Elias’s Explanation of the European Civilizing Process

This chapter explains Elias’s pioneering analysis of the European civilizing process – the process in which they came to regard themselves as uniquely civilized. It discusses his examination of how state formation, internal pacification, and rising interdependencies were linked with the development of new standards of propriety and new expectations of self-restraint. Changing attitudes to violence were integral parts of the overall direction of change. Civilized people came to regard judicial torture and capital punishment as antithetical to their refined ways of life. Changing manners were related developments. Those movements influenced European attitudes to non-European peoples. They underpinned the belief that colonialism was necessary to spread civilization. Elias did not argue that the process of civilization was evidence of human progress. The chapter discusses his analysis of decivilizing processes in Nazi Germany and the argument that sociological inquiry should seek to explain the shifting balances of power between civilizing and decivilizing processes in human figurations.

Summary and Conclusions

Elias’s relatively detached investigation of the civilizing process remains the key starting point for those who wish to understand the nature and legacy of the peculiar civilized self- images that arose in the European region.

Introduction: A Process-Sociological Approach to Understanding Civilization

The introduction notes that the concept of civilization first rose to prominence in the late eighteenth century French court society and then spread outward to non-European elites and downward to the rest of society. The idea became central to European self- understandings and to the sense of differentiation from the rest of the world. The dominant notions of civilization shaped the global order through colonial offensives to transform supposedly backward societies. Analyses of the civilizational dimensions of the global order have largely ignored Elias’s explanation of the European civilizing process. The introduction explains its contribution to the classical sociological tradition and discusses its relationship with postcolonial investigations and English School studies of international society. Core elements of the method of Eliasian process sociology are explained including the connection between detached social inquiry and the secular humanism that underpinned Elias’s analysis of human societies and their inter-relations.

Civilizing Processes at the Level of Humanity as a Whole

This chapter discusses Elias’s investigation of civilizing processes that have affected humanity as a whole and analyses his criteria for assessing the relative power of civilizing and decivilizing trends. Four criteria are considered – whether controls on violence are increasing or in decline; whether there are significant changes in the rely power of internal and external constraints on conduct; whether emotional identification between peoples is widening or contracting; and whether support for international planning to protect the vulnerable from the problems stemming from global interconnections is on the rise or is weakening. Those yardsticks inform the discussion of Huntington’s idea of a clash of civilizations and English School descriptions of the civilizing potential of international society. The chapter ends with reflections on the importance of shared symbols for a global civilizing process. It considers the complex relations between national-populist movements, images of future global ecological civilizing processes and the political challenges of the Covid-19 health and economic crisis.

The Return of Discourses of Civilization and Barbarism

This chapter discusses the revival of discourses of civilization and barbarism in the recent period, specifically in connection with the 'war on 'terror' and the torture debate. It emphasizes continuities between colonial and contemporary perspectives. Drawing on process sociology, it argues that the idea of civilization has been a central part of struggles to shape the way in which people orientate themselves to the social world. Participants in such struggles use the idea of civilization to justify using force against savage enemies but also to constrain violence in those relations. The chapter argues that the torture debate illustrates Elias’s observations about the peculiar entanglements of civilized peoples. It is essential to consider those entanglements and the discourse of civilization that was used in the 'war on terror' in long-term perspective – as aspects of the process of civilization which Elias set out to explain.