[SIZE=16pt]The Civilizing Process[/SIZE] [SIZE=16pt]is a book by German [/SIZE][SIZE=16pt]sociologist[/SIZE] [SIZE=16pt]Norbert Elias[/SIZE][SIZE=16pt]. It is an influential work in sociology and Elias' most important work. It was first published in two volumes in 1939 in German. Because of World War II it was virtually ignored, but it gained popularity when it was republished in 1969 and translated into English. Covering European history from roughly 800 AD to 1900 AD, it is the first formal analysis and theory of civilization. The Civilizing Process is today regarded as the founding work of [/SIZE][SIZE=16pt]Figurational Sociology. In 1998 the [/SIZE][SIZE=16pt]International Sociological Association[/SIZE] [SIZE=16pt]listed this work as the seventh most important sociological book of the 20th century.[/SIZE] [SIZE=16pt]This process has been variously analyzed in the past as the triumph of reason over ignorance ; as the victory of sweetness and light over crude and uncouth existence ; as the displacement of brutality and barbarism by politeness and gentle habits ; as law and peaceful order replacing the fist and the pandemonium of universal war; as the taming of passions by civility and self-control. With a measure of emotional detachment, more becoming of the academic mode, the process has been characterized as the rise to dominance of instrumental rationality over irrational behaviour; as the trading off of a part of freedom for a partial security, and the concomitant harnessing of aggression; as the imposition of the courtier's ideal of l'homme honnete, and later of !'homme eclaire, upon successively lower rungs of the status ladder .[/SIZE] [SIZE=16pt]The descriptions vary in the size and importance of the aspect of the process in civilization that they capture. But no one description seems to grasp the main link in the long chain of historical transformations which Western European society went through in the course of the last three-and-a-half centuries. If the main link is the one which articulates all the others into a continuous chain, and thereby contains the key to the interdependence of all units of the totality, then the gradual emergence of the new form of management of the socially produced surplus seems to be a promising candidate.-Ron Price with thanks to several internet sites on Norbert Elias and The Civilizing Process, 7/8/'14. [/SIZE] [SIZE=16pt]This form was indeed revolutionary and set the era of "civilisation" or, industrial capitalist society, apart from the previously dominant type of society. In this old type, surplus value was extracted from the producers, so to speak, in leaps and bounds, say, once or several times during the annual cycle of the predominantly agricultural production.[/SIZE]
Sounds like an interesting author/Sociologist. Have you ever looked at Fernand Braudel or Giovanni Arrighi?
