‘Culture’ and the Concepts of Culture

The study of culture and cultural variations around the world attracted the interest of the social sciences, as well as anthropology and history, throughout the twentieth century. A political culture is the product of both the collective history of a political system and the life histories of the members of that system, and thus it is rooted equally in public events and private experiences. The study of culture in the nineteenth century was inspired by a scientific ambition to investigate other aspects of human interaction and societies than the history of great personalities and warfare. The connotation of a word consists of the characteristics that make up the concept, whereas the denotation of a term is the set of real-life phenomena of which these characteristics are true. To define ‘civilization’ merely as all that which has been accomplished, or as a refinement, would entail a definition that is as vague as the concept of culture.