Eisenstadt's Analysis of the Relations Between Modernization and Tradition in China

Recently Professor S. N. Eisenstadt of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem participated in three conferences that, organized in Germany under the leadership of Professor Wolfgang Schluchter, dealt respectively with Max Weber’s analyses of China’s traditional civilization, ancient Judaism, and the civilization of Hinduism and Buddhism. His participation was an event of some importance, because he is today probably the single scholar most able to evaluate these three analyses. He has a remarkable command of the secondary literature in a variety of languages on these three civilizations, and the breadth of his reading enables him to punctuate his generalizations with references to exceptions. This erudition, combined with his acknowledged mastery of sociological thought, allows him to shed much new light on the comparative study of civilizations. His approach is highly inductive, undogmatic, and marked by a Weberian openness to the multiplicity of causative patterns in history. He looks to the combination of well-established sociological categories with the perspectives of philosophy and intellectual history. With this combination, he seeks to understand“ how the great variety of historical experiences and traditions of different .. civilizations has influenced the ways in which[ these civilizations have shaped] their destinies in the modern world.”