Review Article

Evaluating Elias
Richard Kilminster
Norbert Elias: Civilization and the Human Self-image
by Stephen Mennell
Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989, pp. 319, 30
There are two kinds of critique. One version, typical of those
influenced by analytic philosophy, goes first for the weaknesses of
the theory or text and proceeds swiftly to its demolition. This
type of critique is a strong temptation because pointing out what
is wrong with something comes very easily to highly self-controlled
people brought up in internally pacified societies. Here fear and
aggression have long been turned mainly inwards in the personality
and conflicts have been largely transformed into non-violent
rivalries with their weapons rhetoric and skilful calculation.
Attacking a text by vigorous fault-finding protects the critic against
the threat posed by the author whose superiority the critic unconsciously fears. In this kind of analysis what is valuable and positive
in the subject matter gratuitously appears only at the end of the
story, as an afterthought, overshadowed by the catalogue of faults.
Another style, however, arguably associated with a different
tradition, including Hegel, Mannheim, Elias and others, is more
detached and less defensive, affirming first what is considered
valuable and positive, given the author's presuppositions and
perspective. Only then does the critic show how certain negative
features entail us moving 'beyond the standpoint' concerned, as
Hegel would have put it, carrying forward what is positive. So let
us take this path here and begin with what is good in this new book
on Elias.
This book is most welcome as the first major study to appear in

Theory, Culture & Society (SAGE, London, Newbury Park and New Delhi), Vol. 8
(1991), 165-176

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from the SAGE Social Science Collections. All Rights Reserved.

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English on the life and work of Norbert Elias and the research
tradition he has inspired in Holland, Germany and Britain, which
has become known (against the wishes of its founder) as 'figurational sociology'. As such this book will for a while corner the
market and become the standard reference work on Elias. Mennell
was translator of Elias's What Is Sociology? into English (1978), has
applied Elias's theories to his own researches into eating and taste
in France and England, and has been a devotee and champion of
Elias's work for some years, informed by long acquaintance with
the man himself and his closest collaborators. As one works through
the book, it becomes apparent, not surprisingly, that Mennell
knows the writings of Elias very well, which he expounds for the
most part faithfully. The author is particularly au fait with the
research by and debates between followers and critics in Holland,
where Elias has had the most influence. The book is a clearly written
exposition of Elias's way of doing sociology and constitutes its sustained defence, in virtually every respect.
As I know well from my own experience expounding Elias's
theory of civilizing processes, one is frequently confronted by the
same knee-jerk reactions from the audience: Aha, Eurocentrism!
Sounds like evolutionism to me! But what about the increasing
violence in our society? What about football hooligans? Surely the
Holocaust gives the lie to the whole project? Doesn't the sexual
revolution of the 1960s suggest the opposite trend to that delineated
by Elias? In the well-organized chapter 10 'Civilization and
Decivilization' on disputes, Mennell evaluates the main criticisms of
Elias which have emerged in recent years under four headings:
(a) arguments from cultural relativism (Blok, Duerr); (b) objections
involving 'stateless' civilizations (van Velzen, Rasing, Jagers);
(c) those invoking the problem of the 'permissive society'
(Brinkgreve and Korzec); and (d) the problem of 'barbarism' in the
twentieth century (Leach). Mennell discusses these controversies
thoroughly and fairly. This chapter is a Godsend.
There are still outstanding problems with Elias's theory and much
more theoretical and empirical work to be done, but I think the
more common and crass objections are more-or-less successfully
rebutted here. I would like to think that this chapter will finally lay
to rest the recurrent misreadings of Elias, though I doubt it. No matter how many times, for example, that Elias distinguishes between
largely irreversible biological evolution and potentially reversible
social development (the latter exemplified by his theory), it goes
unnoticed. The cultural relativists and anthropologists who can only

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see evolutionism (and hence for them ethnocentrism and even
racism) in Elias should check out The Court Society (Elias 1983: 221
ff) as one place among others where all this is dealt with. But they
won't. He in fact posits criteria for accurately calibrating progression and regression in social processes based on comparative
empirical research into real interdependencies in different societies
(set out by Mennell from Elias on p. 236). It is precisely ethnocentrism and the ideology of 'progress' that this procedure is designed
to circumvent.
Nor does the Holocaust of itself (repugnant though it is to the
vast majority of 'civilized' people in modern societies) provide a simple knock-down refutation of the theory of civilizing processes. As
Mennell shows, Elias offers many insights into the origins of
Nazism and the social preconditions conducive to the operation of
the rationally organized slaughter of outsider groups (see Mennell,
pp. 248-9; Elias, 1983: Appendix 1; Elias, 1989). This example and
others provide the impetus to redouble research into the dynamics
of'decivilizing' processes of many kinds and should not drive us into
unnecessarily positing a basic and barbaric instinct in human beings
to explain such episodes, appalling though they are (Mennell,
p. 248).
Another apparent knock-down argument has been that the relaxation of sexual and other behavioural standards during the 1960s
and 1970s signals a descent into lack of control, i.e. a reversal of
the civilizing process. In fact it implies new patterns of self-restraints
emerging to enable such 'controlled decontrolling of controls'
(Elias) to occur. And there have been such phases of 'informalization' (Wouters) before, followed by reformalization and then further informalization on a new level. These all reflect empirically
verifiable shifts in power balances between groups. Failure to suspend value judgements in favour of this kind of research inevitably
leads to assertions of a descent into decadence or the affirmation
that such periods as the 1920s or the 1960s just show that people
have always been the same, human nature being what it is.
This exercise is useful not only because it puts the record straight
in relation to misunderstandings about Elias, but also because at the
same time it tells us a great deal about the condition of the social
sciences within contemporary societies which spawn the criticisms.
It also alerts us to our tendency to find our own preoccupations mirrored in the projected omissions of others. Elias would have had
to have been monumentally naive or obtuse to have made such

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obvious blunders. There is a striking parallel with the litany of

erroneous criticisms made again and again against Karl Mannheim's
sociology of knowledge, even though he had explicitly anticipated
them (see Simonds, 1978). The repeated knee-jerk reactions, which
seem so indubitable to the opponents, involve many rigid presuppositions and prejudices, interests and unthought-out antinomies
which must fulfil deep-seated needs for them. Out from under their
stones have come the Marxists, the Romantics, the philosophers,
the structuralists, the anthropologists, the relativists, the historians
and the rest from left, right and centre on the political spectrum,
eager to do battle with Elias. To be embattled in this way is probably
endemic to the vocation of the sociologist, but some of the attacks
have been particularly shrill in relation to Elias because he has the
gall to pronounce on 'evaluative' matters from a sociological point
of view. (More on this later.)
What also comes over clearly in this book is how wide-ranging
is Elias's knowledge and broad his historical canvas. He moves between the arts and the sciences and roams across many different
periods and societies at will. And we also get a glimpse of the
magnitude of the staggering intellectual synthesis that is the Civilizing Process, Mennell rightly draws our attention to the unity of the
two volumes and to the remarkable synopsis in the last chapter.
Elias had an extraordinary talent for solving in a theoretical synthesis, hand-in-hand with empirical evidence, problems shrewdly
posed but left in the air by other writers. As is very well known,
Sombart, Veblen, Simmei, Weber, Mannheim and Freud Gust to
name a few important figures) had already in their different ways
tried to understand conspicuous consumption by elites, two-front
strata, the monopoly of the means of force, the dynamics of competition, patrimonialism, rationalization, democratization, civilized self-restraints and so on. As he expounds Elias, Mennell
mentions briefly in passing how they and some other German
writers handled similar issues to those of Elias, though this dimension is not central to his treatment. He picks out mostly those referred to in the footnotes in Elias's works written in the 1930s. Were
he more interested in the origins of Elias's synthesis, Mennell might
have made the point that perhaps the power of Elias's achievement
owes something to the stature of the social scientists of his generation and the one before who set the remarkably fertile problem
agenda of his time. Elias has been criticized for not acknowledging
them enough.

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I found much to disagree with about the first biographical

chapter. It tells the fascinating and sometimes harrowing story of
Elias's eventful life from Breslau to Amsterdam via Paris, London
and Leicester as a Jewish refugee from Nazism and his attempts to
rebuild a shattered academic career in Britain. Much of this
chapter's content was familiar to me from many hours of talking
myself with Elias over the last twenty years, and as such it has the
ring of authenticity. But this otherwise absorbing chapter suffers
because Mennell has reported the story only according to Elias's
accounts of it, either in his own published interviews and biographical reflections or from personal conversations. There is, for
example, a growing literature on the German refugees in wartime
Britain which could illuminate this phase (see Hirschfeld, 1984: esp.
chapters by F.L. Carsten and M. Seyfert). Obviously, taking Elias's
account as definitive produces a highly selective biographical
sketch.
This chapter covers also Elias's relationships with other prominent figures such as Alfred Weber, Mannheim, Ginsberg, Adorno
and S.H. Foulkes. But these too are presented entirely as Elias
recounts them, with no attempt made to seek corroboration or different angles from other sources than the man himself. The result
is a one-sided picture. The portrait of Elias's intellectual differences
with Mannheim, for example, is particularly overdrawn, as well as
reproducing the older received view (now much discredited) of
Mannheim as a brilliant relativist, but a relativist nonetheless. In
general, Mannheim was more rationalistic than Elias, but my own
view is that there is nonetheless an affinity between their approaches
to sociology and much more common ground between them than
has hitherto been recognised, particularly on the relationship between sociology and philosophy, the role of sociological knowledge
in society and on epistemological matters. But much more research
has to be done on this subject to arrive at a realistic evaluation
(Kilminster, forthcoming).
Part of the problem is that Mennell's book gamely tries to do too
many things at once. He expounds Elias's theories; shows parallel
discussions by other German writers in the Weimar period in particular; weaves in current research by Elias's associates which
extends his ideas in various fields; makes connections to the converging work of prominent sociologists, natural scientists and
philosophers in our time (Goffman, Rorty, Bhaskar, Richard
Dawkins and many more); deals with the main disputes; and tries

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to make the book partly a biography at the same time. This multipurpose character has been a further inevitable source of gaps,
omissions and unevennesses.
There is no mention or discussion of Elias's involvement with the
Utopieforschung project at the University of Bielefeld in 1980-1
and his subsequent writings on this theme (see Kilminster 1982;
Elias, 1982b). Neither is the discussion of Elias's critics by any
means complete. Omitted are at least the critiques by Susan BuckMorss, Robert M. Adams, Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, Christopher
Lasch, Mike Gane, S.G. Sathaye and Martin Albrow. And in his
zeal to leave no Dutch stone unturned, Mennell has also overlooked
some of the British research. Left out is a body of research carried
out in the Sociology Department of "the University of Leeds during
the 1980s which follows up lines of inquiry initiated by Elias in the
sociology of knowledge and science. In particular, Elias's conceptions of reality-congruence, levels of integration, psychogenesis,
sociogenesis and object-adequacy have been clarified and sharpened
through comparison with the converging work of other writers, past
and present. This work has tested the strength of Elias's theories by
pushing them outwards to encounter other research traditions. And
by and large the explanatory power of Elias's theories has come out
of these encounters very well, subject to various modifications (see
Wassail, 1990; Burkitt, 1989; Longmate, 1989).
Altogether Mennell's book is a curious mixture of care and
carelessness. The daunting task of conveying the seamless web of
Elias's writings is tackled by Mennell by expounding the main
arguments of The Civilizing Process and The Court Society first and
then dealing with Elias's other works and co-written pieces (e.g. on
established/outsider relations, sport, sciences, social sciences and
time) under separate themes. Inevitably this procedure has the effect
of breaking up Elias's work into neat boxes, when for him it was
probably all of a piece. But I concede that it is difficult to see how
else to present his ideas in an assimilable manner and in any case
he himself did also write on themes and topics. Mennell takes no
chances and expounds Elias by following the contours of the
original texts very closely indeed, often producing expository paragraphs which reproduce pages from Elias in precis form. To his
credit he explains and sorts out very succinctly some difficult and
closely interwoven ideas and gets them right most of the time; but
there are lapses which have substantive interpretative consequences.
1. In chapter 4, 'Sociogenesis and Psychogenesis', Mennell

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explains the profound synthetic force of Elias's insight that the

advances in the thresholds of shame and embarrassment and the
increasing rationalization of conduct are linked. This chapter is
based on intertwined themes taken from the first 80 pages of the
brilliant synopsis to volume II of The Civilizing Process, dealt with
under sub-headings which are adapted from some of Elias's own.
In Elias the two processes are different aspects of the growing split
in the personality between drives and drive-controls, producing
both increasing rational foresight and conscience (super-ego) formation. In a nutshell, in the course of a civilizing process physical
fears of attack are increasingly replaced by social fears of shame and
embarrassment in an increasingly complex and internally pacified
society.
But what Elias calls two 'forms' of foresight psychologization
and rationalization are lumped together by Mennell with the
advance of thresholds of shame and embarrassment and all called
'variations' or 'facets' of foresight. The advances in the thresholds in Elias are, however, not examples of or direct aspects of
foresight only psychologization and rationalization are. This is
no mere terminological quibble. The advances in the thresholds
show how fears have been turned inwards into the psyche: both this
process (involving superego formation) and the increasing detachment associated with rationalization and psychologization are associated with the development of the particular kind of drives/control
balance mentioned. In Elias the developing 'civilized' personality in
the West was always caught up in the pincer movement of two
related processes internal pacification of the state and the extending web of inter-group interdependencies. Mennell more-or-less
says that, but confuses the issue through carelessly attempting a
systematic formulation which contains an erroneous conflation.
2. Mennell's account (pp. 182-4) of Elias's researches into the
origins of political economy and sociology in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries as part of a general transformation in ways of
thinking about 'society', fails to do justice to the richness of Elias's
account. Elias's original paper on this subject from 1962 was called
'"The Break With Traditionalism" and the Origins of Sociology' and
not 'On the Sociogenesis of Sociology' as Mennell says. The new
title, which lacks the specificity of the original one, was given to the
unchanged manuscript by the editors of the Sociologisch Tijdschrift
when it was published in Holland in 1984.
Mennell mentions the significance of political economy as the

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social science to advise kings and ministers of what came to be called

economic processes, such as the circulation of income between
classes and the operation of national markets. Here, prior to what
we think of as the 'modern' world, were the first social scientists
systematically to deploy empirical evidence: the Physiocrats.
Although Mennell does not say so, Elias's analysis chimes in with
his views on the non-bourgeois, aristocratic, courtly origins of
'rationality': Frangois Quesnay was a court physician. There is no
mention either of Elias's interesting remarks on the transfer of
meaning of the word 'economy' from the household to the national
level, as a movement towards a more impersonal usage. Mennell
inexplicably also leaves out Elias's crucial account of the emergent
subject matter of sociology as such, compared with its forerunner
political economy. He avoids the issue with a vacuous comment:
'The origins of modern sociology are inextricably entangled with
those of modern economics' (p. 183).
But the pioneer sociologists, as Elias in fact points out, although
steeped in the social ideologies of their time, were nonetheless
interested in a wider range of problems about social development
and the longer-run direction of change, very different from the
static economic regularities studied by the political economists.
Mennell gets bogged down in the niceties of homo economicus and
misses the central ontological point of the article: that is that 'the
social' as a range of regularities sui-generis was first noticed in what
came to be called the economic activities of society. Later, says
Elias, when the power potential of the middle-class business groups
increased in their interdependence with the workers, and became
more consolidated and pervasive as part of the overall social web,
then it even became possible to conceptualize self-regulating
economic mechanisms such as business cycles, national markets and
so on as 'the economy'. Mennell does not distinguish sufficiently
clearly between political economy and economics.
3. Mennell's rendering of Elias's theory of established-outsider
relations in chapter 5 is full and up-to-date with recent Dutch and
British research into relations between ethnic groups, men and
women and homosexuals and heterosexuals. But I think Mennell
overstates the point that this is a 'later theory' of Elias's (p. 116) arising from the community study undertaken by Elias with John L.
Scotson in 1965 with this title. He gives the impression that the
theory has its origins entirely there. It is certainly more elaborated
in that study, but both the basic insight and the concept are to be

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found in The Civilizing Process (Elias, 1982a: 250, 314). And Eiias's
concepts of group charisma and group disgrace so important to
the later applications of the theory for explaining the dynamics of
group domination and group subjection are adumbrated there
too in essence, even if not named as such. The mechanism is
explained on both the individual and group levels (Elias, 1982a: 292,
314).
There is a real problem of getting Elias's undoubtedly outstanding
work into perspective. There must be a third way between the two
alternatives of out-and-out dismissal or uncritical acceptance of the
whole figurational package, lock, stock and concept. Mennell is
closer to the latter pole, which means that with the best of intentions
he tends to accept Elias's accounts of his intellectual debts at face
value and acquiesces in the historical amnesia which has descended
over the genesis of Elias's sociological programme, which Elias
himself has done very little substantively to correct. As I said before,
Elias's theory of civilizing processes is a synthesis which, in a scientific spirit, attempts to solve problems which were shrewdly posed
by a number of very gifted people of his generation and the one
before. But it was more than that.
There is a forgotten 'evaluative' dimension, born in the German
tradition of the sociology of knowledge. It has its origins as a
moral-political strategy, a wager for a strong scientific sociology as
a counterweight to the spiralling social and ideological conflicts of
the 1930s. Sociology can evaluate the feasibility, credibility and
desirability of reform programmes put forward by political groups
and in political ideologies and illuminate the roots of conflict. At
the same time, coming from this tradition it means almost certainly
that Elias takes it for granted, hence does not always bother to keep
repeating, that sociology can by comparative, empirical inquiries
into real societies, also significantly reframe so-called 'ethical' questions posed by philosophers.1 It is thus obvious that Elias is no
practitioner of any simple-minded 'value-free' sociology.
But Mennell only presents this thrust in a diluted form in his
discussion of the opening chapter of volume I of The Civilizing Process on the sociogenesis of the concepts of Kultur and Civilization.
Elias starts the whole investigation with a sociogenetic inquiry,
typical of the sociology of knowledge, into the origins of these concepts, which were in the 1930s redolent of both Alfred Weber's
sociology and the highly charged discussions of whether civilized
behaviour was the acme or the nadir of the human social

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achievement. The task is to reframe their range of applicability and
realistic usefulness via the sociological inquiry into their genesis and
into the European civilizing process in general. Significantly, Elias
returns to the concepts at the end of volume II (Elias, 1982a: 310ff
and 328-33) at a new level and re-poses the questions about human
satisfaction, fulfilment and constraint embodied more ideologically
in the antithesis which partly provided the starting point.
Unfortunately, Mennell mentions none of this, but formulates
Elias's strategy in tracing the origins of the concepts in the weaker
form of a 'concern. . . with the facts to which the words relate, facts
less obvious and more interesting to a social scientist' (p. 30).
This misses the intensity of human commitment embodied in Elias's
scientific quest its whole raison d'etre. Mennell fatally recommends that 'the opening part of the Civilizing Process is frankly now
an obstacle for many readers . . . [so] . . . it is a good idea to omit
this section at first reading' (p. 36). Obviously one needs some
knowledge of the controversy to understand the ideological importance of the concepts in the context, but to advocate, even initially,
skipping the opening section runs counter to the whole method
embodied in the study.
Elias actually refuses to state his central ideas at the beginning
of volume I because he says they only took form gradually in a continuous, sequential process of discussion of the empirical materials
successively presented later, of which the reader will as yet have no
knowledge. He suggests therefore that 'the individual parts of this
study, its structure and method, will probably be completely
intelligible only when they are perceived in their entirety' (Elias,
1978: iii). He would not have bothered to say this unless he had
something in mind. After all, could he not have stated his conclusions right away and let us take on trust that he had the empirical
backing? No, my reading is that he wants us to work through the
material with him.
It would not be too fanciful to say that for the individual to read
through the two volumes from beginning to end itself exemplifies
what Elias calls a basic 'sociogenetic law', i.e. that in the individual's
short lifetime he or she can pass through some of the processes that
their society has passed through. He says that his (now celebrated)
picturesque empirical examples (about spitting, farting, bedroom
behaviour, etc.) are laid out in such way as to 'serve to show
development in an accelerated fashion. In a few pages we see how
in the course of centuries the standard of human behaviour on the

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same occasion very gradually shifts in a specific direction' (Elias
1978: xii). As we read through them we also gain insight through
this experience into our own feelings of shame and delicacy derived
from the standards of our own society. And as we complete the
second volume we have also gained comparative insight into the
nature and limits of ideological discussions of 'civilized* and
'uncivilized' behaviour, so the value-issues look different. He writes:
'only historical experience makes clearer what this word [civilization] actually means' (Elias, 1978: xiii). If one is searching for an
example of the elusive 'unity of theory and practice', then The
Civilizing Process is surely a strong candidate.
Note
1. See the discussions in The Court Society, (Elias 1983: 28ff, 208-13 and chapter
VIII). For example, on the controversy between free will and determinism Elias
(1983: 30) writes: 'If one is prepared to approach such problems through twopronged investigations on the theoretical and empirical planes in closest touch with
one another, rather than on the basis of preconceived dogmatic positions, the question one is aiming at with words such as 'freedom' and 'determinacy', poses itself
in a different way1 (my emphasis). Elias shares this radical view of the task of
sociology with both Mannheim and Durkheim: see my 'Sociology and the Professional Culture of Philosophers' (Kilminster, 1989).

References
Burkitt, Ian (1989) The Sociologicial Problem of Personality Formation.
Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leeds (forthcoming book, Sage Publications, 1991).
Elias, N. (1978) The Civilizing Process Volume I. Oxford: Blackwell.
Elias, N. (1982a) The Civilizing Process Volume II. Oxford: Blackwell.
Elias, N. (1982b) 'Thomas Moms' Staatskritik', in W. Vosskamp (ed.),
Utopieforschung, Band 2. Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag.
Elias, N. (1983) The Court Society. Oxford: Blackwell.
Elias, N. (1989) Studien uber die Deutschen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Hirschfeld, Gerhard (ed.) (1984) Exile in Great Britain: Refugees From Hitler's Germany. London: Berg Publishes for the German Historical Institute.
Kilminster, R. (1982) 'Zur Utopidiskussion aus soziologischer Sicht', in W.
Vosskamp (ed.) Utopieforschung Band 2. Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag.
Kilminster, R. (1989) 'Sociology and the Professional Culture of Philosophers', in
H. Haferkamp (ed.) Social Structure and Culture. Berlin and New York: de
Gruyter.
Kilminster, R. (forthcoming) Involved Detachment: Norbert Elias and the Sociology
of Figurations. London: Routledge.
Longmate, D. (1989) Objectivity as Process. Unpublished MA thesis, University of
Leeds.

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176 Theory, Culture & Society

Simonds, A.P. (1978) KarlMannheim's Sociology of Knowledge. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Wassail, T.J. (1990) The Development of Scientific Knowledge in Relation to the
Development of Societies. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leeds.

Richard Kilminster is lecturer in sociology at the University of Leeds

and author of Praxis and Method, London, Routledge, 1979 and
numerous articles on the sociology of knowledge, sociological
theory and on Norbert Elias.

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