Violence, Symbolic Violence and the Decivilizing Process: Approaches from Marx, Elias and Bourdieu

Abstract

Classical sociologists, notably Marx—but also Weber, argued that a vital key to the transition from feudalism to capitalism was the State’s monopolization of violence.

The distinctive French route to capitalism has continued to be a major issue in Marxist and historical sociological discussion, notably in the Brenner (Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe: The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism. In The Brenner Debate, ed. T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin, 10–63, 213–327, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) and Davidson (How Revolutionary were the Bourgeois Revolutions? Chicago: Haymarket, 2012) debates. Elias assessed the nature of such a State monopoly and its impact on the “civilizing process,” combining a Marxist with a Freudian model to address the consequences of repressing violent and sexual drives. The civilizing process, for Elias, was developed particularly by the seventeenth-century court aristocracy, transmitted to the urban bourgeoisie and then ultimately to the popular classes. Bourdieu, in his turn, addressed such an Eliasian “civilizing process” in various works, whilst emphasizing not just the State monopoly of violent power but also of symbolic power. Further, in his development of Marx’s and Elias’s argument, he sheds light on the comparatively late extension in France of the capitalist market, notably into provincial peasant worlds (cf. The Bachelors’ Ball (2008), On the State. Lectures at the College de France, 1989–1992. Translated by D. Fernbach. Cambridge: Polity, 2014).

We argue in this chapter that there are certain key affinities between Marx, Elias and Bourdieu in their relational approaches and conceptual instruments. Not the least important amongst such socio-historical concepts is that of “decivilizing periods” or “counter-civilizing spurts.” These are Elias’s terms for periods which reverse the earlier direction of pacification and witness a turn to barbarism, as typified in Marx’s classical discussion of Louis-Napoleon in The Eighteenth Brumaire. Elias examines the outbreak of one such epoch-making decivilizing period in his theoretically rich analysis of Nazism in The Germans, in which he draws attention to the National Socialist Party’s use of both ideology and utopia. Bourdieu addresses particularly the intellectual legitimation for Nazism, exemplifying this in Martin Heidegger’s symbolic revolution within the philosophical field. But he also introduces the concept of “decivilizing periods” more broadly, in particular via the withdrawal of the “left hand” of the French State, following the end of paternalistic “planification” and the retraction of the Welfare State, post-1968. In this vein, and drawing on Marx, Bourdieu and Elias, Wacquant has fruitfully made the case for conceptualizing the high rates of homicide in contemporary America as a similar “decivilizing spurt,” offering an explanation particularly in terms of the "desertification" of the State.

A version of this chapter has appeared in German, see Fowler (2008): the present version is substantially revised.