The Civilising Process: World Figuration or World System?

Abstract

In his introductory paper Evers advocates Norbert Elias’s concept of figuration as an antidote to narrow interpretations of ‘the civilising process’. According to Alfred Weber, the key to macro-history is to be understood as the interaction of three different long-term macro-processes: (1) the civilisatory process (more or less identical to Max Weber’s concept of a long-term process of intellectualisation or ‘enlightenment’); (2) the emergence and change of societal formations; and (3) the cultural process. Systems theories such as Luhmann’s and Wallerstein’s assume a global trend towards a coherent global entity or system without boundaries, either a ‘world system’ or—Wallerstein’s version—a ‘modern world economy’. Elias’s theory combines these diverse dimensions of change in his concepts of figurations and civilising processes. Elias’s analysis and concepts are similar to, but more flexible, open-ended and more open to the empirical investigation of the component (micro-)processes than the concepts and conceptions of these systems theories of social evolution or long-term change in history. Furthermore Evers suggests that civilising processes have been and are always combined, in a dialectical manner, with decivilising trends, civilisation with barbarism, developments towards pacification (or civility or mutual identification or empathy) in the centres of these large-scale processes with counter-processes of intensifying violence, of exclusion and marginalisation, which become concentrated at the periphery of the global system or of global processes and in marginalised groupings in the resulting societal formations.