Civilisations, Civilising Processes and Modernity – A Debate

Civilisations, Civilising Processes and Modernity – A Debate PDF Author: Artur Bogner
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030803791
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
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.

Civilisations, Civilising Processes and Modernity – A Debate

Civilisations, Civilising Processes and Modernity – A Debate PDF Author: Artur Bogner
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030803791
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Civilisations, Civilising Processes and Modernity - A Debate

Civilisations, Civilising Processes and Modernity - A Debate PDF Author: Artur Bogner
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783030803803
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
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. 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.

Norbert Elias’s African Processes of Civilisation

Norbert Elias’s African Processes of Civilisation PDF Author: Dieter Reicher
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3658378492
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
In 1962 Norbert Elias was invited as a temporary professor at the University of Ghana in Legon, Accra. He taught, employed fieldwork, travelled, and met many people in postcolonial Africa. When Elias left Ghana in 1964, he had laid the basic groundwork for a fundamental sociological argument on human societies. The volume on hand is a selection of his unpublished writings based on these experiences. Together they touch upon not only the well-known criticism of Eurocentrism and a developmental perspective but also what could be considered the core of Elias’s work: the concept of civilisation. In a foreword, Dieter Reicher and Adrian Jitschin have endeavoured to explain and break down the relations of Elias’s African experience to the rest of his work and biography. They also clarified some misleading interpretations of Elias’s time in Africa. Finally, Arjan Post has uncovered the previously unknown fascinating story of Elias’ encounter with Malcolm X in an epilogue.

Adab and Modernity

Adab and Modernity PDF Author: Cathérine Mayeur-Jaouen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004415998
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 744

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Book Description
Adab is a concept situated at the heart of Arabic and Islamic civilization. What became of it, towards modernity? The question of the civilising process (Norbert Elias) helps us reflect on this story.

Debating civilisations

Debating civilisations PDF Author: Jeremy C. A. Smith
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526105306
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC) open access license. Debating civilisations offers an up-to-date evaluation of the re-emerging field of civilisational analysis, tracing its main currents and comparing it to rival paradigms such as Marxism, globalisation theory and postcolonial sociology. The book suggests that civilisational analysis offers an alternative approach to understanding globalisation, one that focuses on the dense engagement of societies, cultures, empires and civilisations in human history. Building on Castoriadis’s theory of social imaginaries, it argues that civilisations are best understood as the products of routine contacts and connections carried out by anonymous actors over the course of long periods of time. It illustrates this argument through case studies of modern Japan, the Pacific and post-Conquest Latin America (including the revival of indigenous civilisations), exploring discourses of civilisation outside the West within the context of growing Western imperial power.

Un-Civilizing Processes?

Un-Civilizing Processes? PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004333061
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
The collapse of the supposedly ‘civilized’ German nation into the ‘barbarism’ of Hitler’s Third Reich has cast a long shadow over interpretations of German culture and society. In the remarkable work of Norbert Elias, himself a refugee from Nazi Germany, a deep concern with the distinctiveness of ‘the Germans’ is linked with an ambitious attempt to work out more general relations between broad historical processes – patterns of state formation, changing social structures – and the character of the individual self, as evidenced in changing thresholds of shame and embarrassment. In critical engagement with Elias’s notion of the ‘civilizing process’, the essays collected here explore moments of excess and transgression, moments when the very boundaries of ‘civilization’ are both constructed and challenged. Inter-disciplinary contributions – on topics ranging from medieval laughter, cursing and swearing, through to music, the bourgeois self, and aspects of modern violence – highlight the complexity of inter-relations between the individual imagination and creativity, on the one hand, and the brute facts of political power and social structural inequalities, on the other; and develop new insights into the changing patterns of culture and society in Germany from the Middle Ages to the present.

Modernity at the Beginning of the 21st Century

Modernity at the Beginning of the 21st Century PDF Author: Volker Schmidt
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443802255
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Modernity is back on sociology's agenda. From the beginnings of sociology as an academic discipline, questions surrounding the meaning and consequences of modernity have fascinated generations of sociologists. The initial interest in the concept was inspired by a sense of a deep rupture (and crisis) afflicting European society, a sense that society was approaching something fundamentally different from the past, an entirely new form of societal organization that bore little resemblance to anything known before. Where exactly this transformation was headed was by no means clear, but around the 18th century a growing number of European intellectuals and scholars realized that the changes that had been in the making since the late 15th century were irreversible and could not be contained in any particular region or confined to particular sectors of society, but would ultimately transform all spheres of life. Like other thinkers, sociologists observed this transformation with awe, and their attitude towards it has always been ambivalent. The 20th century, during which modernity gradually began to break through globally, was also a century during which many sociologists became increasingly disillusioned with the promises of "the modern project". But with the exhaustion of the energies of "postmodernism", the intellectual movement that wanted to bury modernity, the interest in modernity began to resurface again; not least because it became increasingly clear that the world is far from approaching a societal condition pointing systematically beyond modernity. Instead, we are witnessing an intensification of modernization processes around the world. But what is modernity, anyway? The aim of the present volume is to contribute to the ongoing discussion about the meaning of modernity and about the significance of modernization processes in non-Western societies. As befits a subject matter as controversial and complex at this one, the book's chapters offer no conclusive answers to the questions they raise and address. The debate about modernity must and will continue, and one hopes that it will be conducted in an atmosphere of mutual respect despite sometimes fierce disagreement between the participants. For only if we listen to each other can we make genuine intellectual progress.

Violence and Civilization

Violence and Civilization PDF Author: Jonathan Fletcher
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745666280
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
This book provides an introduction to the work of Norbert Elias. It is the first systematic appraisal of two central themes of his thought - violence and civilization. Although Elias is best known for his theory of civilizing processes, this study highlights the crucial importance of the concept of decivilizing processes. Fletcher argues that while Elias did not develop a theory of decivilizing processes, such a theory is logically implied in his perspective and is highly pertinent to an understanding of the most violent episodes of twentieth-century history, such as the Nazi genocides. Elias's original synthesis of sociology and psychology is examined through an analysis of several key texts including The Civilizing Process, The Established and the Outsiders and The Germans. Fletcher shows how Elias constructs his "figurational models" and applies these comparatively to specific historical examples drawn from England and Germany. Violence and Civilization is an excellent introduction to Elias's work. It will appeal to students of sociology, anthropology, and history interested in understanding the phenomenon of violence in the modern world.

Social Disciplining and Civilising Processes in China

Social Disciplining and Civilising Processes in China PDF Author: Thomas Heberer
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000924890
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
This book argues that a major part of the Chinese government’s road map, formulated in 2017, to modernise China comprehensively by 2049 is the process of social disciplining. It contends that the Chinese state sees that modernisation and modernity encompass not only economic and political–administrative change but are also related to the organisation of society in general and the disciplining of this society and its individuals to create people with “modernised” minds and behaviour; and that, moreover, the Chinese state is aspiring to a modernity with “Chinese characteristics”. The question of modernising by disciplining was extensively dealt with in the twentieth century by leading Western social scientists including Max Weber, Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault, who argued that disciplining, extending from external coercion towards the internalisation of restraints, is indispensable for achieving social order and thereby for “civilisation” –but defined from a European perspective, in relation to developments in Europe. This book therefore not only discusses the Chinese experience of social disciplining, but also, by looking at a non-Western society, identifies universal tendencies of societal change and social disciplining and separates them from particular occurrences.

The Great Revolutions and the Civilizations of Modernity

The Great Revolutions and the Civilizations of Modernity PDF Author: Shmuel N. Eisenstadt
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047417658
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
This book attempts to analyze the civilizational and historical context of the development of the modern revolutions — of the Great Revolutions and of their relations to modernity, to the civilization of modernity, its dynamics and tribulations.