The coming barbarism may be the empire of civilization itself.
Evidence
However, the spectre is there again, inside and outside the frontiers of the advanced societies. The facile historical parallel with the barbarians threatening the empire of civilization prejudges the issue; the second period of barbarism may well be the continued empire of civilization itself. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 887
Categorization
- XREF: Reverses the familiar decline-and-fall framing of Gibbon’s barbarian hordes; resonates with the administered-society thesis that domination achieves its end through technical rationality, not outside invaders. — connects to: Marxism holds that capitalism’s collapse could end in barbarism, not only communism. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 161; Civilization can manufacture internal barbarians by mass rightlessness; Modern civilization produces its own barbarians from within rather than from outside — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 739 (+4 more)
- SEED: Angle: the collapse of liberal institutions need not look like collapse at all — bureaucratic-technocratic continuity can itself be the barbarism. Pairs with ‘breakdown’ literature that assumes catastrophe is legible.
Broader Connections
- Modern civilization produces its own barbarians from within rather than from outside
#expands(0.90) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 739 - Civilization can manufacture internal barbarians by mass rightlessness
#expands(0.85) - Civilization cannot be separated from the terror that sustains it
#corroborates(0.78) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 188 - Civilization recreates the sacrificial situation it claims to abolish
#corroborates(0.75) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 106 - Imperial dispositions may be the template for modern political self-deception
#expands(0.72) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1412 - Empire is a contingent process that reproduces itself through shifting racism.
#expands(0.70) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 93