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Preface
Opinions presented in this publication are the private Author's opinions and do not present the official European Parliament position.
Humanity can be divided according to race, religion, ethnicity, profession, level of education and other categories. Civilisation is a distinguishing feature that is of the highest importance. It pertains to the norms that people consider as obligatory in the organisation of communal life.
What I am going to present below is based on the teaching of Feliks Koneczny, a Polish historian and philosopher, who developed his own school of thinking on civilisational differences. He lived from 1862 to 1949. Until 1929, he was a professor of history but it is primarily during his retirement years that he produced his most important historiosophical works.
Almost all of his writings were in Polish and until now, only On the Plurality of Civilisations (Polonica Publications: London 1962) has been published in English. This book has a lengthy introduction by Prof. Anton Hilckman from Mainz University, Germany, a former student of Koneczny, who explains Koneczny's scientific method.
The book also contains a preface by Arnold Toynbee. It is Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler that Koneczny should be compared with. He belongs to their class of thinkers. Toynbee and Spengler are well known to students of civilisations. Koneczny is not, yet it is Koneczny who developed a truly new approach to the issue of classifying civilisations and is deserving of universal acclaim.