The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations

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Summary: Warriors Into Functionaries: Tamed Nobility & the State
Review: Norbert Elais' The Civilizing Process is an explanation of the rise of the modern nation-state, and the process by which state formation engendered changes in the psyches and day-to-day manners of modern citizens. In short, his argument is that the functional complexity of post-medieval Europe went hand-in-hand with a sublimation of man's baser instincts. Upon first glance, the reader immediately wonders about the relevance of findings such as "in medieval society people generally blew their noses into their hands" (126). The dominant explanations for the rise of the modern nation-state have usually been based in economics (Marx, Polanyi, Moore, North & Thomas) and not in the sort of etiquette, manners and social customs that are the key operating concepts in Elias' work. However, Elias makes a convincing case that such customs deserve predominant explanatory weight, being vehicles of social control that lay the psychological groundwork for the nation-state. Such a finding helps political scientists answer the persistent question of why Western political institutions fail when placed into unfamiliar Third-World social environments. Most analysts have chalked this up to unequal economic development, but Elias would probably favor an argument emphasizing the lack of a "civilizing" process in Third-World societies. Such an explanation--like Putnam's reasoning in revealing Southern Italy's "civic culture" to be bankrupt--is admittedly open to criticism of essentialism, cultural determinism, and other postmodern shortcomings, but at a minimum, it certainly alerts us to pertinent, non-economic variables at work in the development-democracy relationship.

Elias selects three comparative cases, France, England and Germany, and performs a content analysis of medieval texts on manners, etiquette, and the transformation of the nobility from warriors into courtiers. These texts are the empirical evidence offered for his key variable, pan-European courtly manners delineated by social structure (classes and "monopolies" of power). The other key variable (it's rather unclear which one is "dependent" on the other) is the rise of the nation-state, which was brought about by an exogenous variable (population growth) as well as two intervening factors: 1) the decline of the nobility relative to national absolutism (both economically and militarily); and 2) the rise of a money economy. Elias shows how centrifugal forces in these societies (mainly the warrior-noble class) resisted the "integration" of absolutism/nationhood, but that these forces in the end were overcome by economics coupled with the centripetal social groundwork of pan-European "civilite" and social customs, leading to an increasingly complex interweaving of social functions. "Society was 'in transition' . . . 'Simplicity' . . . had been lost. People saw things with more differentiation" (61). "Social control was becoming more binding . . . with the structural transformation of society . . . a change slowly came about: the compulsion to check one's own behaviour" (70).

The near totality of Elias' evidence is qualitative, often selected from medieval writings and secondhand observations. Although he means to proceed inductively from these facts, Elias often reads like a deductive historian, especially when positing lawlike generalizations such as "the more or less sudden emergence of words within languages nearly always points to changes in the lives of people themselves, particularly when the new concepts are destined to become as central and long-lived as these" (48). In fact, his entire thesis can be summarized with another of his apparently deductive axioms: "The growth of units of integration and rule is always at the same time an expression of structural changes in society, that is to say, in human relationships" (254). Marxists, of course, would say that such social changes are themselves dependent upon changes in the relations of production, but Elias gives equal weight to social causes as to economic ones. The economy is by no means neglected in his analysis, since he gives currency, demand for property, and population growth prime explanatory roles in his causal process (despite the fact that there is no quantitative evidence given for these socioeconomic correlations, unlike the analysis of the same topics by North & Thomas). However, Marxists would surely have a fit over Elias' assertion that the civilizing process leads to a wholesale leveling of distinctions between social classes (430), as well as his claim that the modern state arose out of a virtual stalemate between the bourgeois and the nobility (327).

On the topic of state-society relations, Elias makes the provocative argument that for the past 300 years, "monopoly rulers" (including, but not limited to, absolutist kings) are mere functionaries, with the real power resting in the hands of their "subjects" (271). "Control of the centralized institutions themselves is so dispersed that it is difficult to discern clearly who are the rulers and who are the ruled" (315). Of course, under an instable balance of power (including today's Third World) the playing field is presumably up for grabs between different classes and parts of the state, but in a developed society, Elias would argue that the internalization of "civilized" norms means that the "strong" state, while resting on a cohesive social order, is not as autonomous from social forces as one might think.

Rating:
Summary: Elias organizes one's thinking about Western Civilization.
Review: This is one of the most important books I have ever read. Norbert Elias ingeniously and persuasively provides a way to understand the evolution of Western societies and personalities from the Twelfth Century to our own time.

He provides an organizing principle for understanding how and why life and people were different in different periods of Western history. Until I read Elias I could only guess at what life was like in earlier eras by inferring from social, economic, and technical conditions. Elias provides a clear and reasonable way to look much closer.

I strongly recommend this book.

Rating:
Summary: Elias organizes one's thinking about Western Civilization.
Review: This is one of the most important books I have ever read. Norbert Elias ingeniously and persuasively provides a way to understand the evolution of Western societies and personalities from the Twelfth Century to our own time.

He provides an organizing principle for understanding how and why life and people were different in different periods of Western history. Until I read Elias I could only guess at what life was like in earlier eras by inferring from social, economic, and technical conditions. Elias provides a clear and reasonable way to look much closer.

I strongly recommend this book.

Rating:
Summary: Know Thyself
Review: We live our everyday lives shrouded in monotony, going about our business as if our existence was the most natural and unquestionable one, yet what our souls calls "home" has actually been created in an extremely complex and all-encompassing process of perpetual change.

In this very ambitious book, Norbert Elias examines both how our consciousness has been transformed by society, and how society itself has "progressed", that is, what mechanisms have propelled the transformation of our western civilization from a violent and unrepressed, autarkic existence, to our infinitely interdependent, specialized and pacified modern nation-states.

By first exploring and analyzing historical documents, the author let's us experience with much detail how human's relations with others have been transformed, how our manners and behavior have been modelled by a changing environment, illustrated by the most diverse situations like table manners, attitude toward those of an inferior condition, hygiene, and sexuality.

It is like glancing at our collective youth, oddly familiar and intimate, yet repulsive.

Elias then meticulously articulates by what forces feudalism eventually gave rise to ever more centralized and interdependent forms of government and the corresponding specific changes in human behavior and attitudes.

A couple of interesting ideas in this book specially relevant to current debate: how society's transformation isn't the design of anyone or a "conspiration" of sorts, but a process that obeys its own laws; how our form of government is very deeply dependent on all classes and peoples, thus enjoying very little freedom for gratuitous action; and how war isn't necessarily the opposite of peace, but the opportunity for ever larger zones of pacification to emerge.

All good lessons to re-learn today, specially by the Left, with its visions of evil conspirations and it's stubborn insistence on perpetuating strife and conflict by opposing lasting resolution by means of war.