‘What is civilisation? I don’t know. I can’t define it in abstract terms yet, but I think I can recognise it when I see it.’– Kenneth Clark, ‘Civilisation’, episode 1, 1969.
Rather than a lazy attempt to avoid defining the very subject of his ground-breaking 1969 documentary, the quote from Lord Clark demonstrates not only the difficulty in defining Western civilisation, but the very concept of ‘civilisation’ itself.
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