The Civilizing Process

The Civilizing Process is a two-volume work by the German sociologist Norbert Elias, first published in Basel in 1939. It is his most important book and one of the most influential works of sociology in the twentieth century. It appeared in the middle of the Second World War and was largely ignored until its republication in 1969 and its translation into English, after which it gained wide readership. It covers European history from roughly 800 to 1900 and is an early attempt to analyse and theorise the very notion of civilisation.

The first volume, The History of Manners, traces how European norms governing violence, sexuality, bodily functions, table manners and forms of speech changed from the Middle Ages onward. Elias argues that these behaviours were refined first within court etiquette and then spread outward through society, raising the thresholds of shame and repugnance. The self-restraint that people internalised in increasingly dense networks of relationships produced what we call the psychological self, which Freud later recognised as the super-ego.

The second volume, State Formation and Civilization, seeks the causes of this process in the making of the modern state. Elias describes how power gradually concentrated in a central court that came to monopolise military force and taxation, while society grew more complex, differentiated and interdependent.

The book's reception was contested. Some readers took it as a defence of Western superiority, close to social Darwinism, yet Elias aimed to describe a process rather than pass a moral verdict. Critics such as the ethnologist Hans Peter Duerr argued that social restraints existed in many cultures long before the medieval period. Elias replied that he had never claimed otherwise, only that Western culture developed unusually sophisticated and rigorous institutions. Today the work is regarded as a foundational text of figurational sociology.