In October 1961, twenty-six scholars gathered in Salzburg, Austria, for a conference funded by the Austrian government in cooperation with UNESCO. The participants — drawn from Austria, Germany, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, England, Russia, the United States, China and Japan — included Pitirim Sorokin and Arnold Toynbee. Over six days they debated the definition of “civilization,” problems in the analysis of complex cultures, civilizational encounters in the past, the Orient versus the Occident, problems of universal history, theories of historiography, and the role of the “human sciences” in “globalization.” Sorokin was elected the Society’s first president. The 1961 Salzburg Conference thus gave institutional form to a discipline that had previously been carried by individual theorists — Spengler, Toynbee, Sorokin, Kroeber, Weber — into a sustained international scholarly society.

After several meetings in Europe, the advancing age of the founding members and the declining health of then-president Othmar Anderle prompted a transfer of the Society to the United States. Between 1968 and 1970 Roger Williams Wescott of Drew University facilitated this transition; in 1971 the first annual meeting of the ISCSC (US) was held in Philadelphia. Important early American participants included Benjamin Nelson (the Society’s first American president), Roger Wescott, Vytautas Kavolis, Matthew Melko, David Wilkinson, Rushton Coulborn and C.P. Wolf. The chain of ISCSC presidents in the United States runs: Benjamin Nelson → Vytautas Kavolis → Matthew Melko → Michael Palencia-Roth → Roger Wescott → Shuntaro Ito (from Japan) → Wayne Bledsoe → Lee Daniel Snyder → Andrew Targowski → David Rosner → Toby Huff → Lynn Rhodes. In 2024–2026 the Society has been re-organized into the Comparative Civilizations Forum (CCF) under presidents Greg Lewicki and Bibi Pelić.

Source summaries:

  • v66 (Spring 2012) — Michael Palencia-Roth’s notes on the 1961 Salzburg Conference and ISCSC history appear alongside Joseph Drew’s editorial note on Weber’s comparative method and Judaism-Buddhism parallels. (v66)
  • v70 (Spring 2014) — Editor’s note by Joseph Drew traces the ISCSC’s evolution through the 1985 Nelson memorial volume Civilizations East and West and forward through decades of conference themes. (v70)
  • v85 (Fall 2021) — Honoring ISCSC co-founder Ross Maxwell with his autobiography, deep seer essays, and intellectual contributions to civilizational studies. (v85)
  • v90 (Spring 2024) — Provides an authoritative list of the 1961 Salzburg participants and the full presidential succession through Lynn Rhodes. (v90)
  • v94 (Spring 2026) — Greg Lewicki’s “Civilizations on Trial: The Dream of ISCSC Founders” reflects on what a modern analogue of Toynbee’s Civilization on Trial would contain, evoking the founders’ vision in the CCF era. (v94)