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Norbert Elias’s contribution to Andrew Linklater’s contribution to International Relations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 September 2017

Stephen Mennell
Stephen Mennell*
Affiliation:
Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University College Dublin
*
* Correspondence to: Stephen Mennell, Professor Emeritus, School of Sociology, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin, D04 F6X4, Ireland. Author’s email: Stephen.Mennell@ucd.ie
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Abstract

Andrew Linklater’s projected trilogy of books for Cambridge University Press rests distinctively on the work of the sociologist Norbert Elias (1897–1990). Linklater is creating a powerful theoretical orientation for the field of International Relations by synthesising the ideas of Martin Wight and the ‘English School’ of IR with those of Elias. Though Elias is best known for his theory of civilising processes – on which Linklater draws most prominently – his writings are far more extensive. In particular, his sociological theory of knowledge and the sciences underlies Linklater’s recent writings, even if that is not immediately apparent on a cursory reading. This article spells out some of the ‘Eliasian infrastructure’ that may not be familiar to many of Linklater’s readers. It also discusses ways in which common misunderstandings of Elias’s ideas may lead to parallel misunderstandings of Linklater’s. The article concludes by asking whether, even if Linklater’s vision of the growth of ‘cosmopolitan responsibility’ may prove correct in the long term, we may nevertheless be experiencing something of a (possibly short-term) reversal towards ‘cosmopolitan irresponsibility’.

Keywords

Andrew LinklaterNorbert EliasCivilising ProcessesCosmopolitan Responsibility
Type
Forum: Linklater’s Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , October 2017 , pp. 654 - 670
Copyright
© British International Studies Association 2017 

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References

1 Linklater, Andrew, The Problem of Harm in World Politics: Theoretical Investigations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Linklater, Andrew, Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)Google Scholar. Hereafter, these books will be cited as PH and V&C.

2 Pinker, Steven, The Better Angels of Our Nature (London: Allen Lane, 2011), p. 59n Google Scholar. Having spent much of the last forty years promoting knowledge of Elias’s work, I found Pinker’s observation mildly discouraging.

3 Elias, Norbert, On the Process of Civilisation: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Dublin: University College Dublin Press [UCD], 2012 [Collected Works, vol. 3]), pp. 13–57 Google Scholar. (Elias’s book was originally published in 1939, in German, in two volumes, as Über den Prozess der Zivilisation, by the émigré publisher Haus zum Falken, Basel, in 1939. Note that previous English editions were published under the title The Civilizing Process.)

4 See {http://www.isa-sociology.org/en/about-isa/history-of-isa/books-of-the-xx-century/} accessed 23 February 2017. Admittedly, the number of respondents was small, and the poll probably not representative of the opinions of, in particular, American sociologists.

5 Before Linklater, the Dutch scholar Godfried van Benthem van den Bergh was an early advocate of the relevance of Elias to IR; see especially his book The Nuclear Revolution and the End of the Cold War: Forced Restraint (London: Macmillan, 1992); cf. PH, 178.

6 Elias, Norbert, The Court Society (Dublin: UCD Press, 2006 [Collected Works, vol. 2])Google Scholar.

7 Elias’s Collected Works were published in 18 volumes by University College Dublin Press, 2006–14.

8 Wight, Martin, Systems of States (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1977)Google Scholar.

9 V&C, p. xi. This seems to me to be not entirely true of Elias’s later works, notably Elias, Humana Conditio: Observations on the Development of Humanity on the Fortieth Anniversary of the End of a War (8 May 1985), in The Loneliness of the Dying and Humana Conditio (Dublin: UCD Press, 2010 [Collected Works, vol. 6]).

10 V&C, p. xii, emphasis added.

11 Goudsblom, Johan, ‘Christian religion and the European civilising process: the views of Norbert Elias and Max Weber compared in the context of the Augustian and Lucretian traditions’, in Steven Loyal and Stephen Quilley (eds), The Sociology of Norbert Elias (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 265–280 Google Scholar.

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13 Most famously, Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1930 [orig. pub. 1904–5])Google Scholar.

14 Elias, On the Process of Civilisation, p. 195.

15 Bowden, Brett, Civilization and War (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2013)Google Scholar.

16 In the English-speaking world, the term ‘habitus’ if often assumed to have been introduced or invented by Pierre Bourdieu, but although unknown in English it was in fact in common use in French and German sociology before the Second World War. Elias used it in his early writings in German, but only began to use it in English after it had been brought into the language by Bourdieu’s translators and became fashionable in the 1990s.

17 For a necessarily subtle discussion of the subtleties of differences in national habitus, see Elias, , Studies on the Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Dublin: UCD Press, 2013 [Collected Works, vol. 11]), especially pp. 1–48 Google Scholar. See also my own cautious remarks: Mennell, Stephen, ‘National character, History of’, in James D. Wright (editor-in-chief), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, vol. 16 (2nd edn, Oxford: Elsevier, 2015), pp. 237–240 Google Scholar.

18 Elias, On the Process of Civilisation, pp. 195–6. An alternative, less literal, translation would refer to ‘the standards of emotion management’.

19 Linklater, PH, pp. 203, 229, 247–8.

20 de Swaan, Abram, ‘Widening circles of identification: Emotional concerns in sociogenetic perspective’, Theory, Culture and Society, 12:2 (1995), pp. 25–39 Google Scholar.

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23 Elias, Norbert, ‘What I mean by civilisation: reply to Hans Peter Duerr’, in Essays II: On Civilising Processes, State Formation and National Identity (Dublin: UCD Press, 2008 [Collected Works, vol. 15]), pp. 8–13 Google Scholar.

24 See Norbert Elias, Studies on the Germans; Mennell, Stephen, ‘Decivilising processes: Theoretical significance and some lines for research’, International Sociology, 5:2 (1990), pp. 205–223 Google Scholar; cf. PH, pp. 172–5.

25 Elias, Norbert, ‘The retreat of sociologists into the present’, Essays III: On Sociology and the Humanities (Dublin: UCD Press, 2009 [Collected Works, vol. 16]), pp. 107–126 Google Scholar.

26 See Rojek, Chris and Turner, Bryan, ‘Decorative sociology: Towards a critique of the cultural turn’, Sociological Review, 48:4 (2000), pp. 629–648 Google Scholar.

27 Gleichmann, Peter R., ‘Zur zivilisationssoziologischen Begriffsbildung’, in J. Diederich et al. (eds), Sozialer Wandel in Westeuropa (Berlin: Universitätsbibliothek der Technischen Universität Berlin, 1979)Google Scholar. Something similar characterises the symbolic interactionist tradition; see Blumer, Herbert, Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), pp. 153–170 Google Scholar.

28 Lee Whorf, Benjamin, Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1956)Google Scholar.

29 Elias, Norbert, What is Sociology? (Dublin: UCD Press, 2012 [Collected Works, vol. 5]), pp. 107–110 Google Scholar. (In German, Elias used the term Zustandsreduktion, but after I discussed it with him, we decided to turn the idea around and translate it into English as ‘process reduction’.)

30 Elias, Norbert, ‘Scientific establishments’, Essays I: On the Sociology of Knowledge and the Sciences (Dublin: UCD Press, 2009 [Collected Works, vol. 14]), pp. 107–160 Google Scholar.

31 See Elias, Norbert, Interviews and Autobiographical Reflections (Dublin: UCD Press, 2013 [Collected Works, vol. 17]), pp. 10–14 Google Scholar.

32 Elias, Norbert, ‘Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and “the question of the logical unity of humankind”’, in Katie Liston and Stephen Mennell (eds), Supplements and Index to the Collected Works (Dublin: UCD Press, 2014 [Collected Works, vol. 18]), pp. 53–106 Google Scholar.

33 See my paper ‘Elias and Popper’, presented at a colloquium on ‘Norbert Elias: Sociologue de la connaissance et des sciences’, Centre Alexandre Koyré (EHESS), Paris (19–20 January 2017), available at: {http://www.stephenmennell.eu/docs/pdf/EliasPopper.pdf} accessed 23 February 2017.

34 Norbert Elias, ‘Figuration’, Essays III, pp. 1–3.

35 See Tainter, Joseph A., The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

36 Extending even to his use, for example, of Elias’s ugly neologism ‘courtisation’ (V&C, pp. 221, 423, 438).

37 Elias, Norbert, Involvement and Detachment (Dublin: UCD Press, 2007 [Collected Works, vol. 8]), especially ‘The Fishermen in the Maelstrom’, pp. 105–178 Google Scholar.

38 Increasing pressures habitually to exercise foresight and self-constraint are an important component of civilising processes in the technical sense. See Elias, On the Process of Civilisation, pp. 418–22.

39 Linklater, V&C, pp. 14, 17, 88–90, 211–222, 282, 299, 430.

40 For example by the (mainly American) ‘Culture and Personality’ school of anthropology; see Harris, Rise of Anthropological Theory, pp. 393–463.

41 Weber defined a state as ‘an organisation which successfully upholds a claim to binding rule-making over a territory, by virtue of commanding a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence’. See Weber, , Economy and Society, 2 vols (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978 [orig. pub. 1922]), Vol. I, p. 54 Google Scholar.

42 Elias, Essays III, p. 40.

43 Ikegami, Eiko, The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

44 Broadhurst, Roderic, Bouhours, Thierry, and Bouhours, Brigitte, Violence and the Civilising Process in Cambodia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)Google Scholar. See also Stauth, Georg, ‘Elias in Singapore: Civilizing processes in a tropical city’, Thesis Eleven, 50:1 (1997), pp. 51–70 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mennell, Stephen, ‘Asia and Europe: Comparing civilising processes’, in Johan Goudsblom, Eric Jones, and Stephen Mennell, The Course of Human History (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), ch. 7, pp. 117–134 Google Scholar.

45 Mennell, American Civilizing Process.

46 Hartz, Louis, The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada and Australia (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964)Google Scholar.

47 Jones, Charles A., American Civilization (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2007)Google Scholar.

48 For example, it has been suggested that the high level of gun ownership and gun violence in the US is in part explained by the fact that political democratisation had taken place there before an effective state monopoly of the means of violence had been established. See Spierenburg, Pieter, ‘Democracy came too early: a tentative explanation for the problem of American homicide’, American Historical Review, 111:1 (2006), pp. 104–114 Google Scholar.

49 When colleagues like me pointed out details that seemed not to fit into his theory of civilising processes, Elias always responded, in the best scientific spirit, ‘Then, Stephen my dear, we must do more research.’

50 See Elias, Studies on the Germans.

51 See Elias’s remarks about Native American warriors’ endurance of pain, in An Essay on Time (Dublin: UCD Press, 2007 [Collected Works, vol. 9]), pp. 128–30; and about monastic asceticism, in On the Process of Civilisation, p. 119.

52 Elias, Norbert, ‘Freud’s concept of society and beyond it’, Supplements and Index, pp. 13–52 Google Scholar.

53 Waltz, Kenneth N., Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw Hill, 1979)Google Scholar. For a fuller discussion of Waltz in relation to Elias, see Hobson, John M., ‘Reconfiguring Elias: Historical sociology, the English School, and the challenge of international relations’, Human Figurations, 1:2 (2012), available at: {http://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/humfig/11217607.0001.206/--reconfiguring-elias-historical-sociology-the-english-school?rgn=main;view=fulltext} accessed 25 February 2017Google Scholar.

54 Elias, however, always restricted the word ‘evolution’ to (irreversible) biological processes, and spoke of ‘development’ in (reversible) social processes.

55 Elias, On the Process of Civilisation, pp. 406–7, 447.

56 Elias, What is Sociology?, ch. 6.

57 Ibid., p. 145.

58 Gibson, Quentin, The Logic of Social Enquiry (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), p. 139 Google Scholar.

59 Elias, On the Process of Civilisation, p. 297.

60 Ibid., p. 576. Perversely, but quite characteristically, Elias tucked away this point, fundamental to his theory, in a long footnote about standards of cleanliness; in the definitive Collected Works edition, it is printed as an appendix, given the title ‘On cleanliness and the crumbling of the armour of civilised conduct’, ibid., pp. 573–6.

61 Edmund Leach, ‘Violence’, London Review of Books (23 October 1986).

62 See, for example Elias, Humana Conditio.

63 Goudsblom, Johan, Stof waar honger uit ontstond: Over evolutie en sociale processen (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 2001), pp. 94–111 Google Scholar. An English version of the argument, ‘The paradox of pacification’, can be found at: {http://www.norberteliasfoundation.nl/network/essays.php}.

64 Wilterdink, Nico, ‘The internationalization of capital and trends in income inequality in Western societies’, in Don Kalb et al. (eds), The Ends of Globalization (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), pp. 187–200 Google Scholar.

65 Linklater, Violence and Civilization, p. 454. Here Linklater claims to be paraphrasing my own argument, in The American Civilizing Process, pp. 305–10, although I was thinking about the growing inequalities within states such as the US and the UK.

66 Linklater refers to this idea in V&C, pp. 358, 393, 398, 434.

67 Elias, Studies on the Germans, p. 169.

68 Pinter, Harold, Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics 1948–2005 (rev. edn, London: Faber and Faber, 2005), pp. 198–199 Google Scholar.

69 Mennell, Stephen, ‘Explaining American hypocrisy’, Human Figurations, 4:2 (2015), available at: {http://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/humfig/11217607.0004.202/--explaining-american-hypocrisy?rgn=main;view=fulltext Google Scholar}.

70 Elias, Norbert and Scotson, John L., The Established and the Outsiders (Dublin: UCD Press, 2008 [Collected Works, vol. 4]), especially ch. 7, ‘Observations on gossip’, pp. 122–36. Cf. Linklater, V&C, p. 230 Google Scholar.

71 The point was made by Hegel in his discussion of the master–slave relationship; see Hegel, G. W. F., Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 111 Google Scholar, and today it is a key point in postcolonial theory.

72 Quoted by John Mearsheimer, ‘Why is Europe so peaceful?’, keynote address to European Consortium for Political Research, Potsdam (11 September 2009).

73 Mennell, Stephen, The American Civilizing Process (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), pp. 311–314 Google Scholar.

74 A great deal of evidence that supports my hypothesis has been presented by Andrew Alexander in his study of US foreign policy since 1945, America and the Imperialism of Ignorance (London: Biteback, 2011).

75 This a good example of the ‘drag effect of habitus’ discussed by Elias in The Society of Individuals (Dublin: UCD Press, 2010 [Collected Works, vol. 10]), pp. 188–90, 196.

76 See Mennell, American Civilizing Process, ch. 11, ‘Involvement, detachment and American religiosity’, pp. 266–93.

77 United States Government, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 2002)Google Scholar.

78 Mearsheimer, John, ‘Why is Europe peaceful today?’, European Political Science, 9 (2010), p. 389 Google Scholar.