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The work of Norbert Elias
HrrroryofEuropeonIderrr. Printedin
Great
Vol. 3. No. 3. pp. 335-340.1982
0191-65~/8u030335-06103.oo/Iy~
Britain.
0
1982 Pergamon
PressLId.
REVIEWS THE WORK OF NORBERT
ELIAS
On the occasion of Norbert Elias’s eightieth birthday in 1977 the Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift brought out a volume of Essays.’ In the biographical introduction it is pointed out that Elias’s work received very belated recognition. He incorporated his Habififurionsschrift into the twovolumed iiber den Prozess der Zivifisafion which was published in Basle in 1939 and, owing to the circumstances of the time, received scant acknowledgement. The book was reissued in 3968 and Elias composed an extensive introduction in which he propounds his by now familiar line of argument: the figurative and interdependent pattern of social history. Only the first volume was translated into English;2 it contains the new introduction. Both volumes appeared in a French version.3 Elias’s second major work, Die hofische Gesellschufr 4 also had little repercussion. It was translated into French as La Socitte de COU~.~Most of the book had been elaborated before the War and the historical sources quoted make this obvious. Elias had begun his academic career as assistant to Mannheim in Frankfurt. He left Germany in 1935 and came to England where he held several minor posts. He interested himself in group therapy, and was eventually, in 1954, appointed to a lectureship in the Department of Sociology in the University of Leicester. He later wrote, together with a colleague, J. L. Scotson, a sociological monograph, The Established and the Outsider (1965) and in 1970, Was ist Soziologie? translated as What is Sociolology? (1978). Some of Elias’s points of investigation, particularly the whole series of quotations from past accounts of behaviour, manners (eating habits, personal hygiene, etc.) could be seen as a kind of forerunner to the school of the Annales material investigations or perhaps even to such structuralist writings as Barthes’s Mythologies. The main criticisms voiced in the articles concern his lack of proper discussion of other sociologists. It is also remarked that in the history of civilisation he does not take Christianity into account, in fact, stands for an uncompromising and undefended agnosticism. The Festschrift contains a complete bibliography of Elias’s work and lists review articles. iiber den Prozess der Zivilisation Soziogenetische Untersuchungen Wandlungen des Verhaltens in den weltlichen Oberschichten des Abendlandes,6
Elias’s earliest work, is based on a thesis on French court society, completed in 1936. On the basis of German usage he introduces a distinction between Kultur and Zivilisation, the former referring to the things of the mind, art and religion, and the latter to behaviour, manner of living, technical progress. The French definition of civilisation (see the Robert), and much of what Elias writes is concerned with France. includes ‘caracteres, religieux, moraux, esthe. . tiques, scientifiques, techniques’, e.g. ‘czvdisation mediterrantenne’, whereas culture is related to education and erudition. For Elias Zivilisation is superficial. where Kultur indicates depth. In a first historical part Elias compares the 335
336
Reviews
development of France and Germany in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In German-speaking countries the bourgeoisie. selfconsciously patriotic, gained importance, not as a mercantile class but as an intelligentsia; they were distinct from court society. In the second part Elias turns to his chief interest: that is France. In France the bourgeoisie gained political power in the eighteenth century (in fact this dates back to the seventeenth century: did not Saint-Simon deplore the ‘r&gne de vile bourgeoisie’?). Civilit&, in the meaning of social behaviour, took over from courroisie in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, with Erasmus’s De C~y~I~tffte~~orzzrn P~erilizzm (1530). The Renaissance saw the end of feudalism, the rise of bourgeois humanists, and the gradual creation of absolutism, which came into its own in seventeenth-century France. The court became and remained a model for behaviour. Elias lists and uses a number of books on etiquette and manners: the thirteenth-century German Tischzuchten: De institutione l~ovitiarum by Hugh of St Victor (for monastic education); the fifteenth-century German Das mittelalterliche Hausbuch: The Book of Curtasye (c. 1450); the Babees Book (c. 1475); among later ones Castiglione’s If Cortegiano (1.528);’ de Courtin’s Nouveau trait6 de civilitt, (1672); J.-B. de la Salle’s Les Rdgles de la bienskance et de la civilitP chrdtienne (1729), the full title of which shows that it is a school book, li I’usage des t?coEes chr~t~en~es des gaqons. The most interesting part of the first volume are the quotations on social behaviour and taboos. In this whole field Elias has preceded the investigations of the Annales school; in their periodical articles on food and eating habits have been appearing since about the 1950s: on ‘Coffee and cafes in Paris’ (6, 1951), on contemporary food consumption (Barthes, 1961), on ‘The potato in the eighteenth century’ (1970), on ‘The diet in boarding schools in the Ancien Regime’ (1975). This sociological approach to history has never impinged on Eiias who deplores the dichotomy between history and sociology. In the second volume, Elias concentrates on the transformation of society, mainly in France, from feudalism to absolutism. Here he elaborates fully his theory that the civilising process, leading to self discipline of the individual, has been achieved through the example and pressure of court etiquette. This particular aspect forms the subject of the fitifische Geselfschaft. Feudal society was based on a protective defence relationship and on the individual distribution of land. This regional power of limited sovereignty persisted in the Sacrum fmperium; it developed into centralised power in France. Elias bases himself on Calmette’s La SociS ft?odafe (1932), now superseded by Bloch’s La Soci& f~oda~e (1939) and his subsequent writings on medieval social history in the Annaies (1954, 1960). Retrospectively one can see the gradual rise of the great independent houses from the twelfth century onwards in their struggle for power, until first the Capetiens acquired enough territory to centralise government and then the Bourbons established full absolutism. Even in an absolutist regime, so Elias argues, the monarch depends on other groups in society; the nobility, notably in France, became entirely dependent on the king’s graces and favours to pursue their pseudofunction at court. The personal military role of the feudal overlord was replaced by a mercenary army paid for out of taxation, the successor of feudal
Reviews
337
dues. One could argue that the dividing lines were not quite so clear-cut and also that there was a discrepancy between guidelines on behaviour and reality in court circles. With the Revolution there came a shift in the privileged classes, the noblesse de robe and the bourgeoisie took the lead, a process which by then was well on the way. In the concluding chapter Elias brings out the salient points of his social theory. Progress is neither planned nor entirely haphazard. The interdependence of social groups creates a certain order which is neither rational nor irrational. Only in a backward glance can one see the pattern of the civilising process which transforms imposed discipline into self control. Changes in society occur through tension between functional groups and rivalry between men. In the introduction to the 1968 edition Elias favours an undogmatic and empirical approach to sociology. He takes some sociologists to task for what he sees as a theoretical separation between the individual and society, referring specifically to Talcott Parsons. In all fairness to the latter it ought to be said that there is a clear development from The Structure of Social Action (1937) to The Evolution of Societies (1977) where Parsons also underlines the growth of interdependence. Elias regrets that modern sociologists have scrapped the ideas held by such nineteenth-century sociologists as Comte, Spencer, Marx and Hobhouse and have introduced a confusion between sociology as a subject and social ideals. The idea of progress has gone out of favour; a cleavage between the individual as a ‘homo clu~~~us’set against an alien social system has been introduced. For Elias there is no inside and outside, he dismisses personality as such and replaces it by human activity, as he also rejects all value judgements. The civilising process, as he sees it, could qnly happen to un-enclosed beings who become interdependent. To explain his notion of figuration he refers to dance and elsewhere to games; it stands for what other sociologists call social systems. This depersonalised human figure merely changes positions within an increasingly complex situation. Nowhere does Elias argue the case of those who have, scientifically, metaphysically or poetically upheld the inner being of man. In the introduction to Die h~~~che Gesellschaft (1968) Elias accuses historians of merely accumulating facts rather than examining social patterns (which historians? and anyway the point is no longer valid in 1968), and sociologists of using either the concept of absolute freedom or absolute determinism. Elias approaches court society from the angle of objects, and begins with the ~za~~o~7royafe and its layout which reveals the distinction between the official and the private life of the monarch. The h&e/s of the upper nobility reproduced the same structure on a smaller scale; the artisans’ houses are adapted to a more familiar pattern of life. Most of this information comes either from the Encycloptdie or such secondary sources as Taine and the Goncourts, description of court etiquette is culled from Saint-Simon. Perhaps one ought to remember that court ceremonial was largely a public relations act. The submission of the nobility to this elaborate etiquette, Verhofung. is given as the reason for the ‘Romantic’ nostalgia felt in the seventeenth century for life in the country. Elias quotes first from sixteenth-
338
Re1jiert.s
century poets, Ronsard and Du Bellay (who was an exile in Rome). and from L’Astrt?e with its nobles disguised as shepherds and shepherdesses pursuing the ‘simple life’. Some of this may well be true. but Elias entirely neglects the literary conventions of the earlier pastoral novels, Spanish and Italian, and the Virgilian topos. It is hardly a class struggle of the lower nobility against the ‘great’, but the assertion of teen-age love in a long drawn-out badinage, with a clear erotic undercurrent. The monograph on a modern suburban community, referred to as Winston Prava, on the outskirts of a midland town, is based on the application of configurational principles. The authors analyse the interrelationship between the ‘established’ families, or those who consider themselves as such. living in the ‘village’, who think they have a claim to being considered as ‘civilised’. and the ‘outsiders’ who have moved in more recently and live on the estate. But all are trapped in the tensions and conflicts and are thus interdependent not free, since individuals find themselves ‘placed’. One is not altogether convinced of the pattern of interdependence, but it is an interesting sociological study which clearly belongs to the sixties. Lastly Elias has gathered up his ideas, propounded throughout his earlier publications in What is Sociofogy?8 He reiterates his stance against Marx, whose observation on the rise and fall of social strata Elias finds acceptable, but spoilt by evaluating the rising as good and the falling as bad. There is a reappraisal of Comte who, so Elias argues, combined interpretation and observation and wanted to overcome the distinction between the contents of thought and the form of expression. Comte is of course generally considered as having given sociology an autonomous status. For Elias the autonomy of sociology would be based on objective investigations, linked to testable and verifiable theories and factual observation; it must be freed from ‘prescientific’ methods, including metaphysical speculation, and of course from any religious considerations, which are bracketed with myths, if not identified with them. The reader is here faced with bland statements which are neither defined nor explained. In order to give his basic thesis of interrelational figurations a concrete example, Elias uses the metaphor of games. From two players the game can extend to groups, which may disintegrate into splinter groups and create a complex figuration. So it is within society, for which Elias builds a mathematical table of possible relationships according to the number of individuals. That ten individuals arrive at the figure of five thousand one hundred and ten multiple relationships leaves one somewhat perplexed and sceptical. It might be noted in passing that Elias has applied his ‘game’ image to sport.’ In fact Elias reduces the players in a game further by making them into mere pronouns, allowing for first- and third-person perspectives. He thus sees the conflict between the individual and society solved; as they are merged into one configuration. Human interdependencies include all man’s needs, emotional, sexual, as well as political and economic. For Elias sociology is an autonomous field of investigation which would need its own language, dynamic rather than static, as is the existing language. Is social development inevitable? Since Elias rejects any idea of causality
339
Reviews
he has to leave what he calls the figurational flow to the chances of a game and shifting functions. Finally he asks whether tensions and conflicts within a nation and between nations can be brought under conscious control or only be solved by violence, revolution or war. The history of the twentieth century would seem to provide the answer Elias does not give. Elias’s work has received some recognition in France, often in newspaper articles, the most authoritative by Le Roy Ladurie.‘a He acknowledges La Civilisation des moeurs as an important book, but has his reservations: ‘Vieilli, un peu dkpasst quelquefois, diffus de temps ci autre et pas toujours totczlement convaincant.’ Should our present civilisation one day return to
barbarism, this book would remain a witness to the formation of Western man. When Elias was interviewed for Le Nouvel Observateur and asked how he viewed our present ‘civilisation’, he underplayed the recent signs of increasing violence, compared with, presumably, a long-distant past. According to an article in Le Monde” Elias is working on the problem of violence. The most comprehensive review of Elias’s work appeared in Debut,‘* by R. Charlier, who summarises and assesses the main tenets of Elias’s sociology, and notes too that it belongs to the period of Fevre and Panofsky, and is therefore out of date in view of such sociological writings as those of Foucault and Bourdieu. It would seem that the merit and originality of Elias’s work lies in his use of material objects in the analysis of civilisation, before this method was used and developed by the Annafes school. His source material is obviously out of date and he rarely discusses the views of those with whom he disagrees. His work is largely oriented to France, but he brought in comparisons with, mainly, Germany and England. One welcomes his distinction between sociology as a subject of study and sociological ideals and his attempt to overcome the cleavage between the individual and society. One is less happy with his limited view of the human person as a figuration. The historical perspective of civilisation from compulsion to restraint is an interesting and partly acceptable one, but his presentation of the French Ancien Regime is rosier than it actually was; he was somewhat eclectic in the use of source material in order to prove his point. E. T. Dubois Oxford
NOTES 1. Edited by P. Gleichmann, J. Goudsblom and H. Korte. 2. The Civilizing Process, trans. E. Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwells, 1978). 3. La Civilisationdes moeurs and La Dynamique de I’Occident, trans. P. Kamnitzer (Paris: Archives des Sciences Sociales, Calmann-Levy, 1973 and 1975). 4. Neuwied and Berlin: Hermann Luchter, 1969. 5. La SocitW de cow. trans. P. Kamnitzer (1974). 6. Two volumes (Basel, 1939. reprinted 1968).
340
Reviews
Th. Hoby (1561): Le Parfait Cocrrrisan. trans. G. Chapuis (1580). 8. London: Hut~hinson, 1978, trans. S. Menneil and G. Morrissey from the original German Wus ist Soriolugie? (Munich: Juventa. 1970). 9. N. Elias and E. Dunning, ‘Dynamics of sport groups with special reference to football’, British Journal of Sociology XVII(J) 1966. 10. Le Monde (27 December 1973). 11. 10 January 1981. 12. October 1980.
7. The Courtyer, trans.
Great
Vol. 3. No. 3. pp. 335-340.1982
0191-65~/8u030335-06103.oo/Iy~
Britain.
0
1982 Pergamon
PressLId.
REVIEWS THE WORK OF NORBERT
ELIAS
On the occasion of Norbert Elias’s eightieth birthday in 1977 the Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift brought out a volume of Essays.’ In the biographical introduction it is pointed out that Elias’s work received very belated recognition. He incorporated his Habififurionsschrift into the twovolumed iiber den Prozess der Zivifisafion which was published in Basle in 1939 and, owing to the circumstances of the time, received scant acknowledgement. The book was reissued in 3968 and Elias composed an extensive introduction in which he propounds his by now familiar line of argument: the figurative and interdependent pattern of social history. Only the first volume was translated into English;2 it contains the new introduction. Both volumes appeared in a French version.3 Elias’s second major work, Die hofische Gesellschufr 4 also had little repercussion. It was translated into French as La Socitte de COU~.~Most of the book had been elaborated before the War and the historical sources quoted make this obvious. Elias had begun his academic career as assistant to Mannheim in Frankfurt. He left Germany in 1935 and came to England where he held several minor posts. He interested himself in group therapy, and was eventually, in 1954, appointed to a lectureship in the Department of Sociology in the University of Leicester. He later wrote, together with a colleague, J. L. Scotson, a sociological monograph, The Established and the Outsider (1965) and in 1970, Was ist Soziologie? translated as What is Sociolology? (1978). Some of Elias’s points of investigation, particularly the whole series of quotations from past accounts of behaviour, manners (eating habits, personal hygiene, etc.) could be seen as a kind of forerunner to the school of the Annales material investigations or perhaps even to such structuralist writings as Barthes’s Mythologies. The main criticisms voiced in the articles concern his lack of proper discussion of other sociologists. It is also remarked that in the history of civilisation he does not take Christianity into account, in fact, stands for an uncompromising and undefended agnosticism. The Festschrift contains a complete bibliography of Elias’s work and lists review articles. iiber den Prozess der Zivilisation Soziogenetische Untersuchungen Wandlungen des Verhaltens in den weltlichen Oberschichten des Abendlandes,6
Elias’s earliest work, is based on a thesis on French court society, completed in 1936. On the basis of German usage he introduces a distinction between Kultur and Zivilisation, the former referring to the things of the mind, art and religion, and the latter to behaviour, manner of living, technical progress. The French definition of civilisation (see the Robert), and much of what Elias writes is concerned with France. includes ‘caracteres, religieux, moraux, esthe. . tiques, scientifiques, techniques’, e.g. ‘czvdisation mediterrantenne’, whereas culture is related to education and erudition. For Elias Zivilisation is superficial. where Kultur indicates depth. In a first historical part Elias compares the 335
336
Reviews
development of France and Germany in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In German-speaking countries the bourgeoisie. selfconsciously patriotic, gained importance, not as a mercantile class but as an intelligentsia; they were distinct from court society. In the second part Elias turns to his chief interest: that is France. In France the bourgeoisie gained political power in the eighteenth century (in fact this dates back to the seventeenth century: did not Saint-Simon deplore the ‘r&gne de vile bourgeoisie’?). Civilit&, in the meaning of social behaviour, took over from courroisie in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, with Erasmus’s De C~y~I~tffte~~orzzrn P~erilizzm (1530). The Renaissance saw the end of feudalism, the rise of bourgeois humanists, and the gradual creation of absolutism, which came into its own in seventeenth-century France. The court became and remained a model for behaviour. Elias lists and uses a number of books on etiquette and manners: the thirteenth-century German Tischzuchten: De institutione l~ovitiarum by Hugh of St Victor (for monastic education); the fifteenth-century German Das mittelalterliche Hausbuch: The Book of Curtasye (c. 1450); the Babees Book (c. 1475); among later ones Castiglione’s If Cortegiano (1.528);’ de Courtin’s Nouveau trait6 de civilitt, (1672); J.-B. de la Salle’s Les Rdgles de la bienskance et de la civilitP chrdtienne (1729), the full title of which shows that it is a school book, li I’usage des t?coEes chr~t~en~es des gaqons. The most interesting part of the first volume are the quotations on social behaviour and taboos. In this whole field Elias has preceded the investigations of the Annales school; in their periodical articles on food and eating habits have been appearing since about the 1950s: on ‘Coffee and cafes in Paris’ (6, 1951), on contemporary food consumption (Barthes, 1961), on ‘The potato in the eighteenth century’ (1970), on ‘The diet in boarding schools in the Ancien Regime’ (1975). This sociological approach to history has never impinged on Eiias who deplores the dichotomy between history and sociology. In the second volume, Elias concentrates on the transformation of society, mainly in France, from feudalism to absolutism. Here he elaborates fully his theory that the civilising process, leading to self discipline of the individual, has been achieved through the example and pressure of court etiquette. This particular aspect forms the subject of the fitifische Geselfschaft. Feudal society was based on a protective defence relationship and on the individual distribution of land. This regional power of limited sovereignty persisted in the Sacrum fmperium; it developed into centralised power in France. Elias bases himself on Calmette’s La SociS ft?odafe (1932), now superseded by Bloch’s La Soci& f~oda~e (1939) and his subsequent writings on medieval social history in the Annaies (1954, 1960). Retrospectively one can see the gradual rise of the great independent houses from the twelfth century onwards in their struggle for power, until first the Capetiens acquired enough territory to centralise government and then the Bourbons established full absolutism. Even in an absolutist regime, so Elias argues, the monarch depends on other groups in society; the nobility, notably in France, became entirely dependent on the king’s graces and favours to pursue their pseudofunction at court. The personal military role of the feudal overlord was replaced by a mercenary army paid for out of taxation, the successor of feudal
Reviews
337
dues. One could argue that the dividing lines were not quite so clear-cut and also that there was a discrepancy between guidelines on behaviour and reality in court circles. With the Revolution there came a shift in the privileged classes, the noblesse de robe and the bourgeoisie took the lead, a process which by then was well on the way. In the concluding chapter Elias brings out the salient points of his social theory. Progress is neither planned nor entirely haphazard. The interdependence of social groups creates a certain order which is neither rational nor irrational. Only in a backward glance can one see the pattern of the civilising process which transforms imposed discipline into self control. Changes in society occur through tension between functional groups and rivalry between men. In the introduction to the 1968 edition Elias favours an undogmatic and empirical approach to sociology. He takes some sociologists to task for what he sees as a theoretical separation between the individual and society, referring specifically to Talcott Parsons. In all fairness to the latter it ought to be said that there is a clear development from The Structure of Social Action (1937) to The Evolution of Societies (1977) where Parsons also underlines the growth of interdependence. Elias regrets that modern sociologists have scrapped the ideas held by such nineteenth-century sociologists as Comte, Spencer, Marx and Hobhouse and have introduced a confusion between sociology as a subject and social ideals. The idea of progress has gone out of favour; a cleavage between the individual as a ‘homo clu~~~us’set against an alien social system has been introduced. For Elias there is no inside and outside, he dismisses personality as such and replaces it by human activity, as he also rejects all value judgements. The civilising process, as he sees it, could qnly happen to un-enclosed beings who become interdependent. To explain his notion of figuration he refers to dance and elsewhere to games; it stands for what other sociologists call social systems. This depersonalised human figure merely changes positions within an increasingly complex situation. Nowhere does Elias argue the case of those who have, scientifically, metaphysically or poetically upheld the inner being of man. In the introduction to Die h~~~che Gesellschaft (1968) Elias accuses historians of merely accumulating facts rather than examining social patterns (which historians? and anyway the point is no longer valid in 1968), and sociologists of using either the concept of absolute freedom or absolute determinism. Elias approaches court society from the angle of objects, and begins with the ~za~~o~7royafe and its layout which reveals the distinction between the official and the private life of the monarch. The h&e/s of the upper nobility reproduced the same structure on a smaller scale; the artisans’ houses are adapted to a more familiar pattern of life. Most of this information comes either from the Encycloptdie or such secondary sources as Taine and the Goncourts, description of court etiquette is culled from Saint-Simon. Perhaps one ought to remember that court ceremonial was largely a public relations act. The submission of the nobility to this elaborate etiquette, Verhofung. is given as the reason for the ‘Romantic’ nostalgia felt in the seventeenth century for life in the country. Elias quotes first from sixteenth-
338
Re1jiert.s
century poets, Ronsard and Du Bellay (who was an exile in Rome). and from L’Astrt?e with its nobles disguised as shepherds and shepherdesses pursuing the ‘simple life’. Some of this may well be true. but Elias entirely neglects the literary conventions of the earlier pastoral novels, Spanish and Italian, and the Virgilian topos. It is hardly a class struggle of the lower nobility against the ‘great’, but the assertion of teen-age love in a long drawn-out badinage, with a clear erotic undercurrent. The monograph on a modern suburban community, referred to as Winston Prava, on the outskirts of a midland town, is based on the application of configurational principles. The authors analyse the interrelationship between the ‘established’ families, or those who consider themselves as such. living in the ‘village’, who think they have a claim to being considered as ‘civilised’. and the ‘outsiders’ who have moved in more recently and live on the estate. But all are trapped in the tensions and conflicts and are thus interdependent not free, since individuals find themselves ‘placed’. One is not altogether convinced of the pattern of interdependence, but it is an interesting sociological study which clearly belongs to the sixties. Lastly Elias has gathered up his ideas, propounded throughout his earlier publications in What is Sociofogy?8 He reiterates his stance against Marx, whose observation on the rise and fall of social strata Elias finds acceptable, but spoilt by evaluating the rising as good and the falling as bad. There is a reappraisal of Comte who, so Elias argues, combined interpretation and observation and wanted to overcome the distinction between the contents of thought and the form of expression. Comte is of course generally considered as having given sociology an autonomous status. For Elias the autonomy of sociology would be based on objective investigations, linked to testable and verifiable theories and factual observation; it must be freed from ‘prescientific’ methods, including metaphysical speculation, and of course from any religious considerations, which are bracketed with myths, if not identified with them. The reader is here faced with bland statements which are neither defined nor explained. In order to give his basic thesis of interrelational figurations a concrete example, Elias uses the metaphor of games. From two players the game can extend to groups, which may disintegrate into splinter groups and create a complex figuration. So it is within society, for which Elias builds a mathematical table of possible relationships according to the number of individuals. That ten individuals arrive at the figure of five thousand one hundred and ten multiple relationships leaves one somewhat perplexed and sceptical. It might be noted in passing that Elias has applied his ‘game’ image to sport.’ In fact Elias reduces the players in a game further by making them into mere pronouns, allowing for first- and third-person perspectives. He thus sees the conflict between the individual and society solved; as they are merged into one configuration. Human interdependencies include all man’s needs, emotional, sexual, as well as political and economic. For Elias sociology is an autonomous field of investigation which would need its own language, dynamic rather than static, as is the existing language. Is social development inevitable? Since Elias rejects any idea of causality
339
Reviews
he has to leave what he calls the figurational flow to the chances of a game and shifting functions. Finally he asks whether tensions and conflicts within a nation and between nations can be brought under conscious control or only be solved by violence, revolution or war. The history of the twentieth century would seem to provide the answer Elias does not give. Elias’s work has received some recognition in France, often in newspaper articles, the most authoritative by Le Roy Ladurie.‘a He acknowledges La Civilisation des moeurs as an important book, but has his reservations: ‘Vieilli, un peu dkpasst quelquefois, diffus de temps ci autre et pas toujours totczlement convaincant.’ Should our present civilisation one day return to
barbarism, this book would remain a witness to the formation of Western man. When Elias was interviewed for Le Nouvel Observateur and asked how he viewed our present ‘civilisation’, he underplayed the recent signs of increasing violence, compared with, presumably, a long-distant past. According to an article in Le Monde” Elias is working on the problem of violence. The most comprehensive review of Elias’s work appeared in Debut,‘* by R. Charlier, who summarises and assesses the main tenets of Elias’s sociology, and notes too that it belongs to the period of Fevre and Panofsky, and is therefore out of date in view of such sociological writings as those of Foucault and Bourdieu. It would seem that the merit and originality of Elias’s work lies in his use of material objects in the analysis of civilisation, before this method was used and developed by the Annafes school. His source material is obviously out of date and he rarely discusses the views of those with whom he disagrees. His work is largely oriented to France, but he brought in comparisons with, mainly, Germany and England. One welcomes his distinction between sociology as a subject of study and sociological ideals and his attempt to overcome the cleavage between the individual and society. One is less happy with his limited view of the human person as a figuration. The historical perspective of civilisation from compulsion to restraint is an interesting and partly acceptable one, but his presentation of the French Ancien Regime is rosier than it actually was; he was somewhat eclectic in the use of source material in order to prove his point. E. T. Dubois Oxford
NOTES 1. Edited by P. Gleichmann, J. Goudsblom and H. Korte. 2. The Civilizing Process, trans. E. Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwells, 1978). 3. La Civilisationdes moeurs and La Dynamique de I’Occident, trans. P. Kamnitzer (Paris: Archives des Sciences Sociales, Calmann-Levy, 1973 and 1975). 4. Neuwied and Berlin: Hermann Luchter, 1969. 5. La SocitW de cow. trans. P. Kamnitzer (1974). 6. Two volumes (Basel, 1939. reprinted 1968).
340
Reviews
Th. Hoby (1561): Le Parfait Cocrrrisan. trans. G. Chapuis (1580). 8. London: Hut~hinson, 1978, trans. S. Menneil and G. Morrissey from the original German Wus ist Soriolugie? (Munich: Juventa. 1970). 9. N. Elias and E. Dunning, ‘Dynamics of sport groups with special reference to football’, British Journal of Sociology XVII(J) 1966. 10. Le Monde (27 December 1973). 11. 10 January 1981. 12. October 1980.
7. The Courtyer, trans.