Boxing and Duelling: Critical Remarks on Elias on Violence and State-Formation from a Historical Perspective
This essay attempts to examine Norbert Elias’s views on the connection between state- formation and the decline of violence, and to examine his analyses boxing and duelling within that context. Crucially, recent research and rethinking on French absolutis
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been was one aspect of the onward progress of state-formation developed by Elias some sixty years previously in The Civilising Process. Here Elias saw individual behaviour being increasing controlled by the monopolization of violence by the state and the dictates of a more complex society: The moderation of spontaneous emotions, the tempering of affects, the extension of mental space beyond the moment into the past and the future, the habit of connecting events in terms of chains of cause and effect – all these are different aspects of the same transformation of conduct which necessarily takes place with the monopolization
J. Sharpe (*) University of York, England, UK E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH 2018 J. Haut et al. (eds.), Excitement Processes, DOI 10.1007/978-3-658-14912-3_9
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of physical violence, and the lengthening of the chains of social action and interdependence. It is a ‘civilising’ change of behaviour. (Elias 1982: 236)
The curbing of violent instincts as a consequence of state-formation was, therefore, a theme of central importance to Elias’s overall project of tracing the processes by which the inhabitants of modern, ‘advanced’, societies have come to be able to maintain a relatively consistent control over their libidinal, emotional, and aggressive urges, and to maintain personality structures which are founded on restraint rather than impulse. But, for Elias, not all states were equal. Expanding on the theme, he commented: The civilizing of conduct and the corresponding transfiguration of human consciousness and libidinal make-up cannot be understood without tracing the processes of state-formation, and within it the advancing centralization of society which first finds particularly visible expression in the absolutist form of rule. (Elias 1982: 6)
This ‘absolutist form of rule’ had, of course, figured prominently in Elias’s Habilitationsschrift of 1933, eventually appearing as The Court Society, first published in German in 1969, and in English (after a French translation of 1974) in 1983. In this work, as is echoed in the typescript under discussion, the French feudal nobility, the old knightly warrior class, was brought under control by the absolutist state. At Versailles, the French aristocracy, locked in an ‘iron cage of etiquette’, turned their violent instincts towards competition for royal favour, and Louis XIV used the resultant rivalries and faction-fighting to his own advantage. For Elias, this was a model of one of the most important stages in the civilising process: as Stephen Mennell put it, ‘the sociogenesis of courts was an indispensable precondition for all subsequent spurts and counter-spurts in the civilizing process’. (Mennell 1992: 80. For the ‘iron cage of etiquette’ see p. 86) Unfortunately, recent historical research has not been kind to the paradigm advanced in The Court Society. Re-evaluation of the importance of Versailles, devaluation of the reliability of evidence supplied by Saint-Simon, research into French p
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