Violence and Civilization E-Book

Jonathan Fletcher

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 423

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This book provides an introduction to the work of Norbert Elias. It is the first systematic appraisal of two central themes of his thought - violence and civilization. Although Elias is best known for his theory of civilizing processes, this study highlights the crucial importance of the concept of decivilizing processes. Fletcher argues that while Elias did not develop a theory of decivilizing processes, such a theory is logically implied in his perspective and is highly pertinent to an understanding of the most violent episodes of twentieth-century history, such as the Nazi genocides.

Elias's original synthesis of sociology and psychology is examined through an analysis of several key texts including The Civilizing Process, The Established and the Outsiders and The Germans. Fletcher shows how Elias constructs his "figurational models" and applies these comparatively to specific historical examples drawn from England and Germany.

Violence and Civilization is an excellent introduction to Elias's work. It will appeal to students of sociology, anthropology, and history interested in understanding the phenomenon of violence in the modern world.

Leseprobe

ViolenceANDCivilization

An Introduction to the Work of Norbert Elias

Jonathan Fletcher

Polity Press

Copyright © Jonathan Fletcher 1997

The right of Jonathan Fletcher to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1997 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Reprinted 2005

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For my friends and teachers, Pete, Eric, Stephen, Helmut, Joop and Cas.

Contents

Acknowledgements

1 Introduction

2 Civilization, Habitus and Civilizing Processes

The development of civilization as a concept

Changes in social and individual habitus

Socialization, aggression and shame

3 Violence, Habitus and State Formation

Violence monopolies and pacification

Linearity, development and evolution

On the concepts of violence and civilization

4 Identity, Violence and Process Models

Interdependence, social bonds and the we–I balance

Established-outsider relations

Criteria of civilizing and decivilizing processes

5 Social Habitus and Civilizing Processes in England

State formation and pacification

Public opinion and national ideals

Sport and violence: the example of foxhunting

6 Nationalism and Decivilizing Processes in Germany

State formation and national identification

Violence in the imperial establishment

Violence in the Weimar Republic

7 Genocide and Decivilizing Processes in Germany

National ideals and the rise of the Nazis

Mass murder and national we-identity

Civilization, ‘modernity’ and decivilizing processes

8 Elias on Violence, Civilization and Decivilization

Notes

References

Index

Acknowledgements

Above all, I would like to thank my mother, Margaret Gwilym, and my father, John Fletcher, from whom I have learnt the most.

Several people read all or parts of this book through its various stages of production. I owe a great debt to John Thompson, who supervised the project as a PhD thesis. His advice, support, criticism and encouragement proved invaluable. I am also particularly grateful to Eric Dunning, Tony Giddens, Joop Goudsblom, Johan Heilbron, Helmut Kuzmics and Stephen Mennell.

Special thanks go to Cas Wouters for his constant encouragement, enduring friendship and detailed commentary on my work. His enthusiasm for civilized conversation over involved and sometimes decivilizing topics is a rare treasure.

In Cambridge I was able to share ideas with many people of exceptional talent, among them, my friends Graeme Gilloch, Adrian Gregory, Montse Guibernau, Roxanne Hakim, Patrick McGinn, Denis McManus, Dominic O’Brien and Nick Pilgrim. My debt to Lisa Driver Davidson is incalculable. I cannot underestimate how important her companionship and support have been for me.

Without my Dutch friends in Amsterdam this book would probably have been completed sooner. Their welcome distraction, as they often made me realize, proved to be a necessity. They helped me feel at home in an unfamiliar country and with a language that deserves its reputation as the ‘Chinese of the West’. In particular, I would like to mention Reneé IJbema and Ellen Griffioen for their acceptance, faith and enduring support; Annemarie Waterhout, for her boundless warmth and understanding; Florien Linck, simply because she’s wonderful; Louran van Keulen, the tallest person I know, for his support and gentle encouragement with my ‘prille’ Nederlands; Hank(erchief) Roland Poot, for unforgettable memories of the Zeedijk; Jan Ott, for the gezelligheid of Café de Kletskop; and Peter Mader, for overseeing the neighbourhood. Hartelijk bedankt. Jullie hebben mij enorm geholpen.

I would also like to thank those who have provided the funding which has allowed me to complete this project. In particular, I would like to thank Syl Hughes, trustee to the estate of Thelma George, without whose financial planning and personal generosity I would not have been able to start this book as a PhD in Cambridge.

From King’s College, Cambridge I received a two-year Research Studentship, as well as financial assistance for one month’s research at the University of Graz, Austria, and funding to attend conferences on Elias in the Netherlands, Austria and Germany. Rob Wallach, financial tutor at King’s, extended his generous understanding throughout my period in Cambridge.

The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) funded four months’ research at the University of Bochum, Germany.

I am also grateful to the Leverhulme Trust, from whom I received a two-year Study Abroad Studentship which enabled me to complete this book in Amsterdam.

Finally, I would like to thank the students and staff at the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research. It was gratifying to work among such a committed and talented group of social scientists.

The author and publisher are grateful for permission to quote copyright material from the following work:

Norbert Elias, The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Edited by Michael Schröter and translated by Eric Dunning and Stephen Mennel. Polity Press, Cambridge, 1996.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

On 1 September 1939, German troops invaded Poland on the orders of Adolf Hitler. The same year saw the publication in Switzerland of a two-volume work entitled The Civilizing Process. Its author, Norbert Elias, was a German of Jewish descent who had already fled his homeland with the ascent of the Nazis in 1933. By 1941, Elias’s parents had lost their lives under Nazi rule: his father in Breslau and his mother in the Auschwitz concentration camp, although the true character of the regime was only to emerge clearly with its defeat by Allied forces.1

The processes traced in The Civilizing Process seemed irrelevant to many, given events which were then overtaking continental Europe. There was simply no market for such a book, especially one written by a German Jew, and indeed, only a small number of copies were sold.2 It appears that few people were willing to read a work on ‘civilization’ at the very time when the nations of the Western world were witnessing the eclipse of all that the term was thought to represent. In such a context it does seem surprising that Elias had completed a long-term study of state formation and the development of manners among the European secular upper classes in conjunction with the term ‘civilization’. The seeming contradiction between the process identified by the book’s title and the violent events of more recent European history form one of the main themes of this book.

Elias studied medicine, philosophy and later sociology at the universities of Breslau and Heidelberg, subsequently becoming Karl Mannheim’s assistant at the Department of Sociology at the University of Frankfurt. After fleeing Germany and spending some time in Paris, he moved to England in 1935 and remained there until the mid 1970s, working as a guest lecturer at the London School of Economics and later as Reader in Sociology at the University of Leicester. Elias received the title of professor from the University of Ghana in the late 1960s, and for the last fifteen years of his life he lived and worked in Amsterdam, where he died on 1 August 1990, at the age of 93. With such a biography,3 it is not surprising to learn that Elias was interested in developing a sociological understanding of violence and violence controls in twentieth-century European societies more generally, and of the National Socialists and the Holocaust in particular. But it was not until some twenty years after having left Germany that he wrote in any detail about events in the Third Reich.

It is no exaggeration to say that, along with other murderous episodes, two world wars and the Holocaust in Germany have shattered many of the connotations which hitherto seemed to enshroud the concept of civilization with an aura of mystique. These connotations were carried over from certain beliefs generated in the eighteenth century and earlier, accompanying the rise of industrialism, technological innovation, colonization and a belief in the inherent ‘progress’ associated with such developments. The events of the twentieth century have exposed many of these beliefs as delusions. A sense of caution and even despondency has resulted. In turn, this general attitude has brought forth a strong reaction against the very use of the word ‘civilization’. Indeed, ‘barbarization’ would seem to many to be a more appropriate term with which to characterize the twentieth century so far.

As regards the work of Norbert Elias, this general reaction has often taken the form of dismissive and sometimes even tasteless commentaries (see respectively Leach 1986: 13; and Hunt 1988: 30). Others have described his theory of civilizing processes variously in terms of its simplicity (Lasch 1985: 714), evolutionism (Lenhardt 1979: 127; Giddens 1984: 241), its inability to account for the ‘barbarism’ of the present century (Coser 1978: 6; Buck-Morss 1978: 187–9), or even its ethnocentrism and racism (Blok in Wilterdink 1984: 290).4 Some of these reactions can only be understood in the context of the pervasive sense of disillusionment which has come to permeate Western culture. But to what extent are they an accurate assessment of Elias’s perspective? Or is the strength of these responses an over-reaction?

In criticizing Elias for his use of the terms ‘civilization’ or ‘civilizing process’, many writers have overlooked the implications of his ideas for developing an understanding of ‘breakdowns in civilization’. The attention to violence and its controls lies at the centre of his theory, and this book seeks to clarify the insights provided by Elias’s approach with respect to the notions of ‘civilizing’ and ‘decivilizing’ processes. It also includes a critical assessment of some of Elias’s main ideas on violence and its controls. A considerable amount of space is given to exposition, particularly with respect to Elias’s work in The Germans. I attempt to provide clear, accurate summaries of Elias’s comments on specific themes to do with violence, civilization and decivilization, themes which are central to an understanding of the broad spectrum of Elias’s writing. This book therefore serves as an introduction to his work as a whole. Needless to say, it is not a substitute for reading Elias’s books and articles themselves.

Even this focus on violence and civilization, however, is a broad enough task in relation to Elias’s work. Whilst seeking answers to several key questions which I pose below, I have therefore restricted the scope of this book to include only some examples Elias draws from England, providing a comparative contrast to his use of examples from Germany up until the end of the Second World War. Apart from lack of space, one important reason for not considering Elias’s work on Germany after 1945 was that I wanted to understand how far his approach is relevant to an understanding of Nazism. Certainly, Elias’s work on the civilizing process is far from being the product of blind naivety to the world at the time of the book’s production in the 1930s. But the extent to which it was in fact inspired by a pressing need to develop a more detached understanding of social processes including the rise of Nazism and the ‘barbarization’ of the twentieth century has remained obscured, particularly in the Anglo-American world, for a variety of reasons. Among others, these reasons include Elias’s idiosyncratic pattern with respect to the publication of his work; the intrinsic complexity of the synthesis to which he sought to contribute, a synthesis that is sociological, psychological, historical and equally theoretical and empirical; and the fact that his approach did not fit in with the ‘philosophical’, ‘present-day’ orientation which overtook British sociology during the 1960s. This perceived inability to account for ‘reversals’ of civilizing processes may also result from the fact that Elias tended to focus on civilizing processes rather than their deterioration, leading in part to the widespread misunderstanding of his theory as teleological, evolutionary and overly optimistic.

The central task of this book, then, is to clarify the relationship between violence, civilization and decivilization in Elias’s work through seeking answers to the following questions: What does Elias mean by civilization, civilizing and decivilizing processes? What does he mean by violence? What are the characteristics of social processes he specifies which may generate violence? What is the relationship between violence, civilization and decivilization in modern twentieth-century societies? And how do these issues connect with historical examples which feature most significantly in Elias’s discussions? Several related questions are also considered. Elias attempts to develop a concept of civilization which he believes to be largely non-normative, but to what extent did he succeed in this? Did he reveal any ambiguity in using this concept when dealing with events in Nazi Germany? And if so, would this be fatal for his overall approach? In addition, although Elias did not develop a theory of decivilizing processes, is it logically implied in his theory of civilizing processes? Lastly, while Elias’s work tends to emphasize societal continuities, does this in fact involve teleology and evolutionism in considering problems of violence and its controls, and if so, to what extent?

I do not intend to detail how his work differs from other writers who have dealt with similar topics, for example, Freud, Max and Alfred Weber, Horkheimer and Adorno, Goffman or Foucault. Instead, I critically analyse the themes mentioned in order to highlight their interconnections in relation to the various subjects on which Elias has written. While my critical exposition of Elias’s work includes some assessment of commentaries on his approach, I have not attempted to cover all these critics’ perspectives; nor do I focus on them in detail unless they are of particular relevance to an issue at hand. From my central questions, it follows that my primary concern is to show how Elias develops his perspective and applies it in the context of historical studies, particularly in his consideration of England and Germany. In order to do this, I focus on Elias’s most significant publications so as to gain an appreciation of his approach as a whole.5

This book is distinctive in emphasizing the role of violence in civilizing and decivilizing processes in Elias’s work, an aspect which few commentators have drawn out so explicitly.6 Also, in showing how Elias develops and applies his sociological concepts in relation to England and Germany, I emphasize a comparative side to his writings that has received scant attention. In order to address the key questions of this book, I highlight the central role played by the concept of habitus in Elias’s work, as well as his ideas on the formation of group identity. However, both themes, while generally neglected in English-language works on Elias, appear to be of central importance for the understanding of civilizing and decivilizing processes.

The book falls into two main parts. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 present a critical exposition of the main themes in Elias’s work on violence and habitus in civilizing processes, state formation, his development of sociological process models and how they can account for violent social processes. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 consider how these themes and models are woven into Elias’s approach to specific socio-historical situations, concentrating on England and particularly Germany. At the same time, the advantages and shortcomings of his approach are addressed. Chapter 8 summarizes the issues discussed and highlights the key problems surrounding Elias’s ideas on violence, civilization and civilizing processes. In addition, I point to the main elements of Elias’s approach that are relevant to a sociological understanding of violence, focusing on the example of the former Yugoslavia in terms of a decivilizing process.

Through exposing some of the lacunae in Elias’s work on violence and civilization and through suggesting how these may be dealt with, or not, as the case may be, this book forms part of the ongoing assessment of his contribution to social science and, more generally, to the development of an understanding of the way in which people are willing and able to achieve a more adequate perspective on violence and its controls.

CHAPTER TWO

Civilization, Habitus and Civilizing Processes

The concept of civilization developed by Elias shows marked differences in comparison to other writers who have used the term. The main task of this chapter is to show how it is employed by him to refer to a transformation of behaviour in the secular upper classes of the West. The term is also essential to an understanding of aggression and violence in Elias’s work. This chapter begins with his account of the emergence of the word civilization before specifying the way in which he connects this to behavioural dispositions, aggression, violence and shame. The concept of habitus is also shown to be highly significant for Elias’s project.

The development of civilization as a concept

A useful summary of many important formulations of civilization as a concept and empirical referent among several prominent historians is given by Fernand Braudel (1980: 177–218). However, while he discusses the work of various writers, including Guizot, Burckhardt, Spengler, Toynbee, Bagby and Alfred Weber, there is no mention of the significant contribution of Norbert Elias. The concept of civilization has been used variously either as an ideological, evaluative weapon employed by generations of historians in the service of Western colonialist aspirations, or as a generic term used to refer to the level of economic, political and social development achieved by a particular society in the past or present.1

In contrast, Norbert Elias elaborates a different concept of civilization. His formulation was partly inspired by the public debate between Thomas and Heinrich Mann, in which Thomas indirectly denounced his brother as a Zivilisationsliterat. By this he meant that Heinrich was a French-influenced, superficial, democracy-smitten, Enlightenment-orientated revolutionary novelist who had no appreciation of ‘truly German’ poetry and art. Elias’s sensitive discussion of the concepts of Zivilisation and Kultur in the first volume of The Civilizing Process in Germany evokes all the nationalist connotations and intentions which these terms generated at the time. He begins his study with a concerted attempt to understand the development of these terms in connection with the development of the societies of which they are a part. The Civilizing Process forms the keystone of his theory of civilizing processes.2

Inter-group tensions and conceptual developments

Elias argues that the concept of civilization develops through inter-group tensions and rivalries. In Germany, for example, he places the development of Zivilisation and Kultur in the larger context of the formation of group identities, world-views and personality structures among particular social classes within that country and between Germany and other nations. By tracing the development of the antithetical concepts Kultur and Zivilisation in Germany and ‘civilization’ in France and England, he focuses on aspects of a social and psychical transformation. From around 1500 to 1525, the concept of civilité developed as a badge of the French courtly circles: civility in England, civiltà in Italy and Zivilität in Germany all fulfilled similar functions. They were all precursors of the later concept of civilization and they emerged in order to demarcate the behaviour of courtly circles from the rest of society.

By the eighteenth century, the ruling classes in Germany spoke French and they tended to imitate the French courts, while German was considered by them to be a coarse and unrefined language. In contrast, the relatively small German bourgeoisie generally spoke German. They were excluded from court society: not only were they denied social access but, more importantly, they had no voice in political decision-making processes. The bourgeoisie were effectively politically impotent – their struggle with the nobility took place largely outside the political realm. As a consequence, the German bourgeoisie developed their own world-view and self-identity. In contrast to what they perceived as the superficiality or Zivilisation of court life, they employed another symbol of their own self-image: Kultur. This was highly particularistic; great importance was placed on books, scholarship, religion, art, philosophy and inner enrichment leading to the intellectual formation (Bildung) of the individual.

The antithesis between the court-aristocracy and these middle classes expressed in the concepts Kultur and Zivilisation was transformed from a ‘social’ to a national one. This occurred in conjunction with the slow rise of the German bourgeoisie to a class which bore the ‘national consciousness’ (Elias 1994a: 25): it was defined first in terms of its relation to the nobility and then in terms of its relation to other nations. Along with this development there occurred a change in the perception of German ‘national character’. Honesty and sincerity were held up as typical of the German people, in contrast to superficial courtesy, an attitude which stemmed from the relatively isolated and clearly defined German middle class, which found expression in the German intelligentsia through their artistic and literary products. Thus, with the slow rise of the middle classes, the social characteristics of this class gradually broadened to the national level.

The concept of civilisation originated in France, replacing the terms courtoisie and civilité. There, in contrast to Germany, sections of the bourgeoisie were drawn into courtly life relatively early on, which allowed them to develop a capability of thinking and acting in political categories. Having considerable influence at court gave them access to even the highest government positions; their power in relation to the aristocracy made them indispensable to the king. Consequently, continuous and close social contact emerged between people of different social backgrounds. Sections of the bourgeoisie then formed part of the courtly ruling class and increasingly copied the manners of the nobility. This occurred long before the Revolution, which, although it destroyed the old political structures, did not erase the old courtly forms of manners. Thus, while the bourgeoisie in Germany was confined to the realm of ‘ideas’ and the ‘mind’, with the university as their social base, their French counterparts existed more in the ‘real world’, as they were more politically informed because of their access to courtly circles and their prominence in higher administrative positions.

Elias aligns the development of the concept of civilisation in France with the emergence of the reform movement in the late eighteenth century. It was the Physiocrats who articulated for a wider audience sentiments that were more general among those connected with and influenced by the court. These reformers shared several ideas centring on the notion that kings and ministers were not all-powerful in the regulation of affairs and that there were broader social forces with their own laws operating above and beyond the wishes of rulers. They argued that a rational and planned administration was necessary in order to cope more adequately with these social processes. Civilisation emerged as a banner proclaiming these reformist goals and also as an indication of the existence of systematic social regularities. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, civilisation became infused with two central ideas: first, it stood as a courtly concept in opposition to ‘barbarism’; and second, it constituted the notion of a process with a goal. It is the latter which represents an extension of the original courtly concept in the hands of the reformists. Anything from trade to education, within which ‘barbaric’ practices could be discerned, came under the province of reform in the name of civilisation, involving the refinement of manners and the internal pacification of the country by the kings (1994a: 39). This formed part and parcel of what has been described as a ‘civilizing offensive’ (cf. Kruithof 1980; Mitzman 1987: 663–87; Van Krieken 1989:193–218).

To an English person, the concept of civilization usually appears relatively clear, referring to political, economic, religious, technical, moral or other social facts (1994a: 4). The concept developed roughly the same meaning in France, where it expressed the social situation, behaviour- and feeling-codes of an upper class which comprised aristocratic and bourgeois elements and which was more unified than in Germany. By the early part of the twentieth century the concept of civilization was used by people in Western societies to refer to a completed process. They increasingly saw themselves as the vanguard of a particular form of personality make-up which they felt compelled to disseminate. But ‘of the whole preceding process of civilization’, says Elias of those living at that time, ‘nothing remains in their consciousness except a vague residue’ (1994a: 41). They were mostly unaware of this change as it occurred: it was an unplanned process.

Changes in social and individual habitus

Elias’s discussion of the development of ‘civilization’ is bound up with his use of the term ‘habitus’. The significance of this notion in Elias’s work is usually lost to his non-German reading audience. While the word is usually associated with the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1990), it is in fact a Latin term which gained currency among academics in the Middle Ages. It was also popular in German social science around the time Elias wrote The Civilizing Process, and the term appears in the German edition as ‘psychical habitus’ or simply ‘habitus’ (for example, see 1988a: lxxiii, lxxv, lxxvi, lxxviii; 1988b: 315, 316, 319, 320, 333, 387, 388, 484n). But in the English translations, habitus is misleadingly rendered as ‘psychological make-up’, ‘make-up’, ‘social make-up’, ‘habits’, or even simply ‘personality’, but never as ‘habitus’ (for example, 1994a: xii, xiii, xv, xvi, 444, 445, 446, 447, 454, 485, 540n). In a later publication, The Society of Individuals (1991a), Elias makes greater use of the term ‘habitus’ and provides a more differentiated application of the concept.3 The notion of social habitus as used by Elias is one of the keys which can be used to escape what he calls the either–or approach to considerations of the individual and society. The social habitus of people forms the basis from which the more individual characteristics of a person can emerge:

This make-up [Gepräge], the social habitus of individuals, forms, as it were, the soil from which grow the personal characteristics through which an individual differs from other members of his society … The concept of social habitus enables us to bring social phenomena within the field of scientific investigation previously inaccessible to them. (1991a: 182)

For Elias, individuals have little free choice in relation to their own group identity and social habitus: ‘these things cannot be simply changed like clothes’ (1991a: 224–5). The social habitus is expressed in an individual’s codes of feeling and behaviour, the social standards of which change over generations. So Elias uses the term ‘habitus’ to refer to changes on this ‘individual’ level of the civilizing process.4 One can distinguish between individual habitus, which refers to the learned emotional and behavioural dispositions which are specific to a particular person, and social habitus, which denotes the learned dispositions shared by most members of a group or society.

The concept of habitus enables Elias to introduce a way of comprehending broad social and psychical processes which is relatively free of evaluations, a social-scientific understanding.5 He does this by urging us to suspend all feelings of embarrassment and superiority when considering the social habitus of people in the past or in other societies. This particularly applies to the value judgements associated with the concepts ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’:

Our kind of behaviour has grown out of that which we call uncivilized. But these concepts grasp the actual change too statically and coarsely. In reality, our terms ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’ do not constitute an antithesis of the kind that exists between ‘good’ and ‘bad’, but represent stages in a development which, moreover, is still continuing. (1994a: 47).

This emphasis on a sequence of changes in an ongoing process of civilization leads Elias to focus on a ‘specific transformation of behaviour’ (1994a: 42–178) which is connected to other changes which cannot be seen and must be inferred. Elias ties in the conceptual development of words such as ‘civilization’ to concrete social dynamics and the directional changes of standards in behaviour- and feeling-codes – to changes in social and individual habitus – which are in turn connected with underlying social dynamics and shifts in balances of power between various social groups.

The transformation of words and manners

From the sixteenth century, people in Western European societies tended to perceive their behaviour and that of others with greater differentiation and with more even and stricter controls over their emotions than before. Manners increasingly became a social problem and the precepts contained in books on the subject were derived from the experience of social life, as opposed to traditions passed down through word of mouth. This was a transition period, during which the old feudal knightly nobility was in decline and the new aristocracy of the absolutist courts was still forming, while at the same time bourgeois groups were rising.

In stressing the sociogenesis of concepts, Elias singles out one individual in the hands of whom civilité gained a specific and characteristically novel meaning: Erasmus of Rotterdam. In his popular book, De civilitate morum puerilium (On Civility in Children, 1530), Erasmus reworked the long-established word civilitas. Dedicated to the son of a noble, this book discussed the way people looked, how they carried themselves, their facial expressions, dress and also some gestures which later generations might find strange. Elias seeks to establish that the precepts contained in the work are embodiments of a mental and emotional structure among the secular upper classes of the Middle Ages which differed from that which is predominantly characteristic of ourselves (1994a: 45).6 Erasmus was writing amid a ‘loosening’ transformation between the old medieval social formation and the crystallization of social relations around the formation of court societies. This structural transition in the pattern of social relations was not sudden, but it generated an increasing tendency for people to mould their own and others’ behaviour more deliberately than before. The whole transformation is neatly summed up in Caxton’s phrase from his Book of Curtesye in the late fifteenth century: ‘Thingis somtyme alowed is now repreuid’ (1994a: 66). This suggests that people like Erasmus were able to mention things which at a later stage became imbued with shame and embarrassment. Individuals from different social origins were thrown together as the rising and declining social fortunes of various groups accelerated. From the sixteenth century, an increasingly rigid social hierarchy set in at the same time as a growing need for particular groups to establish a uniform code of behaviour and distinguishing group traits. Increasingly, a ‘threat from below’ was perceived by the established ruling groups, demanding an increased sensitivity and social pressure to exert greater vigilance over one’s own impulses and immediate desires. A compelling form of social control began to establish itself which became more effective ‘in inculcating lasting habits, than insults, mockery, or any threat of outward physical violence’ (1994a: 65). External compulsions were more and more transformed into internal compulsions. This is a key aspect of Elias’s analysis of social controls, or constraints by others, and the development of particular types of self-restraint.7

The precepts for behaviour contained in the manners books studied by Elias were aimed at a specific group of people: the upper class and the knights who lived at court. They were addressed to adults as well as to children. Examples include not picking one’s nose in public, farting at the table or speaking when one’s mouth is full, spitting in public, wiping one’s nose on one’s clothing, and so on. He chooses examples relating to manners and bodily functions in order to diminish the ambiguity of historical interpretation – the problems surrounding the control of physical functions need to be dealt with in all cultures. All of Elias’s examples are drawn from sources written between the Middle Ages and the middle of the nineteenth century, and, where possible, he uses the same, or variations on the same, precept in each quotation in order to establish before the reader’s eyes the sequence of development which he is ultimately concerned to demonstrate. Interspersed between these citations, Elias offers his interpretations of the examples he quotes. It is these comments, where his conception of socio-historical interpretation is to be found, which I shall comment on below.

The various aspects of bodily functions are mentioned by the authors of the manners books in a matter of fact way; there appears to be a very low level of embarrassment surrounding the mention of, for example, defecating on tapestries, in a manner which suggests that certain actions, simply the mention of which to a later observer would most likely be regarded with some distaste, were in fact once relatively common. People became more sensitive towards one another, especially as regards bodily fluids and orifices. Many of the quoted examples are excluded from subsequent editions of a particular work because, Elias suggests, the forms of behaviour mentioned no longer need to be considered since they had become part of people’s own consciousness and self-steering, and therefore external prompting was no longer required: the topics dealt with are themselves deemed too distasteful to be mentioned. Today, for example, these aspects of bodily behaviour are not covered in etiquette books because they have already been ‘imprinted’ in early socialization and are taken for granted. As for behaviour at table, Elias suggests that it was not the lack of utensils that forced people to maintain what to us may appear coarse standards of manners, but that, given the characteristic affect-economy of these people, nothing else was deemed necessary. Regulations of conduct while eating provide the modern reader with ‘a segment … of the totality of socially instilled forms of conduct’ (1994a: 54), corresponding to a different social structure: it is not just a curious excursus into seemingly trite or even quaint forms of behaviour which prompts Elias to cite these examples in all their richness. Common features within specific groups in different countries appear, revealing a ‘unity of actual behaviour in the medieval upper class, measured against the modern period’ (1994a: 53).

While this process of change in people’s behaviour had its fluctuations, Elias points to an overall trend. It is this search for the structural dynamics of social relations which provides the driving force behind his project: to perceive lines of development in apparently random forms of human behaviour with special reference to the advancing thresholds of shame and embarrassment bound up with notions of ‘refinement’ or ‘civilization’. ‘A particular social dynamism’, writes Elias, ‘triggers a particular psychological one, which has its own regularities’ (1994a: 82). This social dynamism is the growing interdependence of the bourgeois classes and aristocratic groups involving the increasingly felt need on the part of the former to imitate the forms of behaviour prevalent at court. For Elias then, the different sensibilities found in different societies are the result of observable, long-term social processes which in retrospect can be seen to have taken a particular direction. However, he does not conceive of this ‘directional’ change as smooth, unilinear or even ‘necessary’, but rather as one which shows fluctuations and short-term changes of direction which follow smaller and larger curves (1994a: 67; this point will be explored further in chapter 3).

In focusing on the secular upper classes, Elias reveals a developmental curve. The change in standards is clear to him: in medieval society, control by others within the small courts characteristic of that stage did impinge upon the emotional life of individuals, but in a relatively relaxed way. Subsequent changes were clearly unplanned and blind social processes. For example, forks were introduced to the courts, not so as to serve some rational purpose such as a need for greater efficiency in moving food from plate to mouth. The advance in the thresholds of shame and embarrassment – the standards of revulsion towards, or moral precepts against, the perpetration of certain forms of behaviour – did not come about through the conscious plan of any single individual, or through consciously rational considerations of large groups of people. Nor are such changes in standards explicable in terms of a growing awareness of personal hygiene. These types of explanation become prevalent only after the observable changes have occurred. Rational, calculating consideration, suggests Elias, is not the driving force in the development of civilization. Rather, it is the unplanned dynamics of social competition and social interweaving that foster the development of ‘delicate’ sensibilities. Feelings and affects are transformed in this way first among the upper classes, and it is only the changing structure of society as a whole which allows the transmission of the new standards to permeate other segments of the population. The medieval social structure was less amenable to the reception of models of social behaviour which developed in a specific social centre, spreading throughout large segments of the populace (Elias 1994a: 95; cf. Chartier 1988: 89–90). There was no single, clearly dominant centre, and chains of interdependence were shorter, which meant that opportunities for local autonomy and differentiation were greater. While in the course of the sixteenth century, a new, relatively more ossified social hierarchy established itself, it was formed by people of much more diverse origins than in, for instance, the Roman Empire. The new upper class of courtiers that emerged throughout Europe did not all share hereditary descendency from the old warrior classes. This led to questions of manners and behaviour becoming highly important to them, and in tandem with an increased social interdependency, they also developed an increase in the level of mutual identification, adding further impetus to the spread of their model of social habitus.

Aggressive knights and the medieval personality

In his discussion of the manners and behaviour of the European secular upper classes, Elias also looks at the life of knights in order to demonstrate changes in sensibilities with respect to aggression and violence. The majority of the adult males in the medieval upper classes were warriors who led armed groups into battle, and so Elias focuses primarily on public violence in wars, but he does not neglect everyday life in towns and cities.

Elias argues that the conscience or super-ego8 of these people was relatively weak and undifferentiated. This is not to say that people were at one time devoid of conscience or some type of cognitive self-steering processes, but that the types of automatic self-restraint which developed later were largely absent. These later types emerged together with increasing social integration and extended networks of social interdependency. While there were many differences between the standards of behaviour and emotion management found within the various classes of medieval secular society, the emotional expression of medieval people generally can be said to be relatively more spontaneous and unrestrained than in the following period (1994a: 176).

Even in the Middle Ages the expression of aggressive affects in battle was, Elias suggests, slightly more tame than in the earlier period of the Great Migrations, although compared to later times it was certainly more free and unfettered. The perpetration of violence was regarded as a pleasure by many of the powerful in the medieval period: mostly men, but also women were able to indulge in such violent pleasures.9 In the more developed state societies of our day, it is only during times of social unrest or situations of looser controls by others that the release of affects becomes more direct, uninhibited and less impeded by shame and revulsion (Elias 1978b: 230).

Once again, literary sources provide Elias with evidence of the transformation of aggressive behaviour and the more open enjoyment of impulsive violence in former times.10 He also makes use of the woodcut prints in Das Mittelalterliche Hausbuch (Bossert and Storck 1912), and it is especially these pictorial examples that serve to demonstrate a different standard of affectual expression and control from those forms which developed later. For Elias, the pictures reveal:

a society in which people gave way to drives and feelings incomparably more easily, quickly, spontaneously, and openly than today, in which the emotions were less restrained and, as a consequence, less evenly regulated and more liable to oscillate more violently between extremes. (1994a: 175–6)

We are given an impression of the attitude of the knightly classes who revelled in the perpetration of what most people in the industrialized West would tend to see as unusually violent and atrocious acts against other human beings. The life of knights was spent training for or being involved in physical combat and there was no social power which could legitimately restrict the scope of their affective outbursts. The social structure encouraged this kind of behaviour, although these types of emotional outburst could also be followed by extreme feelings of pity and identification with the victims of violence. Social fears were pervasive, life was lived for the moment, and, as a consequence, fortunes might change quickly. This was reflected in the ease with which pleasure could quickly change into fear, or fear into pleasure or rage.

Within a barter economy, the income of these knightly groups was secured through raids and wars. But with the rising importance of markets and other social processes, the knightly classes gradually lost their function. Since they held a precarious, outsider position in the general process of commercialization, they were less bound in their conduct by economic ties – their primary form of livelihood was through their ability to use weapons. Among other processes, the growth of a money economy and the division of labour saw a shift in the affective controls of some of their number. Before this, there was no necessity for them to develop a more strongly differentiated super-ego. Rather, a form of self-restraint was required which was more appropriate to the immediate emotional demands of battle; a self-steering that was ‘wild, cruel, prone to violent outbreaks and abandoned to the joy of the moment’ (1994a: 319).

In the Middle Ages, the early stages of a twin process of the emergence of the great courts and the towns became evident. Primarily the larger of these courts, and especially those presided over by a lady,11 became centres in which obligatory forms of conduct developed along the lines of stricter, more even self-restraint. The warriors who experienced a devaluation of their own social function were often drawn into court life in order to survive, into a situation demanding restraint, renunciation and the transformation of drives. Knightly feudal forms of conduct combined with courtly forms, generating the sociogenesis of the term courtoisie, an expression of particular forms of conduct and sentiment (1994a: 330). Elias refers to the whole process as the ‘courtization of warriors’ (1994a: 500–1).

In contrast, however, Benjo Maso (1982) has argued that there was in fact an increase, not a decrease, in knightly belligerence during this period. This was because they had to maintain traditions of a knightly calling, rather than fight for the possession of lands, as their predecessors were obliged to do. He argues that this led them to over-exaggerate their supposed virtues of ferocity and honour in an attempt to legitimate their weakened position. However, Elias suggests that only a minority of the warrior knights were actually drawn into life at court, while those remaining petered out. He also points out that the presence of these knights at court was larger and more important at the end of the Middle Ages than at the beginning (1994a: 319).

Several critics have also drawn attention to what they consider to be the exaggerated picture painted by Elias of the level of violence and ‘anarchy’ in the Middle Ages.12 But it would seem this criticism is itself somewhat exaggerated as there is a good deal of evidence which supports Elias’s interpretation.13 Elias provides documentary evidence which shows that the readiness to fight was a precondition of social survival, not only for the secular upper classes, but also for the burghers in towns whose lives were often dogged by private feuds and vendettas. This is contrary to one commentator (Seigel 1979: 123), who seems to have missed the section in The Civilizing Process which deals at length with the case of Mathieu d’Escouchy, whose ‘Chronicle’ of his own life demonstrates the readiness and extent to which violence was used in the settling of disputes between townsfolk (see also Elias 1994a: 162–4). Elias writes: ‘Family vendettas … not only existed among the noble-born; the towns of the fifteenth century were no less filled with private wars between families and cliques. Even the little people – hat makers, tailors, shepherds – they all had the knife quickly to hand’ (Elias 1978b: 237).

Elias regards volatility as part of the aggressive behaviour of knights. Compared with ourselves, he suggests, they tended to show relatively little regard for the future and to swing unexpectedly from the expression of joy to violent aggression. Robert van Krieken has questioned the very assumption of this type of medieval personality structure which swings between extremes. He argues that if one assumes medieval personality structures were so radically different from our own, one then becomes blind to the possibility that behaviour can be explained by reference to direct responses to situations (Van Krieken 1989: 207), an argument which seems to suggest that only situations change, and that the personality structures of human beings do not change through history. One answer to this is that one has only to travel outside the richer European societies in order to experience such differences for oneself. In other words, we cannot go back in time, but it is possible to use cultural differences as a justification for the existence of historical differences, provided there is evidence to back up these claims (cf. Elias 1994a: xiv). But this would not be proof of changing personality structures, as the affective expression of those being studied could still depend upon situational stimuli (see Argyle 1976: 145–86). Elias effectively by-passes these issues by arguing that the distinction between ‘situational’ and ‘personality-traits’ is a spurious one. But it is simply very difficult to establish the extent to which ‘traits’ of personality – for example, stability or aggressiveness – are the result of intergenerationally reproduced patterns, the law, the economy, or the product of training in early childhood. It would seem that we – like Elias – are seldom in a position to make use of the necessary empirical information required to draw such conclusions. So Elias’s claim that there has been a change in attitudes with regard to the perpetration of violent acts causing harm to other people, animals or even property in Western societies is interesting, but it requires further empirical corroboration. Also, his use of pictorial evidence can be criticized as naive since he is arguably relying on the ‘exaggerated imagery’ of these drawings and presenting them as evidence of the actual behavioural and emotional standards found in European societies of the time. The conclusions Elias draws from these pictures are consistent with his other evidence, and his discussion of their relevance is explicit; his non-critical use of such material effectively smooths over doubts as to their accuracy and reliability as historical sources. But for now, in the absence of further research, these questions of interpretation remain open.

Other critics have pointed to Elias’s neglect of the role of religion in tempering conduct (see Buck-Morss 1978:192; Albrow 1969: 231; Barraclough 1982:38; Thomas 1978:30; and Wehowsky 1978:73–6). However, Elias argues that religion in itself did not dampen this volatility because it is only as ‘civilized’ as the society or class which upholds it (1994a: 164). Nevertheless, religion as an institutional organization, in which the lives of individuals are patterned through adhering to ritualistic practices and codes which mould behaviour and identities, is certainly absent from his work. Indeed, Elias could have strengthened his arguments if he had made more explicit reference to Max Weber’s work on the Protestant Ethic (Weber 1930). The important point remains, however, that if Elias had taken the religious upper classes into account in a more systematic fashion, the structure of his argument would probably have taken a different form (cf. Goudsblom 1995).

Elias’s thesis of a civilizing process is woven continuously around theoretical threads of argumentation interspersed with empirical details in an ever-rising spiral. His argument is therefore repetitious, but each time he deviates from a particular segment of the spiral in order to provide examples for a theoretical point, he returns to the issue at hand armed with one more contribution to the development of the theory’s explanatory power. Hence the constant reference to the seemingly irrelevant and small scale, such as conversation, the modelling of speech or the use of the fork. This has led some critics to suggest that Elias’s approach is idealist and neglects the historical importance of the means of production. For example, Susan Buck-Morss (1978: 189) relies on Marxian categories in her critique of Elias, implying his neglect of the role of the economy generally. Harte (1979: 602) accuses him of interweaving ‘speculative-philosophical’ interpretations into his evidence. Other critics have accused him of neglecting the role of ideas in historical development (cf. Albrow 1969: 232; and Lasch 1985: 719). But what we actually find throughout The Civilizing Process is an emphasis on developing an interpretation in conjunction with historical evidence in a manner which does not prioritize either economic, political or social processes, but considers them as inextricably woven together.

This chapter has focused on the way Elias explains the development of civilization as a concept and how this is related to changes of social and individual habitus among the secular upper classes in Western European societies. The manners books provide evidence in condensed form of changes in behaviour through revealing small segments of social life, recorded out of the need to establish particular behaviour-codes. Their function in Elias’s work is not simply to reveal details of the standards of past eras, but also to illuminate the very tissue of social interdependencies in which people were enmeshed and how the networks of such interdependencies change over several hundred years. The standards of behaviour in face-to-face interaction, psychological and emotional make-up which he discusses are conditioned by broader social processes which will be considered in more detail in chapter 3.

Socialization, aggression and shame