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This paper focuses on the contributions of Norbert Elias’s theory to the study of the European integration process. There is a long tradition in EU studies to analyze the emergence in Brussels of a Regulatory state. But the European Regulatory State (ERS) has remained to this day largely an asociological and ahistorical concept. Yet, everything indicates that the ERS was not just a product of the European treaties. It appears as a result of political and professional mobilizations that developed in the long history of European construction. Elias’s theory provides a useful framework to study the socio-genesis of the ERS. First, his long-term approach of state formation instead of state building not only helps to sociologize and historicize the form of government that emerged in Brussels but also to understand the role of private actors, such as competition lawyers, in this process. Second, Elias’s sociology of professions invites us to go beyond the study of the institutional façade of legal professions and to analyze lawyers’ investments in the “civilizing” of European capitalism. Studying the role of first competition lawyers who specialized in EU policies in the 1970s and 1980s, this paper shows how these lawyers strengthened their position in national bars and established themselves as the first intermediaries of EU policies. Finally, however, the constitution of the European competition lawyer’s habitus illustrates loopholes in European integration as a civilizing process, or the possibility of a concurrent decivilizing one.

Sociologists have long been concerned with the extent to which \"civilizing processes\" lead to the increasing salience of rationalized behavioral guidelines and corresponding internal controls, especially in social situations characterized by violence. Following Norbert Elias's identification of a civilizing process in combat sports, sociologists have debated, though not empirically established, whether emerging \"no-holds-barred\" fight practices indicate a rupture in the historical civilization of leisure time violence. Using a critical case study of a \"no-rules\" weapons fighting group, where participants espouse libertarian values and compete in preparation for hypothetical self-defense encounters, I ask how the boundary between violence and social regulation is negotiated in an arena that putatively aims to remove the latter. Drawing on more than three years of ethnographic fieldwork, I specify the mechanisms that moderate action: (1) the cultivation of a code of honor and linked dispositions to replace codified rules; (2) the interactional hesitance that arises when participants lack clear rules or norms to coordinate action; and (3) the importation of external rule sets, such as self-defense law, to simulate the \"real\" world. Contrary to surface readings of \"no-rules\" discourse, I conclude that the activity is deeply embedded in larger societal norms of order. Participants' ethos of honorable self-governance, \"thresholds of repugnance\" when exposed to serious injury, and aim of transforming emotive, violent reaction into reflective, instrumental action all indicate that the ostensibly unrestrained violence is, in Elias's technical sense, precisely civilized.

In this contribution to the forum marking the publication of Andrew Linklater’s remarkable book on Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems we first locate the book in the context of Linklater’s overarching intellectual journey. While best known for his contribution to a critical international theory, it is through his engagement with Martin Wight’s comparative sociology of states-systems that Linklater found resonances with the work of process sociologist, Norbert Elias. Integrating Wight’s insights into the states-system with Elias’s insights into civilising processes, Violence and Civilization presents a high-level theoretical synthesis with the aim of historically tracing restraints on violence. The article identifies a tension between the cosmopolitan philosophical history which underpins the argument of the book, and which has underpinned all Linklater’s previous works, and the ‘Utrecht Enlightenment’ that offers a conception of ‘civilized statecraft’ at odds with a universal conception of morality and justice. The article then examines Linklater’s argument about the ‘global civilizing process’ as it applies to post-Second World War efforts to build greater institutional capability to protect peoples from harm. It is argued that Linklater over-estimates the extent to which solidarism has civilised international society, and that the extension of state responsibilities and development of civilised statecraft owe more to pluralism than solidarism.

Instead of conceiving civilisation as a destination, both Norbert Elias and Sigmund Freud have questioned the ideals of the civilised individual, revealing its darker aspects, steeped in contradictions and ambivalences. Both thinkers have integrated barbarism within the concept of civilisation, thereby rewriting the destinies of societies. The civilising process is thus interpreted as a combination of progress and regression, construction and destruction, civilisation and barbarism, influenced by both civilising and de-civilising forces. Experiences of violence generate social traumas that are passed down from generation to generation. In this context, the collapse of civilisation emerges as one of the inevitable fates of the civilising process.

Norbert Elias's The Civilizing Process, which was published in German in 1939 and first translated into English in two volumes in 1978 and 1982, is now widely regarded as one of the great works of twentieth-century sociology. This work attempted to explain how Europeans came to think of themselves as more \"civilized\" than their forebears and neighboring societies. By analyzing books about manners that had been published between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, Elias observed changing conceptions of shame and embarrassment with respect to, among other things, bodily propriety and violence. To explain those developments, Elias examined the interplay among the rise of state monopolies of power, increasing levels of economic interconnectedness among people, and pressures to become attuned to others over greater distances that led to advances in identifying with others in the same society irrespective of social origins. Elias's analysis of the civilizing process was not confined, however, to explaining changing social bonds within separate societies. The investigation also focused on the division of Europe into sovereign states that were embroiled in struggles for power and security. This article provides an overview and analysis of Elias's principal claims in the light of growing interest in this seminal work in sociology. The analysis shows how Elias defended higher levels of synthesis in the social sciences to explain relations between \"domestic\" and \"international\" developments, and changes in social structure and in the emotional lives of modern people. Elias's investigation, which explained long-term processes of development over several centuries, pointed to the limitations of inquiries that concentrate on short-term intervals. Only by placing short-term trends in long-term perspective could sociologists understand contemporary developments. This article maintains that Elias's analysis of the civilizing process remains an exemplary study of long-term developments in Western societies over the last five centuries.

This article analyses magazines and books of Nazi propaganda representing meat in order to demonise the Jews. Nazism adopted controversial policies on meat. On the one hand, it banned vegetarian associations; on the other hand, Hitler and many Nazi officials professed their vegetarianism. Moreover, Nazi Animal Protection Law protected animals from the same tortures that the Nazis inflicted in the concentration camps. The article draws on Bauman's theory that Nazism may be understood through the opposition purity/impurity, and on Gambrill's propaganda studies. Moreover, it is based on Elias's Civilising Process and on Fullbrook's 'uncivilising process'. Finally, it focuses on other studies on Nazism and on ancient myths on animals revived by the Nazis. Qualitative propaganda and semiotic analysis focuses on Jews dealing with producing, selling and eating meat. Magazines and books have been sampled according to maximum variation strategy, and therefore this study focuses on a great variety of propagandistic images and texts. Results show that propaganda targeted the Jewish slaughterers, dealers, butchers and eaters in order to represent them as involved in the uncivilising process. In the end, meat contributed to the representation of the Jew as 'impure'. Related to this, blood is overrepresented and is often part of a code of violence that depicts the Jew as separate from the rest of the world, as threatening the German civilising process and, again, as impure. Moreover, the symbolic meat eating contributed to the fabrication of the legend of the Jews as human flesh eaters. Finally, propaganda for children conveyed the Nazi criminal message more directly than any other form.

This paper contributes to the debate on the relationship between managerial control and organizational autonomy of employees, by highlighting the general directions in which this relationship has developed over time since the post-Fordist turn of half a century ago. These changes are accelerated and made more evident by the processes that go by the names of automation (1980s-1990s), informatization (mid-1990s-early 2000s), and digitization/Fourth Industrial Revolution. To this end, primary research data will not be analyzed here; instead, a rather diverse literature will be reviewed, both theoretical and empirical, addressing key themes for interpreting the changing situations of organized labor. The interpretative framework is primarily constituted by some conceptual categories borrowed from Norbert Elias’ processual sociology, summarized in the following points: a) the processual conception of social reality; b) power relations; c) the process of civilization; d) the relationship between I-identity and We-identity in contemporary society. Digitalization in organized work accentuates a most general trend, already clearly observable in the past but especially from the post-Fordist turn, towards forms of managerial control based more on employees self-control and assessment of outcomes than direct supervision of the work processes.

This article offers incipient theoretical analysis and reflections on the recent rises in lethal violence recorded in the United Kingdom. The rises have attracted considerable media attention, with the more informed discussions drawing plausible causal associations between rising lethal violence and the policy context of austerity. Criminology, however, has been relatively silent so far on the recent rises and this potential association. In response, this article attempts to stimulate debate by critically considering the utility of one of the most widely cited theoretical frameworks in the study of historical patterns of violence in the western nations: the ‘civilizing process’. The article then moves on to consider the applicability of insights from the incipient ultra-realist criminological perspective. The article suggests that the ultra-realist concept of the ‘pseudo-pacification process’ provides a useful means of furthering our understanding of these rises in the current socioeconomic context of post-crash capitalism.

This essay presents a cautionary tale about certain problems with systematization and abstraction in comparative civilizational studies. It advocates instead for the analysis of single works, limited events, or particular figures, within larger issues pertaining to what is understood as a \"civilization\" or \"culture\". It prioritizes certain aspects of the civilizing process: the here, or the civilizing and interpretive gaze; the there, or the Other that is the object of that gaze; and the in-between. It further suggests that insights and methods from Mikhail Bakhtin, Hans-Georg Gadamer and others from the humanities, social sciences, and philosophy can be useful in the kind of analysis advocated here.

The paper emphasizes the contemporary relevance of civility, understood as a respectful way of treating the other and recognition of people’s differences and sensibilities. It outlines the sociological importance of civility as being connected with its role as both a normative guidance orienting us towards prescriptive ideals and as an empirical concept with important social impact on identities and actions. The paper examines Adam Smith’s theory which roots civility in a commercial society, analyses Elias’s (1994) history of civility as the folding of the logic of the civilizing process, and it debates theories linking the idea of civility to civil society. In conclusion, emphases are put on the importance of civility, seen as the act of respectful engaging with people across deep divisions, for the quality of democracy.