ABSTRACT
Introduction Norbert Elias (1897-1990) is one of the giants in the social sciences in the twentieth-century. His rich contributions are, however, not much discussed by economists-mainstream and heterodox economists alike. It might be because the topics he dealt with seem barely related to the ‘economy’ as we understand now. Titles like The Loneliness of the Dying or The Court Society appear to be more akin to an analysis of Faulkner or Shakespeare. But Elias has also made some major contributions to topics like individualism, sport, social norms, knowledge, and behavior. The Civilizing Process is probably the core of his works. In 1998, it was listed by the International Sociological Association as the seventh most important book of the twentieth century.1 The idea of this book is very ambitious. Elias’ plan is to explain the emergence and the structuration of the modern state throughout a very long historical overview that goes from the end of the Carolingian Empire to absolute monarchy in Europe. He considers that the civilizing process involves a deep historical transformation of social habits, including the most trivial ones like everyday life manners, where self-restraint behavior is more and more internalized by individuals with the growth of social differentiation and interconnection. This internalization process is related to the change in the social access to violence which is increasingly centralized and monopolized through the formation and development of the state system. Initially the book was made of two volumes; the first one discusses the historical development of social attitudes and the second volume analyzes the state formation. The latter part is directly related to the concerns of heterodox economics as it focuses on the emergence of the modern state but, strangely enough, such an important book remains overlooked by heterodox economics.2 Note that in other disciplines, like medieval history or sociology, Elias’ global framework of analysis on the modern state formation is considered as a kind of model.3 In mainstream economics, the state is something that exists in order to solve (only partially) market failures. In most of the Keynesian traditions, the state is something that exists in order to lead the economy to full employment. In Marxist economics, the state is something that exists in order to maintain and reproduce the capitalist class as the dominant class in the society. Nevertheless,
it is dubious that the state exists and has been able to perpetuate through centuries only to fulfill a specific and/or such a simple functionalist purpose. One of the important features in Elias’ framework is to analyze the modern state formation without resorting to a purposive or deterministic argument. In particular, he shows that the state is not an immutable entity but an evolving set of elements, which are themselves subject to transformations, that exercise altogether a contradictory role in the process of social provisioning and of social (or class) reproduction. The state cannot be understood as an entity situated out of the economy and its development. Neither can it be interpreted as a pure economic entity created to achieve one form of efficiency or another. The aim of this chapter is to present the basic line of argument that Elias develops and to point out some elements that can be of crucial importance for heterodox economics as defined by Frederic Lee in his constructive book, A History of Heterodox Economics, and some other papers. This chapter should be considered as an engagement with Lee’s endeavor to build an integrative and pluralist approach to the social provisioning process. His pioneering work and energetic commitment to heterodox economics contributes to the invaluable bedrock that opens up a range of opportunities to advance heterodox economics. Lee rejects indeed the mainstream explanation of the economy as it considers asocial and ahistorical individuals and uses fictitious concepts based on a deductivist and closed-system methodology (Lee 2009, 7). Such a dismissal is actually based on a long series of critiques which form together a general structured critique and which Lee considers also as providing a way to do heterodox economics in a very different fashion from mainstream. He defines heterodoxy as being
concerned with explaining the process that provides the flow of goods and services required by society to meet the needs of those who participate in its activities. That is from a heterodox perspective, economics is the science of the social provisioning process. . . . The heterodox explanation involves human agency in a cultural context and social processes in historical time affecting resources, consumption patterns, production and reproduction, and the meaning (or ideology) of market, state, and non market/state activities engaged in social provisioning. Thus heterodox economic theory is a theoretical explanation of the historical process of social provisioning within the context of a capitalist economy.
