Ariel or caliban?1 The civilizing process and its critiques

Abstract

In 1939 Elias published The Civilizing Process in German. The Nazis were in power, the Second World War was starting, and the Holocaust was coming. It was a terrible configuration for a young Jewish intellectual publishing a book on how "civilization" (of Western Europe, in particular) is based on manners, self-control, and state formation. Thirty years later, the book was finally republished in English. In a context made by various social movements, critiques of capitalism, racism, colonization, and patriarchy, Elias’s book could hardly compete with the work of intellectuals such as C. W. Mills, A. Gouldner, structuro-Marxists, M. Foucault, P. Bourdieu, and A. Touraine. For many readers Elias’s explanations looked to be out-of-place in relation to what were considered "radical" theories and other emerging currents, such as Feminism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism. At its best, this book was seen as a curiosity; at the worst, it could be interpreted as one form of outdated sociology, as the "mirror image" of Parsons’s theory (Mouzelis 2008, 112). In fact, even if his number of readers has constantly increased in the last decades, Elias’s sociology has always stayed behind the big stars of the disciplines, as one can see by looking at the number of citations of Elias and other famous social scientists (see Figure 3.1).