The Civilizing Process, Vol. 1: The History of Manners, by Norbert Elias

Abstract

The sociology of emotions concerns itself with the social dimensions of human affectivity and its expression. It is a relatively new subdiscipline identified with the works of such contemporary figures as Hochschild (1979, 1983), Kemper (1978a,b), Scheff (1979, 1983), and Denzin (1984).’ Despite its newness or, perhaps because of it, sociologists of emotions now claim a variety of classic works as part of its current perspective, for example, Scheler’s Ressentiment (1961), Simmel’s (1950) treatment of the social psychological implications of secrecy and betrayal, and Lynd’s work on the role of shame and its relationship to guilt (1958). As classic statements of the primacy of social factors in the development and maintenance of human affects, each, by implication, considers human emotionality within a framework of social and historical change. The History of Manners should be recognized as one such classic statement for the sociology of emotions. Much of its importance as social science is to be found in its thoroughgoing historical perspective on human emotions, With high originality,Elias displays human emotions by giving us a history of etiquette. His thesis is that the history of Western society from the late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century represents a gradual transformation in people’s ideas concerning manners and bodily propriety. Central to this transformation were decisive changes in the feeling of shame, repugnance, and embarrassment that attended a wide range of human bodily functions such as eating, spitting, nose-blowing, urinating, and defecating. Originally published in 1939 as a two-volume work in German, Vber den Prozess der Zivilisation waited nearly forty years for an English translation. In 1978 volume one appeared as The History of Manners, in 1982 the second volume as Power and Civility. Both may be read as separate books, the first dealing with the development of civilized manners and the second with the rise of the modem state. For Elias the two volumes constitute one attempt to interconnect the process of “civilizing” and the centralization of power in the form of the modem state. Power and Civility explains the changes in affects studied in The History of Manners by tracing the development of the absolutism of the modem state from earlier forms of feudal anarchy. I have deliberately reviewed only the first volume here, convinced that it stands as a lasting contribution to the sociology of the emotions regardless of the explanatory value of Elias’s grand design. The History of Manners attempts to show in detail how the psychological makeup of modem man has been shaped by certain fundamental changes in standards of shame and delicacy which occurred in Western Europe over a five-hundred-year period, changes due to the rise of a new political economy. In this review the intention is to present Elias’s argument and to highlight those elements in it which bear most directly on the sociological study of emotions.