At first glance the work of Elias is characterized by striking heterogeneity. It seems as though this sociologist wrote about almost every subject that he could lay his hands on. The court of Louis XIV, the development of the naval profession in England, a history of the use of the fork and the knife. The life of Mozart, the tensions between two groups of factory workers in a small English city, and even the phenomenon of time. You might think that somebody with such a broad collection of topics can not be taken too seriously. But, appearance is deceived because, in fact, all of those subjects are kept together by one central concept, the concept of civilization. Elias has developed a very general theory of the civilizing process, and in order to show his audience the fruitfulness and the implications, the relevancy, enormous range of his theoretical approach, he applied it to a wide variety of themes, many of which are considered to be pressing problems. Take, for example, that small and beautiful book that he published in the final phase of his life, the book about the loneliness about dying. That book seemed to treat a subject that is entirely different from anything that he had written about before. But on closer inspection, it is again a book that has a lot to do with the process of civilization. Sometimes the critics believe that Elias applauds the process of civilization, but this small book shows that his position is more detached and that he also recognized the more tragic aspects of the process of civilization. When we find it difficult to be in the presence of people who are going to die, when we hesitate to touch let alone to wash our dying fathers and mothers, this is related to feelings of shame and embarrassment and even repugnance that have emerged in the civilizing process. And today we have so deeply internalized the civilized behavioral standards that it is difficult for us to do those friendly things for our dying relatives that people who are raised in another type of culture consider to be completely self-evident. One of the problems with the word civilization is that it has so many moral overtones. Some ethnologists, for example, think that it is a term with such an ugly history that we should take away from it when it's used in contexts like we are civilized, they are primitives. We are civilized, they are savages. They should obey us, we are their masters, etc., etc. A terminology that this plays such a preferred role and especially in the discourse of colonialism. Should that deserve a place in the social sciences? In political debates, the word civilization still plays a more realistic role. When a member of parliament, for example, says that the way in which we treat our elderly or the way in which we treat the sick or the handicapped or the way in which we treat, let's say, our farm animals is an indication of how civilized we actually are, then the word is civilized is used as a weapon in a verbal fight. And in that context it, you know, it means the ultimate good thing, the thing that nobody could possibly be against. But it's also possible to oppose to the term civilized concepts like honest, authentic, genuine, sincere. And then Civilized refers to superficiality, to dishonesty, to hypocrisy, hiding away your feelings. And then there is the more Freudian way to speak about civilization, as something that forces people to hide their innermost impulses, to suppress what they really feel, what they actually would like to do. And the suppression of those urges may lead, in time, to frustration, and frustration may become the cause of all kinds of psychological problems. In this course, civilization is seen as something that may undermine our psychological h. So civilization carries with it a lot of value judgments, sometimes positive, sometimes negative. Now what Elias does is not to silence those judgmental overtones. It would be an impossible thing to do. But he asks very simple question. Is there a possibility to study the process of civilisation in an empirical way? Can we operationalize this concept? Can we observe how it actually works? And his answer is yes. We can do that. We can, for example, use etiquette books, books that were published over a period of some five centuries. Books in which the children of the higher strata of society are instructed in how to behave when you find yourself in good company. And those about, for example, how to behave when you're having dinner with a group of high society people tell us a lot about behavioral standards at a certain moment in time. And when you make a large collection of that genre of books, when you take them from different time periods, then you can begin to look out for trends. You can begin to recognize a process. And that is what Elias intended to do. He studied and he systematically compared French etiquette books, for the members, especially for the children, of the secular upper classes in France over a period from the late Middle Ages until, well around the end of the 18th century. And he concluded that one can indeed discern a trend, a movement into one direction. And that is a tendency that Elias calls the civilizing process.
