Civilisations, Civilising Processes and Modernity – A Debate

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.

• 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.