Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Profiles In Influence: Shaping American Perceptions, Attitudes, And Policy Towards China, Benjamin Merritt

Masters Theses

Pearl Buck, Henry Luce, Edgar Snow, and Richard Nixon have profoundly influenced Sino-American relations throughout the 20th century. Their impact on American perceptions, attitudes, and foreign policy has played a pivotal role in shaping the current state of relations between the United States government and the People’s Republic of China. Pivotal historical events such as WWI & WWII, the Sino-Japanese War, China’s Civil War, and the Soviet-Sino conflict—among other events—have also significantly influenced the dynamics of Sino-American relations. Despite their importance, there is a notable absence of studies that comprehensively explore the collective impact of these individuals and events. Understanding …

The Rise Of China And The Concept Of Civilization: Constructing Conceptual Apparatus For Cross-Civilizational Comparisons, Liah Greenfeld

Comparative Civilizations Review

The paper argues that the rise of China to a position of prominence in the contemporary world offers Western scholars a greatly expanded comparative perspective and, thus, an opportunity to re-assess their fundamental view of social reality. This comparative perspective draws attention to supra-national cultural unities, “civilizations,” first suggested by both Durkheim and Weber.

There are deficiencies in the current understanding of “civilization” in the social science literature, among others exemplified by “civilizational analysis,” and so this paper proposes a new concept which adds to the conceptual apparatus of sociological theory a new — fully independent of others — variant …

Apotheosis Of The State And The Decline Of Civilization: A Systems Approach, Robert Bedeski

Comparative Civilizations Review

Humanity is undergoing a second Axial Age. The first, as described by Karl Jaspers, brought transcendence into the vision and self-understanding of humans and the world. The rise of secularism and “Death of God” is dissolving and fragmenting that transcendence — a vital subsystem of the civilization system. Economy, knowledge and government comprise three additional subsystems and have coalesced to form the modern sovereign state, diminishing the traditional place of religion, art and philosophy in civilizations. An example of a state lacking common institutions of transcendence was the Mongol empire. Ruling Russia for a quarter millennium, its state form was …