Violence and Civilité: The Ambivalences of the State

The concern expressed by Elias about the increase in incivilities in Germany in the Thirties makes violence a clear political motive of his famous On the Process of Civilization (1939). He comes to question the general evolution from which the German Nation-State, if not Europe as a whole, seems to be diverging. As he would write later in The Germans (1996), what is indeed “astonishing and unique” in contemporary societies is not the persisting or growing violence but rather “the relatively high degree of nonviolence.” The first part of this chapter, “State (monopolies) and civilité against violence”, discusses the role that Elias gives to the State as a first-rank historical reducer of social violence. The monopoly of legitimate physical force does indeed entail a containment of physical violence that is undoubtedly progress. On the other hand, civil pacification inside States goes along with multiplied violence between States. Symbolic and psychological violence have also been reinforced. However, all these forms of violence are in a way due to a “normal” civilizing process, where profits seem more important than losses. That is not always the case. Civilizing and decivilizing processes often go hand in hand and the latter can outweigh the former. The second part of the chapter, “State violence against civilité”, focuses on the denials of civilité that are tolerated by or due to the State. At their pinnacle, Nazi barbarity, which was only apparently an exception, revealed the ethical core of the civilizing process, i.e., the widening scope of mutual identification due to a growing learned repulsion to others’ suffering and pain that was centuries in the making, through the very attempt at its destruction. The authors end by positing that, according to Elias, the State is not always the guardian of civil security and civilité cannot be reduced to the opposite of violence or to an attribute of a bounded community