What do you think?
Rate this book
Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation 1.
This is Volume 1 of Elias's work The Civilizing Process . The History of Manners examines the links between the social graces and social control, concentrating on changes in social norms and individual perceptions and behavior.
502 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1939
48 people are currently reading
1478 people want to read
About the author
Norbert Elias
146 books187 followersNorbert Elias was a German-Jewish sociologist who later became a British citizen, though he is often referred to as a Dutch thinker, and made his home in Amsterdam in his latter years.
Elias's theory focused on the relationship between power, behavior, emotion, and knowledge over time. He significantly shaped what is called process or figurational sociology. Due to historical circumstances, Elias had long remained a marginal author, until being rediscovered by a new generation of scholars in the 1970s, when he eventually became one of the most influential sociologists in the history of the field.
(Some text from Wikipedia licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License)
Elias's theory focused on the relationship between power, behavior, emotion, and knowledge over time. He significantly shaped what is called process or figurational sociology. Due to historical circumstances, Elias had long remained a marginal author, until being rediscovered by a new generation of scholars in the 1970s, when he eventually became one of the most influential sociologists in the history of the field.
(Some text from Wikipedia licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License)
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
July 5, 2015
A great book, easy to read, though parts (for instance the first section contrasting the German concept of Kultur with the French concept of civilization) were dealing with unfamiliar questions which are perhaps dated. Keep in mind, this was written in the 1930s and so has a different tone, and different areas of emphasis (and blank spots) than one might expect of more recent work. However, at least in terms of keeping it easy to read for someone with no academic background in sociology, the tone at least was a plus for me.
Elias weaves a tight narrative, of modern west-european manners (personal etiquette – ranging from what cutlery to eat what food with, to how to sleep in a bed with a stranger, to how to speak to people, to where to take a dump) having a genealogy that can be traced back to court society in France in the late Middle Ages. (Elias traces things back further than that, to the early medieval period, however most of his focus is on the key five hundred years beginning in the 15th century).
During this period, in a variety of areas of everyday life, Elias shows how there was a clear pattern of personal behaviour becoming more repressed, of people becoming more physically uptight, and more alienated from their bodily functions and spontaneous urges. Along with this, a new affective regime came into play, giving far more importance to feelings of being "sensitive", "embarrassed" and "ashamed".
In terms of the positive, i want to say that i really enjoyed this book, and am in fact surprised that it has not been checked out more by those rads into things like anti-civ and primitivism, as Elias's framework integrates personal habits with political structures and with the rise of the very concept of "civilization", in a convincing (if incomplete) manner. At its best, i could see The History of Manners being read productively alongside Wilhelm Reich or even Alice Miller, and certainly alongside folks writing about the body with a feminist queer anticolonial approach. Certainly, in terms of understanding the past thousand years of cultural change in the colonizing world, i think Elias could serve as a backgrounder to Foucault, or to Aries, or to more radical writers like Federici.
In terms of the negative, Elias's argument is jarringly flat and undynamic, in large part i think because of his top-down optic. Consider this passage, in which he very much sums up his overall argument:
“This délicatesse, this sensibility and a highly-developed feeling for the ‘embarrassing’, is at first all a distinguishing feature of small courtly circles, then of court society as a whole. This applies to language in exactly the same way as to eating habits. [...] In conjunction with a very specific social situation, the feelings and affects are first transformed in the upper class, and the structure of society as a whole permits this changed affect standard to spread slowly throughout society.” (115
What is put forth is an internal process which spreads, including more and more people within its field of influence, but not in any important way being impacted or changing through this process of expansion. Indeed, it is almost a passive and seamless extension. Not ever being resisted, or subverted, even as it becomes the cultural heritage and identity of millions of people, classes and societies hitherto beyond its horizon. Until eventually by the 20th century it is just part of how almost everyone in these societies thinks everyone should act -- i.e. don't piss in the curtains, don't wipe your nose on the tablecloth, don’t put food back in the common serving dish after it has been in your mouth, etc.
This may or may not be an accurate portrayal of this process in its inception and in the first one or two hundred years of its development. However, at the moment of the bourgeoisie’s ascent and establishment as the hegemonic class – let us say, the 17th century – things seem to have developed according to a very different dynamic.
It is here that i find another account, that of Silvia Federici in her book Caliban and the Witch (esp. the chapter “The Great Caliban”) to be particularly valuable as a corrective to Elias. As Federici puts it, “It was in the attempt to form a new type of individual that the bourgeoisie engaged in that battle against the body that has become its historic mark.” (CATW, 135) Federici argues that this was not a passive process without subjects or antagonism, but a violent act of class war against the former peasantry (uprooted by the enclosures) and new proletariat, imposing the habits and ways-of-life necessary for the bourgeoisie’s new capitalist order –
“Like Caliban, the proletariat personified the ‘ill humors’ that hid in the social body, beginning with the disgusting monsters of idleness and drunkenness. In the eyes of his masters, its life was pure inertia, but at the same time was uncontrolled passion and unbridled fantasy, ever ready to explode in riotous commotions. Above all, it was indiscipline, lack of productivity, incontinence, lust for immediate physical satisfaction...” (CABW, 154)
This was about more than getting the new workers to show up at work on time (though it was that too). It was about instilling quiet, subconscious consent even, what Freud would call the superego or what Elias calls drive control or what the young rebels in May 68 recognized as “the cop in your head”. So that when quiet won’t cut it and consent breaks down, violent energies are unleashed sideways or downwards, anywhere but up. Or as Lee Maracle put it in her poem Hate, “Blinded by the niceties and polite liberality; We can’t see our enemy; so, we’ll just have to kill each other.” Niceties, politeness ... exactly what we are talking about here ...
Indeed, Federici herself cites Elias, nodding at his research, when she states that “the definition of a new relation with the body did not remain at a purely ideological level. Many practices began to appear in daily life to signal the deep transformations occurring in this domain: the use of cutlery, the development of shame with respect to nakedness, the advent of ‘manners’ that attempted to regulate how one laughed, walked, sneezed, how one should behave at the table, and to what extent one could sing, joke, play.” (CABW, 153)
Not unrelated to the problems with his top-down optic, Elias also largely ignores gender differences, and the specific role and realities of mothering (and being a "good mother" as a social construct and ideal), despite noting that with the bourgeois revolutions the role of "installing drive control" in children, of inculcating them with the ever-more-repressive manners, fell suddenly to the family, and also despite his observation about how the new manners-regime led to a lengthening of the period of life we term childhood (something examined in more detail, if not 100% convincingly, by Philippe Aries). Unfortunately, Federici can’t help us here either, as the historical construction of and changes to childhood are somewhat beyond the ken of her argument, and are indeed rarely theorized thesedays from a radical perspective.
Furthermore, in terms of this inattention to gender and women, consider how many of the attributes of the developing “good manners” in the period in question match up with our ideas of what “femininity” or “being a lady” was during that same time period. Indeed, manliness and masculinity, at least as we see it looking back, seems to exist with less ease alongside injunctions on how to eat, how to speak, how to dress, etc., all of which seem somehow unvirile. Whereas emotional discomfort with physical laxity is something more common amongst women, eventually manifesting as generalized body shame. As this Sociological Images article (http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/...) pointed out, “Generally, women are expected to have better control of their body, to be more polite, and to avoid offending others. All of these things are consistent with being more discreet with farts and poops.”
Returning to and crossreferencing this with Elias, this may be why court society and that kind of upper class seems not only effete (a term which today means affected and pretentious, overly-mannered, but which comes from the Latin effetus which meant “worn out by bearing young” – an etymology bringing all this together nicely methinks) but also effeminate to our eyes. One can imagine a complex but very illuminating series of historical-social relations that produced this disjunction, but unfortunately this is wholly absent from Elias. Or at least from this book of his. (Here i should mention that i have not read Elias’s accompanying volume, Power and Civility – some of these lacunae may be addressed there.)
Yet another area where Elias’s top-down optic seems to limit considerations of the process at play is in providing alternate explanations for aspects of the manners-drift. Everything according to Elias was contained by a process within the upper class, internal to what would be known as Western Europe, and it all was driven by spiralling repression of the urges (drive control) without any rational basis – in cases where scientists would later show a health benefit (in terms of hygiene for instance) Elias insists that this was irrelevant because the change in manners came centuries before such “rational explanations” about disease or health were known. However, “rational explanations” is a pretty vague and loaded concept, and kind of tautologically excludes anyone not part of the “civilizing” or “civilized” classes and society itself.
Against this, i would suspect that injunctions about what we would today call hygiene were not solely developed out of an alienation from the body (although they may have been encouraged by this social development), but also from learning beneficial practices from non-ruling-class cultures and peoples. To give but one example, many Jews in Europe observed a wide variety of rules having to do with food preparation and consumption, and also with other forms of what we would call hygiene, in the period in question. Elias ignores the existence of these parallel traditions and cultures, intermixed but distinct as they seem to have been. Never mind interaction with peoples outside of Western Europe, with two brief exceptions (the Byzantine princess with her fork, and the Chinese chopstick, each of which are mentioned in contradistinction to Western Europe’s less civilized cutlery at the time, but not in a way that upsets the model of the development of cutlery in Western Europe being an entirely internal process originating within the highest levels of the ruling class). I don’t think it is irrelevant to note that in most societies which lacked such “rational explanation” for disease, women – again that undercontemplated group in Elias’s account – played the major role in developing, passing down, and implementing these protocols on a daily level.
i wanted to note these shortcomings, just because they were there and occurred to me as i read The History of Manners. But i would still strongly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in European history, especially in the changes between the medieval and modern periods, and in the ways in which political structures and changes interact with personal habits and inclinations. In other words, for those wanting to unpack the socio-cultural and psycho-historical underpinnings of that famous feminist observation, you know, that "the personal is political".
Elias weaves a tight narrative, of modern west-european manners (personal etiquette – ranging from what cutlery to eat what food with, to how to sleep in a bed with a stranger, to how to speak to people, to where to take a dump) having a genealogy that can be traced back to court society in France in the late Middle Ages. (Elias traces things back further than that, to the early medieval period, however most of his focus is on the key five hundred years beginning in the 15th century).
During this period, in a variety of areas of everyday life, Elias shows how there was a clear pattern of personal behaviour becoming more repressed, of people becoming more physically uptight, and more alienated from their bodily functions and spontaneous urges. Along with this, a new affective regime came into play, giving far more importance to feelings of being "sensitive", "embarrassed" and "ashamed".
In terms of the positive, i want to say that i really enjoyed this book, and am in fact surprised that it has not been checked out more by those rads into things like anti-civ and primitivism, as Elias's framework integrates personal habits with political structures and with the rise of the very concept of "civilization", in a convincing (if incomplete) manner. At its best, i could see The History of Manners being read productively alongside Wilhelm Reich or even Alice Miller, and certainly alongside folks writing about the body with a feminist queer anticolonial approach. Certainly, in terms of understanding the past thousand years of cultural change in the colonizing world, i think Elias could serve as a backgrounder to Foucault, or to Aries, or to more radical writers like Federici.
In terms of the negative, Elias's argument is jarringly flat and undynamic, in large part i think because of his top-down optic. Consider this passage, in which he very much sums up his overall argument:
“This délicatesse, this sensibility and a highly-developed feeling for the ‘embarrassing’, is at first all a distinguishing feature of small courtly circles, then of court society as a whole. This applies to language in exactly the same way as to eating habits. [...] In conjunction with a very specific social situation, the feelings and affects are first transformed in the upper class, and the structure of society as a whole permits this changed affect standard to spread slowly throughout society.” (115
What is put forth is an internal process which spreads, including more and more people within its field of influence, but not in any important way being impacted or changing through this process of expansion. Indeed, it is almost a passive and seamless extension. Not ever being resisted, or subverted, even as it becomes the cultural heritage and identity of millions of people, classes and societies hitherto beyond its horizon. Until eventually by the 20th century it is just part of how almost everyone in these societies thinks everyone should act -- i.e. don't piss in the curtains, don't wipe your nose on the tablecloth, don’t put food back in the common serving dish after it has been in your mouth, etc.
This may or may not be an accurate portrayal of this process in its inception and in the first one or two hundred years of its development. However, at the moment of the bourgeoisie’s ascent and establishment as the hegemonic class – let us say, the 17th century – things seem to have developed according to a very different dynamic.
It is here that i find another account, that of Silvia Federici in her book Caliban and the Witch (esp. the chapter “The Great Caliban”) to be particularly valuable as a corrective to Elias. As Federici puts it, “It was in the attempt to form a new type of individual that the bourgeoisie engaged in that battle against the body that has become its historic mark.” (CATW, 135) Federici argues that this was not a passive process without subjects or antagonism, but a violent act of class war against the former peasantry (uprooted by the enclosures) and new proletariat, imposing the habits and ways-of-life necessary for the bourgeoisie’s new capitalist order –
“Like Caliban, the proletariat personified the ‘ill humors’ that hid in the social body, beginning with the disgusting monsters of idleness and drunkenness. In the eyes of his masters, its life was pure inertia, but at the same time was uncontrolled passion and unbridled fantasy, ever ready to explode in riotous commotions. Above all, it was indiscipline, lack of productivity, incontinence, lust for immediate physical satisfaction...” (CABW, 154)
This was about more than getting the new workers to show up at work on time (though it was that too). It was about instilling quiet, subconscious consent even, what Freud would call the superego or what Elias calls drive control or what the young rebels in May 68 recognized as “the cop in your head”. So that when quiet won’t cut it and consent breaks down, violent energies are unleashed sideways or downwards, anywhere but up. Or as Lee Maracle put it in her poem Hate, “Blinded by the niceties and polite liberality; We can’t see our enemy; so, we’ll just have to kill each other.” Niceties, politeness ... exactly what we are talking about here ...
Indeed, Federici herself cites Elias, nodding at his research, when she states that “the definition of a new relation with the body did not remain at a purely ideological level. Many practices began to appear in daily life to signal the deep transformations occurring in this domain: the use of cutlery, the development of shame with respect to nakedness, the advent of ‘manners’ that attempted to regulate how one laughed, walked, sneezed, how one should behave at the table, and to what extent one could sing, joke, play.” (CABW, 153)
Not unrelated to the problems with his top-down optic, Elias also largely ignores gender differences, and the specific role and realities of mothering (and being a "good mother" as a social construct and ideal), despite noting that with the bourgeois revolutions the role of "installing drive control" in children, of inculcating them with the ever-more-repressive manners, fell suddenly to the family, and also despite his observation about how the new manners-regime led to a lengthening of the period of life we term childhood (something examined in more detail, if not 100% convincingly, by Philippe Aries). Unfortunately, Federici can’t help us here either, as the historical construction of and changes to childhood are somewhat beyond the ken of her argument, and are indeed rarely theorized thesedays from a radical perspective.
Furthermore, in terms of this inattention to gender and women, consider how many of the attributes of the developing “good manners” in the period in question match up with our ideas of what “femininity” or “being a lady” was during that same time period. Indeed, manliness and masculinity, at least as we see it looking back, seems to exist with less ease alongside injunctions on how to eat, how to speak, how to dress, etc., all of which seem somehow unvirile. Whereas emotional discomfort with physical laxity is something more common amongst women, eventually manifesting as generalized body shame. As this Sociological Images article (http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/...) pointed out, “Generally, women are expected to have better control of their body, to be more polite, and to avoid offending others. All of these things are consistent with being more discreet with farts and poops.”
Returning to and crossreferencing this with Elias, this may be why court society and that kind of upper class seems not only effete (a term which today means affected and pretentious, overly-mannered, but which comes from the Latin effetus which meant “worn out by bearing young” – an etymology bringing all this together nicely methinks) but also effeminate to our eyes. One can imagine a complex but very illuminating series of historical-social relations that produced this disjunction, but unfortunately this is wholly absent from Elias. Or at least from this book of his. (Here i should mention that i have not read Elias’s accompanying volume, Power and Civility – some of these lacunae may be addressed there.)
Yet another area where Elias’s top-down optic seems to limit considerations of the process at play is in providing alternate explanations for aspects of the manners-drift. Everything according to Elias was contained by a process within the upper class, internal to what would be known as Western Europe, and it all was driven by spiralling repression of the urges (drive control) without any rational basis – in cases where scientists would later show a health benefit (in terms of hygiene for instance) Elias insists that this was irrelevant because the change in manners came centuries before such “rational explanations” about disease or health were known. However, “rational explanations” is a pretty vague and loaded concept, and kind of tautologically excludes anyone not part of the “civilizing” or “civilized” classes and society itself.
Against this, i would suspect that injunctions about what we would today call hygiene were not solely developed out of an alienation from the body (although they may have been encouraged by this social development), but also from learning beneficial practices from non-ruling-class cultures and peoples. To give but one example, many Jews in Europe observed a wide variety of rules having to do with food preparation and consumption, and also with other forms of what we would call hygiene, in the period in question. Elias ignores the existence of these parallel traditions and cultures, intermixed but distinct as they seem to have been. Never mind interaction with peoples outside of Western Europe, with two brief exceptions (the Byzantine princess with her fork, and the Chinese chopstick, each of which are mentioned in contradistinction to Western Europe’s less civilized cutlery at the time, but not in a way that upsets the model of the development of cutlery in Western Europe being an entirely internal process originating within the highest levels of the ruling class). I don’t think it is irrelevant to note that in most societies which lacked such “rational explanation” for disease, women – again that undercontemplated group in Elias’s account – played the major role in developing, passing down, and implementing these protocols on a daily level.
i wanted to note these shortcomings, just because they were there and occurred to me as i read The History of Manners. But i would still strongly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in European history, especially in the changes between the medieval and modern periods, and in the ways in which political structures and changes interact with personal habits and inclinations. In other words, for those wanting to unpack the socio-cultural and psycho-historical underpinnings of that famous feminist observation, you know, that "the personal is political".
January 3, 2021
An excellent, brilliant and paradigm shifting book. Probably the best book about the weaknesses in the modern Western cultural system.
November 22, 2017
Myslíte, že tradice je něco neměnného, dobré mravy vždy znamenaly to samé a že ve středověku byli lidé čuňata jen proto, že ještě nevěděli o bacilech? Elias podává velmi silný argument, proč je i civilizace, kultura - dnes by ale bylo nejlepší slovo etiketa - nekončící proces.
Tahle kniha ovšem není jen archivem intimní historie Evropy od středověku po první polovinu 20. stoletís. Elias se ukazuje, jak se proměny během staletí toho, co je vhodné, promítaly do výchovy a jak se zniterňovaly až nakonec přirozené a dříve běžné projevy začaly vyvolávat pocit studu, trapnosti, že se náhle musíte oklepat, a nelibosti (oproti dřívějšímu vzrušení).
Mluví o korespondenci mezi strukturou společnosti a strukturou jednotlivého "já" a jak se tato korespondence v dějinách posouvala; jak se vývoj společnosti odráží v psychologii jednotlivců. Důkazem byly i moje fyzické reakce na některé příklady - autor vše dokládá na literatuře o vhodném chování, výchově dětí, ale i na románech.
* Pokud vás nezajímá kontext knihy, vyjádření k diskurzu a knihu nečtete kvůli škole, klidně přeskočte 50stránkový úvod.
* Pokud vás nezajímá kontext a vývoj za hranicemi intimních projevů - ve francouzské a německé společnosti na příkladu vymezení několika pojmů (každopádně je to hezké pro etymology), přeskočte klidně ke druhé části.
* O hlavní myšlenku knihy nepřijdete a k tomu vás čeká 150 stran zábavných rad, jak plivat a smrkat, jak se chovat v posteli a že byste neměli dávat po vykonané potřebě lidem čuchat k ruce, že páchne... Kapitoly jsou:
- O CHOVÁNÍ PŘI JÍDLE
- PROMĚNY POSTOJŮ K PŘIROZENÝM POTŘEBÁM
- O SMRKÁNÍ
- O PLIVÁNÍ
- O CHOVÁNÍ V LOŽNICI
- PROMĚNY POSTOJE KE VZTAHŮM MEZI MUŽEM A ŽENOU
- O PROMĚNÁCH AGRESIVITY
- POHLED NA ŽIVOT RYTÍŘE
Mnoho z toho, co považujeme za samozřejmé, se vyvíjelo desítky let. A rozhodně nás ještě čeká hodně změn. Buckle up Buckaroos!
P.S.: Erasmus Rotterdamský > Ladislav Špaček
Tahle kniha ovšem není jen archivem intimní historie Evropy od středověku po první polovinu 20. stoletís. Elias se ukazuje, jak se proměny během staletí toho, co je vhodné, promítaly do výchovy a jak se zniterňovaly až nakonec přirozené a dříve běžné projevy začaly vyvolávat pocit studu, trapnosti, že se náhle musíte oklepat, a nelibosti (oproti dřívějšímu vzrušení).
Mluví o korespondenci mezi strukturou společnosti a strukturou jednotlivého "já" a jak se tato korespondence v dějinách posouvala; jak se vývoj společnosti odráží v psychologii jednotlivců. Důkazem byly i moje fyzické reakce na některé příklady - autor vše dokládá na literatuře o vhodném chování, výchově dětí, ale i na románech.
* Pokud vás nezajímá kontext knihy, vyjádření k diskurzu a knihu nečtete kvůli škole, klidně přeskočte 50stránkový úvod.
* Pokud vás nezajímá kontext a vývoj za hranicemi intimních projevů - ve francouzské a německé společnosti na příkladu vymezení několika pojmů (každopádně je to hezké pro etymology), přeskočte klidně ke druhé části.
* O hlavní myšlenku knihy nepřijdete a k tomu vás čeká 150 stran zábavných rad, jak plivat a smrkat, jak se chovat v posteli a že byste neměli dávat po vykonané potřebě lidem čuchat k ruce, že páchne... Kapitoly jsou:
- O CHOVÁNÍ PŘI JÍDLE
- PROMĚNY POSTOJŮ K PŘIROZENÝM POTŘEBÁM
- O SMRKÁNÍ
- O PLIVÁNÍ
- O CHOVÁNÍ V LOŽNICI
- PROMĚNY POSTOJE KE VZTAHŮM MEZI MUŽEM A ŽENOU
- O PROMĚNÁCH AGRESIVITY
- POHLED NA ŽIVOT RYTÍŘE
Mnoho z toho, co považujeme za samozřejmé, se vyvíjelo desítky let. A rozhodně nás ještě čeká hodně změn. Buckle up Buckaroos!
P.S.: Erasmus Rotterdamský > Ladislav Špaček
March 18, 2024
In 1981 my then-girlfriend gave me this book as a gift. I never read it. Maybe because I was insulted? Understood it as a hint that I had no manners? More probably as a student of philosophy, I was too arrogant to read the work of a mere sociologist. Anyway, instead of throwing the book away, it stood peacefully on the shelf waiting patiently to be picked up one day.
And that is what I did after nearly 40 years, because of the praise it got by Pinker in Better Angels.
It is a wonderful book. Because it makes you think about how civilization changed the individual. To give just one example. People used to spit all the time. And it started slowly to change when they were advised at least to not spit over the table but under the table. Funny thing is, that we do not even feel the urge to spit. I do not remember that that habit was enforced on me by education. But why is it, that I do not spit in society? And why is it that it is repulsive to see people spitting e.g. in old Western movies? Even sympathetic characters like Henry Fonda in My Darling Clementine (if I remember correctly) does it. And it very nearly makes him a villain.
Why is it that people do not use knives anymore when eating? I always thought it was barbaric of Americans to use the knife only for cutting meat and then using only the fork. But reading Elias, it seems obvious, that it is more civilized. And still, a long way to go to the Chinese habit of banning the knife altogether.
How different were people that would not only enjoy public executions (what could be rationalized) but also the killing of dozens of cats at midsummers festivity - just for the fun of it?
What is the relationship between an individual and society? It does get philosophical in the Appendix (foreword to the 1968 edition) and that is why I shelved this under philosophy: “What in man is the capsule, what is the encapsulated?” (p. 249) And curiously, by learning to control affects, by self-control, something that evolved through the civilization process, the feeling (the illusion?) of a true inner self that is confronted to an outside world emerged. Elias mentions Leibniz as the first man who noticed the paradox and tried to explain it with his windowless monads. 9/10
And that is what I did after nearly 40 years, because of the praise it got by Pinker in Better Angels.
It is a wonderful book. Because it makes you think about how civilization changed the individual. To give just one example. People used to spit all the time. And it started slowly to change when they were advised at least to not spit over the table but under the table. Funny thing is, that we do not even feel the urge to spit. I do not remember that that habit was enforced on me by education. But why is it, that I do not spit in society? And why is it that it is repulsive to see people spitting e.g. in old Western movies? Even sympathetic characters like Henry Fonda in My Darling Clementine (if I remember correctly) does it. And it very nearly makes him a villain.
Why is it that people do not use knives anymore when eating? I always thought it was barbaric of Americans to use the knife only for cutting meat and then using only the fork. But reading Elias, it seems obvious, that it is more civilized. And still, a long way to go to the Chinese habit of banning the knife altogether.
How different were people that would not only enjoy public executions (what could be rationalized) but also the killing of dozens of cats at midsummers festivity - just for the fun of it?
What is the relationship between an individual and society? It does get philosophical in the Appendix (foreword to the 1968 edition) and that is why I shelved this under philosophy: “What in man is the capsule, what is the encapsulated?” (p. 249) And curiously, by learning to control affects, by self-control, something that evolved through the civilization process, the feeling (the illusion?) of a true inner self that is confronted to an outside world emerged. Elias mentions Leibniz as the first man who noticed the paradox and tried to explain it with his windowless monads. 9/10
June 4, 2024
eu nunca mais vou olhar para as atitudes das pessoas da mesma maneira
July 31, 2017
This is either the boringest five-star book or the most interesting book there ever was on forks and farting, probably both.
Elias, who was writing in the middle of the previous fascist wave, right before it started getting extra-deadly - his parents would die in concentration camps - was interested in something less timely, the history of things like table manners, over the longue duree. He collated a ton of etiquette manuals from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries and found them getting stricter and stricter over time, both in terms of what they directly enjoined and in what they assumed their readers would already know. Boundaries between bodies, taboos against the acknowledgment of them, norms of banishment of hostility, all get removed. He calls this the "civilizing process," with a preface qualifying that in Germany Zivilization implies something rather superficial, like table manners (but also more serious things like extramarital relations and open carrying of weaponry.)
His theory behind this is elaborated in the second book (which hopefully I'll read soon!), but from Vol. 1 it's clear that this is driven by a two-level causal account. The proximate cause is class signaling, wanting to appear higher in rank, or at least no lower in rank, than one actually is - and while everyone who reads this thread is likely to know one can make accusations of signaling rather promiscuously, Elias demonstrates pretty well that he's not accusing anyone of hidden motives but that this is the explicit motive, often the only one, appealed to in the primary sources themselves. "Don't do this or you'll come off as some sort of peasant/poor/provincial," they say again and again.
The longer-term causal force is that the ruling classes themselves - the people everyone wants to imitate - are being placed more and more under external social control, as the feudal nobility start becoming court aristocracy accountable to the crown, and those in turn replaced by bourgeois responsible before the market. (Elias doesn't talk about the disciplining effects enacted in people initially resistant to becoming wage laborers, but it's certainly something that slots in well.) The habits of discipline are internalized, both within the person and within the newly created "private sphere" of the individual household, where bodily functions and moral education are increasingly confined. Westerners of Elias' day are prone to see non-Westerners are "childlike," because, like Western children, they haven't internalized the incredibly historically specific and weird sets of habits that Western adults have (though of course the reverse also applies to some extent, since every culture has their own taboos - though Western ones have gotten much stricter in the course of a few centuries.)
It might be because I'm fresh after reading Angela Nagle's "Kill All Normies," but all of this seems more relevant to the online culture wars than it should be. Nagle makes many references to conscious counter-movements against this process, antinomians from Sade and Nietzsche through the Decadents and Hippies; Elias also acknowledged that there are rumblings along this process as well as periods where the tide ebbs - though neither really theorizes much about why these appear when they do. (Elias is keen to note that an apparent relaxation can be the consequence of actual, or at least otherwise, strictening - women being able to wear more revealing clothing, for instance, having a precondition men being less likely to sexually harass any women willing to bear an ankle, for instance.)
In the contemporary moment I'm inclined to say that what *might* be driving some of the culture wars is a polarization of the degree of social control, resulting in turn from a stregthening in the relative power of capital over labor. On one hand, those in precarious employment, especially but certainly not exclusively in the humanities, are subjected to extremely intense social control, which cannot help but become internalized; this involves a lot of signaling of middle class status and adherence to the kinds of norms that are functional in a highly cosmopolitan society. On the other hand, you have a lot of young men who go straight to being "raised on the Internet" to NEETS (though also in some cases moving on to more stable employment), who have this reflexive and loudly proclaimed aversion to "signaling" and really self-control in general as inauthentic. I'm not an expert on the subject but you certainly see this kind of labor force dualism used to explain the appeal of Salafism and so on to young male losers who happen to belong to a different demographic category than the one WNs recruit from. And this also explains the specific nature of a lot of WN/Salafist complaints: social atomization is real but unevenly distributed, and they're dealing with a lot of it.
I haven't thought all this through too deeply, though, which perhaps just means I should shut up and get to the next volume.
Elias, who was writing in the middle of the previous fascist wave, right before it started getting extra-deadly - his parents would die in concentration camps - was interested in something less timely, the history of things like table manners, over the longue duree. He collated a ton of etiquette manuals from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries and found them getting stricter and stricter over time, both in terms of what they directly enjoined and in what they assumed their readers would already know. Boundaries between bodies, taboos against the acknowledgment of them, norms of banishment of hostility, all get removed. He calls this the "civilizing process," with a preface qualifying that in Germany Zivilization implies something rather superficial, like table manners (but also more serious things like extramarital relations and open carrying of weaponry.)
His theory behind this is elaborated in the second book (which hopefully I'll read soon!), but from Vol. 1 it's clear that this is driven by a two-level causal account. The proximate cause is class signaling, wanting to appear higher in rank, or at least no lower in rank, than one actually is - and while everyone who reads this thread is likely to know one can make accusations of signaling rather promiscuously, Elias demonstrates pretty well that he's not accusing anyone of hidden motives but that this is the explicit motive, often the only one, appealed to in the primary sources themselves. "Don't do this or you'll come off as some sort of peasant/poor/provincial," they say again and again.
The longer-term causal force is that the ruling classes themselves - the people everyone wants to imitate - are being placed more and more under external social control, as the feudal nobility start becoming court aristocracy accountable to the crown, and those in turn replaced by bourgeois responsible before the market. (Elias doesn't talk about the disciplining effects enacted in people initially resistant to becoming wage laborers, but it's certainly something that slots in well.) The habits of discipline are internalized, both within the person and within the newly created "private sphere" of the individual household, where bodily functions and moral education are increasingly confined. Westerners of Elias' day are prone to see non-Westerners are "childlike," because, like Western children, they haven't internalized the incredibly historically specific and weird sets of habits that Western adults have (though of course the reverse also applies to some extent, since every culture has their own taboos - though Western ones have gotten much stricter in the course of a few centuries.)
It might be because I'm fresh after reading Angela Nagle's "Kill All Normies," but all of this seems more relevant to the online culture wars than it should be. Nagle makes many references to conscious counter-movements against this process, antinomians from Sade and Nietzsche through the Decadents and Hippies; Elias also acknowledged that there are rumblings along this process as well as periods where the tide ebbs - though neither really theorizes much about why these appear when they do. (Elias is keen to note that an apparent relaxation can be the consequence of actual, or at least otherwise, strictening - women being able to wear more revealing clothing, for instance, having a precondition men being less likely to sexually harass any women willing to bear an ankle, for instance.)
In the contemporary moment I'm inclined to say that what *might* be driving some of the culture wars is a polarization of the degree of social control, resulting in turn from a stregthening in the relative power of capital over labor. On one hand, those in precarious employment, especially but certainly not exclusively in the humanities, are subjected to extremely intense social control, which cannot help but become internalized; this involves a lot of signaling of middle class status and adherence to the kinds of norms that are functional in a highly cosmopolitan society. On the other hand, you have a lot of young men who go straight to being "raised on the Internet" to NEETS (though also in some cases moving on to more stable employment), who have this reflexive and loudly proclaimed aversion to "signaling" and really self-control in general as inauthentic. I'm not an expert on the subject but you certainly see this kind of labor force dualism used to explain the appeal of Salafism and so on to young male losers who happen to belong to a different demographic category than the one WNs recruit from. And this also explains the specific nature of a lot of WN/Salafist complaints: social atomization is real but unevenly distributed, and they're dealing with a lot of it.
I haven't thought all this through too deeply, though, which perhaps just means I should shut up and get to the next volume.
August 30, 2022
O Processo Civilizador • Volume 1: Uma história dos costumes. | Norbert Elias // Apresentação: Renato Janine Ribeiro.
Foi agradável ler o material de Norbert Elias, estou me referindo ao livro: “O Processo Civilizador” – Volume 1: Uma história dos costumes; foi uma releitura do livro apresentado na época de graduação. Sempre lembro nas aquisições dos clássicos, desde o início até o término do curso minha realidade permitia acesso de alguns capítulos considerados "essenciais", disponibilizados na gráfica do campus. No post temos um obra escrita em 1939, importante trabalho intelectual de Norbert Elias, correspondendo aos tipos de conexões e traços sociais atrelados aos costumes. O leitor entrará em contato com outros dois fatores, seguem como; “natureza e cultura”, significativo no campo sociocultural e no decorrer do processo histórico, ou seja, um dos aspectos do autor permanecia em trabalhar com uma história de longa duração.
O livro disponibiliza os variados tipos de adequações sociopolíticas em cada região, seguem outros fenômenos considerados através dos estudos de Norbert, estou referindo aos conceitos de “sociedade e indivíduo”, promovendo análise na dinâmica de interdependência social. Apesar do livro atender os critérios de qualidade em sua publicação pela editora Zahar, faço uma breve observação, no qual vai de encontro com o entendimento de Norbert Elias. O livro possui abrangência, não permitindo "engessar" o tema, contém assuntos complexos, e mesmo através do genial nível de exemplificação no estilo de escrita, o leitor precisará de uma dose extra de paciência e profunda reflexão.
Foi agradável ler o material de Norbert Elias, estou me referindo ao livro: “O Processo Civilizador” – Volume 1: Uma história dos costumes; foi uma releitura do livro apresentado na época de graduação. Sempre lembro nas aquisições dos clássicos, desde o início até o término do curso minha realidade permitia acesso de alguns capítulos considerados "essenciais", disponibilizados na gráfica do campus. No post temos um obra escrita em 1939, importante trabalho intelectual de Norbert Elias, correspondendo aos tipos de conexões e traços sociais atrelados aos costumes. O leitor entrará em contato com outros dois fatores, seguem como; “natureza e cultura”, significativo no campo sociocultural e no decorrer do processo histórico, ou seja, um dos aspectos do autor permanecia em trabalhar com uma história de longa duração.
O livro disponibiliza os variados tipos de adequações sociopolíticas em cada região, seguem outros fenômenos considerados através dos estudos de Norbert, estou referindo aos conceitos de “sociedade e indivíduo”, promovendo análise na dinâmica de interdependência social. Apesar do livro atender os critérios de qualidade em sua publicação pela editora Zahar, faço uma breve observação, no qual vai de encontro com o entendimento de Norbert Elias. O livro possui abrangência, não permitindo "engessar" o tema, contém assuntos complexos, e mesmo através do genial nível de exemplificação no estilo de escrita, o leitor precisará de uma dose extra de paciência e profunda reflexão.
September 7, 2023
Este trabalho revela uma abordagem minuciosa ao estudar a evolução dos costumes e comportamentos ao longo da história. Norbert Elias utiliza uma vasta gama de fontes, incluindo trechos de livros antigos, para traçar como as normas sociais, a etiqueta e os padrões de comportamento evoluíram ao longo do tempo. Sua abordagem descritiva meticulosa oferece aos leitores uma visão aprofundada das mudanças culturais e sociais.
Para um demógrafo como eu, o livro se torna ainda mais intrigante. Ele lança luz sobre aspectos do comportamento humano relacionados às dinâmicas familiares e à transmissão de valores e normas de geração em geração que ajudam a demografia histórica a ter um conteúdo qualitativo daquilo que normalmente só se estuda de forma mais fria. Isso é crucial para compreender como as sociedades se transformaram antes da revolução industrial e como essas mudanças afetaram a demografia.
Em resumo, "O Processo Civilizador 1" é uma obra impressionante que não apenas oferece uma perspectiva profunda sobre a evolução dos costumes, mas também se revela uma leitura essencial para aqueles interessados na compreensão das raízes do comportamento humano nas sociedades.
Para um demógrafo como eu, o livro se torna ainda mais intrigante. Ele lança luz sobre aspectos do comportamento humano relacionados às dinâmicas familiares e à transmissão de valores e normas de geração em geração que ajudam a demografia histórica a ter um conteúdo qualitativo daquilo que normalmente só se estuda de forma mais fria. Isso é crucial para compreender como as sociedades se transformaram antes da revolução industrial e como essas mudanças afetaram a demografia.
Em resumo, "O Processo Civilizador 1" é uma obra impressionante que não apenas oferece uma perspectiva profunda sobre a evolução dos costumes, mas também se revela uma leitura essencial para aqueles interessados na compreensão das raízes do comportamento humano nas sociedades.
May 30, 2019
I read this for a class. It's definitely a must read to all who want to get insight into how the Western manners came to be. The first book compares French and German cultures and how they viewed civilization. There are pretty strict differences. Then Elias uses a variety of books of the time (one belongs to Erasmus) about manners as an empirical evidence to show the transformation across centuries. The aristocracy really cared about separating themselves from the commoners. I believe he does a good analysis of the elite. Lastly, I won't forget the princess that was damned for using a gold fork and died a quick death.
August 18, 2020
Interesting book to read, although there was a lack of methodology for modern readers (what is fine taking into account the dact that this is a sociology book written in the 1930s).
July 5, 2022
« les hommes s’appliquent, pendant le ‘processus de civilisation’, à refouler tout ce qu’ils ressentent en eux-mêmes comme relevant de leur ‘nature animale’ »
August 25, 2024
Çok uzun detaylarla dolu. İkinci cilde devam etme anlamında motivasyon sağladı .
March 30, 2025
Gerulis, laisvalaikiui ir pasaulio apie save supratimui
August 31, 2023
ein soziologe, der nicht schreibt, als hätte er einen stock im arsch. love it.
sehr spannend und einfach zu lesen. keine krassen wertungen, einfach nur gute beobachtungen, die nachvollziehbar dargestellt werden.
sehr spannend und einfach zu lesen. keine krassen wertungen, einfach nur gute beobachtungen, die nachvollziehbar dargestellt werden.
December 28, 2025
Dünya üzerinde yazılmış en iyi sosyoloji kitabı. Artırıyorum: Dünya üzerinde yazılabilecek en iyi sosyoloji kitabı! Bu eseri okumadan yapılacak her sosyal bilim çalışması veya analizi eksik kalacaktır. Norbert Elias bir alim! Bu sıfatı sonuna kadar hak ediyor.
Norbert Elias uygarlık ve kültür kavramlarının sosyal anlamlarının tarihsel oluşumunu incelerken aynı zamanda siyasal, iktisadi ve toplumsal dönüşümleri ele alıyor. İnsanlık tarihindeki tarihsel ve toplumsal olayları ve fenomenleri anlamakta ve onları yerli yerlerine oturtmakta tüm insanlığa kılavuz olabilecek yegane kitap Uygarlık Süreci.
Uygarlık Süreci kitabı, hayatında hiçbir tanıdığı ya da yakınının mezarına ziyareti düşünmeyen bana Norbert Elias'ın kabrinde bir kez olsun bulunma isteği uyandıran kitaptır. Uygarlık Süreci kitabı, beste yapabilsem Norbert Elias'a bağlamamla bir türkü havalandırarak onu anmayı istememe yol açan kitaptır. Uygarlık Süreci kitabı, isim babası olduğum yeğenime "Uygar" ismini vermeme neden olan kitaptır!
Siteye girdiğimde kitap hakkında sayısız incelemeyle karşılaşacağımı sanıyordum. Umarım son yazdıklarım kitaba birkaç kişinin ilgisini çekebilir.
* Benzer minvalde kurmaca bir eser olarak, Alain René Lesage'nin "Gil Blas de Santillane'ın Maceraları" kitabını önerebilirim. İnsanlığı tanımak için yegane kurmaca eserdir Lesage'nin kitabı. Zira Edgar Allan Poe, "dünyanın en güzel anlatıları" arasında sayıyordu eseri. Schopenhauer'e göre ise eser, "dünyada gerçekte neler olup bittiğini" gösteren az sayıdaki romandan biridir. Es geçilmemeli "Gil Blas de Santillane'ın Maceraları" kitabı da.
Norbert Elias uygarlık ve kültür kavramlarının sosyal anlamlarının tarihsel oluşumunu incelerken aynı zamanda siyasal, iktisadi ve toplumsal dönüşümleri ele alıyor. İnsanlık tarihindeki tarihsel ve toplumsal olayları ve fenomenleri anlamakta ve onları yerli yerlerine oturtmakta tüm insanlığa kılavuz olabilecek yegane kitap Uygarlık Süreci.
Uygarlık Süreci kitabı, hayatında hiçbir tanıdığı ya da yakınının mezarına ziyareti düşünmeyen bana Norbert Elias'ın kabrinde bir kez olsun bulunma isteği uyandıran kitaptır. Uygarlık Süreci kitabı, beste yapabilsem Norbert Elias'a bağlamamla bir türkü havalandırarak onu anmayı istememe yol açan kitaptır. Uygarlık Süreci kitabı, isim babası olduğum yeğenime "Uygar" ismini vermeme neden olan kitaptır!
Siteye girdiğimde kitap hakkında sayısız incelemeyle karşılaşacağımı sanıyordum. Umarım son yazdıklarım kitaba birkaç kişinin ilgisini çekebilir.
* Benzer minvalde kurmaca bir eser olarak, Alain René Lesage'nin "Gil Blas de Santillane'ın Maceraları" kitabını önerebilirim. İnsanlığı tanımak için yegane kurmaca eserdir Lesage'nin kitabı. Zira Edgar Allan Poe, "dünyanın en güzel anlatıları" arasında sayıyordu eseri. Schopenhauer'e göre ise eser, "dünyada gerçekte neler olup bittiğini" gösteren az sayıdaki romandan biridir. Es geçilmemeli "Gil Blas de Santillane'ın Maceraları" kitabı da.
June 1, 2018
A rich and heuristic account of changes, both in personality and social structures, among the French and German from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and into the late 18th century, of modes of existence in terms of 'culture' and 'civilization'. Different dynamics played out in France than in Germany; a German middle-class intelligentsia had a different relationship to its courtly world than the French did; thus, Germans comported themselves towards 'civilized' behaviour differently. In general, though, 'affect control' increased and internalised, and the 'threshold of repugnance' or 'fastidiousness' went up. Elias must be right that few of these developments had to do with increases in scientific understanding of hygiene; you don't dip your fingers in common bowls now because it is un-hygienic; you do it because it's perceived as uncivilized; the hygienic response is a kind of rationalisation. Beyond these and similar arguments, get ready for an hilarious and lengthy set of good advice from medieval Tischzuchten, Erasmus, and others.
November 17, 2013
"Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late." - Thomas Sowell
Chapter 3 of The Better Angels of Our Nature, which heavily referenced this book, piqued my interest. However, unless you are writing a sociology paper, or want a very detailed analysis of Renaissance era primary sources, you are better served by having Steven Pinker summarize Norbert Elias' major ideas and findings instead. Or, better yet, read the opening chapters of A Renegade History of the United States.
Chapter 3 of The Better Angels of Our Nature, which heavily referenced this book, piqued my interest. However, unless you are writing a sociology paper, or want a very detailed analysis of Renaissance era primary sources, you are better served by having Steven Pinker summarize Norbert Elias' major ideas and findings instead. Or, better yet, read the opening chapters of A Renegade History of the United States.
December 1, 2014
First part of the book was quite boring and sometimes hard to understand (there were lots of quotes in German and other languages without them being translated to English) but the second half was brilliant. There were so many genious thoughts and I do understand why this is classic in cultural history.
July 22, 2011
D'ou vient la politesse, les bonnes manières? Ce livre donne des idées sur le sujet. On pourra se référer aussi aux écrits d’Érasme. Amusant.
November 23, 2015
Stunning. Solid academia. Lucid, cogent, well-measured, well-tempered; and (for a work of nonfiction) really just exquisite in its language and logic. Beautifully executed.
October 26, 2021
teoria boa e leitura fácil, porém cansativa, mesmo com a quantidade extensa de exemplos que chegam a ser cômicos
April 17, 2017
Une analyse certes datée mais quand même extrêmement intéressante de l'évolution des règles de savoir-vivre, et de ce que signifie cette évolution à la fois pour la société et pour ceux qui la composent.
Je lis peu (pas?) de sociologie, mais ce livre me donne envie de changer ça !
Je lis peu (pas?) de sociologie, mais ce livre me donne envie de changer ça !
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews