Norbert Elias (J1897 — 1990埃利亞斯 )《文明進程》1991: Mozart. Zur Soziologie eines Genies, edited by Michael Schröter, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (Published in English as Mozart. Portrait of a Genius, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993).
- 1991: Mozart. Zur Soziologie eines Genies, edited by Michael Schröter, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (Published in English as Mozart. Portrait of a Genius, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993).
It seems to me, for some reason, that lately over the pages of this blog and elsewhere we have rekindled discussions over the difference or ‘pastness’ of the past as compared with the present. Are historians too eager to find difference in the past that similarities go unnoticed, or is it the other way around? How familiar or different is the past? It would seem that as historians we have a vested interest in arguing for difference, since it renders our profession as that much more necessary—and alluring. And while it is quite impossible to argue that the past was not qualitatively different from the present, I think that too often—as present minded people—we regard particularly the modern period as standing on a different ontological plain altogether. I have always found the scholarship of Norbert Elias as one of the best correctives for this quite natural inclination to fetishize modernity. In what follows, I would like to convince you that his ideas offer us a viable alternative–one that regards the past both as very different from the present, yet on the same ontological plain we today inhabit.
不知何故，最近我似乎在本部落格和其他一些地方重新點燃了關於過去與現在之間的差異或「過去性」的討論。是歷史學家過於急於尋找過去的差異，而忽略了相似之處，還是恰恰相反？過去究竟有多熟悉或不同？身為歷史學家，我們似乎有既得利益去探討差異，因為這使我們的職業變得更加必要，也更加誘人。雖然很難斷言過去與現在沒有質的差異，但我認為，作為關注當下的人，我們常常將現代時期視為完全不同的本體論層面。我一直認為諾伯特·埃利亞斯的學術研究是糾正這種對現代性盲目崇拜的自然傾向的最佳方法之一。接下來，我想讓你們相信，他的想法為我們提供了一個可行的選擇——既認為過去與現在截然不同，又與我們今天所處的本體論層面相同。
With time I figured out the reason my fellow student reacted the way she did—it was because she was interested in medieval history. And medievalists, at least in my university it turned out, begrudged Foucault both his sentimentalization of the premodern period and his leading role in promoting the paradigm of the great schism in history between the premodern and the modern. Thus, I learned that medievalists were often quite critical of Foucault’s work, accusing him of historical simplification and teleological, cherry-picking, empiricism. More importantly, however, I learned about Norbert Elias, who, as I found out, many medievalists had since the late 1970s viewed as the best alternative to Foucault. For them Elias offered not only a more gradual and accurate longue durée
rendering of the process of ‘individuation’ than Foucault’s, but also an analysis that reckoned with the premodern era with due historicist nuance.
隨著時間的推移，我終於明白了這位同學為何會有如此反應──是因為她對中世紀史感興趣。而中世紀研究者，至少在我所在的大學裡，對傅柯既不滿他對前現代時期的感性化，也不滿他在推動前現代與現代之間歷史大分裂範式方面所發揮的主導作用。因此，我了解到中世紀研究者常對傅柯的作品頗有微詞，指責他簡化歷史，推崇目的論、唯利是圖的經驗主義。然而，更重要的是，我了解了諾伯特·埃利亞斯，我發現，自1970年代末以來，許多中世紀研究者都認為他是傅柯的最佳替代品。對他們來說，埃利亞斯不僅比傅柯對「個體化」過程進行了更為漸進和準確的長時段
的解讀，而且還以一種應有的歷史主義色彩對前現代時期進行了考量。
Norbert Elias (June 22, 1897 — August 1, 1990) was a German sociologist of Jewish descent, who later became a British citizen.
His work 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.
Interest in his work can be partly attributed to the fact that his concept of large social figurations or networks explains the emergence and function of large societal structures without neglecting the aspect of individual agency. In the 1960s and 1970s, the overemphasis of structure over agency was heavily criticized about the then-dominant school of structural functionalism.
Elias' most important work is the two-volume The Civilizing Process (Über den Prozess der Zivilisation). Originally published in 1939, it was virtually ignored until its republication in 1969, when its first volume was also translated into English. The first volume traces the historical developments of the European habitus, or "second nature," the particular individual psychic structures molded by social attitudes. Elias traced how post-medieval European standards regarding violence, sexual behaviour, bodily functions, table manners and forms of speech were gradually transformed by increasing thresholds of shame and repugnance, working outward from a nucleus in court etiquette. The internalized "self-restraint" imposed by increasingly complex networks of social connections developed the "psychological" self-perceptions that Freud recognized as the "super-ego." The second volume of The Civilizing Process looks into the causes of these processes and finds them in the increasingly centralized Early Modern state and the increasingly differentiated and interconnected web of society.
When Elias' work found a larger audience in the 1960s, at first his analysis of the process was misunderstood as an extension of discredited "social Darwinism," the idea of upward "progress" was dismissed by reading it as consecutive history rather than a metaphor for a social process.
The Quest for Excitement, written by Norbert Elias with Eric Dunning, and published in 1986 has proved a seminal work for the sociology of sport, and of football in particular. The Centre for the Sociology of Sport at the University of Leicester, England is host to a number of important sociologists who work on the Elias and Dunning tradition.
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Biography
Elias was born on June 22, 1897 in Breslau (Wrocław) in Silesia to Hermann and Sophie Elias. His father was a businessman in the textile industry and his mother, as usual at the time, a housewife. After passing the abitur in 1915 he volunteered for the German army in World War I and was employed as a telegrapher, first at the Eastern front, then at the Western front. After suffering a nervous breakdown in 1917, he was declared unfit for service and was posted to Wroclaw as a medical orderly. The same year, Elias began studying philosophy, psychology and medicine at the University of Breslau, in addition spending a term each at the universities of Heidelberg (where he attended lectures by Karl Jaspers) and Freiburg in 1919 and 1920. He quit medicine in 1919 after passing the preliminary examination (Physikum). To finance his studies after his father's fortune had been reduced by hyperinflation, he took up a job as the head of the export department in a local hardware factory 1922. In 1924, he graduated with a doctoral dissertation in philosophy entitled Idee und Individuum ("Idea and Individual") supervised by Richard Hönigswald, a representative of Neo-Kantianism. Disappointed about the absence of the social aspect from Neo-Kantianism, which had led to a serious dispute with his supervisor about his dissertation, Elias decided to turn to sociology for his further studies.
During his Breslau years, until 1925, Elias was deeply involved in the German Zionist movement, and acted as one of the leading intellectuals within the German-Jewish youth movement "Blau-Weiss" (Blue-White). During these years he got acquainted with other young zionists like Erich Fromm, Leo Strauss, Leo Löwenthal and Gershom Scholem. In 1925, Elias moved to Heidelberg, where Alfred Weber accepted him as a candidate for a habilitation (second book project) on the development of modern science, entitled Die Bedeutung der Florentiner Gesellschaft und Kultur für die Entstehung der Wissenschaft (The Significance of Florentine Society and Culture for the Development of Science). In 1930 Elias chose to cancel this project and followed Karl Mannheim to become his assistant at the University of Frankfurt. However, after the Nazi take-over in early 1933, Mannheim's sociological institute was forced to close. The already submitted habilitation thesis entitled Der höfische Mensch ("The Man of the Court") was never formally accepted and not published until 1969. In 1933, Elias fled to Paris. His elderly parents remained in Breslau, where his father died in 1940; his mother was deported to Auschwitz, where she probably was killed in 1941.
During his two years in Paris, Elias worked as a private scholar supported by a scholarship from the Amsterdam Steunfonds Foundation. In 1935, he moved on to Great Britain, where he worked on his magnum opus, The Civilizing Process, until 1939, now supported by a scholarship from a relief organization for Jewish refugees. In 1939, he met up with his former supervisor Mannheim at the London School of Economics, where he obtained a position as Senior Research Assistant. In 1940, when an invasion of Britain by German forces appeared imminent, Elias was detained at internment camps in Liverpool and on the Isle of Man for eight months, on account of his being German. During his internment he organized political lectures and staged a drama he had written himself, Die Ballade vom armen Jakob (The Ballad of Poor Jacob) (eventually published in 1987).
Upon his release in 1941, he moved to Cambridge. He taught evening classes for the Workers' Educational Association (the adult education organization), and later evening extension courses in sociology, psychology, economics and economic history at the University of Leicester. He also held occasional lectureships at other institutions of higher learning. While in Cambridge, he trained as a group therapist under the psychoanalyst S. H. Foulkes, another German emigrant, with whom he co-founded the Group Analytic Society in 1952 and worked as a group therapist.
In 1954, he moved to Leicester, where he became a lecturer at, and contributed to the development of, the University's Department of Sociology, until his retirement in 1962. At Leicester, his students included John Eldridge and Anthony Giddens.
From 1962 to 1964, Elias taught as professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Ghana in Legon near Accra. After his return to Europe in 1965, he based himself in Amsterdam but travelled much as a visiting professor, mainly at German universities. His reputation and popularity grew immensely after the republication of The Civilising Process in 1969. From 1978 to 1984 he worked at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Bielefeld.
Elias was the first ever laureate of both the Theodor W. Adorno Award (1977) and the European Amalfi Prize for Sociology and Social Sciences (1987).
Outside his sociological work he sporadically also wrote poetry and essays.
Elias died at his home in Amsterdam on 1 August 1990.
Selected Bibliography
Books
(In chronological order, by date of original publication)
- 1939: Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation. Soziogenetische und psychogenetische Untersuchungen. Erster Band. Wandlungen des Verhaltens in den weltlichen Oberschichten des Abendlandes and Zweiter Band. Wandlungen der Gesellschaft. Entwurf einer Theorie der Zivilisation. Basel: Verlag Haus zum Falken. (Published in English as The Civilizing Process, Vol.I. The History of Manners, Oxford: Blackwell, 1969, and The Civilizing Process, Vol.II. State Formation and Civilization, Oxford: Blackwell, 1982).
The Civilizing Process is a masterful piece of historical and sociological analysis that views the slow change over time of social cohesion in Europe from the high medieval period to the modern period. It’s greatest insights stem from Elias’ ability to tether the transformation of everyday habits of people to a much larger macro vision of social change over a millennium. Elias’ central concern is with the notion of ‘civility,’ or ‘civilization.’ Examining the changing literature on manners in Europe, Elias argues that the general trend towards what Europeans regarded as a greater level of civilization revolved around greater constraint people exhibit in their most basic conduct. Thus he follows changing table manners, changing codes regarding the dealings with bodily excrements, the transformation of behavior in the bedroom, and much more. Such refinement of habits, which had originated with the medieval aristocracy, spread over the centuries to lower strata of society, as they sought to imitate the form of those who employed elaborate manners to assert superiority. According to Elias, by the modern period most Europeans had developed an elaborate system of constraint, imposed both by oneself and by one’s social surroundings, that governs one’s most basic acts. Though quite implicit and careful on such points, Elias insinuates that such changing configurations of habits constitute the contours of the transformation of the ‘self’ over many centuries.
The refinement of manners, argues Elias, also had important ramifications in organizing and controlling the violence in European societies, which had once been dominated by bands of armed nobles. This point also provides Elias with the crucial link between micro and macro levels of analysis, as he charts the consolidation of nation states. Following in the footsteps of Max Weber, he traces the centralizing forces that would culminate in the state’s claim to monopolize violence and levy taxes, thereby taming the aggression of the old manly ideal.
Though many, including myself here, have sought to tap the full potential of Elias’ ideas, he himself was quite hesitant to make unequivocal claims, which I think many medieval historians appreciate. Elias repeats time and again that the process he traces is far from linear, had no clear beginning and no clear end. It was rather a process rife with ebbs and flows and that exhibited certain patterns that he tries to identify. Furthermore, Elias attempts, with varying degrees of success, to purge the term ‘civilization’ of its moral implications in western imagination for the purposes of his project. This however, is to a certain degree in vain. Indeed, the heritage of the word civilization haunts the work, at times in a productive way, in other instances—especially as a title—it compromises Elias’ project to a certain extent. It is perhaps important to note that the word civilization and the title in German have a different linguistic connotations than in English, and that Elias begins his work with a drawn-out discussion of the terms ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ in German, French, and English.
One of the best features of Elias’ work is that it is very accessible. Though his ideas are challenging and penetrating, he puts them in very straightforward terms. Unlike too many theorists, he does not seek to sound profound, but rather to deliver profound ideas in an intelligible fashion that is well grounded in concrete empirical findings. Particularly for historians, I believe, he provides an example of historical and theoretical work that explains change over time—a very long time—in a pithy and compelling package.
儘管包括我在內的許多人都試圖充分挖掘埃利亞斯思想的潛力，但他本人卻不願做出明確的斷言，我認為許多中世紀歷史學家對此深表讚賞。埃利亞斯一再強調，他所追溯的進程遠非線性，沒有明確的起點，也沒有明確的終點。相反，這是一個充滿起伏的過程，展現出他試圖識別的某些模式。此外，為了他的研究項目，埃利亞斯試圖清除「文明」一詞在西方想像中的道德意義，並取得了不同程度的成功。然而，這在某種程度上是徒勞無功的。事實上，「文明」一詞的傳承始終縈繞在他的著作中，有時以一種富有成效的方式，有時則在某種程度上——尤其是作為標題——它在一定程度上損害了埃利亞斯的研究項目。或許值得注意的是，「文明」一詞及其標題在德語中的意義與英語不同，而埃利亞斯在其著作的開篇就對德語、法語和英語中「文化」和「文明」一詞進行了詳盡的探討。
埃利亞斯著作的一大亮點在於其通俗易懂。儘管他的思想富有挑戰性和洞察力，但他卻用非常直白的語言表達它們。與許多理論家不同，他並不追求高深莫測，而是力求以簡單易懂的方式傳達深刻的思想，並以具體的實證研究為基礎。我認為，尤其對歷史學家而言，他提供了一個歷史和理論著作的典範，以簡潔明了、引人入勝的方式解釋了隨著時間推移——一段漫長的時間——而發生的變化。
[2000, The Civilizing Process. Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. Revised edition of 1994. Oxford, Blackwell].
- 1965 (with John L. Scotson): The Established and the Outsiders. A Sociological Enquiry into Community Problems, London: Frank Cass & Co. (Originally published in English.)
- 1969: Die höfische Gesellschaft. Untersuchungen zur Soziologie des Königtums und der höfischen Aristokratie (based on the 1933 habilitation). Neuwied/Berlin: Luchterhand. (Published in English translation by Edmund Jephcott as The Court Society, Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).
- 1970: Was ist Soziologie?. München: Juventa. (Published in English as What is Sociology?, London: Hutchinson, 1978).
- 1982: Über die Einsamkeit der Sterbenden in unseren Tagen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (Published in English as The Loneliness of the Dying, Oxford: Blackwell, 1985).
- 1982 (edited with Herminio Martins and Richard Whitley): Scientific Establishments and Hierarchies. Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook 1982, Dordrecht: Reidel.
- 1983: Engagement und Distanzierung. Arbeiten zur Wissenssoziologie I, edited by Michael Schröter, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (Published in English as Involvement and Detachment. Contributions to the Sociology of Knowledge, Oxford: Blackwell, 1987.)
- 1984: Über die Zeit. Arbeiten zur Wissenssoziologie II, edited by Michael Schröter, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (Published in English as Time. An Essay, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).
- 1985: Humana conditio. Betrachtungen zur Entwicklung der Menschheit am 40. Jahrestag eines Kriegsendes (8. Mai 1985), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (Not available in English).
- 1986 (with Eric Dunning): Quest for Excitement. Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process. Oxford: Blackwell.
- 1987: Die Gesellschaft der Individuen, edited by Michael Schröter, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (Original 1939, published in English as The Society of Individuals, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).
- 1987: Los der Menschen. Gedichte, Nachdichtungen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (Poetry, not available in English).
- 1989: Studien über die Deutschen. Machtkämpfe und Habitusentwicklung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Michael Schröter, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (Published in English as The Germans. Power struggles and the development of habitus in the 19th and 20th centuries, Cambridge: Polity Press 1996.)
- 1990: Über sich selbst, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (Published in English as Reflections on a life, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994).
- 1991: Mozart. Zur Soziologie eines Genies, edited by Michael Schröter, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (Published in English as Mozart. Portrait of a Genius, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993).
- 1991: The Symbol Theory. London: Sage. (Originally published in English.)
- 1996: Die Ballade vom armen Jakob, Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag (Drama, not available in English).
- 1998: Watteaus Pilgerfahrt zur Insel der Liebe, Weitra (Austria): Bibliothek der Provinz (Not available in English).
- 1998: The Norbert Elias Reader: A Biographical Selection, edited by Johan Goudsblom and Stephen Mennell, Oxford: Blackwell.
- 1999: Zeugen des Jahrhunderts. Norbert Elias im Gespräch mit Hans Christian Huf, edited by Wolfgang Homering, Berlin: Ullstein. (Interview, not available in English).
- 2002: Frühschriften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (Early writings, not available in English.)
- 2004: Gedichte und Sprüche. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (Translations of poems in English and French).
See also:
Norbert Elias, by Robert van Krieken, London: Routledge, 1998; La sociologie de Norbert Elias, by Nathalie Heinich, Paris: La Découverte, 2002 (in French).
Articles
- "Civilization and Violence". TELOS 54 (Winter 1982-83). New York: Telos Press
External links
- The Norbert Elias Foundation website
- The HyperElias website (A complete list of all works by Norbert Elias, in all languages, published and unpublished, as well as many full text items and abstracts)
- Site on Norbert Elias and Process Sociology at the University of Sydney (partially out of date)
- Online interview from the Dutch television organization VPRO.
- The Centre for the Sociology of Sport
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