ABSTRACT
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The focus of this final chapter is on the testing the core components of Elias’ ‘central theory’ of the Western civilizing process. This is achieved by examining the significant critiques and adaptive advances in the sociology of violence and civilizing processes made by inter-disciplinary scholarship in response to the theoretical and methodological claims and substantive evidence gathered in Elias’ The Civilizing Process (TCP). Parts one and two of the chapter identify and assess the conceptual, methodological and evidential limitations, and explore how these have been addressed in subsequent sociological and criminological scholarship. Part three then focuses on the key advances that have been made in the further development of a classically-informed, substantive sociological criminology of violence and civilizing processes. I argue that an adequate sociological criminology must address violence and its causes as well as the investigation of legally sanctioned criminal acts. Consequently we must include in our enquiries a sustained analysis of organized brutality (including the violence of warfare and colonialism), and its obverse, peace-making and human rights claims-making. This is an expansive criminological gaze shifting attention to both the long-term trajectories of collective human violence and the civilizing constraints developed in response to such violence. The chapter may be read as an essay arguing for the ‘rehabilitation’ of the sociological analysis of long-term civilizational processes in contemporary social science. At the same time, the theoretical task of developing the sociology of civilizing and decivilizing processes for sociological criminology cannot be achieved without substantive empirical work to test it against, and the empirical work only makes sense in the context of theory. Because of this, the chapter also works on another level as a methodological exemplar of how ‘research-theorizing’ in sociological criminology can be carried out. In these ways, the chapter integrates theory, method and evidence. The chapter concludes by drawing together the core themes and provocations of the book as a whole.
