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Civilizing Processes—Myth or Reality? A Comment on Duerr's Critique of Elias

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2012

Stephen Mennell  and
Johan Goudsblom
Stephen Mennell
Affiliation:
University College Dublin
Johan Goudsblom
Affiliation:
University of Amsterdam
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Extract

It is a great tribute to the late Norbert Elias that Hans-Peter Duerr has embarked upon a four-volume critique, Der Mythos vom Zivilisationsprozess, of Elias's original two volumes of The Civilizing Process (recently reissued in a single-volume edition). Duerr's volumes may initiate a major intellectual debate and thus lead to the wider recognition of the importance of Elias—whom Duerr himself rates as “perhaps the most influential and stimulating sociologist of the second half of the twentieth century” (Duerr, vol. 3:11).

Space does not permit us to examine here the wealth of empirical detail which Duerr deploys, so we shall concentrate on discussing the main theoretical issues at stake. We cannot help noticing, however, a certain double standard in his handling of evidence. Duerr is a very severe judge of the way that Norbert Elias handles his historical evidence in documenting medieval customs and sensitivities, and his keen eye in this regard is to be applauded. However, whereas every item used by Elias to support his point of view is subjected to extremely rigorous criticism, all the items that can be used to contest Elias's views are accepted at face value.

Type
Shaping the Social Being
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , October 1997 , pp. 729 - 733
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1997

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References

1 Elias, Norbert, The Civilizing Process (Oxford, Blackwell, 1994Google Scholar).

2 This passage, which we translated is quoted from Duerr, vol. 1:227–8.

3 Attributed to Douglas, Mary, Implicit Meanings (London 1975), 10, 12Google Scholar.

4 Attributed to Vetromile, E., The Abnakis and their History (New York, 1866), 89Google Scholarff.

5 Attributed to Goodenough, Ward, “Personal Names and Modes of Address in Two Oceanic Societies”, in Spiro, M. E., ed., Context and Meaning in Cultural Anthropology (New York, 1965Google Scholar).

6 Attributions are given to Strathern, A., “Why is Shame on the Skin?” Ethnology, New York, (1975Google Scholar), and to Vicedom, G. F. and Tischner, H., Die Mbowamb, vol. 1 (Hamburg, 1948Google Scholar).

7 Leach, Edmund, Rethinking Anthropology (London, Athlone Press, 1961Google Scholar).

8 Duerr, vol. 3:26.

9 Duerr, vol. 3:27.

10 Elias, The Civilizing Process, 481.

11 Duerr, vol. 3:28.

12 Our allusion here is to Elias. The Civilizing Process, 460–5. “Diminishing Contrasts. Increasing Varieties.”

13 Elias, Norbert, Time: An Essay (Oxford, Blackwell, 1992Google Scholar); The Symbol Theory (London, Sage, 1991Google Scholar).

14 Ikegami, E., The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1995Google Scholar).

15 Kürsat-Ahlers, Elçin, Zur frühen Staatenbildung von Steppenvölkern: Über die Sozio- und Psychogenese der eurasischen Nomadenreiche am Beispiel der Hsiung-Nu and Göktürken mit einem Exkurs über die Skythen (Berlin, Dunker and Humblot, 1994Google Scholar).

16 Rasing, Wim, “Too Many People”: Order and Nonconformity in Iglulingmiut Social Process (Nijmegen, Catholic University of Nijmegen, 1994Google Scholar).

17 Elias, , The Germans: Studies of Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Oxford, Polity Press, 1995Google Scholar).

18 Elias himself defined the task of the sociologist as to be “a destroyer of myths” (What is Sociology? [New York, Columbia University Press, 1978Google Scholar]). Although he took great pains to distance himself from nineteenth-century models of social evolution and progress, Duerr is not the first critic to level at Elias the charge of following such outdated models.