ABSTRACT
Norbert Elias’s celebrated two-volume study Über den Prozess der Zivilisation. Soziogenetische und Psychogenetische Untersuchungen was originally published in 1939 by Haus zum Falken in Basel. It was little known in the anglophone world until the publication of a translation (The Civilizing Process) in 1978 to 1982.1 Few would disagree that it has now achieved the status of a sociological classic. In this monumental study, Elias traced long-term connections between changes in power balances in society at large and changes in the embodied habitus – or cultural personality make-up – of individual people, among the secular upper classes in Western Europe from the late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. Although it was originally grounded in a study of European history, the theory of civilizing processes points to linked changes in power, behaviour and habitus which can be demonstrated to have been at work elsewhere and in many other periods. In The Civilizing Process Elias set out to explain sociologically the origins of what has come to be called ‘civilized’ behaviour, which Stephen Mennell has characterized as follows:
To be civilized is to be polite and good mannered and considerate towards others; clean and decent and hygienic in personal habits; humane and gentle and kind, restrained and self-controlled and even-tempered; reluctant to use violence against others save in exceptional circumstances. … Above all, though, to be civilized is to live with others in an orderly, well organized, just, predictable and calculable society.
