Abstract
The reception of the writings of Norbert Elias has some peculiarities. One is that, while he is a very significant figure in sociology across most of the world—though lagging far behind Bourdieu or Foucault in the citation indices—he remains very marginal in American sociology. Since Steven Pinker’s 2011 book The Better Angels of our Nature, that may be changing a little. Pinker described Elias as “the most important thinker you have never heard of,” which, after spending the last four decades promoting Elias’s ideas, I found mildly discouraging. Most Americans still cite only the (original) first volume of The Civilizing Process. (The definitive text in a single volume, published as Volume Three in the collected works in English as On the Process of Civilisation [OTPC], may in time yield a better appreciation of that major early work.) Little transatlantic notice seems to have been taken of Elias’s later and wider work. Particularly important is his theory of knowledge and the sciences, which provides a sociological epistemology and lays waste to great tracts of the philosophical tradition to which sociologists usually pay homage.
Another peculiarity is that Elias’s ideas often seem to be of greater interest and inspiration to scholars working at the interstices of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities than they are to sociologists working in the conventional mainstream. The young, prolific, and multilingual Polish author of A Global Community of Self-Defense: Norbert Elias on Normativity, Culture and Involvement, Marta Bucholc, is the personal embodiment of this interdisciplinarity: she trained in Warsaw as a lawyer and a philosopher as well as a sociologist. Her book appears in a series entitled Recht als Kultur—law as culture. Besides Elias, the other face on its front cover is that of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Bucholc tackles a central problem in social thought, that of “normativity.” Central to it is the ambivalence of violence, which is the antisocial force at work in all societies but “has also been acclaimed as the ultimate source of social order” (p. 13). In mainstream social theory, solutions to this ambivalence have conventionally been sought in religion and in law. Religion is notoriously and intentionally absent from Elias’s work: he said, “Religion, the belief in the punishing or rewarding omnipotence of God, never has in itself a ‘civilising’ or affect-subduing effect. On the contrary, religion is always exactly as ‘civilised’ as the society or class that upholds it” (OTPC, p. 195). But explicit discussion of law, so central in the work of Max Weber and others in the German tradition out of which Elias came, is almost equally absent. Bucholc praises Elias’s radicalism: his “blank refusal to take for granted the socially prefabricated criteria for determining what is really important in the schemes of control applied to human beings” (pp. 14–15), seeing that “law is essentially no different from any other set of rules which govern human lives” (p.16). She contends that on this point, Elias anticipated the approach that was developed a little later by Wittgenstein. Although parallels between Elias and Wittgenstein were noted by the anthropologist Anton Blok 40 years ago, the similarities between Elias’s and Wittgenstein’s theories of language did not become obvious until the posthumous publication of Elias’s book The Symbol Theory in 1991. This complex argument is developed subtly in Bucholc’s Chapter Three.
The final two chapters are concerned with questions not just of theoretical but also of some contemporary practical relevance. Chapter Four, “Cultures of Involvement,” poses the problem of why cultures are so binding, including emotionally binding. It draws on Elias’s sociology of knowledge, including the idea of the continuum of “involvement” and “detachment,” which offers a more sophisticated alternative to traditional discussions of “objectivity” and “value-neutrality.” Part of that is the fluctuating balance between fantasy and “reality-congruence”—fantasy beliefs being a highly topical matter as I write this in the summer of 2016, perhaps especially in the United States; for, as Bucholc remarks, “It is rarely granted to the strong, the powerful, and the ferocious to understand their own strength, power and ferocity” (p. 13).
Which leads naturally to Chapter Five, “Human Rights and Global Civil Society: Towards a Civilised Humanity.” In the absence of anything like a world state structure capable of imposing law and restraining violence, how can humanity in a globalized society made of so many divergent cultures become a “community of self-defence” (or, in Elias’s own term, a “survival unit”)? Far from believing in a Victorian-era theory of inexorable “progress” toward an ever-greater degree of “civilization,” Elias was very pessimistic about humankind’s chances of survival. In his late book Humana Conditio (only recently published in English translation in Volume Six of the Collected Works), he says there is not and probably cannot be any agent capable of exerting civilizing, affect-subduing pressures at the global level comparable to the role played by the centralized state in European history. His friend, the Dutch political scientist Godfried van Benthem van den Bergh (not cited by Bucholc), disagreed, arguing that during the Cold War mutually assured destruction (MAD) provided a functional equivalent of the state monopoly of violence. But, in an increasingly multi-polar world with numerous nuclear states, MAD no longer works in quite the same way. Bucholc pursues the problem in the face of twenty-first-century realities. Is a global civil society possible, “a new concept of universal self-defence where the need to restrain certain actions is imposed on the powerful” (p. 26)? The signs are ambiguous. It is not hard to find evidence of improvement in the enforcement of human rights and the rule of international law—at least in the richer parts of the globe. On the other hand, as Bucholc powerfully writes: The basic mechanism for dealing with violence in civilisation is to suppress its presence in selected spheres of social life. Violence is pushed backstage—and the backstage of the global world is immense. What used to accumulate in the dark corners of our cities and beyond the tightly-closed doors of Goffmanian asylums is now removed to other continents and burdens the lives of people who, for their equally anonymous oppressors, have neither names nor faces. Violence, which we have cast out from here, may easily be found out there. (p. 27)
In a short review, it is hard to give more than a sketch of the main themes of Bucholc’s book. I have not conveyed her learned mastery of the literature of several different disciplines. This is a wide-ranging, well-written, and very important book.