Description
Book SynopsisIn 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.
Table of Contents1. 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.
