Civilisations, Civilising Processes and Modernity – A Debate Documents from the Conference at Bielefeld, 1984

In 1984, the celebrated sociologist and historian Norbert Elias convened a major conference on ‘Civilisations and civilising processes’ at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (University of Bielefeld). Participants included the most distinguished and influential scholars in historical sociology and world history. This book will make available, for the first time in one place, the papers presented by the speakers and, even more interestingly, the transcripts of discussions at the symposium. This conference brought together eminent and internationally reputed scholars of macro-history and historical sociology including Johann P. Arnason, Elias, Hans-Dieter Evers, Johan Goudsblom, Keith Hopkins, William H. McNeill, and Immanuel Wallerstein. This highly informative encounter between various leading scholars of humanity’s global social history has never before been published, although it was completely recorded on paper and in tape recordings. Its publication in one volume should be an important event for all students of the long-term structural transformations of humanity.

1. Introduction.- 2. The Civilising Process: World Figuration or World System?.- 3. Discussion of Evers’s Paper.-  4. The Modern World-System as a Civilisation.- 5. Discussion of Wallerstein’s Paper.- 6. The Formation of States and Changes in Restraint.- 7. Discussion of Elias’s Paper.- 8. The Rise of the West as a Long-Term Process.- 9. Discussion of McNeill’s Paper.- 10. From Shamelessness to Guilt.- 11. Discussion of Hopkins’s Paper.- 12. Civilisation, Culture and Power: Reflections on Norbert Elias’s Genealogy of the West.- 13. Discussion of Arnason’s Paper.- 14. The Domestication of Fire as a Civilising Process.- 15. Discussion of Goudsblom’s Paper.- 16. Final Discussion.

Artur Bogner, Dr (Social Sciences), then secretary to Norbert Elias and Research Assistant at the Centre of Interdisciplinary Research at Bielefeld, was the principal organiser of the conference which is the subject of this book. In recent decades, as a researcher at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the University of Bayreuth, he has conducted field research and published on topics related to armed conflicts and peacebuilding in sub-Saharan Africa.

Stephen Mennell is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at University College Dublin, Ireland. He served as General Editor of the Collected Works of Norbert Elias, published in eighteen volumes by UCD Press, and as a member of the board of the Norbert Elias foundation from 1997 to 2016. He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Irish Academy and Academia Europaea, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.