The Civilization/Barbarism Dichotomy in Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy: An Essay on Political and Social Criticism (1869) and Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of the World Order (1996)

Abstract

The present dissertation aims at studying the dichotomy of civilization/barbarism in Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869) and Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (1996). To reach our purpose, we have analyzed their respective discourses from a cultural perspective. We have divided our work into three chapters. The first chapter explores the context of the discourse as developed by David Nunan (1993). The second chapter explains the authors’ perception of culture relying on Gillian Brown and George Yule’s Discourse Analysis (1983). The third chapter examines the construction and reconstruction of the civilized/barbarian dichotomy in the two texts and its relation to power, following Michael Foucault’s thought. The results of the analysis underscore Huntington’s indebtedness to Arnold. Indeed, even if he wrote from a context which can be described as global, the American scholar seems aware of the affinity in context between him and his English counterpart. For that, he reworked some of his paradigms, such as the necessity to renew the ruling class power.