Manindra Nath Thakur, Jawaharlal Nehru University
One fine morning, I dropped into my room at the Centre for Political Studies, JNU.
Monika took an appointment to meet and discuss her project. I was curious to know
about her work and wanted to see if there was anything to learn from it. Within no time,
I discovered that she was influenced by a professor and that we had many common
concerns. I listened carefully and was convinced by her impression. We decided to
initiate a conversation. Suddenly, a few months later, she informed me about Liah
Greenfeld’s sad demise. Our conversation could not take off.
There are some scholars whom you meet and never forget. There are others whom one
never gets an opportunity to meet, yet whose ideas enter one’s intellectual world with
such intensity that they become part of the future conversations in absentia. Professor
Liah Greenfeld belongs to the latter category for me. Monika shared some of her
writings, and I discovered striking convergences between her work and the questions a
group of us in India has been pursuing in the Creative Theory Colloquium. We had
begun contemplating a larger civilizational conversation that could bring together
different intellectual traditions and modes of understanding humanity.
The news of her passing away came as a blow to our plans. However, some
conversations do not end with death. Indeed, the most significant conversations in
human history often begin after the physical departure of those who initiate them. If
civilization itself is a cumulative dialogue across generations, then the death of a thinker
does not close a discussion. In this case, I believe, it should begin the discussion. The
shift of location is inevitable — from direct exchange to engagement through texts,
ideas, memoirs, and communities of scholars. Despite not being able to converse with
her directly, I felt it was worth documenting her influence on our thinking to initiate a
new chapter in the dialogue. I would like to acknowledge her presence in the memory
of the members of the Creative Theory Group who enjoy discussing her writings.
Civilizational Dialogue and Emergentist Universals
What first attracted me to Greenfeld’s work was her attempt to recover the concept of
civilization as a serious analytical category. For several decades, the language of
civilization has often been viewed with suspicion. It was associated either with
triumphalist narratives of the West or with simplistic theories of cultural conflict.
Greenfeld approached the idea differently. Instead of ranking civilizations, it invited
us to address the question of differences in civilization. It is no longer a question of judging a civilization as good or bad. She appreciated the differences in civilizations and suggested exploring the reasons for these differences and developing a theory to understand them.