Interpersonal Violence as an Intrinsic Part of The Civilizing Process

Abstract

AbstractEven though Elias himself does not focus on an explicit theory on violence inThe Civilizing Process, due to his research question on pacific social processes, violence is not generally theoretically excluded. Against this backdrop, and contrary to criticisms regarding a general loss as well as a biological rather than a sociological explanation of violence, and besides theories that explain meso and macro-level violence within Elias’s framework, this article considers interpersonal micro-level violence as an intrinsic part of the civilizing process. Especially by supplementing Elias’s assumptions of drive control and self-constraint with recent neuroscientific findings, it is possible to conceptualize interpersonal micro-level violence as situational exceedance of a subjective threshold of pain. Here, despite a normative civilized frame of behavior, aggression, as a (neuro)biologically-based reactive drive, is no longer controlled by socially learned self-constraint, leading to violence as a subjectively perceived rewarding behavior and socially performed action.