Civilization as an Aesthetic Concept: The “Standard of Civilization” Reconsidered

Abstract Civilization, I argue, is an aesthetic concept, not just a legal and political one. To make this case, I take as an illustration the nineteenth-century “standard of civilization,” which ranked peoples and countries into “civilized,” “barbarous,” and “savage,” specifying the requirements aspiring outsiders had to fulfill to enter the “charmed circle of civilization.” I show that “the standard” was fundamentally informed by historical judgments of taste; it functioned not so much according to an explicit set of legal-political criteria but to Orientalist cultural discourses of landscape (danger, paradise, and neglect) and identity (violence, sensuality, and subservience), which I relate to a visual archive of paintings of the time. If civilization is understood in primarily aesthetic terms, focusing on international legal texts provides only a partial explanation of the concept’s use. I suggest artists and artworks, as historically significant sources of cultural discourse, disclose what the law did not say, or dare say explicitly, about civilization and hence should be more central to analysis.