Civilisation, Decivilisatio, Civil Society and Violence

Irish Journal of Sociology, Vol 5,1995, pp. 1-21.

Civilisation and Decivilisation, Civil Society andViolence

STEPHEN MENNELLUniversity College, Dublin

ABSTRACT: In the written version of his inaugural lecture as Professorof Sociology at University College, Dublin, the author emphasises thatdespite the direct or indirect connection of most sociological concerns withquestions intrinsic to civil society, contemporary 'meliorist' sociology inthe ^Nest takes the existence of a relatively peaceful civil society for granted.This assumption is anything but justified. Ironically, the birth ofsociology itself was intricately bound up with the relatively extraordinarycircumstances which have led to the emergence of orderly civil societies insome parts of the world. The author explores crucial preconditions for andaspects of civil society - in particular, habitus and the problem of violence.He situates this dual problematic within that of the development of multi-layered forms of globalisation, demonstrating both the power and thefragility of civil society. The indispensability of the processes concerned,as well as their proneness to interruption, lead the author to concludethat deepening their understanding of civil society is a task of suchurgency that sociologists can no longer afford to neglect it.

INTRODUCTION

Three decades ago, C. Wright Mills inspired a generatior\ ofsociologists with his vision of the place of 'the sociologicalimagination' in modern society. Ordinary people, he wrote,

do not usually define the troubles they endure in terms ofhistorical change and institutional contradiction.... Seldomaware of the intricate connection between the patterns of theirown lives and the course of world history, ordinary men do notusually know what this connection means for the kinds of menthey are becoming and for the kinds of history-making in whichthey might take part (Mills 1959, pp. 3-4).̂

But, Mills contended, people were becoming more aware of theirinability to make these connections. It was not, however, onlyinformation they needed. Information often swamped their attentionand overwhelmed their capacity to assimilate it. (If that were truein 1959, how much truer is it in the age of the Internet?) Millsconcluded that what people needed, and what they increasingly felt

Mills was writing before people were as conscious as they are now of theneed for gender-neutral vocabulary. In the spoken version of this article Ichanged 'men' in various quotations to 'people', so as not to distractattention from the substance of the quoted remarks.

2 IRISH JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

they needed, was a quality of mind which helped them to useinformation and to understand what was going on in the world, andalso what might be happening within themselves. This quality ofmind he called the sociological imagination. 'The sociologicalimagination', he wrote, 'enables us to grasp history and biographyand the relations between the two within society. That is its taskand its promise' (1959, pp.5-6).

It would be entirely misleading to pretend that - no matter howimpressed they are by Mills's vision - the majority of the world'ssociologists, in their day-to-day research, are preoccupied with thegreat sweep of history. If they were, perhaps governments would notbe prepared to pay the university salaries of quite as manysociologists as they do now. The majority of members of thediscipline always have done, still do, and probably ought tocontinue to do, work which is to a greater or lesser extent useful inpractical ways - often to governments, but often also to the pluralityof competing and overlapping associations, clubs, parties, unions,pressure groups and agencies which constitute 'civil society'.

Sociologists discover information about contemporary society onwhich the formulation of policy can be based. They examinedemographic trends and make predictions which help governmentsand others to anticipate and make better provision for the future.They bring to light social problems, often arousing public opinionand stimulating government to take action to solve them. For a largeproportion of professional sociologists, the aspiration to help,directly or indirectly, to improve the lot of their fellow humanbeings was among the reasons they were drawn to the discipline.Bound up with that in rather complex ways, it has to be admitted,can often be a leaning towards moralising: the attribution of blamecan also serve as a means of orientation in the social sciences (VanBenthem van den Bergh 1980). From whichever motivation, a gooddeal of good sociological research is, directly or indirectly, policy-orientated; the meliorist and policy-orientated tradition has been apowerful element in the growth of sociology not just in Ireland, but inmany other countries also.

CIVIL SOCIETY, HISTORY AND SOCIOLOGY

I wish to draw attention, however, to the extent to which thepractice of meliorist sociology presupposes and takes for granted theexistence of a strong 'civil society'. TTiat term goes back to Hegel andto Adam Ferguson, but it regained its historic significance in the lastyears of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Groups like CivicForum in Czechoslovakia ('Civil Forum' would have been a moreaccurate translation) demanded the re-establishment of a 'publicsphere' (Habermas 1989), in which groups and ideas could competefreely in the formation of public opinion autonomously from thestate. i?e-establish in the case of what is now the Czech Republic;but further east, in most of the successor states of the USSR, or

CIVIL SOCIETY AND VIOLENCE 3

south-east in the Balkans, there is no 're' about it. Events thereremind us that civil society is a creation of historical circumstance,and in many parts of the world these circumstances have neverhitherto arisen. Events there also remind us that 'civil society' isnot just a matter of the free competition of groups and ideasautonomous from the state; the competition must also, crucially, beunder the protection of the state. In other words, 'civil society'presupposes peace, a relatively highly pacified territory. We takethat far too much for granted. Ernest Gellner has recently written:

Atlantic society is endowed with Civil Society, and on thewhole, at any rate since 1945, it has enjoyed it without giving itmuch thought. Much contemporary social theory takes it forgranted in an almost comical manner: it simply starts out withthe assumption of an unconstrained and secular individual,unhampered by social or theological bonds, freely choosing hisaims, and reaching some agreement concerning social order withhis fellows. In this manner. Civil Society is simply presupposedas some kind of attribute of the human condition (Gellner 1994,

Sociology's development as an academic discipline almost exactlycoincides with that of large-scale bureaucratic governmentapparatuses capable of implementing social policies throughouttheir territories. Equally, the effectiveness of such apparatuses hasmaintained a level of internal peace which has allowed sociologyto take that aspect of its own historical context largely for granted,and permitted sociologists a long 'retreat into the present' (Elias1987a).

I have used the term 'permitted', not 'caused'; there are manyand complex reasons why the sociological profession came in largepart to measure its achievements against the yardstick of usefulnessto contemporary society, and why - in most day-to-day research -there was less interest in the questions of long-term socialdevelopment that had been central to the work of the classicalsociologists. Intellectual justification in the post-war years forsociologists' retreat into the present was provided by several notablewriters, among them the philosophers Sir Karl Popper (1945, 1957)and Sir Isaiah Berlin (1954), and the American sociologist RobertNisbet (1969).

The kernel of Popper's argument was that, because the course ofhistory is influenced by the growth of human knowledge, andbecause we cannot predict future knowledge (otherwise we wouldalready know it), history cannot be predicted, and therefore no'laws' can be discovered governing general historical processes.

2For a more recent statement of Popperian views, see John H. Goldthorpe

(1991), and the debate about his article in the British Journal of Sociology , 45


Popper's books were intended to constitute a logical, moral andpolitical knockout blow against any belief - especially any Marxistand nationalist belief - in 'inexorable laws of historical destiny', orindeed any form of 'inevitability' in long-term social development.^Berlin, who appeared to advocate the writing of history in terms ofthe intentions of individuals, revived ancient arguments abouthuman 'free will' and its incompatibility with any broaderexplanation of historical trends. Nisbet in turn recurred to thearguments about 'social evolution', attacking what he called'developmentalism' and any principle of 'immanence' in socialchange. He opposed any belief - the Marxist belief most obviously -in sequential 'stages' of development, where the seeds of a laterstage are immanent in an earlier stage."*

The question of whether a sequence of social development canever be said to be 'inevitable' has tended to become entangled withthe philosophers' metaphysical antithesis of 'determinism' and'free will'. The confusion is then further compounded when, as inBerlin's arguments, 'free will' is linked to 'freedom' in the sense ofsocial and political liberty, and 'determinism' to the lack of liberty.Philosophical discussions of 'free will' and 'determinism' havealways tended to overlook the simple fact that

there are always simultaneously many mutually dependentindividuals, whose interdependence to a greater or lesser extentlimits each one's scope for action (Elias 1978, p.167).

Both Berlin's freely choosing individual and its opposite, Frenchstructuralism's Trciger utterly devoid of choice ('There are no subjectsexcept by and for their subjection' (Althusser 1971, p.169)), aremetaphysical abstractions nowhere to be met in the real socialworld.

On the whole, historical sociologists and sociological historianshave now set aside such philosophical disputation. Over the lasttwo decades, there has been a resurgence of important studies oflong-term processes of social development. Their authors are drawnfrom several disciplines: philosophy, anthropology, history and

(1), 1994.

See Eric Dunning's critique (1977) of Popper, from the point of view of adevelopmental sociology.4See Goudsblom's processual rethinking of 'stages' of development through

a combination of chronology and 'phaseology' (Goudsblom, Jones andMennell 1989 pp.11-26). See also Stephen Sanderson's careful rethinking ofthe principles of social evolutionary theory (1990, 1994). (Goudsblom and I,following Elias, prefer to speak of processes of 'social development' ratherthan 'social evolution', on the grounds that the differences between socialand biological processes - including the potential reversibility of socialprocesses but not biological ones - are too great.)


economic history as well as sociology. The central problem in thestudy of long-term social processes, however, is essentially asociological problem. It is the problem of understanding how theintentional activities of individual people interweave to producemore or less unintended long-term social processes. People act inpursuit of their own particular objectives - objectives that are in partshaped through their experience in interdependence with otherpeople from birth (but not rigidly determined in any way thatsociologists can demonstrate empirically), and which they pursue bymeans that are more or less constrained by this interdependence.These individual activities, each of them in some sense planned andintended, often interweave to produce social processes which no-onehad planned or intended. A familiar example is the long-termdivision of labour. No-one has planned a process like this, but it hasa structure and direction of its own. The process itself compels andconstrains the individuals caught up in it. Once there are factoriesin which a dozen people divide among themselves the labour ofmaking pins, no-one will be able to make a living from producing theindividually hand-crafted pin, however much they want to. In theface of such processes, it is rather futile - but hard not - to indulge inthe impulse to attribute blame. The increased productivity in pinproduction had unintended consequences which its initiators couldnot foresee; and once a few had adopted it, market forces compelledothers to do so, and no doubt drove still others into unemployment.These 'blind', unplanned processes build up a momentum of their own(Mennell 1992b), but they remain contingent, not 'inevitable': if theyencounter obstacles or other processes with sufficient momentum oftheir own, they can be stopped, deflected or reversed. Mere humansuffering is rarely enough to achieve this on its own.

HABITUS

The long-term process in which I have a particular interest is theformation of what is now fashionably called 'habitus'.^ The meaningof the jargon-word 'habitus' is not very different from mentalites, asused by the Annales historians. Its meaning is more exactly describedby the everyday expression 'second nature'.* It refers to those layers

The term has been popularised by Pierre Bourdieu, who probably adoptedit from Norbert Elias who used it in Uber den Prozess der Zivilisation, whichappeared in French translation in the early 1970s. The published Englishtranslation of a decade later renders the German Habitus as 'personalitymake-up', although 'habitus' is an old word which passed out of use inEnglish in the seventeenth century. It was apparently in common use amongGerman sociologists between the two World Wars; in contemporaryGerman usage it refers to an acquired pattern of behaviour, sometimescharacteristic of a person or group: as in 'He soon adopted the habitus of acountry doctor.'

This point was made by Norbert Elias in conversation.


of our personality make-up which are not inherent or innate but arevery deeply habituated in us by learning through social experiencefrom birth onwards - so deeply habituated, in fact, that they feel'natural' or inherent even to ourselves. Studying the formation ofhabitus responds directly to C. Wright Mills's demand that we'grasp history and biography and the relations between the two insociety'. The aspect of human habitus to which I want to payparticular attention - people's cruelty and use of violence towardsother people - is central to the whole problem of civil society.

The problem of violence and aggression used to be debated in astatic and philosophical way, in terms of the outmoded concept of'human nature'. People used to ask 'Is Man inherently aggressive?'(Montagu 1968; Storr 1968) - and 'man' was usually the correct wordin those discussions, not just a 'sexist' slip of the tongue.Sociobiologists, ethologists and some psychoanalysts have believedthat there is in human beings (especially in male human beings,according to some) an unlearned aggressive drive or 'instinct'.Without rehearsing the entire debate, I want to argue that such auniversal 'instinct' does not exist, but that there is equally no inbuiltmechanism in human beings, such as exists in many animals, thatinstinctively controls aggression and limits violence.'' The veryvariability in the forms and degrees of aggressiveness historicallyand cross-culturally shows clearly that, whatever physiologicalroots it may have, it is fundamentally dependent on learned controls,and patterned according to many different social standards whichchange over time.

It may clarify my argument if I quote a useful dictum of ClydeKluckhohn and Henry Murray (1948, p.35):

Every man is in certain respects(a) like all other men(b) like some other men(c) like no other man.

In other words, there are (level (a)) many characteristics thathuman beings share in common with all other members of thespecies. All normal human beings, for instance, are capable of using alanguage. There are also (level (c)) ways in which every individualhuman personality is unique - if only because, as Alfred Schutz(1964) contended, each of us has a unique biographical situation anda unique permutation of experience sedimented into a unique stock ofknowledge. But most of sociology is concerned with level (b), thecharacteristics human beings share with certain other humans - inpractice those groups to which they belong and with which theyidentify. This is the level at which the social incidence of violenceneeds to be studied. Human groups have varied a good deal, andcontinue to vary, in the extent and patterning of aggressiveness andviolence which they permit and which they foster in their

Cf. Norbert Elias, 'On Human Beings and their Emotions' (1987).


members.Norbert Elias (1994, p.446) used a vivid image to draw attention

to how people's habitus has changed, in particular the socialstandards of aggressiveness. Picture the muddy roads of a simpleagrarian society, with a sparse population and a mainly bartereconomy. There is little traffic. The few travellers along these roadsare constantly on the watch, constantly alert to the risk posed tothem by other people (and by wild animals: the landscapegenerally is far less tamed). But the risk of collision with othertravellers is small. The main risk is that they will be attacked,robbed, even killed. They have to be constantly prepared to defendthemselves violently from violent attack; and that meanstemperamentally as well as physically prepared. A volatiletemperament, a constant readiness to fight, and free play of theemotions in defence of one's life and possessions are actually anadvantage and necessity in these circumstances. On the roads ofmodern society, the dangers from other people are very different.The danger of physical attack is comparatively low. But the flow ofcars and pedestrians in all directions is very dense. There are roadsigns, traffic lights and police to control the traffic. This externalcontrol, however, is founded on the assumption that everyindividual is regulating his or her own behaviour very exactly inaccordance with the flow of traffic. Constant vigilance, foresightand self-control is needed whether driving or on foot. An error ofjudgment in foreseeing some movement can kill. Impetuosity, lack offoresight, and loss of self-control are now principal sources of thedangers that people pose to themselves and to each other. Thefrustrations of the traffic can lead someone to lose control, vent hisor her aggression on another driver, or in some other way to 'dosomething stupid'.

This points to how, in the course of social development, someskills and aptitudes are gained and others lost as, over thegenerations, they become more appropriate or less appropriate tothe situations people have regularly to confront in theirinterdependence with other people.^ On medieval battlefields, forinstance, it was an advantage to be fearless and to give vent toaggression in a relatively unbridled way in the joys of battle. Evenimpetuosity could be more an advantage, less a disadvantage thanin modern conflicts. This is not to say that medieval warriors wereentirely unconstrained in the expression of emotions - no human beingis. There is plenty of evidence of their extreme self-constraint, bycomparison with modern people, in their tolerance of physicalagony, their endurance of cruelty inflicted on themselves by theirenemies - as a counterpart to their propensity themselves to inflict

For vivid examples of this principle in the course of changing fire controlregimes over the entire course of human social and biological development,see Goudsblom (1992).


cruelty. Modern armies, at least in relatively pacified, relativelydemocratic industrial societies, are very different. Recruits have tobe trained to kill, it is true. Indeed they have to be trained toovercome, in certain precise circumstances, the normal civilisedrepugnance that they, like most of us, feel towards killing andmaiming our fellow humans. But if some restraints have to beloosened through training, other encompassing restraints have to bemade very strong.' Impetuosity has long since ceased to be anadvantage on the battlefield.'" And the last thing that the armiesof modern democratic states want is to recruit people who enjoykilling; in fact, they take some trouble to root them out. Thusregimes (or regimens) of emotion management form and change hand-in-hand with changes in social organisation. And, unlike biologicalevolution, social development is reversible.

Let us return to the European Middle Ages, around the end of thefirst millennium. The warriors who dominated numerous smallpatches of territory simply could not avoid fighting each other.This is not to be explained in terms of individual psychology. Theirpersonalities may have been adapted to their situation, but thiswas not the prime motive force in their fighting. That was ratherthe consequence of the particular form of their interdependence witheach other. A magnate's power was very closely correlated with theamount of land and population he dominated. His situation vis-a-visneighbouring magnates therefore resembled a situation ofmonopolistic competition between firms in the modern economy."Given three magnates with roughly equal power and adjacentterritory, one of them could not easily sit peacefully by while theother two slugged it out. If one of those two were conquered andeliminated from the contest, the other would end up with twice theterritory and power of the third - the would-be spectator - whowould thus be easy meat in the next round of the contest. In the warsof European history, those defeated in the early rounds, or theirdescendants, ended up playing a subordinate role to the majorplayers - as courtiers, or as officers in the royal armies. But theywere never subordinated without repeated struggles - often involvinga strong element of chance. In agrarian societies, warriors more orless completely pacified the peasants; but how were the warriors to

9For an interesting sociological study of British army training, culminating in

participant observation in the 'bandit country' around Crossmaglen in southArmagh, see Hockey (1986).

Elias (1994 pp.482-3; 1983, p.195) illustrated this point with the story of theDue de Montmorency who, in his rebellion of 1632, threw away a strategicadvantage over the King's forces through an impulsive charge.

For a fuller discussion, see Mennell (1992, pp.66ff.). See also De Swaan(1994) for a particularly succinct use of the idea of monopolistic competitionimplicit in Elias's theory of state-formation.


be pacified? The taming of warriors is a universal problem in tbeestablishment of a more peaceful, less violent social order, and it isvery far from a smootb and inevitable process. Indeed it poses aproblem tbat bas obviously not been universally or permanentlysolved by kings, by dictators, or even by democratic governmentstoday. For example, it may be more difficult for modern complexdemocratic societies to control small minority terrorist movementstban it was for kings in an earlier age to suppress rebelliouswarlords; terrorist movements often set out to provoke extremereaction on the part of democratic regimes, in order to 'prove' theirown contention that democracy is a mere sham.'^

How does internal pacification, achieved in the face of suchdifficulties, affect the habitus, the personality make-up, of membersof society at large? Norbert Elias contends that

if in this or that region the power of central authority grows, ifover a larger or smaller area people are forced to live at peacewith one another, the moulding of affects and the standards ofthe demands made upon emotional management are verygradually changed as well (1994, p.165, my emphasis; publishedtranslation modified to reflect Elias's later terminology).

It seems to accord with common sense that the longer people livepeacefully with each other, the more deeply habitual will peacefulmodes of behaviour become for them. It is not just a matter of thegrowth of central authority alone, however - not just a question ofthe strengthening of a state apparatus's success in upholding amonopoly of the use of violence within a territory.'^ State formationis only one process which has interwoven with others to enmeshindividual people in increasingly complex, dense and extensivenetworks of interdependence. State formation, the division of labour,the growth of trade and towns, the increasing use of money andexpanding administrative apparatuses, as well as increasingpopulation, are interwoven in a spiral process. Taking the long view,the internal pacification of territory facilitated trade, whichfacilitated the growth of towns and division of labour, andgenerated taxes which supported larger administrative and militaryorganisations, which in turn facilitated the pacification of largerterritories - a cumulative process experienced as a compelling forceby people caught up in it.

Along the way, but with varying degrees of success in different

12See, for example, Elias's discussion of the Baader-Meinhof terrorists inWest Germany, in The Germans (1996, pp.229-97, 403-33).13Here I am of course alluding to Max Weber's famous definition of a state(1978 [1922]: I, p.54), which in full reads: 'an organisation which successfullyupholds a claim to binding rule-making over a territory, by virtue ofcommanding a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence'.


states, there gradually also developed the complex of institutionswhich since the eighteenth century we have called 'civil society'. Astrong 'civil society' was most likely to emerge in states withinwhich the outcome of power struggles, including cycles of violence,had eventuated in a relatively equal power balance between themajor social interests contending for political dominance (Elias 1986,pp.26-40). This circumstance is most favourable to the growth of thedense web of cross-cutting group affiliations, where an opponent inone context can be an ally in another, which serve to mute andconstrain people's feelings of enmity. And, about the same time,upper-class European people began to describe themselves as'civilised', a term of self-approbation denoting (among many otherthings) their relatively peaceful modes of habitual behaviourtowards each other.'**

That greatest of sociologists of civil society, Alexis deTocqueville (1961 [1840]: II, pp.195-200; cf. Stone and Mennell 1980,pp.1-46), long ago pointed out 'that manners are softened as socialconditions become more equal'. He cited the flippant attitude ofMme de Sevigne in the late seventeenth century towards peasantsbeing broken on the wheel after a local tax revolt. From a laterstandpoint, her comments seem strikingly callous, especially as weknow from her diaries that she was a kind and affectionate personwithin her own circle. In relatively more equal societies, Tocquevillesuggests, people more readily identify with the sufferings of fellowhuman beings in general.^^

This points to a more general principle. The more are peoplecaught up in longer and denser networks of interdependence witheach other, the more (ceteris paribus) do individual people constantlyhave to attune their actions to those of more and more others. Thehabit of foresight extends itself to longer chains of interaction. InGoudsblom's neat phrase, 'more people are forced more often to paymore and more attention to more and more other people' (1989,p.722). This involves a process of transition in mutual identification.

14See Elias's discussion of the sociogenesis of the concepts of 'civilisation'

and 'culture' in the first two chapters of The Civilising Process (1994, pp.1-41);Elias emphasises that, in Germany, Zivilisation came to be associated withthe francocentric courtly class, while Kultiir signified the self-ascribed virtuesof the peaceful (but later increasingly nationalist) commercial andintellectual Biirgertum. These ideas are developed further, much later inElias's life, in The Germans (1996), especially 'Civilization and Informalization'(pp.21-119) and 'A Digression on Nationalism' (pp.121-70).

Much more recently, Michel Foucault (1977) also documented the changethat has taken place in attitudes towards suffering, although without offeringas much in the way of sociological explanations as did Tocqueville. SeePieter Spierenburg (1984) for an empirical refutation of much of Foucault'sDiscipline and Punish, and a more adequately sociological and processualinterpretation of the changes which actually took place in disciplinaryregimes in connection with phases of state-formation processes in Europe.


Taking more conscious account of how one's behaviour will beinterpreted by others can also be described as a higher level ofidentification with others. In highly unequal societies like theabsolutist states of ancien regime Europe, the boundaries witbinwhich identification was felt were quite narrow. That is thesignificance of Mme de Sevigne's jokes about the execution ofpeasants, or of Voltaire's being horsewhipped by a nobleman'sservants - one did not habitually put oneself in the place of thelower orders. There remained - there still remains - much room forexpansion in the scope of mutual identification between fellowhuman beings. At the present day, people right across the globe areincreasingly entangled in a single world-wide network ofcommunications. The webs of political and economic interdependenceincreasingly bind people together across the boundaries of nation-states - as in the European Union, for instance. One might be temptedto wonder how close we are, at last, to the constitution by humanityof the one single community imagined by Kant two centuries ago inhis Idea of a Universal History from the Point of View of a Citizen of theWorld (1970 [1784]).

But I am far from prophesying any outbreak of universalharmony. Anyone who troubles to read the newspapers and to watchtelevision would find any such prophecy quite counter-intuitive.

Among the reasons why we are not witnessing an inevitableprogression towards an all-embracing mutual identification is thatthe same processes which foster tendencies in that direction alsoserve to produce counter-currents. For instance, in the twentiethcentury, cheap transport and increased mobility over long distanceshave made it even more common throughout the world for displacedgroups to impinge on older-established ones. In this newVbikerwanderungszeit, groups of people whose skins are of differentcolours, or who have been brought up in different ways of life, areincreasingly thrust together. In the short term at least, the result islikely to be more conflict and friction, hatred and even violence. Butit is also important to remember that the factual differencesbetween groups of people need not be large or strikingly self-evidentto produce these effects. They may indeed be negligible or non-existent. Routine questionnaire items about occupation, education, ageand family structure may reveal no significant differences betweenthe inhabitants of neighbouring housing estates, but that may notprevent deep hostility developing between them. For one group to bemore recently settled in the area than the other may be quiteenough. The denser social network of the longer-established groupmay be sufficient for its gossip to label the relative newcomers asinferior - 'immoral', 'dirty', 'violent' and 'drunk' are typical labelsimposed on outsider groups in every part of the world. Differentreligious affiliations or even support for a different football team


may add grist to the mill.'^ Less powerful groups may even partlybegin to believe what more powerful groups claim about them. Onthe other hand, when and if the power ratios between such groupsbegin to become relatively more equal, the resentment of the outsidergroups may surface, even in violence.

Thus we must recognise that paradise may be indefinitelypostponed. Yet it is equally important not to accept uncritically anymyth of a past golden age. The small, relatively isolated ruralcommunity of the past was not all cosy homesteads and comelymaidens. We too often look back admiringly at the intensesolidarity and strong emotional identification found in suchcommunities, but fail to remember the equally strong but lessadmirable hostility to outsiders that went with it. We also oftenfail to take account of the intense rivalries and hatreds which couldbe engendered within such social pressure cookers. This is nocontradiction; they are two sides of the same coin.''' What tends tohappen as smaller, relatively isolated communities becomeenmeshed in wider social networks - as we move, in the terminologyof Tonnies still so beloved of sociologists, from Gemeinschaft toGesellschaft - is that both kinds of affects are muted. Both theintense emotional identification with a limited group, and theintense internal rivalries which often go hand in hand with it,stand a good chance of diminishing as affects generally becomesubject to a more even and more all-round regime.

In the modern world, where people belong to groups withingroups within groups, their sense of identity is always multi-layered. They do not have just a simple self-conception or self-imageof themselves. Incorporated into their self-image are many layers ofwe-images. It is possible that in the very early stages of humansocial development, when people lived in very small and isolatedhunter-gatherer bands, people's we-image had only a single layer;when people said 'we', it always referred to the same specific groupof people (Elias 1991, pp.182-3, 202). In more complex societies thereare always many layers of we-image: I for example am a Yorkshire-born English European resident of Ireland who is also enmeshed in a

'^See N. Elias and J.L. Scotson, The Established and the Outsiders, 1994; E.G.Dunning, P. Murphy and J. Williams, The Roots of Football Hooliganism, 1988.Elias and Scotson studied two adjacent working-class districts of Leicesteraround 1960; readers on John Bull's Other Island may be able to think ofbetter examples.

Anthropologists and sociologists were for some time intrigued by thefamous contradiction between Robert Redfield's (1930) account of Tepoztlanas highly consensual and Oscar Lewis's (1951) account of the samecommunity as riven with conflicts and hatreds. However, as for exampleElias (1974) pointed out, an adequate ethnography would probably show thatboth sets of traits are commonly present at one and the same time in smallcommunities; both are symptoms of relatively unmuted emotions.


world-wide network of academics.These layers of 'we-identity', however, are not a matter of

cognition alone, but also of powerful emotions. We-images arealways tied to they-images, and the more powerful the emotionalattachment to one's own group, the more likely is it to have as itscounterpart hostility towards, and fear of, others who do not belongto it. Indeed the emotional attachment to one's own group is likelyto have been formed in the face of factual dangers posed by othergroups, but may well persist when the factual danger no longerexists. Over time, the emotional centre of gravity can move'upwards' to more inclusive layers of we-identity; it can also, incertain circumstances, move 'downwards' to less inclusive, morelocalised layers. There is a certain asymmetry between civilisingand decivilising processes.'* When people live together relativelymore peacefully, the resulting changes in habitus - a more inclusivemeasure of mutual identification and greater habitual demands uponemotion management - come about only slowly, through gradualchanges in the socialisation process from generation to generation.But the reverse process is able to happen much more quickly. AsElias warned.

The armour of civilized conduct would crumble very rapidly if,through a change in society, the degree of insecurity thatexisted earlier were to break in upon us again, and if dangerbecame as incalculable as once it was. Corresponding fears wouldsoon burst the limits set to them today (1994, p.253).

And once aggression and violence have broken out between two ormore groups of humans, the emotional double-bind process can easilybecome self-perpetuating and self-escalating. When people identifyemotionally with a group, the collective humiliation of a group canbe experienced with great emotional intensity by individualmembers, with practical consequences often of historic importance.Cycles of violence are never easy to break.

NATIONALISM

The level of we-identity which has been most discussed in recentyears is the sense of identification with the nation-state, and theassociated issue of nationalism. It is often overlooked how recently,for most people in most countries, the nation-state has come to rivalfamily and local community as a primary emotional focus (cf.Greenfeld 1992). Eugen Weber, in his classic study Peasants intoFrenchmen (1976), shows how, even as late as the second half of thenineteenth century in one of Europe's longest and most firmly

1 8See Mennell (1990a) and Eletcher (1995) for fuller discussions of

decivilising processes.


established states, there was a surprisingly weak sense ofFrenchness in the minds of people in the remoter areas of territorythat had long been within the boundaries of France. And he showshow, partly through the intentional use of the expandingeducational system, but mainly through unplanned consequences ofprocesses like improved communications, urbanisation,industrialisation, migration and military conscription, the peasantrywas integrated into the French state, and simultaneously subjected tocivilising or disciplinary pressures in their manners, customs andbeliefs. Weber's emphasis on denser networks and improvedcommunications is paralleled in Benedict Anderson's (1983) accountof how nationalist elites in colonial societies have been able tocreate 'imagined communities' through their use of the print andother media in shaping accepted narratives of national history andidentity.

In the past, rulers often (though not always) succeeded inincorporating the people of a region into a state by means of a long-drawn-out combination of inertia and force. That is less easy to do inan age of mass education. But now, especially, it is often in theinterests of leaders seeking to weld a people together to promote thesense of nationhood as something primordial. No nation isprimordial; all are socially constructed. The myth of primordialityis associated with many of the worst instances of racism andxenophobia. There are, however, more mundane and practicalreasons why people in so many countries take their nation so muchfor granted and, at the same time, identify emotionally so stronglywith it. Gellner puts it vividly:

For the average person, the limits of his culture are, if not quitethe limits of the world, at any rate the limits of hisemployability, social acceptability, dignity, effectiveparticipation and citizenship. They define the limits of the useof his conceptual intuitions, access to the rules of the game, andto the intelligibility of the social world; beyond these limits,he becomes gaffe-prone, inept, subject to derision and contempt,and seriously handicapped in any endeavour. Hence hiseducationally acquired culture is by far his most importantpossession and investment, for it alone gives him access to allelse; and the existence of a secure, preferably extensive politicalunit identified with that culture and committed to its protectionand enforcement is his most pressing and powerful politicalconcern. His deepest identity is determined neither by his bankbalance nor by his kin nor by his status, but by his literateculture. He is not a nationalist out of atavism (quite thereverse), but rather from a perfectly sound though seldom lucidand conscious appreciation of his own true interests. He needs apolitically protected Gesellschaft, though he talks of it in theidiom of a spontaneously engendered Gemeinschaft. The rhetoricof nationalism is inversely related to its social reality: it speaks


of Gemeinschaft and is rooted in a semantically and oftenphonetically standardised Gesellschaft (Gellner 1994, p.107).

The strength of people's we-identity with their nation-state, inshort, is related to its effectiveness in providing a relatively secureand peaceful civil society within which they can pursue their ownpeaceful activities and live out their lives together. Ironically, it isoften very difficult to convince people today how relativelyeffectively their states provide this necessary security. There is awidespread perception that 'law and order' is breaking down in thecities of the Western world, and that the level of danger ineveryday life is rising, not falling. This perception cannot be takenat face value. In Britain, for instance, for hundreds of yearssuccessive generations have voiced similar fears of escalatingviolence, moral decline, and the destruction of 'the British way oflife' (Pearson 1983). Certainly, there seem to be short-termfluctuations in violence, in response to rising and falling socialtensions. Yet there is very little hard evidence for a rising curve ofviolence over terms longer than one or two generations. Admittedly,trends are difficult to study even in the short-term, since a rise inofficially recorded or publicly reported incidents of violence may atleast partly reflect an increase in the effectiveness of the police, orindeed a diminished tolerance of minor violence. However, suchevidence as we have of long-term trends in violent crime over manygenerations - for instance, in relation to interpersonal violence inEngland from 1300 to 1980 (1985) - appears to show a long-termdecline . '̂

As against that, it has to be said that there is also someevidence that the long-term decline has in some countries beenreversed over the last two or three decades - whether permanentlyor temporarily reversed we cannot say. Thus, the data of EricDunning and his colleagues (1987) suggest broadly that in Englandthe incidence of violence declined for inost of the twentieth century,but has been rising since the 1960s. These authors admit they do notfully understand why this is so. Ad hoc explanations such as thedrugs problem are obvious, but by no means all of the upturn isdirectly related to drugs. Perhaps, they speculate, relatively moreequal power-balances within society at first make it possible for thedemands of disadvantaged groups to be expressed strongly, but theyhave not proceeded far enough - at least in Britain - to break downthe rigidities which prevent these demands being met fully. Inconsequence, 'relative deprivation' would rise, not fall (Runciman

19The political sociologist, Ted Robert Gurr, analyses data for the USA,Australia, Germany, France and Scandinavia (1983), to show a stable orgently falling rate of homicide since the early nineteenth century, though thetrend is obscured in the USA by three great upsurges of violent crimebeginning around 1850, 1900 and 1960. See also Lawrence Stone's discussionof this data (1985).


1966).It is also tempting to draw a distinction between the

'instrumental' and 'affective' use of violence. Violence as a means toan end might conceivably be on the increase, even though impetuousviolence resulting from an emotional loss of control were not. Butinstrumental violence is mainly governed by the EleventhCommandment, 'Thou shalt not be found out,' and would thereforerise in response to a decline in the effectiveness of the State's policepowers. Of this there is at best only highly debatable evidence inmost of the Western world; if the State's effectiveness did decline,we would expect affect-related violence also to rise, but probablyafter soine delay.

People's identification with their nation-state as the effectiveprovider of civil peace is for the moment largely unchallenged.Perhaps, as the web of interdependencies increases in density acrossstate borders within the European Union, a number of intellectualsand businessmen are beginning to think of themselves as Europeansas much as Dutch, German, Irish or Italian, as Wilterdink (1993)has found. But the same spreading web also produces contraryeffects, at least in the short term. This is evident particularly inBritain, where the current renewal of doubt about its 'place inEurope' is another sign of the long-lasting trauma arising from itsloss of Great Power status. The debate is conducted in the emotivemythical language of 'sovereignty', that being understood as anation's ability to do absolutely as it pleases. Sovereignty, in thereal world, was never absolute, but Great Powers - precisely becauseof their power - feel as if they are absolutely independent. Theillusion is increasingly inadequate to the reality of the world today(Luard 1990). Diminishing relative power vis-a-vis other countriesseems to have produced an emotional illusion that everyone else inthe playground is ganging up against them. Elias, in The Germans ,comments:

...the fortunes of a nation over the centuries become sedimentedinto the habitus of its individual members. Sociologists face atask here which distantly recalls the task which Freud tackled.He attempted to show the connection between the outcome of theconflict-ridden channelling of drives in a person's developmentand his or her resulting habitus. But there are also analogousconnections between a people's long-term fortunes and experiencesand their social habitus at any subsequent time. At this layer ofthe personality structure - let us ... call it the 'we-layer' - thereare often complex symptoms of disturbance at work which arescarcely less in strength and in capacity to cause suffering thanthe individual neuroses (1996, p.19).

At least the British national ordeal is highly unlikely to leadto renewed violence between the states of Western Europe, as thecomparable but more extreme German national trauma after


Versailles contributed both to the Second World War and to thegenocide of the Nazi period. Taking a broader geographical view,however, the world outlook seems dispiriting at present. After thebrief euphoria of 1989-90, when both a 'new world order' and 'theend of history' (Fukuyama, 1992) were proclaimed, wars and ethnicconflicts appear to be breaking out widely. We have no worldgovernment. There is no politically-protected world civil society.Indeed some territorial units which outwardly appeared peaceful -Yugoslavia, the USSR - have dissolved into iniernecine strife, as lessinclusive we-identities such as Croat, Serb or Bosnian have risen todominance.^"

Although the parallel is not exact, the Bosnian war in someways resembles a medieval struggle for territory. So it was notwholly surprising if a succession of international statesmen (LordCarrington and Douglas Hurd spring to mind) stood transfixed andimmobile, with grimaces of disgust and repugnance expressing afeeling that 'This isn't gentlemanly, this is uncivilised,' as theoncoming tanks rolled forward. Their plight was also a reflection inpractical politics of the fact that liberal democratic politicaltheory has no clear conception of the place - especially in an inter-state context - of the use of force for humane reasons in preventingthe use of force for inhumane reasons. From a sociological point ofview, there is every reason to believe that the decisive deploymentof international forces at an early stage could have averted theBosnian war. It is equally clear that no effective machinery as yetexists for that purpose. Perhaps the war will prove in hindsight tohave nudged along the creation of a more effective commandstructure for the deployment of international force, and thus donesomething to foster the emergence of a world monopoly apparatus; orperhaps not. We may for some time look back ironically on thenuclear standoff between the two former superpowers as somethinglike a golden age. Godfried van Benthem van de Bergh (1992) hasconvincingly argued that the morally repulsive strategy of MutuallyAssured Destruction (MAD) provided a powerful external constrainttowards self-constraint on the part of the superpowers, and on manyof their clients in more local conflicts across the globe.^' In theabsence of any worldwide 'organisation which successfully upholds aclaim to binding rule-making over a territory, by virtue ofcommanding a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence', MAD in

20For my fuller discussion of nationalism in a process-sociological context,

see Mennell (1994).The phrase 'external constraint towards self-constraint' is an allusion to

Elias's theory of the changing balance between Fremdzzvang and Selbstzwang;see Elias, The Civilising Process, (1994), pp. 443-56 and passim. For a fulleraccount of Elias's concern with the threat of nuclear war and hisdisagreement with Van Benthen van den Bergh, see Mennell (1992, pp. 217-23).


effect served as a functional alternative to the non-existent worldgovernment.

Yet in the longer term it may be that centripetal, integratingforces will prevail, just as they have in Western Europe. What weare witnessing in the European Union appears to be the continuationby peaceful means of long-term processes which in the past unfoldedwith a great deal of violence. For state-formation, including thetaming of warriors and the internal pacification of territory, is notprimarily a process driven by political will. It is mainly driven bylargely unplanned social and economic processes of integration. Therehas been much talk of 'globalisation' and 'global society', and withthe signs all around us of the all-encompassing web of globalcommunications and trade, it is not very fanciful to think thatcorresponding political arrangements may eventually emerge inresponse to problems of regulation and co-ordination. This is, though,hardly likely to occur in our own lifetimes.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, I return to C. Wright Mills's vision of the sociologicalimagination. I have tried to indicate in outline some of the ways inwhich we may 'grasp history and biography and the relationsbetween the two within society'. In pleading for a greater historicalawareness on the part of sociologists I am not advocating anhistorical sociology in the sense of a mere 'sociology of the past'(Mennell, 1990b), the application of modern sociological knowledgeto the investigation of past societies for its own sake - interestingthough that might be. What I advocate is the investigation ofstructured processes of development at all levels of human socialinterdependence. This can lend scale and perspective to the presentand how we understand it. And, although it is not quite true to saytout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner, better understanding of the long-term roots of contemporary social problems can often diminishpreoccupation with the attribution of blame, and lead to moredetached, more realistic modes of policy-making. An historically-informed sociology can influence the way people see the world,shaking them out of old perceptions and into new. But it is a slowbusiness. This too, in its own right, is a long-term, structured processof social development.

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