Civilizing Processes

The term civilizing process is associated with the work of Norbert Elias (1897–1990) and the research tradition of figurational sociology, which he established. In his early magnum opus, The Civilizing Process (2000; first published in German in 1939), he studied and sought to explain just one strand of one civilizing process—changing standards of behavior and emotional habitus among the secular upper classes in Western Europe since the late Middle Ages—but he came to consider that he had discovered a more general principle. There are many civilizing processes, in many cultures, over many timescales, and among many social groups, and the theory has been greatly extended both by Elias in his later works and by others inspired by his work.

Many social scientists feel uncomfortable with the use of civilization as a technical term. The connotations of collective self-approbation, especially by Europeans and Americans, that have become attached to the word civilization certainly complicate the use of the concept of civilizing process as a tool of relatively detached analysis. Elias confronts this problem in part I of The Civilizing Process, in which he discusses the origins of the concepts of civilisation in France and Kultur in Germany. He makes it clear from the beginning that his is not a theory of “progress,” let alone of inevitable progress or of Western triumphalism. Elias was not putting his own moral evaluations of good and bad on the ideas of “civilization” and “civilized behavior,” but showing the social historical context in which all sorts of positive evaluations had accreted around particular facets of behavior and of cultural expression (and negative evaluations around others). As a “commonsense” (or, in anthropologists' jargon, emic) rather than a scientific (etic) concept, the term civilization had come to serve a specific social function, expressing “everything in which Western society of the last two or three centuries believes itself superior to earlier societies or ‘more primitive’ contemporary ones” (Elias 2000:5). By the nineteenth century, the ways in which people in the West used the word civilization showed that they had forgotten the long process of civilization through which their ancestors' behavior and feelings had changed and been socially molded from generation to generation. They had come to think of the traits they considered “civilization” as innate in themselves and their fellow Westerners, and, indeed, as inherent in what they unabashedly then termed the “white race.” Elias was, after all, writing in the 1930s as a German Jew who had witnessed firsthand the Nazi seizure of power in his homeland.

In the next and more famous part of the book, Elias sought to document and explain the changes in people's actual behavior and feelings to which these evaluative connotations became attached. What came to be defined as “superior” and what as “inferior” was, and is, often quite arbitrary. For example, in seventeenth-century French, there were two ways of speaking of a friend, “un de mes amis” and “un mien ami,” which meant exactly the same thing, but that did not prevent the one from being defined as “the way people speak at court” and the other as “smelling of the bourgeois.” Social competition for “respectability” and the avoidance of shame is indeed a principal driving force in why such distinctions assume importance. Elias's central concern was with changes in habitus, which he defined as “second nature”; it refers to that level of habits of thinking, feeling, and behaving that are, in fact, learned from early childhood onward but become so deeply ingrained that they feel “innate,” as if we had never had to learn them.

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