Abstract
Arnason’s long paper is simultaneously a refined reconstruction of the meanings and roles of the concept ‘civilisation’ in classical social theory (especially Durkheim and the Durkheimian strand of social thought including M. Mauss, M. Granet and Lévi-Strauss, as well as Marx’s and Max Weber’s writings); an exploration of their treatment of the plurality of civilisations and civilising processes; a compact interpretation and critique of Elias’s theory; and an attempt to reformulate the marginalised project of a historical sociology, including an outline and road-map for the essential research questions and research work to be taken on under these headings. In this context, Elias has to be read as a pioneering key figure and as a classic and early example of the deconstruction of the traditional discourse on the subject matter of sociology and social theory. Arnason is particularly interested in, and (like McNeill) places emphasis on, the role of cultural images and worldviews (last not least the religious ones) in the diversification, interaction and development of civilisations—as compared with phenomena of power, control or constraint. Last but not least, the terms civilisation and civilisations refer to socio-historical forces which extend, in space and time, beyond the units which are usually termed ‘nation’, ‘state’ or ‘society’. Among other things, in these respects his paper shows that the term ‘civilisation’ and the conflicts or tensions between its synchronic/static and processual/dynamic meanings, as well as between universalistic versus particularistic uses of these terms, or between Zivilisation and Kultur point to the most central problems of social theory and theoretical sociology—and to themes usually relegated to their periphery.
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Notes
- 1.
Alain Touraine, Le Retour de l’acteur (Paris: Fayard, 1984). For Touraine, the Parsonian system is the most consistent and detailed version of the dominant image.
- 2.
Our analysis is confined to classical social theory and subsequent developments; Comte’s idea of sociology and his notion of civilisation, much closer to eighteenth-century precursors, is beyond the scope of this paper. Elias’s partial rehabilitation of Comtean ideas is only understandable in the light of his critique of Marx, Weber and Durkheim. [See Elias, chapter 1 in What is Sociology?—eds.].
- 3.
Claude Lefort, ‘Permanence du Theologico-politique?’, Le temps de la reflexion, II (Paris, 1981), pp. 13–60.
- 4.
The interpretation proposed here draws mainly on the following works by Norbert Elias: The Civilizing Process, vol. 1, The History of Manners (New York: Urizen, 1978); vol. 2, State Formation and Civilization (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982) [On the Process of Civilisation (Dublin: UCD Press, 2012—Collected Works, vol. 3)]; Die höfische Gesellschaft (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1970) [The Court Society (Dublin: UCD Press, 2006—Collected Works, vol.2)]; Was ist Soziologie? (München: Juventa, 1970) [What is Sociology? (Dublin: UCD Press, 2012—Collected Works, vol. 5)]; ‘Sociology of Knowledge: New Perspectives’, Sociology (1971), pp. 149–68 and 355–70 [in Essays I: On the Sociology of Knowledge and the Sciences (Dublin: UCD Press, 2009—Collected Works, vol. 14), pp. 1–41]; ‘Zur Grundlegung einer Theorie sozialer Prozesse’, Zeitschrift für Soziologie 6: 2 (1977), pp. 127–49 [in Essays III: On Sociology and the Humanities (Dublin: UCD Press, 2009—Collected Works, vol. 16), pp. 9–39]; ‘Über die Zeit’, Merkur 411 (1982), рр. 841–56 and 412 (1982), pp. 998–1016 [An Essay on Time (Dublin: UCD Press, 2007—vol. 9)]; ‘Der Rückzug der Soziologen auf die Gegenwart’, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie and Sozialpsychologie 35 (1983), рр. 29–40 [‘The retreat of sociologists into the present’, in Essays III, pp. 107–26]; The Established and the Outsiders (London: Frank Cass, 1965), with J. L. Scotson [enlarged edn., Dublin, UCD Press, 2008—Collected Works, vol. 4]. See also Johan Goudblom, Sociology in the Balance (Oxford; Blackwell, 1977); and Artur Bogner, Macht und Herrschaft unter zivilisationstheoretischer Perspektive (unpublished ms, Bielefeld, 1981).
- 5.
Elías, Was ist Sociologie?, p. 173 [What is Sociology?, pp. 151–2].
- 6.
Elias, ‘Sociology of Knowledge: New Perspectives’, p. 23.
- 7.
Elias, Was ist Sociologie?, p. 98 [What is Sociology?, p. 89].
- 8.
See for example Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1984).—eds.
- 9.
Elias, Was ist Sociologie?, p. 162 [What is Sociology?, p. 142].
- 10.
Elias’s most extensive discussion of this is in the 1968 Postscript to Process of Civilisation, pp. 512–26.—eds.
- 11.
Hans Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979).
- 12.
Elias, Was ist Sociologie?, p. 137 [What is Sociology?, p. 122].
- 13.
The concluding remarks of the essay on time (Über die Zeit) are particularly interesting. After reducing the experience and interpretation of time to a practical foundation, the measurement and coordination of concrete processes, Elias tries to explain why this primary meaning of temporality is overlaid and distorted by the ‘substantialising’ interpretations that have [marked] philosophical theories of time. His answer is that the idea of time per se as an unchanging and universal structure, encompassing all specific processes, can only be understood as the expression of a deep-seated and tenacious human need: the quest for a permanent reality as a counter-weight to human finitude and transitoriness. The conception of time as the unchanging background of change is thus ultimately rooted in the same way of thinking as theological notions of eternity. [See Elias, An Essay on Time; although he wrote the book in English, it was first published in Dutch translation (1974–5), then in German in 1984, about the time of the conference, and the first English edition appeared in 1992.—eds.].
- 14.
Elias, Process of Civilisation, p. 260. In the original German version (Über den Prozess der Zivilisation, Bd.2, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977, p. 72), a stronger formulation is used: ‘Umbildung des Abendlandes zu einer als Ganzes arbeitenden Gesellschaft’.
- 15.
Ibid., p. 466.
- 16.
Ibid., p. 253.
- 17.
Ibid., p. 261.
- 18.
As far as we can judge from Elias’s brief excursus on the classical world (ibid., pp. 258–63), he seems both to overestimate the role of slavery (this argument generalises some features of the late Roman republic) and to rely on questionable analogies with a capitalist economy to explain its consequences.
- 19.
For a succinct formulation of this distinction, see Aram A. Yengoyan, ‘Cultural forms and a theory of constraints’, in A.L. Becker and A.A. Yengoyan, The Imagination of Reality: Essays in Southeast Asian Coherence Systems (Norwood, NJ: ABLEX, 1979), pp. 325–30; this article draws on the work of Clifford Geertz.
- 20.
Franz Borkenau, End and Beginning: On the Generations of Cultures and the Origins of the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), p. 385.
- 21.
The societal consequences of the ‘technological boom’, as Gimpel calls it, between the tenth and the thirteenth century are certainly not easy to trace, but various historians have put forward suggestive hypotheses; see particularly Lynn White, Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962); Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (New York, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1976); William McNeill, Venice: The Hinge of Europe, 1081–1797 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1974), and The Shape of European History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974).
- 22.
See Maurice Lombard, The Golden Age of Islam (Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing, 1975), and Espaces et réseaux du haut moyen âge (Paris: Mouton, 1972). Lombard’s position is best summed up in the following statement from the latter book (p. 44): ‘Ainsi nait et se développe dans l’Occident barbare une tendance qu’il ne portait pas en lui-même: éveil commercial, gonflement démographique, développement urbain, économie en progrès. L’origine doit en être cherchée dans le monde musulman.’ (Italics mine, JPA).
- 23.
Elias, Was ist Sociologie?, p. 21 [What is Sociology?, pp. 18–19.] In English, Elias uses various terms in various places, but as often as not ‘reality congruence’ which, in Involvement and Detachment (Dublin: UCD Press, 2007 [Collected Works, vol. 8]), p. 135, he defines in terms of its ‘cognitive value’.—eds.
- 24.
Elias, Process of Civilisation, р. 521.
- 25.
Hans Blumenberg, Die Genesis der kopernikanischen Welt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975); see p. 416: ‘in the end, Copernicus triumphed not so much over his opponents as through them’. In other words, the most important aspect of the Copernican revolution was the conflict of interpretations which it generated. [English translation by Robert M. Wallace, The Genesis of the Copernican World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987)—eds].
- 26.
Elias seems to have recognised this gap: The Symbol Theory was published in journal articles in 1989, and posthumously as a book in 1991, and finally, including some passages on which he was working in the days before he died, as volume 13 of the Collected Works on 2011.—eds.
- 27.
Theodor Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10/2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), p. 752: ‘The key contribution of the subject to knowledge is experience, not form’; and H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Sheed & Ward, 1975), р. 319: ‘The dialectic of experience has its own fulfilment not in definitive knowledge, but in that openness to experience that is encouraged by experience itself’.
- 28.
The shift from homo clausus to homines aperti is relevant to a further issue: the need for a more adequate account of the contacts, exchanges and fusions of different civilisations. The predominance of the closed image of the human being has obviously impeded the recognition and understanding of such processes. William McNeill’s critique of Elias (formulated in discussions at the Bielefeld conference) focuses on this problem; as he sees it, neither the original analysis of the civilising process nor later ventures into other areas have done justice to the phenomena of inter-civilizational contacts (including both cultural borrowing and the more autonomous initiatives stimulated by contact). But on closer examination, the two approaches seem easy to reconcile. McNeill stresses the diffusion of inventions that enhance power or wealth and the role of civilizational centres that achieve major breakthroughs in this respect. Both these criteria of progress can be interpreted in terms of Elias’s ‘basic controls’, and there is nothing in the latter model that would preclude a stronger emphasis on the interaction between civilisations. On the other hand, the radical transformations of religious consciousness—or, in more general terms, of world views—that McNeill associates with intensified contacts between cultures and the need to account for a more variegated experience obviously involve what Elias calls ‘means of orientation’, in contrast to the means of control in the more specific sense. A study of intercultural encounters and their repercussions would thus be particularly useful for the clarification of this distinction.
- 29.
Elias, Process of Civilisation, pp. 262–3.
- 30.
Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
- 31.
Elias, Process of Civilisation, p. 310.
- 32.
Fernand Braudel, Civilisation and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. I, The structures of everyday life: the limits of the Possible (London: Collins, 1981). A more radical—and much more speculative—variation on the same theme is Immanuel Wallerstein’s suggestion that ‘the creation of historical capitalism as a social system dramatically reversed a trend that the upper strata (that is, the ruling classes of feudal Europe, J.P.A.) feared, and established in its place one that served their interests even better’ (Historical Capitalism (London; Verso, 1983), p. 43).
- 33.
Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime (London: Croom Helm, 1981).
- 34.
See Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1987).
- 35.
Appendix XVI in Elias, Process of Civilisation, pp. 585–6 (originally a long footnote to p. 267) contains more allusions to the changing image of power in an increasingly complex society. Elaborating on his statement that ‘the law is a function and symbol of the social structure or—what comes to the same thing—the balance of social power’, Elias argues that as the ‘direct visibility’ of power is replaced by more abstract networks of interdependence, ‘A so-called general law—that is, a law applicable and valid equally over the whole area for all the people within it’ must develop. However, it is hard to see how the intrinsic dynamics of a more impersonal power structure could account for the whole range of metamorphoses and polarisations characteristic of the modern era. Elias’s model is perhaps capable of explaining the secular trend of bureaucratisation as well as the interplay of centralising and diffusive tendencies within this process, but not—to mention only the most obvious problem—the contrast between democratic and totalitarian transformations of the relationship between power and society. Nor is the functional adjustment of law to a more complex ‘social balance of power’ a sufficient reason for the tension between normative grounding and purposive rationalisation in the development of modern legal structures.
- 36.
For Claude Lefort’s position, see particularly, Les formes de l’histoire: essais d’anthropologie politique (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), and L’invention democratique (Paris: Fayard, 1981).
- 37.
Braudel, Civilisation materielle, economie et capitalisme, 3 vols (Paris: Armand Colin, 1979), vol. I, pp. 537–48. [English translation, Civilization and Capitalism, 3 vols (London: Collins, 1981–84)—eds.].
- 38.
Christopher Dawson, Understanding Europe (London: Sheed & Ward, 1953), p. 43.
- 39.
Georges Duby, Le Temps des cathédrales: l’art et la société 980–1420 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), pp. 296–327. [English translation, The Age of Cathedrals (London: Croom Helm, 1981)—eds.].
- 40.
Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 358.
- 41.
Elias’s later book on German nationalism and the German national habitus was first published in the same year as Arnason’s paper (1989). See Norbert Elias, Studies on the Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Dublin: UCD Press, 2013 [Collected Works, vol. 11]).—eds.
- 42.
See particularly Elias, Process of Civilisation, p. 267.
- 43.
See Ernest Gellner, ‘Nationalism’, Theory and Society, 10: 6 (1981), рр. 753–76, for a succinct and up-to-date analysis of nationalism from this point. of view.
- 44.
Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (London: Macmillan, 1981).
- 45.
See the recent and important work by John A. Armstrong, Nations Before Nationalism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1982).
- 46.
The most representative recent work on these problems is Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Cambridge: Polity, 1985).
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Arnason, J.P. (2022). Civilisation, Culture and Power: Reflections on Norbert Elias’s Genealogy of the West. In: Bogner, A., Mennell, S. (eds) Civilisations, Civilising Processes and Modernity – A Debate. Palgrave Studies on Norbert Elias. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80379-7_12
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