Notes, References and Table
Table:
‘The state, mass extermination and the breakdown of civilization’
Monopolization of violence (state formation) Decreasing levels of domestic violence ‘Normal’ civilizing processes: [NB externalization of violence: world wars, colonial wars]
Monopolization of violence (state formation) Increasing levels of compartmentalized domestic violence ‘Dyscivilizing’ processes: categorical disidentification; compartmentalization (with encapsulated local decivilizing processes) [NB externalization of violence: idem]
Demonopolization of violence Increasing levels of domestic violence ‘Normal’ decivilizing processes pervasive deinstitutionalization, anomie, regression – ‘breakdown’ [NB external invasions, ‘peace keeping missions’ etc.]
Demonopolization of violence Decreasing levels of internal violence ‘Civilizing’ processes ‘without a state’? low-level, local balances of power [NB external indifference, oblivion]
Notes
1. For a combined discussion of Elias’ and Bauman’s views, see Jonathan Fletcher (1997: 148-175), and Watts (1998).
2. This is a quite literal rendering of the German title of the last part of the original German edition, Elias, 1978-9 (‘Entwurf zu einer Theorie der Zivilisation’, pp. 312-454). It was abandoned for the heading ‘Towards a theory of civilizing processes’ (my emphasis) in the English editions (Elias 1982, 2000).
3. Quotations are from the English edition (Elias, 1996).
4. Elias adds that this was not the only regression into barbarism in the civilized societies of the twentieth century.
5. For a thoughtful account of the ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the former Yugoslavia in terms of a ‘fragmentation’ and ‘disintegration’ of the state and a subsequent ‘decivilizing process’, see Zwaan (1996). For a discussion of a variety of 20th century developments in terms of civilization theory see also Mennell (1990).
6. It is worthwhile to note that to this very day the massacres of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of Africans, e.g. in the conquest of the Congo (cf. Hochschild, 1998) merit hardly any mention in the literature on the overall evaluation of the nineteenth century.
7. This is a variation on the expression ‘regression in service of the ego’, which goes back to Ernst Kris (1959; 312): ’the ego may use the primary process and not only be overwhelmed by it… under certain conditions the ego regulates regression…’ This refers to an ego-controlled regression in order to accomplish certain ego-syntonic tasks, as may occur for example during the creative process or in the course of the patient’s psychoanalysis. In the case of dyscivilization, barbaric episodes occur under conditions of full control by the state apparatus in order better to accomplish certain objectives the regime has set itself.
8. It would be most worthwhile to pursue the themes in Foucault’s oeuvre that anticipate the present line of argument.
9. It takes ‘only one wrong turn’ for people to inadvertently become enmeshed in the inferno of decivilization: this is of course what happened to the hero of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the vanities (1987), from the moment he took the wrong highway exit.
10. Robert van Krieken (1999) describes one step along that road when he relates how the Australian authorities took children of (mixed) aboriginal descent away from their parents, precisely in the name of ‘civilization’.
11. Cf. Fletcher (1997: 286), who defines civilization a.o. as ‘an expansion in the scope of mutual identification within and between groups’.
12. Such an effort might find support in the literature that has emerged around the concept of ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ states, e.g. Badie and Birnbaum (1983); Migdal (1988).
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