Languages of Civilization

Abstract

‘Civilization’ is a keyword that has been heavily implicated in relations of power and domination throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. This paper offers a case-study of one moment in the modern genesis of the term and of its translation into a colonial language. Though largely forgotten today by the social sciences, Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931) was one of the most important and popular social thinkers of the Third Republic in France. He was a seminal theoretician of race and a tireless anti-revolutionary polemicist who elaborated a form of historical social Darwinism in which progress was defined in and through increasing social and civilizational inequality. Le Bon greatly influenced the new social thought of the Nahdah period in Egypt – especially in its liberal and secular currents – through the many translations that were made of his works between 1909 and 1922. His main translator was Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul: founding member of The Ummah Party, jurist implicated in the infamous Dinshaway affair and an important intellectual of the period in his own right. Zaghlul exemplifies the section of liberal and colonial elites who sought to reform and modernize Egypt according to the ‘natural’ laws that govern human societies in order to lead the country to independence. This paper examines Zaghlul’s Arabic translation of one of Le Bon’s most important works, Les Lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peuples (The Psychological Laws of the Evolution of Peoples, 1894/1913), in order to explore the ambiguous role played by new concepts of ‘race’, ‘nation’ and ‘civilization’ in the secular, reformist social thought of the Nahdah in Egypt.