The work of ameliorating the conditions of life--the true
civilizing process that makes life more and more secure--had gone steadily on to a climax.
The
civilizing process, however, does not target all emotions, only emotions considered "negative" and critical, such as anger and indignation.
In his study of 'children's
civilizing process', Elias (15) state that this process describes a double movement 'of tightening but also of slackening of constraints'.
As he observes, analysis of the penny press troubles conventional wisdom "about the irredeemable misogyny of Mexican popular culture, the bourgeois origins of the '
civilizing process,' and working-class men as the spiritual progenitors and paradigmatic practitioners of macho" (219).
"Leisure," a polysemic word, is read here as a pastime in the perspective addressed by Elias and Dunning in the book Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the
Civilizing Process, which, in general, refers to the idea that in modern society there are several forms of leisure that cause "controlled but pleasant emotional excitement." (15) This leads to "two contradictory functions" for, on the one hand, there is "the pleasure of unleashing human feelings," a "pleasant excitement," and on the other there is "the conservation of a set of surveillance devices to maintain pleasant uncontrolled emotions under control" (p.
He covers Marx: the romance of the revolution; Weber: the state, science, and the university; Freud and Elias: the
civilizing process; Spengler: cultural pessimism and anti-Semitism; Heidegger and Wittgenstein: two philosophers at odds and evens; Hannah Arendt: the politics of metphysical despair; Nietzsche: the prophet of nihilism; and Foucault: death and resurrection of the subject.
The dominance of white, male members in the club and the emphasis on climbing, or conquering, the next peak is reminiscent of the way in which Gail Bederman connects masculinity and race identity to the
civilizing process in Manliness and Civilization (Chicago, 1995).
In the following I intend to examine the gradually upcoming of ethical standards of behavior as the result of what has been called the
civilizing process. Hereby I draw theoretically on Norbert Elias' work The
civilizing process from 1939, in which he explores the civilizing achievements in Europe from the renaissance to the early modern times hereby stressing the interplay between psychogenetic and sociogenetic constituents.
Discourses of civility celebrate collective goals and self-discipline, but the
civilizing process itself, as social scientists have recognized since at least the pioneering work of Norbert Elias ([1939] 1994), is riven with power and hierarchy, and commonly leads to unequal distribution of resources.
Last, did the wars influence Russia's domestic history by inflecting educated society's experience of what Norbert Elias called the "
civilizing process"?
In 1939, sociologist Norbert Elias published a renowned work "The
Civilizing Process," in which he traced changes in interpersonal behavior and manners in the Western world over eight centuries.