Peter Emmerson

  1.1.1 Some general points about Elias’ work

 Elias developed the ‘civilizing process’, as a model to be tested, which if nothing else, offers a more realistic understanding of the growth in rationality so much at the heart of Weber’s work. For the latter rationality was a version of the Kantian ‘categorical imperative’, an ideal that existed in the mind to be transposed onto different social experiences. Thus, when explaining the character of western capitalism, Weber linked general characteristics such as the search for profit, which is not peculiar to the West, with specifically western variables such as free labour and Protestant beliefs. In this way historically located activities are described in terms of general or ideal concepts which in turn define the perspectives of social science.

For Elias the process of the development of this style of thinking can be traced back even further, associated with the emergence of a new word, ‘courtesy’, which he correlates with social changes experienced by medieval knights, who were schooled in violence and had few predators. In a very short time many knights became what we would call redundant and plied their trade as troubadours at the courts of the great lords and ladies. They found themselves in a state of dependency having to control their emotions and become more servile in order to stay in contact with the great Lords who held the purse strings and who held court.

By the sixteenth century Elias detects the rise in use of another word ‘civility’, synonymous with the formation of the court aristocracy. Civility is indicative of a deepening level of self-control which because it is inculcated in childhood, becomes part of the aristocratic character or, as Elias prefers, ‘habitus’. Habitus is a process word Elias uses instead of personality in order to portray human identity in more developmental terms, formed predominantly by experience, but, interdependent with biological predisposition. He believed that human beings are different to all other life-forms with respect to the level of control they can exert over biological instincts. For the figurations close to Louis XIV self-restraint is no longer something to be imposed by the physical presence of others, it is a normal feature of aristocratic make-up. Elias writes of the small day to day activities of the exercise of power as the King’s figuration manipulates the fortunes of the high aristocracy and the emergent high bourgeoisie who had little choice but to be compliant, if they wanted to remain attached to the royal figuration and the benefits it could provide.

The civilizing process is correlated with the changes in the balance of power, that occurred in relation to the formation of nation states and the levying of taxes needed to fund grand schemes such as monopolizing access to the means of violence and the training associated with their use. Aristocrats were not war lords, they were skilled social operators who worked behind a front, as Goffman would say, in the competition for royal patronage. Naked violence was shunned in such social networks as processes formed that relied on social manipulation rather than open resistance.

Elias describes how such figurations with their civilized habitus have slowly extended beyond the elites, pacifying wider social networks as the level of interdependency has increased. Civilized people experience themselves internally as two people, much in the Freudian sense, one governed by short-term desires, the other who assiduously manages such urges to avoid damaging censure or disaster by carefully studying longer-term possibilities: you may lose the battle by retreating but win the war. This is not a top-down determinist pattern of social change, it is about people making life choices to accommodate power and survive.

People viewed in the manner suggested by Elias, never cease to be involved in change. Life’s experiences are modelled as processes that have no beginning nor a definitive end: the civilising process does not prescribe some state of ideal being in the form of a civilized person, it just tracks changes in the habitus of certain figurations over a long period of social development, sometimes quick, more often slow, and certainly not inevitable. The civilizing process is a model that was derived from a scientific study of history that has learned from the mistakes of Comte, Marx, Durkheim, Weber and Parsons; that it is necessary to be more ‘reality congruent’. The proliferation of the scientific habitus since the 17^th century is a feature of the civilising process.

Elias is at pains to emphasise that there was no planning involved in the development of self-control: the civilizing process is not connected to some ethereal dialectical spirit or zeitgeist moving in mysterious ways functioning in relation to some pre-installed design system or set of laws – his science is a programme of exploration using a theory to be tested by historical evidence. However, Comte, Marx, Durkheim, Weber or Parsons would no doubt have made this claim. The difference is that the scientific sociology of Norbert Elias has stripped away any pretence towards offering up absolute truths. Elias’ science is sensitive to its limitations, has no claim to objectivity, does not attempt to suggest that it can define the causes of anything as yet. All that process sociology can establish at present is that sociological variables are interdependent with one another in a web of possibilities. The best we can do, he would say, is attain sufficient ‘relative detachment’ to make statements about the manner in which the processes involving social structures and functions interrelate with one another. By using models such as the civilizing process social scientists can use the past to build insights into the present so that modest claims about contingencies can be drawn, rather than bold causal statements. Consequently, the future is difficult to tell.

The science that Elias espouses is aware of the sheer size of the task because of the immense complexity of social processes which need a new, more reality congruent, dynamic language to analyse them more usefully. There is no singular in this exercise, there are just figurations of people who can use their self-control to become relatively detached enough to do science, people who can turn down the volume of their emotions and values sufficiently enough to do physics, chemistry, biology, sociology. Even though the problems are different in the latter, linked to the greater difficulty in attaining the necessary level of relative detachment to study them scientifically, I believe it is worth taking on the habitus of what Elias calls Homines aperti (open people) that should allow more valid conclusions to be drawn in relation to understanding human problems.

This is not to suggest that in using Elias’ approach the problem of how to produce more valid and reliable sociological evidence will be solved, but it does hold out a sociological way of moving on from the impasse that emerged during the 1970s as Parsonianism and Marxism hit the buffers. Elias’ model can give us a scientific diagnosis of the problem and a means of moving beyond it. The key theme of this essay is geared to one possible reason: that too many sociologists have nowadays become more susceptible to idealism and turned down the influence of the scientific ethos on their work, not taking sufficient account of what Elias called ‘the detour via detachment’. I want to help change the emphasis here. There is long tradition in western cultures that life is about the pursuance of perfection. Thus, much of our thinking is habitually utopian. These habits die hard. I want to argue, that the problem with sociology, and probably science generally, is that it too insensitive to the damage done by idealism.