The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations [Paperback]

Norbert Elias (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 21, 2000 | ISBN-10: 0631221611 | ISBN-13: 978-0631221616 | Edition: Revised

The Civilizing Process stands out as Norbert Elias' greatest work, tracing the "civilizing" of manners and personality in Western Europe since the late Middle Ages by demonstrating how the formation of states and the monopolization of power within them changed Western society forever.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Without doubt the most important piece of historical sociology since Max Weber." Richard Sennett, London School of Economics. <!--end-->

"A modern classic of the first order." Lewis Coser.

"Elias has all the boldness and sureness of touch of the old masters, of whom he is perhaps the last. Reading his pages one again and again makes the mental note that this or that point is worthy of a Max Weber ... One realises from a book like this that serious sociology must remain dependent on the insightful interpretation of history of just the kind that Elias provides." Bryan Wilson.

"The most remarkable recent attempt to contain the social and the individual within a unified scheme of sociological analysis." Philip Abrams

"The Civilizing Process is remarkable: eclectic, insightful and constantly surprising." Times Higher Education Supplement

Language Notes

Text: English, German (translation) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 592 pages
• Publisher: Blackwell Publishing; Revised edition (July 21, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0631221611
• ISBN-13: 978-0631221616
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.2 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #106,770 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #74 in Books > History > Historical Study > Civilization & Culture
  • #87 in Books > Education & Reference > Foreign Language Nonfiction > German

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Warriors Into Functionaries: Tamed Nobility & the State, October 23, 2001

By 

ChairmanLuedtke "SchumpeterWasRight" (Princeton, NJ, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Paperback)

Norbert Elais' The Civilizing Process is an explanation of the rise of the modern nation-state, and the process by which state formation engendered changes in the psyches and day-to-day manners of modern citizens. In short, his argument is that the functional complexity of post-medieval Europe went hand-in-hand with a sublimation of man's baser instincts. Upon first glance, the reader immediately wonders about the relevance of findings such as "in medieval society people generally blew their noses into their hands" (126). The dominant explanations for the rise of the modern nation-state have usually been based in economics (Marx, Polanyi, Moore, North & Thomas) and not in the sort of etiquette, manners and social customs that are the key operating concepts in Elias' work. However, Elias makes a convincing case that such customs deserve predominant explanatory weight, being vehicles of social control that lay the psychological groundwork for the nation-state. Such a finding helps political scientists answer the persistent question of why Western political institutions fail when placed into unfamiliar Third-World social environments. Most analysts have chalked this up to unequal economic development, but Elias would probably favor an argument emphasizing the lack of a "civilizing" process in Third-World societies. Such an explanation--like Putnam's reasoning in revealing Southern Italy's "civic culture" to be bankrupt--is admittedly open to criticism of essentialism, cultural determinism, and other postmodern shortcomings, but at a minimum, it certainly alerts us to pertinent, non-economic variables at work in the development-democracy relationship.

Elias selects three comparative cases, France, England and Germany, and performs a content analysis of medieval texts on manners, etiquette, and the transformation of the nobility from warriors into courtiers. These texts are the empirical evidence offered for his key variable, pan-European courtly manners delineated by social structure (classes and "monopolies" of power). The other key variable (it's rather unclear which one is "dependent" on the other) is the rise of the nation-state, which was brought about by an exogenous variable (population growth) as well as two intervening factors: 1) the decline of the nobility relative to national absolutism (both economically and militarily); and 2) the rise of a money economy. Elias shows how centrifugal forces in these societies (mainly the warrior-noble class) resisted the "integration" of absolutism/nationhood, but that these forces in the end were overcome by economics coupled with the centripetal social groundwork of pan-European "civilite" and social customs, leading to an increasingly complex interweaving of social functions. "Society was `in transition' . . . `Simplicity' . . . had been lost. People saw things with more differentiation" (61). "Social control was becoming more binding . . . with the structural transformation of society . . . a change slowly came about: the compulsion to check one's own behaviour" (70).

The near totality of Elias' evidence is qualitative, often selected from medieval writings and secondhand observations. Although he means to proceed inductively from these facts, Elias often reads like a deductive historian, especially when positing lawlike generalizations such as "the more or less sudden emergence of words within languages nearly always points to changes in the lives of people themselves, particularly when the new concepts are destined to become as central and long-lived as these" (48). In fact, his entire thesis can be summarized with another of his apparently deductive axioms: "The growth of units of integration and rule is always at the same time an expression of structural changes in society, that is to say, in human relationships" (254). Marxists, of course, would say that such social changes are themselves dependent upon changes in the relations of production, but Elias gives equal weight to social causes as to economic ones. The economy is by no means neglected in his analysis, since he gives currency, demand for property, and population growth prime explanatory roles in his causal process (despite the fact that there is no quantitative evidence given for these socioeconomic correlations, unlike the analysis of the same topics by North & Thomas). However, Marxists would surely have a fit over Elias' assertion that the civilizing process leads to a wholesale leveling of distinctions between social classes (430), as well as his claim that the modern state arose out of a virtual stalemate between the bourgeois and the nobility (327).

On the topic of state-society relations, Elias makes the provocative argument that for the past 300 years, "monopoly rulers" (including, but not limited to, absolutist kings) are mere functionaries, with the real power resting in the hands of their "subjects" (271). "Control of the centralized institutions themselves is so dispersed that it is difficult to discern clearly who are the rulers and who are the ruled" (315). Of course, under an instable balance of power (including today's Third World) the playing field is presumably up for grabs between different classes and parts of the state, but in a developed society, Elias would argue that the internalization of "civilized" norms means that the "strong" state, while resting on a cohesive social order, is not as autonomous from social forces as one might think.

28 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Elias organizes one's thinking about Western Civilization., July 9, 1998

By 

Jack Kessler - See all my reviews

This review is from: Civilizing Process (Paperback)

This is one of the most important books I have ever read. Norbert Elias ingeniously and persuasively provides a way to understand the evolution of Western societies and personalities from the Twelfth Century to our own time.

He provides an organizing principle for understanding how and why life and people were different in different periods of Western history. Until I read Elias I could only guess at what life was like in earlier eras by inferring from social, economic, and technical conditions. Elias provides a clear and reasonable way to look much closer.

I strongly recommend this book.

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I wonder if its complete, December 26, 2006

By 

D. Schotman "D.E.B. Schotman" (Dublin, Ireland) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Paperback)

Both the German & the Dutch version of this work are much longer and stretch about 850 pages. This one is only 600 pages long, so I wonder where the other 250 are.

Apart from that its one of the most important books I think there ever have been published by any Sociologist. On of the few that really stands on par with Weber, Durkheim & Habermas (if you concider him as a sociologist).

I really want to read the rest also.