers to the sway of man over nature, civili
zation to his sway over himself; though he admits that
there is contrary usage as well as the non-differentiating,
inclusive meaning given to culture. It is clear that in the
sway-over-nature antithesis with sway-over-himself, the
spirit of man is still being preserved as something intact
and independent of nature.
It was into this current of nomenclature that Ward and
Small dipped.
Now for the contrary stream, which, although overlap
ping in time, began and perhaps continued somewhat
later, and to which Maclver and Merton are related. Here
it is civilization that is technological, culture that contains
the spiritualities like religion and art.
Toennies, in his Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, first
published in 1887,3
4 makes his primary dichotomy between
community and society, to which there corresponds a prog
ress from what is socially “ organic” to what is “ mechanical,”
a transition from the culture of folk society (Volkstum)
to the civilization of state organization (Staatstum). Cul
ture comprises custom (Sitte), religion, and art: civiliza
tion comprises law and science. Just as psychological de
velopment is seen as the step from Gemüt to Verstand and
political development that from Gemeinschaft to Gesell
schaft, so Kultur is what precedes and begets Zivilisation.
There is some similarity to Irwing's distinction between
Kultur des Willens and Kultur des Verstandes. While
Toennies' culture-civilization contrast is formally second
ary to the Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft polarity in Toennies'8
3
8
4
8
3Bernheim’s Lehrbuch (6th edition, 1914, p. 60) also has cul
ture and civilization refer to man’s mastery respectively over nature
and over himself.
8
4Later editions in 19 12, 1920— Barth’s summary in 1922, pp.
441-44-

28 Culture
thought, it is implicit in this from the beginning. His
frame of distinction is social in terms, but the loading of
the frame is largely cultural (in the anthropological sense
of the word).
Alfred Weber's address “ Der Soziologische Kulturbe
griff," first read at the second German “ Soziologentag"
in 19 12,8
5 views the process of civilization as a develop
mental continuation of biological processes in that it meets
necessities and serves the utilitarian objective of man's con
trol over nature. It is intellectual and rational; it can be de
layed, but not permanently prevented from unfolding. By
contrast, culture is superstructural, produced from feeling;
it works toward no immanent end; its products are unique,
plural, non-additive.
Eight years later Weber reworked this thesis in Prinzi
pielles zur Kultursoziologie3
8 in language that is equally
difficult, but in a form that is clearer than his first at
tempt, perhaps both because of more thorough thinking
through and because of a less cramping limitation of space.
In this philosophical essay Weber distinguishes three com
ponents: social process, civilizational process, and cultural
movement (or flow: Bewegung). It is this work to which
Maclver and Merton refer in the passages already cited.8
7
It should be added that Weber's 1920 essay contains evi
dent reactions— generally negative— to Spengler's Unter
gang that had appeared two years before.
Spengler in 1918 s8 made civilization merely a stage of
culture— the final phase of sterile crystallization and repe
tition of what earlier was creative. Spengler's basic view of
culture is discussed below (in $ 10).
“ Published, he says in “ Verhandlungen 1 Serie II.” It is re
printed in his Ideen zur Staats- und Kultursoziologie, 1927, pp.
31- 47«
“ Weber, 1920, vol. 47, pp. 1-49. Primarily historical in treat
ment is Weber's book Kulturgeschichte als Kultursoziologie,
1935«
” A comment by Kroeber was published under the title Real
ity Culture and Value Culture, No. 18 of The Nature of Culture,
University of Chicago Press, 1952.
38Untergang des Abendlandes. The standard translation by C. F.
Atkinson as The Decline of the West was published in 1926
(vol. 1) , 1928 (vol. 2), 1939 (2 vols, in 1) .

Oppenheimer in 1922,* reverting to Schaeffle's "Gesit
tung/' makes civilization to be the material, culture the
spiritual content (geistige Gehalt) of "Gesittung." To art
and religion, as expressions of culture, Oppenheimer adds
science.4
0
Meanwhile, the Alfred Weber distinction, with civiliza
tion viewed as the technological, subsistential, and mate
rial facies, and culture as the spiritual, emotional, and
idealistic one, maintained itself in Germany. See Menghin,
19 31, and Tessmann in 1930, as cited and discussed in
Part III, b. Thurnwald, who always believed in progress in
the sense of accumulation on physically predetermined
stages, determined the locus of this as being situate in
technology and allied activities, and set this off as civiliza
tion. In a recent work of his (1950) the contrast between
this sphere of "civilization" and the contrasting one of
residual "culture" is the main theme, as the subtitle of
the booklet shows: man's "ascent between reason and illu
sion." See especially our tabulation at the end of Part
III, b.41
Nevertheless, it is evident that the contrasting of cul
ture and civilization, within the scope of a larger entity,
was mainly an episode in German thought. Basically it re
flects, as we have said, the old spirit-nature or spirit-matter
dualism carried over into the field of the growing recogni
tion of culture. That it was essentially an incident is shown
by the fact that the number of writers who made culture
“ Oppenheimer, 1922, vol. 1.
4
0For Wundt’s distinction, see § 1, especially its footnote 8.
41 Thurnwald, 1950, p. 38: “ The sequence of civilizational hori
zons represents progress.” Page 107: “ Civilization is to be con
strued as the equipment of dexterities and skills through which
the accumulation of technology and knowledge takes place. Cul
ture operates with civilization as a means.” Legend facing plate
1 1 : “ Civilization is to be understood as the variation, elaboration,
and perfection of devices, tools, utensils, skills, knowledge, and
information. Civilization thus refers to an essentially temporal
chain of variable but accumulative progress— an irreversible proc
ess . . . The same [civilizationall object, when viewed as com
ponent of an associational unity at a given time, that is, in
synchronic section of a consociation of particular human beings,
appears as a component in a culture.”

the material or technological aspect is about as great as the
number of those who called that same aspect civilization.
More significant yet is the fact that probably a still greater
number of Germans than both the foregoing together used
culture in the inclusive sense in which we are using it in
this book.
W e therefore return to consideration of this major cur
rent, especially as this is the one that ultimately prevailed
in North America and Latin America, in Russia and Italy,
in Scandinavia and the Netherlands, partially so in Eng
land, and is beginning to be felt in long-resistive France.
30 Culture
6. Phases in the History of the Concept of
Culture in Germany
At least three stages may be recognized in the main stream
of use of the term culture in Germany.
First, it appears toward the end of the eighteenth cen
tury in a group of universal histories of which Herder's is
most famous. In these, the idea of progress is well tem
pered by an intrinsic interest in the variety of forms that
culture has assumed. The slant is therefore comparative,
sometimes even ethnographic, and inclined toward relativ
ism. Culture still means progress in cultivation, toward en
lightenment; but the context is one from which it was only
a step to the climate of opinion in which Klemm wrote
and the word culture began to take on its modern mean
ing.
Second, beginning contemporaneously with the first
stage but persisting somewhat longer, is a formal philo
sophic current, from Kant to Hegel, in which culture was
of decreasing interest. This was part of the last florescence
of the concept of spirit.
The third phase, since about 1850, is that in which cul
ture came increasingly to have its modern meaning, in gen
eral intellectual as well as technical circles. Among its
initiators were Klemm the ethnographer and Burckhardt
the culture historian; and in its development there partici

pated figures as distinct as the neo-Kantian Rickert and
Spengler.
M. Heyne's Deutsches Wörterbuch, 1890-95, illustrates
the lag of dictionary makers in all languages in seizing the
modern broad meaning of culture as compared with its
specific technical senses. After mentioning "pure cultures
of bacilli," the Dictionary says that the original meaning
was easily transferred to the evocation or finishing (Aus
bildung) and the refining of the capabilities (Kräfte) of
man's spirit and body— in other words, the sense attained
by the word by 1780. No later meaning is mentioned, al
though the compound "culture history" is mentioned.
H. Schulz, Deutsches Fremdwörterbuch, 19 13, says that
the word Kultur was taken into German toward the end of
the seventeenth century to denote spiritual culture, on the
model of Cicero's cultura animi, or the development or
evocation (Ausbildung) of man's intellectual and moral
capacities. In the eighteenth century, he says, this concept
was broadened by transfer from individuals to peoples 01
mankind. Thus it attained its modern sense of the total
ity (as E. Bernheim, 1889, Lehrbuch, p. 47, puts it) "of
the forms and processes of social life, of the means and re
sults of work, spiritual as well as material."
This seems a fair summary of the history of the mean
ings of the word in German; as Bernheim's definition is
the fair equivalent, for a German and a historian, of Ty-
lor's of eighteen years earlier.
The earliest appearance of the term "culture history,"
according to Schulz, is in Adelung's Geschichte der Cul-
tur, 1782, and (discussed in $ 7 and note 49) in the re
versed order of words, in D. H. Hegewisch, Allgemeine
Uebersicht der teutschen Culturgeschickte, 1788.
7. Culture as a Concept of Eighteenth-Century
General History
In its later course, the activity of eighteenth-century en
lightenment found expression in attempts at universal his
tories of the development of mankind of which Herder's

is the best-known. This movement was particularly strong
in Germany and tended to make considerable use of the
term culture. It was allied to thinking about the "philos
ophy of history/' but not quite the same. The latter term
was established in 1765 by Voltaire when he used it as the
title of an essay that in 1769 became the introduction of the
definitive edition of his Essai sur les Moeurs et VEsprit des
Nations.*2 Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists were incisive,
reflective, inclined to comment philosophically. Their Ger
man counterparts or successors tended rather to write
systematic and sometimes lengthy histories detailing how
man developed through time in all the continents, and gen
erally with more emphasis on his stages of development
than on particular or personal events. Such stages of devel
opment would be traceable through subsistence, arts, be
liefs, religion of various successive peoples: in short,
through their customs, what we today would call their cul
ture. The word culture was in fact used by most of this
group of writers of universal history. To be sure, a close
reading reveals that its precise meaning was that of "de
gree to which cultivation has progressed.” But that mean
ing in turn grades very easily and almost imperceptibly
into the modern sense of culture. In any event, these his
tories undoubtedly helped establish the word in wide Ger
man usage; the shift in meaning then followed, until by
the time of Klemm, in 1843, the present-day sense had
been mainly attained and was ready-made for Tylor, for
the Russians, and others.
In the present connection, the significant feature of these
histories of mankind is that they were actual histories.
They were permeated by, or aimed at, large ideas; but
they also contained masses of concrete fact, presented in
historical organization. It was a different stream of thought
from that which resulted in true "philosophies of his
tory,” that is, philosophizings about history, of which Hegel
“ As usually stated; e.g., in E. Bernheim, Lehrbuch, 6th edition,
19 14. But dates and titles are given variously, due no doubt in
part to alterations, inclusions, and reissues by Voltaire himself.
Febvre, 1930, summarized in Addendum to our Part I, credits the
Philosophie de VHistoire to 1736.
32 Culture

became the most eminent representative. By comparison,
this latter was a deductive, transcendental movement; and
it is significant that Hegel seems never to have used the
word culture in his Philosophy of History, and civilization
only once and incidentally/3 This fact is the more remark
able in that Hegel died only twelve years4
4 before Klemm
began to publish. He could not have been ignorant of
the word culture, after Herder and Kant had used it: it
was his thinking and interests that were oriented away
from it.
It must accordingly be concluded that the course of
“ philosophy of history” forked in Germany. One branch,
the earlier, was interested in the actual story of what ap
peared to have happened to mankind. It therefore bore
heavily on customs and institutions, became what we to
day should call culture-conscious, and finally resulted in a
somewhat diffuse ethnographic interest. From the very be
ginning, however, mankind was viewed as an array or series
of particular peoples. The other branch of philosophy of
history became less interested in history and more in its
supreme principle. It dealt increasingly with mankind in
stead of peoples, it aimed at clarifying basic schemes, and
it operated with the concept of “ spirit” instead of that of
culture.
This second movement is of little further concern to us
here. But it will be profitable to examine the first current,
in which comparative, cultural, and ethnographic slants
are visible from the beginning.
The principal figures to be reviewed are Irwing, Adelung,
Herder, Meiners, and Jenisch; their work falls into the
period from 1779 to 1801. First, however, let us note
briefly a somewhat earlier figure.
Isaac Iselin, a Swiss, published in Zurich in 1768 a4
8
4
8“ Es ist ferner ein Faktum, dass mit fortschreitender Zivilisation
der Gesellschaft und des Staats diese systematische Ausführung
des Verstandes [in gebildeter Sprache] sich abschleift und die
Sprache hieran ärmer und ungebildeter wird.” (1920, 147; All-
gern. Einleitung, III, 2.)
4
4His Philosophy of History is a posthumous work, based on his
lecture notes and those of his students. It was first published in
1837.

History of M a n k in d which seems not to contain the
words culture or civilization. The first of eight “ books” is
given over to a Psychological (“ psychologische” ) Consider
ation of Man, the second to the Condition (Stand) of Na
ture (of Man— in Rousseau's sense, but not in agreement
with him), the third to the Condition of Savagery, the
fourth to the Beginnings of Good Breeding (Gesittung, i.e.,
civilization). Books five to eight deal with the Progress
of Society (Geselligkeit— sociability, association?) toward
Civil (bürgerlich, civilized?) Condition, the Oriental peo
ples, the Greeks and Romans, the Nations of Europe. The
implicit idea of progress is evident. The polar catchwords
are Wildheit and Barbarey (Savagery and Barbarism), on
the one hand; on the other, Milderung der Sitten, Polici-
rung, Erleuchtung, Verbesserung, that is, Amelioration of
Manners, Polishing (rather than Policing), Illumination
(i.e., Enlightenment), Improvement. The vocabulary is
typical mid-eighteenth-century French or English Enlight
enment language put into German— quite different from
the vocabulary of Adelung and Herder only twenty-five to
thirty years later: Cultur, Humanität, Tradition are all
lacking. While Europe was everywhere groping toward con
cepts like those of progress and culture, these efforts were
already segregating into fairly diverse streams, largely
along national speech lines.
K. F. von Irwing, 1725-1801, an Oberconsistorialrat in
Berlin, who introduces the main German series, attempted,
strictly speaking, not so much a history of mankind as an
inquiry into man,4
8 especially his individual and social
springs or impulses (“ Triebfedern” or “ Triebwerke” ). He
is of interest in the present connection on account of a
long section, his fourteenth, devoted to an essay on the cul
ture of mankind.4
6
4
7 Culture is cultivation, improvement,
4
6Iselin, 1768 (Preface dated 1764, in Basel).
4
8Irwing, 1777-85-
47Vol. 3, § 184-207, pp. 88-372 (1779 ). This Abtheilung is en
titled: “ Von der allgemeinen Veranlassung zu Begriffen, oder
von den Triebwerken, wodurch die Menschen zum richtigen
Gebrauch ihrer Geisteskraefte gebracht werden. Ein Versuch
ueber die Kultur der Menschheit ueberhaupt.” The word is spelt
with K— Kultur.
34 Culture

to Irwing. Thus: The improvements and increases of hu
man capacities and energies, or the sum of the perfectings
(Vollkommenheiten) to which man can be raised from
his original rudest condition—these constitute "den
allgemeinen Begriff der ganzen Kultur ueberhaupt” —
a very Kantian-sounding phrase. Again: The more the
capacities of man are worked upon ("bearbeitet werden” )
by culture ("durch die Kultur” ) the more does man de
part from the neutral condition ("Sinnesart” ) of animals.
Here the near-reification of culture into a seemingly auton
omous instrument is of interest. Culture is a matter and
degree of human perfection (Vollkommenheiten) that is
properly attributable only to the human race or entire
peoples: individuals are given only an education (Erzie
hung), and it is through this that they are brought to the
degree (Grade) of culture of their nation.4
8
Johann Christoph Adelung, 1732-1806, already men
tioned as the author of the dictionaries of 1774 and 1793,
published anonymously in 1782 an Essay on the History of
Culture of the Human Species.*9This is genuine if highly
summarized history, and it is concerned primarily with cub
ture, though political events are not wholly disregarded.
The presentation is in eight periods, each of which is des
ignated by a stage of individual human age, so that the
idea of growth progress is not only fundamental but ex
plicit. The comparison of stages of culture with stages of
individual development was of course revived by Spengler,
though Spengler also used the metaphor of the seasons.5
0
Adelung’s periods with their metaphorical designations are
the following:
"T h e three passages rendered are from pp. 122-23, 127 of § 188,
“ Von der Kultur ueberhaupt.”
"Adelung, 1782. Sickel, 1933, contains on pp. 145-209 a well-
considered analysis of “ Adelungs Kultur-theorie.” Sickel credits
Adelung with being the first inquirer to attribute cultural advance
to increased population density (pp. 151-55).
6
0A fundamental difference is that Spengler applies the metaphor
only to stages within particular cultures, never to human culture
as a whole; but Adelung applies it to the totality seen as one
grand unit.

1. From origins to the flood. Mankind an embryo.
2. From the flood to Moses. The human race a child in its
culture.
3. From Moses to 683 b .c . The human race a boy.
4. 683 b .c . to A.D. 1. Rapid blooming of youth of the human
race.
5. A.D. 1 to 400 (Migrations). Mankind an enlightened man
(aufgeklaerter Mann).
6. 400-1096 (Crusades). A man's heavy bodily labors.
7. 1096-1520 (1520, full enlightenment reached). A man oc
cupied in installation and improvement of his economy
(Hauswesen).
8. i52o -(i782). A man in enlightened enjoyment (im auf-
geklaerten Genüsse).6
1
Adelung is completely enlightened religiously. In $ 1 he
does not treat of the creation of man but of the origins of
the human race (“ Ursprung seines Geschlechts” ) . Moses
assures us, he says, that all humanity is descended from a
single pair, which is reasonable; but the question of how
this pair originated cannot be answered satisfactorily, un
less one accepts, along with Moses, their immediate crea
tion by God. But man was created merely with the dis
position and capacity (“ Anlage” ) of what he was to
become ($ 3 ). Language was invented by man; it is the first
step toward culture ($ 5 foil.). The fall of man is evaded
(J 13 ); but as early as Cain a simultaneous refinement
and corruption of customs (“ Verderben der Sitten” ) be
gan (J 24). The Flood and the Tower of Babel are mini
mized (Ch. 2, $ 1-4), not because the author is anticlerical
but because he is seeking a natural explanation for the
growth of culture. Throughout, he sees population in
crease as a primary cause of cultural progress.5
2
W hile there are innumerable passages in Adelung in
61 The metaphorical subtitles appear in the Table of Contents,
but not in the chapter headings. For the first five periods, refer
ence is to "mankind" (der Mensch) or to "the human race"
(das menschliche Geschlecht); for the last three, directly to "a
man" (der M ann), which is awkward in English where "m an"
denotes both "Mensch" and "M ann."
“ Preface: "Die Cultur wird durch Volksmenge . . . bewirkt";
"Volksmenge im eingeschraenkten Raume erzeuget Cultur"; and
passim to Chapter 8, § 2, p. 413.
36 Culture

which his “ Cultur” could be read with its modern mean
ing, it is evident that he did not intend this meaning—
though he was unconsciously on the way to it. This is clear
from his formal definitions in his Preface. These are worth
quoting.
Cultur ist mir der Uebergang aus dem mehr sinn
lichen und thierischen Zustande in enger verschlungene
Verbindungen des gesellschaftlichen Lebens. (Culture is
the transition from a more sensual and animal condition to
the more closely knit interrelations of social life.)
Die Cultur bestehet . . . in der Summe deutlicher Be
griffe, und . . . in der . . . Milderung und Verfeinerung
des Koerpers und der Sitten. (Culture consists of the sum
of defined concepts and of the amelioration and refinement
of the body and of manners.)
The word “ sum” here brings this definition close to
modern ones as discussed in our Part II; it suggests that
Adelung now and then was slipping into the way of think
ing of culture as the product of cultivation as well as the
act of cultivating.
Die Cultur des Geistes bestehet in einer immer
zunehmenden Summe von Erkenntnissen, welche noth-
wendig wachsen muss. . . . (Spiritual culture consists in
an ever increasing and necessarily growing sum of under
standings.)
And finally:
Gerne haette ich für das Wort Cultur einen deut
schen Ausdruck gewählet; allein ich weiss keinen, der des
sen Begriff erschoepfte. Verfeinerung, Aufklaerung, Ent
wickelung der Faehigkeiten, sagen alle etwas, aber nicht
alles. (I should have liked to choose a German expression
instead of the word culture; but I know none that exhausts
its meaning. Refinement, enlightenment, development of
capacities all convey something, but not the whole sense.)
Again we seem on the verge of the present-day meaning
of culture.

Adelung’s definition of Cultur in his 1793 German dic
tionary confirms that to him and his contemporaries the
word meant improvement, rather than a state or condition
of human social behavior, as it does now. It reads:
Cultur— die Veredlung oder Verfeinerung der
gesummten Geistes- and Leibeskraefte eines Menschen
oder eines Volkes, so dass dieses Wort so wohl die Auf-
klaerung, die Veredlung des Verstandes durch Befreyung
von Vorurtheilen, aber auch die Politur, die Veredlung und
Verfeinerung der Sitten unter sich begreift. (Culture: the
improvement [ennoblement] or refining of the total mental
and bodily forces of a person or a people; so that the word
includes not only the enlightening or improving of under
standing through liberation from prejudices, but also polish
ing, namely [increased] improvement and refinement, of
customs and manners.)
Veredlung, literally ennoblement, seems to be a meta
phor taken from the improvement of breeds of domesti
cated plants and animals.
It is significant that the application of the term culture
still is individual as well as social.
Adelung’s definition is of interest as being perhaps the
first formal one made that includes, however dimly, the
modern scientific concept of culture. However, basically it
is still late eighteenth century, revolving around polish, re
fining, enlightenment, individual improvement, and so
cial progress.
Johann Gottfried Herder’s (1744-1803) Ideas on the
Philosophy of History of Mankind6
3 is the best-known and
most influential of these early histories of culture. The title
reverts to the “ Philosophy of History” which Voltaire had
introduced twenty years before; but the work itself deals
as consistently as Adelung’s with the development of cul
ture. The setting, to be sure, is broader. The first section
of Book I has the heading: “ Our Earth is a Star Among
63 Herder, 1744-1803, 4 vols., 1784, 1785, 1787, 179 1. These
constitute vols. 13 and 14 of Herder's Sämtliche Werke edited
by Bernhard Suphan, 1887, reprinted 1909, pagination double to
preserve that of the original work. W e cite the Suphan paging.
38 Culture

Stars.” Books II and III deal with plants and animals; and
when man is reached in Book IV, it is to describe his struc
ture, what functions he is organized and shaped to exercise.
Book V deals with energies, organs, progress, and prospects.
In Books V I and V II racial physiques and geographical in
fluences are discussed. A sort of theory of culture, variously
called Cultur, Humanität, Tradition, is developed in V III
and IX; X is devoted to the historic origin of man in Asia,
as evidenced by "the course of culture and history” in its
$ 3. Books XI to X X then settle down to an actual uni
versal history of peoples— of their cultures, as we would
say, rather than of their politics or events. These final ten
books deal successively5
4 with East Asia, West Asia, the
Greeks, Rome, humanization as the purpose of human na
ture, marginal peoples of Europe, origin and early develop
ment of Christianity, Germanic peoples, Catholicism and
Islam, modern Europe since Amalfi and the Crusades.
Herder's scope, his curiosity and knowledge, his sympa
thy, imagination, and verve, his enthusiasm for the most
foreign and remote of human achievements, his extraordi
nary freedom from bias and ethnocentricity, endow his
work with an indubitable quality of greatness. He sought to
discover the peculiar values of all peoples and cultures,
where his great contemporary Gibbon amused himself by
castigating with mordant polish the moral defects of the
personages and the corruption and superstition of the ages
which he portrayed.
Basically, Herder construes Cultur as a progressive culti
vation or development of faculties. Not infrequently he
uses Humanität in about the same sense. Enlightenment,
Aufklärung, he employs less often; but Tradition fre
quently, both in its strict sense and coupled with Cultur.
This approach to the concepts of culture and tradition has
a modern ring: compare our Part II.
Wollen wir diese zweite Genesis des Menschen die
sein ganzes Leben durchgeht, von der Bearbeitung des
Ackers Cultur, oder vom Bilde des Lichtes Aufklärung nen-
54The books are without titles as such; we are roughly summariz
ing their contents.

nen: so stehet uns der Name frei; die Kette der Cultur und
Aufklärung reicht aber sodann ans Ende der Erde. (13:
34% IX, 1)
Setzen wir gar noch willkührliche Unterschiede zwischen
Cultur und Aufklärung fest, deren keine doch, wenn sie
rechter Art ist, ohne die andere sein kann . . . (13: 348;
IX, 1)
Die Philosophie der Geschichte also, die die Kette der
Tradition verfolgt, ist eigentlich die wahre Menschen
geschichte. (13: 352; IX, 1)
Die ganze Geschichte der Menschheit . . . mit allen
Schätzen ihrer Tradition und Cultur . . . (13: 355; IX, 2)
Zum gesunden Gebrauch unsres Lebens, kurz zur Bil
dung der Humanität in uns . . . (13: 361; IX, 2)
Die Tradition der Traditionen, die Schrift. (13: 366;
IX, 2)
Tradition ist [also auch hier] die fortpflanzende Mutter,
wie ihrer Sprache und wenigen Cultur, so auch ihrer Reli
gion und heiligen Gebräuche (13: 388; IX, 3)
Der religiösen Tradition in Schrift und Sprache ist die
Erde ihre Samenkörner aller höheren Cultur schuldig.
(13: 391; IX, 5)
Das gewisseste Zeichen der Cultur einer Sprache ist ihre
Schrift. (13: 408; X, 3)
Wenn . . . die Regierungsformen die schwerste Kunst
der Cultur sind . . . (13: 4 11; X, 3)
Auch hüte man sich, allen diesen Völkern gleiche Sitten
oder gleiche Cultur zuzueignen. (14: 275; X V I, 3)
Von selbst hat sich kein Volk in Europa zur Cultur
erhoben. (14: 289; X V I, 6)
Die Städte sind in Europe gleichsam stehende Heerlager
der Cultur. (14; 486; XX, 5)
Kein Tier hat Sprache, wie der Mensch sie hat, noch
weniger Schrift, Tradition, Religion, willkührliche Gesetze
und Rechte. Kein Tier endlich hat auch nur die Bildung,
die Kleidung, die Wohnung, die Künste, die unbestimmte
Lebensart, die ungebundenen Triebe, die flatterhaften
Meinungen, womit sich beinahe jedes Individuum der
Menschheit auszeichnet. (13: 109; III, 6)
40 Culture

The enumeration in this last citation is a good enough
description of culture as we use the word. If it had had the
modern meaning in his day, Herder would probably have
clinched his point by adding “ culture” to sum up the pas
sage.
C. Meiners, 1747-1810, published in 1785 a Grundriss
der Geschichte der Menschheit. W e have not seen this
work and know of it through Stoltenberg,55 Muehlmann.
and Lowie.5
8 It aims to present the bodily formation, the
“Anlagen” of the “ spirit and heart,” the various grades of
culture of all peoples, especially of the unenlightened and
half-cultivated ones. This comes, as Meiners himself ad
mits, close to being a “ Völkerkunde” 5
7 or ethnography.5
8
Like most of his contemporaries, Meiners saw culture as
graded in completeness, but since he rejected the prevalent
three-stage theory (hunting, herding, farming) he was at
least not a unilinear developmentalist.
D. Jenisch, 1762-1804, published in 1801 a work called
Universal-historical Review of the Development of Man
kind viewed as a Progressing Whole.5
9 This book also we
have not seen, and know of it through Stoltenberges sum
mary.8
0 It appears to bear a subtitle “ Philosophie der Kul
turgeschichte.” 61 Stoltenberg quotes Jenisch’s recognition
of the immeasurable gap between the actual history of cul
ture and a rationally ideal history of human culture marked
by progressive perfection. He also cites Jenisch's discussion
of the “ developmental history of political and civilizing
culture.” It would seem that Jenisch, like his German con-
“ As cited, 1937, vol. 1, 199-201.
“ Mühlmann, 1948, pp. 63-66; Lowie, 1937, pp. 5, 10 -11.
87The word Völkerkunde had been previously used by f. R. For
ster, Beiträge zur Völker- und Länderkunde, 1781 (according to
Stoltenberg, vol. 1, 200).
“ According to Muehlmann, just cited, p. 46, the word eth
nography was first used in Latin by Johann Olorinus in his
“ Ethnographia Mundi,” Magdeburg, 1608.
“ Universalhistorischer Ueberlick der Entwicklung des Menschen
geschlechts,, als eines sich fortbildenden Ganzen, 2 vols., 1801.
8
0Stoltenberg, 1937, vol. 1, pp. 289-92.
81 The original may have been “ Cultur” ; Stoltenberg modernizes
spellings except in titles of works.

temporaries, was concerned with culture as a development
which could be traced historically, but still weighted on the
side of the act of rational refining or cultivation rather than
being viewed as a product or condition which itself serves
as a basic influence on men.
42 Culture
8. K ant6
2 to Hegel
The great German philosophy of the decades before and
after 1800 began with some recognition of enlightenment
culture and improvement culture, as part of its rooting in
the eighteenth century; but its general course was away
from Cultur to Geist. This is evident in the passage from
Kant to Hegel.
Kant says in his Anthropologie
Alle Fortschritte in der Cultur . . . haben das Ziel
diese erworbenen Kenntnisse und Geschicklichkeiten zum
Gebrauch für die Welt anzuwenden.
Die pragmatische Anlage der Civilisirung durch Cultur.
(P -3Z3 )
“ Künste der Cultur” are contrasted with the “ Rohigkeit”
of man's “ Natur.” (p. 324)
" Kant’s position as an "anthropologist” is relevant to considera
tion of his treatment of "Cultur.” Bidney (1949, pp. 484, 485,
486) remarks: "It is most significant, as Cassirer observes, that
Kant was 'the man who introduced anthropology as a branch of
study in German universities and who lectured on it regularly for
decades.’ . . . It should be noted, however, that by anthropology
Kant meant something different from the study of human culture
or comparative anatomy of peoples. For him the term comprised
empirical ethics (folkways), introspective psychology, and 'physi
ology/ Empirical ethics, as distinct from rational ethics, was
called 'practical anthropology/ . . . Kant reduced natural phi
losophy or theoretical science to anthropology. Just as Kant began
his critique of scientific knowledge by accepting the fact of mathe
matical science, so he began his ethics and his Anthropologie by
accepting the fact of civilization.” Kant’s view, as defined by
Bidney, seems very similar to the contemporary "philosophical
anthropology” of Wein (1948) and the "phenomenological an
thropology” of Binswanger ( 1947).
6
3References are to Kant’s Werke, Reimer 1907 edition: the An
thropologie of 1798 is in vol. 7.

W ith reference to Rousseau, Kant mentions the "Aus
gang aus der Natur in die Cultur,7
7 "die Civilisirung,” "die
vermeinteMoralisirung.” (p. 326)
The national peculiarities of the French and English are
derivable largely "aus der Art ihrer verschiedenen Cultur,”
those of other nations "vielmehr aus der Anlage ihrer Na
tur durch Vermischung ihrer ursprünglich verschiedenen
Stämme/7 (p. 315)
In this last passage Cultur might possibly seem to have
been used in its modern sense, except that on page 3 11
Kant calls the French and English "die zwei civilisirtesten
Völker auf Erden,7
7 which brings the word back to the
sense of cultivation.
In Critique of Pure Reason, 178 1, Kant says, "metaphys
ics is the completion of the whole culture of reason.7
76
4
Here again, culture must mean simply cultivation.
Fichte deals with Cultur and "Vernunftcultur” largely
from the angle of its purpose: freedom. Cultur is "die
Uebung aller Kraefte auf den Zweck der voelligen Freiheit,
der voelligen Unabhaengigkeit von allem, was nicht wir
selbst, unser reines Selbst ist.7
70
5
Hegel's transcendental philosophy of history, viewed
with reference only to "spirit,7
7 a generation after a group
of his fellow countrymen had written general histories
which were de facto histories of culture,6
4
*
6
6has already been
mentioned.
Schiller also saw culture unhistorically, added to a cer
tain disappointment in the enlightenment of reason.6
7
6
8
"Culture, far from freeing us, only develops a new need
with every power it develops in us. . . . It was culture it
self which inflicted on modern humanity the wound [of
lessened individual perfection, compared with ancient
6
4Muller's translation, New York, 1896, p. 730. The original
(Kritik, 2nd ed., Riga, 1787, p. 879) reads: “ Eben deswegen ist
Metaphysik auch die Vollendung aller Cultur der Menschlichen
Vernunft.”
® Cited from Eucken, 1878, p. 186.
6
8We have found one use of Zivilisation in Hegel as cited in foot
note 43 above.
* Briefe lieber die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen, 1795.
Citations are from Sämtliche Werke, vol. 4.

times]” (1883, 4: 566, 568). He takes refuge in “ the cul
ture of beauty,” or “ fine [schoene] culture,” evidently on
the analogy of fine arts or belles lettres. Lessing does not
appear to use the word. Goethe uses it loosely in opposition
to “ Barbarei.”
44 Culture
9. Analysis of Klemm’s Use of the W ord “ Cultur”
It seems worth citing examples of Klemm’s use of the word
Cultur, because of his period’s being intermediate between
the late eighteenth-century usage by Herder, Adelung, etc.,
in the sense of “ cultivation,” and the modern or post-
Tylorian usage. W e have therefore gone over the first vol
ume, 1843, of his Cultur-geschichte, and selected from the
hundreds of occurrences of the word some that seem fairly
to represent its range of meaning.
Very common are references to stages (Stufen) of cul
ture. These can generally be read as referring to conditions
of culture, as we still speak of stages; but they may refer
only to steps in the act of becoming cultivated. W e have:
very low stage of culture, up to the stage of European cul
ture, middle stages, higher stages, an early stage, our stage,
a certain degree of culture ( 1 : 2 , 184, 185, 186, 199, 207,
209, 211, 220, 227, etc.).
Similar are combinations which include step or progress
of culture: erste Schritt, fortschreitende, zuschreitet, Fort
schritt zur Cultur (1: 185, 206, 209, 210). These are also
ambiguous.
Also not certain are true culture (1: 204), purpose of
culture (1: 205), yardstick of culture (1: 214), spiritual
culture (1: 221), sittliche Cultur (1: 221), resting places
(Anhaltepunkte) of culture (1:224).
The following are typical passages in which culture is
used as if in the modern sense:
M y effort is to investigate and determine the grad
ual development of mankind from its rudest . . . first be
ginnings to their organization into organic nationalities
(Volkskörper) in all respects, that is to say with reference

to customs, arts (Kenntnisse) and skills (Fertigkeiten), do-
mestic and public life in peace or war, religion, science
(Wissen) and art . . . (1: 2 1) [While the passage begins
with mention of development, the list of activities with
which it concludes is very similar to that in which Tylor’s
famous definition ends.]
We regard chronology as part of culture itself. (1: 25)
The means (or mechanisms, Mittel) of culture rooted
first in private life and originally in the family. (1: 205)
W e shall show . . . that possessions are the beginning
of all human culture. (1: 206)
[With reference to colonies and spread of the “active
race/'] the emigrants brought with them to their new
homes the sum (Summe) of the culture which they had
hitherto achieved (erstrebt) and used it as foundation of
their newly fforescent life. (1: 210)
Among nations of the “passive racecustom (Sitte) is
the tyrant of culture. (1: 220)
South American Indians . . . readily assume a varnish
(Firniss) of culture. . . . But nations of the active race
grow (bilden sich) from inside outward. . . . Their cul
ture consequently takes a slower course but is surer and
more effective. (1: 288)
A blueprint (Fantasie) of a Museum of the culture his
tory of mankind. (1: 352)
The last section of the natural history collection [of the
Museum] would be constituted by [physical] anthropology
. . . [and] . . . [materials illustrating] the rudest cultural
beginnings of the passive race. (1: ^56-^y)
The next section comprises the savage hunting and fish
ing tribes of South and North America. . . . A system
could now be put into effect which would be retained in all
the following sections . . . about as follows: 1) Bodily
constitution . . . 2) Dress . . . 3) Ornament . . . 4)
Hunting gear . . . 5) Vehicles on land and water . . . 6)
Dwellings . . . 7) Household utensils . . . 8) Recepta
cles . . . 9) Tools . . . 10) Objects relating to disposal
of the dead . . . 11) Insignia of public life . . . batons
of command, crowns, wampum, peace pipes, models of as
semblies . . . 12) War . . . 13) Religious objects . . .

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