The civilizing process – According to Mennell,Elias and Freud

I The American civilizing process

Despite its many commendable features, Mennell’s account of American civilization is deeply flawed largely because of its dependence on Eliasian theory, which is disastrously misleading when applied to America. Being so closely attached to Elias, Mennell has little or no regard for the theories of Weber and Hartz, which might have served him ever so much better. He dismisses Hartz’s theory of the ‘fragment’, rejecting it with the comment: ‘Hartz himself revived something resembling the old Johns Hopkins germ theory’ (Mennell, 2007: 3). He is more respectful of Weber, but he, too, is brusquely set aside with the remark: ‘unlike Weber, Elias gave little credence to the independent civilizing influence of religious ideas’ (Mennell, 2007: 268). Thus Weber’s voluminous writings on religious sociology are disparaged. Mennell also seriously misinterprets Weber, when he argues that for Weber it was ideas in themselves, religious and otherwise, that have a social influence; Weber insisted to the contrary that the practical consequences of ideas are what matter. Did Elias believe that religious ideas have no practical consequences? Clearly, Weber’s thesis about the importance of the Protestant ethic in the development of capitalism is highly relevant in any study of the influence of religious ideas on America, but Mennell discounts it because he does not engage with America’s religious origins. Instead, he relies for his theoretical underpinning completely on Elias’s theory of the civilizing process, which was based on the history of manners and state formation in medieval France, and which, as we shall show, has little relevance to America.

There are two matching parts to Elias’s theory, sometimes divided into two volumes in his magnum opus: the first deals with the origins and proliferation of aristocratic manners in France, the second with the rise of the French monarchy from small beginnings in local feudal rule to the centralized absolutist state of a large domain now called the hexagon. Elias holds that these two separate processes of development are inherently related and causally linked, such that the one could not have taken place without the other, an assumption we shall seek to disprove in the next section on Elias. Taken together these two supposedly conjoined developments constitute for Elias the ‘civilizing process’ that holds for Europe in general, which is another misconception on Elias’s part, as we shall show.

However, Mennell, dutifully following Elias, takes it for granted that such a civilizing process must have taken place in America as well, assuming no other process of civilization possible. Thus he transfers the whole Eliasian theoretical apparatus, forged in the context of feudal France, to the early modern colonization of British America as well as the modern United States of America. It leads him to pose questions which make no sense in this utterly different historical and social context and to follow research trails which soon peter out in the American wilderness.

In the context of medieval France it does make good sense, for example, to ask how savage and pagan Norse warriors, such as Rollo the Viking, became the somewhat civilized Normans, such as William the Conqueror, and how these later emerged as fully civilized French and English gentlemen. There was clearly some kind of civilizing process involved, even if Elias, focusing entirely on manners, cannot account for its complexity, as many other aspects were also involved. However, that question cannot be simply transferred to colonial America. One cannot ask, for example, what was involved in ‘civilizing’ Puritans so they became Yankees, for Puritans were already fully civilized Englishmen when they landed in Massachusetts. There was no civilizing process of any kind required to establish civilization in America, it came in the ships together with the people they brought.

There might have been a civilizing process analogous to that in medieval France if America had been settled by the Vikings, following Leif Ericson’s discovery. Then all the questions Mennell asks would have made perfect sense. But this did not happen. Instead, America was settled by groups of Englishmen, among others, who were fragments of their existing English society in Hartz’s sense. They were of the same order of civilization as those left behind in England. Hartz’s thesis of how such splinters from the old block were planted and came to grow in the soil of a new continent would seem a better starting point for research than Elias. The fact that so many of them were Puritans or other non-conformist religious sectarians makes Weber’s Protestant ethics thesis also much more relevant, especially as out of these came the manufacturing capitalists of New England.

Mennell, unfortunately, pays scant attention to the Puritans and other sectarians in America, such as the Quakers, because they were all of lower-class origin, and Eliasian theory requires him to look for aristocrats in America, for these are the members of ‘good society’ who are the carriers of good manners that Elias’s civilizing process requires. It is, of course, a futile search, for Mennell is forced to admit that ‘America never had an hereditary nobility’ (Mennell, 2007: 81). Nevertheless, he is not deterred by this fact for he believes he can locate at least some quasi-aristocrats who ‘fulfilled, or aspired to fulfill, a function equivalent to that seen in European “good societies”, the upper-class circles which laid down the standards and set the models for aspiring lower strata’ (Mennell, 2007: 81). He finds them among the ‘great planters of the Old South’, those who owned more than 100 slaves, ‘who were closer than most northerners to the courtly attitudes of the ancient regime’ (Mennell, 2007: 86). He calls them ‘American Junkers’ on analogy with their German land-owning counterparts.

No doubt there were such people, but their influence on the American ethos was minimal, for they were soon ‘gone with the wind’. In any case, they were hardly an aristocracy. Aristocracy is not a matter of land ownership, wealth or slaves; rather it depends on deference, privileges, titles and status inscribed in law or granted by accepted convention, such as, for example, immunity from taxation, forms of address, reserved positions, etc. No group in America could claim any such thing; the egalitarian ethos was too overwhelming. The fact that the planters of the Old South gave themselves airs and pretended to live like aristocrats, mainly because they could dispose of black slaves, gave them no special standing. What other Americans thought of them is conveyed in Huckleberry Finn:

If they wanted us to call them kings and dukes, I hadn’t no objections ‘long as it would keep the peace in the family … Sometimes I wish we could hear of a country that’s out of kings … What was the use to tell Jim there warn’t real kings and dukes? It wouldn’t have done no good, and besides, it was just as I said: you couldn’t tell them from the real kind. (Twain, 1985: 137, 167)

The people who put their stamp on the American character were the Yankees, the northerners who were least like aristocrats, as de Tocqueville testified. As he stresses repeatedly, they were the opposite of French nobility. They had little time or regard for aristocratic manners. Their egalitarianism, individualism, independence, probity, their lack of ceremony, yet open, frank and free ways, puts them at the opposite pole to any aristocracy. They descended from the Puritans and the other non-conformist sectarians who also scorned manners and put all emphasis on religion and morals, as they conceived these. To say of them, as Elias puts it, that ‘religion … never has in itself a “civilizing” or affect-subduing effect’ is some kind of sociological nonsense or equivocation, even if one follows Freud in identifying ‘civilizing’ with ‘affect-subduing’, which we shall criticize later (Mennell, 2007: 166). Unfortunately, Mennell devotes no time to discussing the civilization of the Puritans; he does not even mention them, except for references to the 19th-century painting ‘Pilgrims Going to Church’ by George Henry Broughton (Mennell, 2007: 165). Presumably he is not interested in them because they had no aristocratic manners.

Mennell’s conception of civilization, derived from Elias, is close to that enunciated by Huckleberry Finn, when in horror of the ‘civilizing process’ to which he is about to be subjected, he ends his narrative on this note:

But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before. (Twain, 1985: 307)

He was ‘there’ right at the start of the book in the first chapter, entitled ‘Civilizing Huck’, where the civilizing process was administered by the Widow Douglas and her sister Miss Watson. In short, on this conception, civilizing has to do with teaching children good manners, on the old adage that ‘manners maketh man’. For Mennell, as for Elias, civilizing a people is much the same kind of process and it also consists in teaching them manners. So Mennell proceeds to ask: ‘how were manners brought to America?’ His research shows that they were brought to America by the importation of books of etiquette from England. Britannia played the role for Americans that the Widow Douglas did for Huck. Mennell is implicitly relying on the parallel between civilizing the individual and civilizing the nation, as both needed to be taught manners. This, as we shall go on to show, is also Elias’s basic error, and it amounts to the view that ontogeny and phylogeny duplicate each other, which Freud expressly states and Elias accepts, whether he realizes this or not (Showalter, 2009: 244). ¹

The other half of Elias’s grand theory, which Mennell also takes over and tries to apply to America, is that of state formation. Elias based this theory on the history of medieval France, which also has no parallels in America. The French monarchy had to constitute a unified state out of innumerable different types of power-holders, both secular and ecclesiastical lords, town communes and corporations, and so on. This was a long-term process full of conflict whereby, as Marx puts it, ‘the seigniorial privileges of the landowners and towns became transformed into so many attributes of state power, the feudal dignitaries into paid officials and the motley pattern of conflicting medieval plenary powers into the regulated plan of a state authority whose work is divided and centralized as in a factory’ (Marx, 1977: 104). Elias expands this sentence into a whole volume, with the help of Weber who says much the same thing. He speaks of an ‘elimination contest’ whereby big lords swallow up many little lords and so enlarge their territorial holdings, until there is only one lord left who rules the whole country or royal realm as it has become.

Applied to America, this makes no sense. There was no motley pattern of conflicting medieval plenary powers, there were no walled cities, no church properties, no Frondeurs, etc. And yet Mennell insists that an ‘elimination contest’ like that in France took place in America as well. The only things he can come up with to fit this picture were the colonial wars, in the North American continent mainly between the British and French. But these were not feudal wars between lords, but European wars between states that spilled over into their overseas possessions. In the New World they were fought by regular troops in barely inhabited wildernesses. Once the British proved victorious in the course of the Seven Years War, they established their sovereignty over the whole eastern part of North America, and the contest ceased. The 13 British colonies did not engage in any further ‘elimination contests’. They only fought the British king and his armies. They amalgamated peacefully by entering into a Lockian social compact, called the Constitution, and emerged as the United States of America.

But this is not how Mennell sees it. He insists that ‘here an illuminating comparison can again be made with Elias’s study of state-formation starting with the best part of a millennium earlier in the region that became France’ (Mennell, 2007: 181). Misled by this comparison, he likens the vicissitudes leading to the formation of the United States to ‘the problems that confronted an early medieval ruler like Charlemagne’ (Mennell, 2007: 169). Realizing that this is clearly absurd, yet determined to find some parallel with Elias’s study of medieval France, he comes up with the following:

Perhaps, if the analogy with the era of Charlemagne seems too far-fetched, the incipient dynamics of the situation could be compared to the late phase in the development of France, the so-called ‘figuration of competing princes’ in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when younger regional appanages granted by kings for their younger sons to rule became in following generations the basis for resurgent centrifugal tendencies undermining the central powers of the king. (Mennell, 2007: 169)

But no sooner stated, this likeness also dissipates as the American states have nothing in common with appanages of younger sons of a central monarch; they neither absorbed nor broke away from each other, none was trying to establish its own independence. The Civil War was another matter altogether and did not involve individual states. The separate states did not have to be subdued by a central power seeking to establish a monopoly of the means of violence. In fact, in America such a monopoly was not necessary and never attained, since the states retained their own militias. Even on an individual level the constitution enshrines the right to bear arms. The fact that this leads to a somewhat higher murder rate than in Europe does not detract from American civilization, as Mennell supposes.

In brief, the American state was not formed in a way that bears comparison with the states of Europe. This is the grain of truth behind American exceptionalism. There was no completely new beginning, the Novus Ordos Mundi of which Jefferson boasts, but it did create a new federated republican democracy. There are only distant parallels to this in Europe, such as the United Provinces of the brief Dutch republic or the Swiss Confederation, which Mennell does not mention. More distant still are the Greek leagues of city states in the early Hellenistic period. All of these are far removed from feudal France, which, following Elias, Mennell seems bound to evoke.

II The civilizing process

Elias’s work has no bearing on America, yet we shall offer a critique of it, partly because of its influence on Mennell, but largely because of its importance in numerous analyses of the 20th century. We shall once again review the two halves of his compound theory, this time reversing our presentation: discussing firstly his theory of state formation as an ‘elimination contest’; we will deal secondly with his idea of a ‘civilizing process’ based on manners as the repression of basic desires and instincts, which is derived from Freud. We shall attempt to show that these two processes, the political and the psychological, have little to do with each other.

It is true that in medieval France a code of aristocratic manners developed and that this coincided with the formation of the state through an ‘elimination contest’, more or less as Elias describes it. But in other parts of Europe there were no such coincidences. Strong centralized states were established with no elimination contests and no particular cultivation of manners; on the other hand, there were societies that cultivated manners but did not form strong centralized states or even states at all. Furthermore, there were all kinds of groups, practicing rigid regulation of behavior and the control of desires, which were not at all political or involved in politics. In short, the variations are almost endless; examples can be found of any and every type of conjunction. Hence, there is no inherent or causal relation between state formation and the cultivation of manners.

Our first example of state formation and the civilizing process that contradicts Elias’s theory is that of the Normans in England and Italy. William the Conqueror established a strong centralized state in England on the basis of already pre-existing Saxon foundations without any extended elimination contest, except for the defeat of Harold in one battle. England remained such a unified and coherent state for the next thousand years and more, though, of course, like all monarchic states it experienced fierce dynastic contests for the crown and civil wars. There is no indication whatever that the Normans had any better manners than any other group at this time; in fact, aristocratic manners had hardly been invented yet. More or less the same story can be told of the Normans in Sicily, who, after they drove out the Arabs, eventually under Roger II established the unified kingdom of what was later called the Two Sicilies. It, too, lasted for over eight hundred years, until overthrown by Garibaldi. There were, of course, changes of dynasty and all kinds of internal disruptions and divisions of rule, but again there was no elimination contest. As for manners, we know that those of the Normans were deplorable, at least by Byzantine standards, for the Emperor’s daughter, Anna Comnena, writes scathingly about the behavior of the ‘barbarian’ Bohemond and his followers at court on the way to the first crusade, in the course of which they captured Antioch and established a successful state (Comnena, 1969: 327). ²

The Norman aristocrats had no manners but were effective rulers of states; the Polish szlachta, to the contrary, had exquisite manners, yet would not establish a strong centralized state, with the result that their country was eventually divided. They were a peculiar aristocracy, diverse economically, some very wealthy and some very poor, and they comprised a sizeable proportion of the population. But they had no need of an absolutist state to cultivate their manners and status etiquette (Davies, 1997). The richest among them, the magnate families, maintained large private armies and had an income larger than the kings’, who were elected to rule on a very restricted mandate. Yet they fought no elimination contests between themselves and in no way sought to unify the country. In no way did they behave like feudal nobles in France.

Quite apart from aristocracies, there were all sorts of other groups, most of them religious communities, who maintained very strict and all-embracing behavioral regulations and so-called affect-controls, but who were totally apolitical and not at all involved or concerned with the state. Elias’s own ancestors, orthodox Jews, were of this kind; they adhered strictly to thousands of Talmudic regulations governing the minutiae of life and were able to restrain all violent conduct or the unregulated satisfaction of desires, without any political backing whatsoever, in many different political dispensations in which they took no part, for at least two thousand years. Aristocratic manners are trifling inhibitions by comparison. The same, perhaps to a lesser degree, can be said of all kinds of sects throughout the ages. And, of course, within Christianity itself the same holds for monks, nuns and priests in general, though these do not constitute self-contained communities.

The main problem with Elias’s sociological procedure is that he does not utilize a wide enough historical canvas, and it is difficult to tell whether this is because he simply lacked sufficient knowledge or because his interests were myopically focused on a limited range of cases. He gives a careful description of one case, that of medieval France and the later French court, but offers no comparative studies of other situations and conditions. He makes a virtue of his shortcoming by arguing that he deals with ‘real types’, as Mennell explains:

Following Otto Hinze, Norbert Elias expressed a distrust of ideal-type conceptualization, preferring ‘real types’ – investigating specific examples of social formation rather than building models whose features were rarely if ever met with altogether in the real. Most ‘figurational’ sociologists have shared this distrust. (Mennell, 2007: 331)

But the reason why ideal-types do not exactly reflect any real situation is, as Weber puts it, that they are ‘utopias’ and are not therefore meant to be exact descriptions of reality. They are constructed by abstraction from the plethora of real cases in order to facilitate comparative studies. And this is precisely what is lacking in Elias, who makes no effort to look at a range of different cases, but seeks to generalize from the one case and builds a theory based on it alone. Had he engaged in comparative studies, he would have realized how helpful ideal-types are in this regard. How else can one study the feudal state, patrimonialism, the gothic, or for that matter aristocratic manners except in this way? And this is precisely what Elias fails to do.

With regard to manners, it is Freudian social theory that misleads Elias. Freud mistakenly applied the insights he had gained from studies of the psychology of individuals – whether these are sound or not is irrelevant here – to groups, social formations, whole civilizations and the human race in general. Freud’s point of departure was the socialization of the infant and the child, which he saw as a model for the process of ‘civilization’. Socialization was achieved through disciplining and controlling processes that involved ‘instinctual renunciation’ or repression, which he explained theoretically in terms of the Id being repressed by the Super-Ego, acting in concert with the Ego, to give the reality principle ascendancy over the pleasure principle. Thus socialized, the child achieves self-control and can bear frustration. As we shall show, Freud projects this whole ‘civilizing process’ onto collective entities and society in general. Elias followed him in this and hit on the idea that the inculcation of manners is the disciplinary agency bringing a people from barbarism to civilization. This has earned him the unsurprising criticism of Jack Goody, the renowned anthropologist:

There is little doubt that in most contexts Elias equated the childhood of the race with the childhood of the human being, the phylogenetic with the ontogenetic (although children did not go through all phases of the civilizing process); the Naturvolk or primitive needed to have his emotional behavior controlled, as was the case with children who required disciplining in the same way (with fear playing its part in both cases). That notion is now generally regarded as misleading. (Goody, 2006: 170)

Goody goes on to bring out the fundamental identity of key themes in Elias and Freud:

The general line of argument, the view of civilization, the notion of restraint and repression, the control of instinctual (animal) nature, the role of authority (absolutism in the shape of the father) in the process, these themes are very similar in the two writers … The rise of the state is directly connected with the control of feelings and behavior. (Goody, 2006: 164)

Freud’s unquestionable influence on Elias is evident on biographical as well as theoretical grounds. Mennell writes that Elias had a life-long involvement with Freudians and psychoanalysis. And he allows that ‘the central theme in his [Elias’s] thinking is that the individual and society are not separate things, but only two different perspectives’ (Mennell, 1989: 20), which is as much as to say that what applies to the one, also applies to the other. Other commentators also point to the Elias and Feud connection, among them Christopher Powell who writes that Elias ‘praises Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents in which the socially produced superego imposes itself on the personal passions of the id, and he makes substantial use of Freudian concepts throughout The Civilizing Process’ (Powell, 2011: 138). Powell remarks appositely that Elias calls the ‘passions that the civilizing process represses, “spontaneous”, “uninhibited”, “immediate”, “uncalculated”, “unrestrained”, and so on’ (Powell, 2011: 138). That is to say, the civilizing process represses basic primitive passions as they appear in the individual, typically the child, and also in the history of human society, typically among so-called primitives or Naturvolk. The two forms of ‘repression’ are seen as basically the same, since both involve the disciplinary control of basic urges to which the child and the primitive would be prone to give way. And just as the child is taught in the family environment to control basic urges, through toilet training and all the other social usages, under the paternal gaze of the father, or the widow Douglas in the orphaned Huck’s case, so are savages and barbarians taught to be civilized through the forcible imposition of manners by the state under the patrimonial regard of the absolutist ruler, the father of his people. Not only is the child father to the man, but this relation is also the image of mankind, the human self-image, as Mennell calls it.

To dismantle this whole self-image of humanity we need first to establish that civilization has nothing to do with instinctual renunciation or repression in the Freudian sense. In a social context the control, inhibition or frustration of natural human desires is called asceticism. Asceticism tends to be practiced in respect of three basic human needs: the need for food and drink, the need for sex or erotic satisfaction and the need to express anger and frustration. There are, of course, all kinds of other needs that can occasion ascetic practices, such as the need for warmth and shelter, the need for companionship, the need for self-expression and many others, but these we shall disregard for the purpose of simplifying the exposition.

Now, it is quite true that some civilizations and most religions engage in some form or other of ascetic practices. For example, Christianity enforces asceticism in relation to sex and sensual satisfaction: it is absolutely forbidden for monks, nuns and priests in Catholicism and restricted to monogamous marriage for the laity. Some attempt is made in Christianity to control anger and to restrict violence to those professionally competent to carry it out, such as soldiers. Little attempt is made to control intake of food and drink, except for some severely puritanical orders of monks. Other religions have very different ascetic practices, such as, for example, Islam, which is latitudinarian in matters of sex as far as men are concerned, though strict with women; but it practices all kinds of rules about fasting on Ramadan and in general about eating certain types of food, together with a strict ban on alcohol consumption. Other religions have no ascetic restraints whatever and some enjoin sensual satisfaction. With regard to anger and violence, the variety of observances is still more extensive and would take volumes to document. All these are matters of culture in which societies and civilizations differ enormously. There is no single form of renunciation or asceticism that can be considered universal, an example of repression common to all civilizations. In fact, the wisdom of Greek civilization was inherent in the adage ‘everything in moderation’, which seems to indicate that nothing was absolutely forbidden. Hence, there is no way of identifying civilization with repression.

There is no way of identifying manners with repression either. All civilizations, and for that matter all societies as such, have their manners or behavioral regulations, which invariably differ from case to case, though it is also true that some have more of these than others, and these might be called well-mannered. Manners are like fashions – they vary almost infinitely and can concern anything at all; most are social conventions without any ascertainable function, others are clearly meant to fulfill a social or hygienic or prudential or some other clearly recognizable purpose. There is no coincidence between manners and instinctual renunciation or asceticism whatever. Indeed, it is rare to find any form of manners at all that involve any suppression of desires, provided we do not confuse manners with morals, as both Elias and Freud tend to do. Perhaps the norms of politeness in Western societies involve a certain degree of anger control and restraint of resort to violence in the immediate situation, but these hardly constrain social repression as punishment in the longer term. To attempt a classification of all the types of manners current in all societies is an endless and fruitless endeavor, like classifying clouds by their shapes, and not something we intend to undertake, and it is not necessary in order to refute Elias.

Elias focuses on French aristocratic manners, and these were certainly important for aristocracies throughout most parts of Europe for a long period. This is mainly due to the fact that France was the central and strongest power in Europe. But there is otherwise nothing special about this code of manners, except for the fact that the aristocracy as the dominant class in society imposed its manners to some varying degree on all the other classes, starting with the upper bourgeoisie, going on to the petty bourgeoisie and eventually embracing all town dwellers, including the workers to some limited extent. It was the same in many other European societies. It was in this way that aristocratic manners came to be associated with ‘good society’ and ‘good behavior’ throughout Europe. And because the aristocrats placed such a high valuation on their own manners – for it was the one thing that distinguished them from others, since they had few other accomplishments to boast of – hence they came to identify these with what they called civilized behavior in general. From that prejudiced tendentious source, the idea arose that civilization had essentially to do with manners, and European aristocratic manners to boot. All others who did not have such manners were considered by them not civilized. Those who propagated this idea, mainly French aristocratic intellectuals during the 18th century, did not ask themselves whether the Greeks or the Romans, whom they so admired, had French aristocratic manners. We now know that they did not, and neither did the Byzantines or any other civilized people. Hence, we must again assert the conclusion that manners have nothing to do with civilization; Elias has followed a false Freudian lead.

In fact, Elias tends to neglect most of the factors that do have a bearing on civilization, because they were not features of aristocratic manners or not evinced by the aristocracy as such. Literacy is one such key factor in respect of which aristocrats in Europe, though not in other civilizations, were for a long time notoriously backward. The emperor Charlemagne could barely sign his name and only began learning to read in old age. For a long time knights and lords were typically illiterate and despised learning as something only fit for monks and clerics whom they employed. The revival of scholarship and the founding of universities, a sure sign of the arrival of civilization in Europe, had nothing to do with them; it was largely a matter of the Church and the cities. Elias pays no attention to cities and the burghers or bourgeois who inhabited them and carried out the work of civilization in most respects. Most other historians and sociologists, be it Marx or Weber or Pirenne, ascribe the revival of European civilization to the growth of cities. It was the achievements that took place in the cities and not the customs, ceremonies and decorum practiced in castles that mattered for civilization.

Even more astonishing than his neglect of cities is that he ignores morals or ethics in general, due to his obsession with manners. But the two are hardly identical as is evident from an 18th-century work by Lord Chesterfield, Letters to his Son (1774), which Mennell describes as ‘a not untypical mixture of highly polished manners with a somewhat cynical attitude to personal relations’ (Mennell, 2007: 55), but which Dr Johnson characterized much better as ‘displaying the manners of a dancing master and the morals of a whore’. Elias pays hardly any attention to the various ethical developments that took place within the course of European civilization. As we saw previously, he seems to be saying that ethical systems have no bearing on civilization whatever, at least not in so far as these are conveyed through religion, for he states that ‘religion is exactly as “civilized” as the society or class which upholds it’ (Mennell, 2007: 266). In other words, he believes that none of the reform movements within the Church, such as among the Franciscans and Dominicans, or outside it among the proto-Protestant heretics such as the Waldensians or the Lollards, none of which he even mentions, played any role in European civilization. Even more surprising, he fails to discuss the one ethical movement current among the aristocrats, the codes of chivalry and honor, the courtly love conventions and other modes of gallantry that had did shape behavior and feeling throughout European history (Redner, 2002). Of course, in respect of love, it had the opposite of the ‘affect-subduing effect’ that Elias associates with civilization (Mennell, 2007: 266).

In discussing European civilization, other authors write about so much that Elias leaves unmentioned that it is hard to know where to begin in correcting his account. Culture, in the sense of literature, art, philosophy and science, goes by the board and so, too, does the whole history of the various renaissances. The Reformation is also implicitly dismissed on the grounds of the irrelevance of mere ‘religious ideas’ to the ‘civilizing process’. Since the influence of Freud is responsible for this systematic misconception of what civilization is all about, we turn to Freud next.

III Civilization and its discontents

Freud, of course, makes the same mistakes about civilization as Elias, as it were, avant la lettre. Freud’s extensive writing on civilization, culture and society in general must be treated as quite separate from his psychological works based on clinical evidence, for the former are largely unsubstantiated speculations entertained by a ‘great mind’, but one with limited sociological and historical knowledge. They had, however, a pernicious influence on some sociologists and historians and numerous other thinkers. That influence radiated far and wide also among intellectuals and litterateurs. Weber encountered it in the person of the charlatan, Otto Gross, whom he fought, and it appeared even earlier in the work of another shady character, Otto Weininger, a Jew who made a great contribution to anti-Semitism. Unfortunately, highly respectable thinkers were touched by it as well, such as the members of the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Horkheimer in The Dialectics of Enlightenment and Marcuse in Eros and Civilization. In this form it had a huge impact on American students and academics in the 1960s–70s era of sexual liberation and political activism. Now, through the agency of Lacan, Freudianism is deeply influencing feminism, also with dubious results.

Elias was swept up on the Freudian wave when it was at its height just prior to the Second World War. He entertained the ambition, as did various others, of producing a synthesis of psychology and sociology, the microcosm and macrocosm of human existence, that is, of fusing Freud and Marx and Weber. For this purpose he propounded a theory of manners, based on the Freudian idea of instinctual renunciation, combining it with a theory of state formation based on the idea of the monopoly of force and the monopoly of taxation derived from Marx and Weber. Unfortunately, he relied heavily on Freud’s writings on society and civilization, which are flawed from start to finish, from Totem and Taboo to Moses and Monotheism. Here we shall refer primarily to the text which most influenced Elias, Civilization and its Discontents (Freud, 1961).

However, before we begin any refutation of Freud, it must be made clear that in no way do we wish to impugn all attempts to combine psychology and sociology; social psychology is certainly a valid subject. It is obvious that psychology and sociology are congruent with one another and causally interpenetrating. The issue, of course, is to distinguish between valid and invalid ways of relating them. Freud’s ways tend to be invalid, for he repeats ancient and long-standing errors.

In a tradition that goes back to Plato, it has often been maintained that society is simply the individual writ large. This is a proton pseudos, a fundamental error, of Western thought that keeps recurring. Freud repeats it in his own way. He had probably learned it from its main expositor in that period, the biologist Ernst Häckel, who coined the formula that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Freud simply inverted the formula to argue that phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny. This has been refuted in both of its forms in modern biology, as recounted by Stephen Gould among others. Though perhaps ‘refuted’ is too strong a word for what takes place in science with superseded theories:

… the biogenetic law [Häckel’s theory of recapitulation] fell only when it became unfashionable in approach (due to the rise of experimental embryology) and finally untenable in theory (when the establishment of Mendelian genetics converted previous exceptions into new expectations). (Gould, 1977: 168)

All this took place within Freud’s own lifetime, but he was obviously unaware of what was going on in biology, simply relying on his memory of what he had learned in his youth.

Freud clearly follows the ontogeny-phylogeny correspondence, for he states this explicitly:

When, however, we look at the relation between the process of human civilization and the development of the educative process of individual human beings, we shall conclude without much hesitation that the two are very similar in nature, if not the very same process applied to different kinds of object. The process of civilization of the human species is, of course, an abstraction of a higher order than is the development of the individual and is therefore harder to apprehend in concrete terms, nor should we pursue the analogies to an obsessional extreme; but in view of the similarity between the aims of the two processes – in the one case the integration of a separate individual into a human group, and in the other case the creation of a unified group out of many individuals – we cannot be surprised at the similarity between the means employed and the resultant phenomena. (Freud, 1961: 86)

The reasoning is highly specious. There is no similarity of aims between a child learning and a civilization developing, for in the former case the goal is already pre-established, the teachers know in advance what is to be learned; in the latter case there is no such preset goal, since where a civilization is heading is unknown. And Freud does ‘pursue the analogies in an obsessional manner’. Before long Freud has society developing a super-ego, just like the child:

The analogy between the process of civilization and the path of individual development may be extended in an important respect. It can be asserted that the community, too, evolves a super-ego under whose influence cultural development proceeds. It would be a tempting for anyone who has knowledge of human civilization to follow out this analogy in detail. (Freud, 1961: 88)

Freud does not wait, however, for any historian or sociologists to advise him on this matter. Undeterred, he proceeds to expound it himself:

I will confine myself to bringing forward a few sticking points. The super-ego of a civilization has an origin similar to that of an individual. It is based on the impression left behind by the personalities of great leaders – men of overwhelming force of mind or men in whom one of the human impulsions has found its strongest and purest, and therefore often its most one-sided expression. In many instances the analogy goes still further, in that during their lifetime these figures were – often enough, even if not always – mocked and maltreated by others or even dispatched in a cruel fashion. (Freud, 1961: 88)

And before we know where we are, the analogy is extended to the ‘primal father [who] did not attain divinity until long after he had met his death by violence’ (Freud, 1961: 89).

The last reference is, of course, to Totem and Taboo, Freud’s early excursion into anthropological theorizing, where he first attempted to practice his psychoanalytic method for arriving at the truths of society. Whatever he had discovered in the course of individual analysis on the couch, so to speak, he would apply to the analysis of human societies, even going back to the dim distant reaches of pre-history about which nothing was known in Freud’s day. So, if an Oedipus complex operates in the infancy of the individual, therefore, there must have been an Oedipus complex, or something like it, in the infancy of the human race as well. Ergo, in the very origin there was a primal father who kept all the women to himself; he was murdered by his sons, who then established the Law to expiate their guilt, etc. This is, of course, pure Freudian mythology no truer than that of the book of Genesis. Yet Freud adhered to it all his life.

In elaborating such analogies Freud is in very good company. Apart from Plato and many other ancient thinkers, we can find the same kind of thing in many modern thinkers as well. Hegel is full of it, for in speaking of consciousness and self-consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit he systematically obfuscates any distinction between the individual and society or between maturation and history. When he nods off, Marx follows him and writes of ancient Greek civilization as the youthful stage of humanity when men were like gifted children:

Why should not the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise an eternal charm? There are unruly children and precocious children. Many of the old peoples belong to this category. The Greeks were normal children. The charm of their art for us is not in contradistinction to the undeveloped stage of society on which it grew. It is its result, and is inextricably bound up, rather, with the fact that the unripe social conditions under which it arose, and could alone arise, can never return. (Marx, 1973: 111)

For Marx, an undeveloped stage of society means youthful people. Thus we are to take the massed Athenian audiences watching some of the greatest dramas ever written as children at play. But what is, after all, only an aberration in Marx becomes a basic methodological principle in Spengler, for all civilizations are seen as organisms which go through the stages of life from youth to senescence.

At a much more sophisticated level, the same set of errors repeat themselves in Habermas:

In discussing Weber’s sociology of religion in the next chapter, I shall attempt to make the development of religious worldviews comprehensible from the aspect of a development of formal world-concepts, that is, as a learning process. In doing so I shall be making tacit use of a concept of learning that Piaget expounded for the ontogenesis of structures of consciousness. (Habermas, 1984: 67)

So here explicitly stated is the so-called law that phylogenesis recapitulates ontogenesis, both are learning processes and Piagetian stages hold in either case. This is repeated in relation to Lawrence Kohlberg’s ‘levels of moral consciousness’, which Habermas applies in the fully Hegelian manner both to children and societies (Habermas, 1984: 174).

And so we arrive once again at Elias, who presents medieval people as if they were unruly adolescents. Mennell puts it quite explicitly:

… more characteristic of their temperament – and here Elias drew on the insights of Johan Huizinga, confirmed by much subsequent historical research – was their volatility, their propensity to switch suddenly from mood to mood, from merriment via sudden offence at a joke taken too far, for example, to violent brawling … Today, some criminologists describe delinquents in much the same way as Elias’ account of the medieval character-type, and often much the same explanation in terms of uneven social control and poorly developed self-controls. (Mennell, 2007: 12)

If medieval folk were as volatile as teenagers and as wayward as delinquents, one begins to wonder how they could have built the Gothic cathedrals, which required careful planning and sometimes perseverance extending over generations. How could they have written and read some of the greatest literature the world has ever seen, which no teenager or delinquent can even begin to understand?

We can now begin to grasp why Freud is so adamant that civilization involves ‘instinctual renunciation’ and Elias equally insistent that it requires ‘affect-control’ and why both place such emphasis on ‘repression’ in furthering the work of civilization. It is quite clear that Freud applies his psychoanalytic theory, which accounts for what goes on in infancy and childhood, to the ‘civilizing process’, which is supposedly the same in the individual and society. All the paraphernalia of individual psychology – repression of primitive urges, the formation of a super-ego, the incurring of guilt, etc. – are projected onto the historical development of civilization. Civilization, therefore, means renunciation: ‘The price we pay for our advance of civilization is loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt’ (Freud, 1961: 81). When this becomes too intense and unbearable, there is a ‘return of the repressed’, and social neurosis results: ‘under the influence of cultural urges some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization – possibly the whole of mankind – have become neurotic’ (Freud, 1961: 91). It is above all the Thanatos, ‘the inclination to aggression’, that reacts most ferociously against the restraints with which civilization has thwarted it and breaks out in social mayhem (Freud, 1961: 59). ³ Freud postulates a perpetual war between the individual, following primitive urges, and civilization, seeking their restraint:

What means does civilization employ in order to inhibit the aggressiveness which opposes it, to make it harmless, to get rid of it, perhaps? This we can study in the history of the development of the individual. What happens in him to render his desire for aggression innocuous? (Freud, 1961: 70)

The answer to both questions is the same; it is, in one word, repression.

If civilization means repression – with the more of the one necessitating the more of the other – then it follows that where there is no civilization there is also no repression. As he expressly states, ‘the primitive man was better off in knowing no restrictions of instinct’ (Freud, 1961: 62). Primitives or savages are thus pictured in the conventional manner as wholly unrestrained Calibans, giving way to all their desires. To some extent Elias shares such anthropological views for, as Mennell reports, in a paper entitled ‘Pacification and Violence’, delivered at a conference in Amsterdam in 1981, he expressed the opinion that ‘people in unspecified African societies must have lived like wild animals’ (Mennell, 1989: 230). Little wonder that anthropologists such as Anton Blok and Jack Goody are so irate. Goody, who knew Elias in Africa, is openly contemptuous of his so-called ‘field-work’ in anthropology (Goody, 2006: ch. 6).

What makes Freud’s theory even worse, and politically dangerous furthermore, is his view that the repression that civilization calls for can only be exercised by coercion at the social level, and that this necessary coercion must be applied by an authoritarian power, a father-figure, and by a minority elite of superior individuals:

For the masses are lazy and unintelligent; they have no love for instinctual renunciation, and they are not to be convinced by argument of its inevitability; and the individuals comprising them support one another in giving free reign to their indiscipline. It is only through the influence of individuals who can set an example and whom the masses recognize as their leaders that they can be induced to perform the work and undergo the renunciation on which the existence of civilization depends. (Freud, 1962: 3)

It is not so much the ultra-conservative tenor of such remarks that is so disturbing, with their fear of the mass, the mob, the canaille, going back to the French Revolution, but rather the effect they had when published in the late 1920s and 30 s with looming totalitarianism of both the Left and the Right. It spread a message of doom and gloom among all those who read Freud and who then conveyed this to the general public. Thus, Edward Glover, head of the Psychoanalytic Institute in London, gave a broadcast on the BBC during October-November 1935, recounting the gist of Civilization and its Discontents. Delivered to a war-weary, pacifist British public it was hardly designed to inspire them to a defense of their liberal democratic civilization against the rising tide of Bolshevism and Nazism. Richard Overy spells out its effect:

The theory of the unconscious, though it was designed simply to explain mental illness, was a metaphor of such remarkable explanatory power that it undermined the whole liberal projection of human nature as essentially reasoning and reasonable, or of individuals exercising free will unconditionally … The unconscious was represented by psychoanalysts as chaotic, primitive, infantile and arbitrary, and the seething mass of instincts and drives that inhabited it was capable of terrible aggression and an urge to morbid self-destruction. When this paradigm was applied to society as a whole, as it was regularly throughout the 1930s, it only served to illuminate what many people already suspected, that beneath the veneer of civilization there lurks a monstrous other self whose release would spell the end of civilization and the triumph of barbarism. (Overy, 2009: 173)

The damage was done precisely ‘when the paradigm was applied to society as a whole’, which is what Freud himself practiced and encouraged.

Thus Freud and the psychoanalysts purveyed a fatalistic attitude to the chief problems of the times, above all to totalitarianism, about which apparently nothing could be done, since, as Freud put it, ‘instinctual passions are stronger than reasonable interests’ (Freud, 1961: 59). In any case, the reasonable interests of liberalism and democracy are hardly ones Freud approved of; and even worse than that, when they are coupled with egalitarianism in the American manner, then they constitute a group illness that is itself a great danger to civilization. In one of his rare remarks on America Freud delivered himself of this view:

Over and above the task of restricting the instincts, which we are prepared for, there forces itself on our notice the danger of a state of things which might be termed ‘the psychological poverty of groups’. This danger is most threatening when the bonds of society are chiefly constituted by the identification of its members with one another, while individuals of the leader type do not acquire the importance that should fall to them in the formation of a group. The present cultural state of America would give us a good opportunity for studying the damage to civilization which is thus to be feared. But I shall avoid the temptation of entering upon a critique of American civilization; I do not wish to give an impression of wanting myself to employ American methods. (Freud, 1961: 62)

What this passage reveals, above all, is the danger of applying psychoanalytic methods to society and to civilization in general. We have studied what damage this does to the work of Elias and, indirectly, also to Mennell’s account of America. But this is only the start of a critique of the civilizing process when it is cast in Freudian terms.