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Anthropological Theory
Copyright 2002 SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi)
Vol 2(4): 413420
[1463-4996(200212)2:4;413420;029505]

Some comments on
Jack Goodys Elias and
the anthropological
tradition1
Eric Dunning
University of Leicester

As a former pupil of Norbert Elias and later a collaborator with him,2 I appreciate having
been given this opportunity to reply to Jack Goodys thought-provoking essay on Elias
and the Anthropological Tradition. I have known Jack for some four or five years now
and have long been an admirer of his work.3 I think, though, that he has got Elias wrong
and, at the end of this essay, after trying to demonstrate some of the ways in which that
is so, I shall offer some thoughts on how an eminent scholar such as Jack Goody can be
so mistaken. In an attempt to avoid being seen as having misrepresented Professor
Goody, I shall quote fairly liberally from his text. I shall similarly use quotations from
Elias to enable readers to judge whether it is Jack Goody or I who is closer to a correct
representation and interpretation of Elias.
Early in his essay, Jack Goody recounts how he met Elias in Ghana in the early 1960s
and formed an impression of him as somewhat isolated from what went on around him.
He appeared, says Jack Goody, the very opposite of an ethnographer. Goody next
proceeds to write:
I believe my impressions are fully supported by looking at [Eliass] autobiographical
account of his experiences in [Ghana] and of his encounter with what he referred to
as Naturvolk.4 The term is significant since it refers to those who have yet to undergo
the civilizing process. They are nearer to nature and to the expression of mans biological nature.
With his training in philosophy, medicine and sociology, Elias never pretended to be
an ethnographer. Those who knew him well, moreover, will, I am sure, agree that, despite
conveying an impression of professorial absent-mindedness, he was profoundly realityorientated in his work. More importantly, Elias never used the concept of a civilizing
process in the way that Jack Goody so rightly criticizes here. There is, Elias wrote, no
zero-point of civilization, no absolutely uncivilized human individual or society.
Civilizing processes the term is at one level a synonym for the more standard terms
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socialization and acculturation are and always have been a human universal, a consequence of the biological evolution of Homo sapiens as a social species dependent on
cognitive and emotional learning.5 It goes without saying, of course, that just as individual civilizing processes vary from individual to individual, group to group and society
to society, societal civilizing processes similarly vary considerably over space and time.
It follows from the foregoing argument that Elias never referred to the people of
Ghana as a Naturvolk. This is Jack Goodys projection onto Eliass text of a notion with
which the latter disagreed as profoundly as any modern anthropologist would. That this
is the case will, I hope, start to emerge from some of the answers which Elias gave in an
interview published in Reflections on a Life (1994) about his time in Ghana:
Q: And where did you find the primitive culture you were looking for?
A: I would not use the word primitive; I do not like it simpler is the right word,
in the sense of less differentiated.6
Q: Much of what you say about Africa makes us think of children.
A: In that case you misunderstand how different it is . . . With regard to such an
experience there are two attitudes, both of which I consider wrong. The first is the
usual colonialist attitude: that we are more rational, more advanced, and that they
are simply more irrational, more childish. In a word, we are better. The second
attitude, just as wrong, stresses how much better it is to give free rein to ones feelings
and affects. It is indeed more colourful and easy to romanticize. My own attitude is,
I think, distinct from both. I see quite clearly that our way of life is only possible
because our physical safety is incomparably greater than theirs. If we lived in similar
insecurity, we too would seek the help of invisible powers. (Elias, 1994: 6871)
Whilst I would not suggest that Elias was necessarily right in everything he said here,
I do insist that his arguments cannot be reasonably construed as implying commitment
to some crude idea of a totally uncivilized Naturvolk.7
Jack Goody next tells us that, whilst at the University of Ghana, Elias tried to get rid
of anthropology on the grounds that Africa should not be left to the anthropologists
who had failed to understand its particular strangeness. He wanted to replace it with
sociology, says Goody. Likewise, in the Sociology Department at Leicester, which Elias
had helped to set up, there was, according to Goody, effectively no element of anthropology in its curriculum. Furthermore:
His book on What is Society? has virtually no reference to anthropologists, except
to Levi-Strauss in relation to the Whorf hypothesis and to Evans-Pritchards Nuer. If
anthropologists in Britain neglected Elias, it was perhaps partly because he neglected
them and showed little interest in the range of society with which they were mainly
dealing and which his universalizing hypotheses might have expected him to include.
The title of Eliass book is What is Sociology?, a fact which may help to explain the
relative lack of references in it to anthropologists. More importantly, in the 1950s and
1960s anthropologists in this country were part of an academic establishment with a
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firm footing at Oxford and Cambridge where they resisted the introduction of sociology.
If I am right, it was mainly their view of Elias not only as a sociologist but also as a
German-born outsider which led them (along with most sociologists) to ignore his work.
At least, that is how some of us at Leicester perceived it at the time.
More importantly still, it is simply untrue that the Leicester Department in the 1960s
had effectively no element of anthropology in its curriculum. The second-year course
on Empirical Sociology contained a substantial anthropological component and two
anthropologists, Tanya Baker (who left after one or two years) and Percy Cohen, were
appointed to the staff. They were ably assisted by Peter Duncan, Tony Giddens and Sami
Zubaida, all taught by Peter Worsley at Hull, and by Geoff Hurd and Terry Johnson,
two Leicester graduates who followed Elias and Neustadt, the Head of the Leicester
Department, to Ghana. Few British Sociology Departments in that period can have
boasted comparable competence in teaching about the kinds of societies regarding which
anthropologists used, not without justification, to claim a particular expertise.
Related to this, whilst I do not doubt that Elias tried to get rid of anthropology at the
University of Ghana, I do doubt that his grounds for this would have rested in a notion
of the failure of anthropologists to understand Africas particular strangeness. It would
have been more in line with his thinking to have argued against them because he believed
that they treated less differentiated societies as self-contained, static systems and ignored
their historical, colonial and wider world contexts. This suggestion is consistent with the
fact that the highly successful first-year course that Elias taught at Leicester arguably
anticipated by 10 or so years the notion of the three worlds of development later
popularized by writers such as Irving Louis Horowitz (1966). Elias divided the world
into Type A, Type B and Type C societies, and the United Nations Yearbooks formed
the basic resource for this part of his course.8 I have now reached a point where I can
discuss what I regard as the core of Jack Goodys critique.
According to Jack Goody, Elias belonged to the Weberian tradition. His central
question in The Civilizing Process, says Goody, concerned
. . . precisely how this process had emerged in modern times and had been internalized by the actors as a set of constraints. His problematic is not identical to Webers
but it is related. He is asking not why capitalism arose exclusively in the West but
why the civilizing process did. True, he never puts it quite as directly as Weber . . .
but in fact his major work concentrates entirely upon Europe and the development
of the civilizing process in the period following the Renaissance. This he sees as manifested in increasing self-restraint, in the internalization of controls over affect, which
he contrasts explicitly with what took place in the Middle Ages (such as uncontrolled
bouts of drinking) and in simpler societies among the naturvolk, as in Ghana, with
their sacrifices, rituals, scanty clothing but greater directness.
Jack Goodys misunderstandings here stem in part from the mistranslation of Eliass
titles and sub-titles in the first English editions of The Civilizing Process. Eliass sub-title
for Volume I, for example, was not The History of Manners but Changes in the Behaviour of the Secular Upper Classes in the West, a sub-title which shows that Eliass study
is explicitly Euro-centred, not Euro-centric as Jack Goody implies. Nevertheless, even
though ber den Prozess der Zivilisation is focused explicitly on the West, Elias does offer
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some observations on non-western societies, some of the most interesting on Imperial

China. For example, after citing W.M. Macleod (1931) on what, given their size and
the means of transport available to them, appear to scholars today to be the remarkable
stability and cohesion of the Inca and Chinese empires, Elias went on to suggest the
need for a detailed structural-historical analysis of the interplay of centrifugal and
centripetal tendencies in these empires. He then outlined the following hypotheses about
the Chinese case. What he wrote is worth citing at length:
The Chinese form of centralisation, compared to that developed in Europe, is certainly
very peculiar. Here the warrior class was eradicated relatively early and very radically
by a strong central authority. This eradication . . . however it happened . . . is connected with two main peculiarities of the Chinese social structure: the passing of
control of the land into the hands of the peasants (which we encounter in the early
western period only in a very few places, for example, Sweden) and the manning of the
governmental apparatus by a bureaucracy always recruited in part from the peasants
themselves and at any rate wholly pacified. Mediated by this hierarchy, courtly forms
of civilisation penetrate deep into the lower classes of the people: they take root, transformed in many ways, in the code of behaviour of the village. And what has so often
been called the unwarlike character of the Chinese people is not the expression of some
natural disposition. It results from the fact that the class from which the people drew
many of their models through constant contact, was for centuries no longer a warrior
class, a nobility, but a peaceful and scholarly officialdom. It is primarily their situation
and function which is expressed in the fact that in the traditional Chinese scale of values
. . . unlike the Japanese . . . military activity and prowess hold no very high place.
Different as the Chinese way to centralisation was to that in the West in detail, therefore, the foundation of the cohesion of larger dominions in both cases was the
elimination of freely competing warriors or landowners. (Elias, 2000: 540)
This passage is illustrative of the fact-orientation of Eliass work and how it is replete
with testable propositions for comparative research. It is accordingly a pity that, like so
many of Eliass critics, Jack Goody has reacted on the whole dismissively to words like
civilizing process without scouring Eliass text for propositions such as the one just
quoted about the part played by the elimination of freely competing warrior landowners
in the interrelated processes of civilization and state-centralization. It is, I think, worth
pointing out in this connection that, as long as they were based on solidly documented,
adequately theorized historical research, Elias would not have rejected claims to have
discovered other routes to state-centralization and civilization. He was not, that is, dogmatically wedded to some crude notion of unilinearity.
Eliass central concern, Jack Goody tells us, was with the background of what in
common speech relates to the change from barbarity to civilization, not in the sense
the terms have been used by prehistorians but referring to changes in the control of
internal (and external) behaviour. Goody fails to mention Eliass discussion of the conceptual issues raised in this connection, a discussion in sociology of knowledge terms
which shows the influence on Elias of his Habilitation supervisor, Karl Mannheim. This
is a crucial omission and helps to explain why Goody thinks it is relevant to discuss the
implications of Nazism for Eliass theory in the following terms:
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. . . towards the end of his life, Elias turned to consider the most dramatic phase, the
rise of Nazism (or more broadly Fascism), which some consider should have had its
place in any account of the overall changes in human society. He now sees the Nazi
period as a process of decivilization, of regression, but that seems to avoid the main
issue. Such activity and the Fascist ideologies in Germany and Italy, like the World
Wars, are surely an intrinsic part of contemporary society, of the development that
has led to our present situation, and not some kind of regression, a social equivalent of Freudian psychological processes.
The idea that Elias only began to consider Nazism towards the end of his life is wrong.
He published an essay on the sociology of German anti-Semitism as early as 19299 and,
as one might expect of a scholar who wrote ber den Prozess der Zivilisation in enforced
exile in the 1930s, the events then occurring in his native land were at the forefront of
his mind in choosing to write on a topic such as violence and civilization. That this was
the case will hopefully become clearer through a resum of Eliass discussion of basic
concepts. So will the fact that what German historians have called their countrys Sonderweg (special path) was already an issue of central concern for Elias in the 1930s.10
Elias started ber den Prozess der Zivilisation by observing that civilization is such an
all-embracing term that it is difficult to define. Its function is easier to discern. Civilization is a concept, he wrote, which has come to express the self-consciousness of the
West (Elias, 2000: 6). It is a usage which lacks any connotation of process. It expresses
the self-confidence of the dominant groups in the late 18th, 19th and early 20th-century
West that their own civilization was complete and that it was their mission to civilize
both the barbaric lands which they had conquered and the masses in their own
societies over whom they ruled. Originally, however, civilization had been a term associated with moderate social critique. It was first used by the Physiocrats as part of a protest
against absolute rule. For them, it had connotations of progress and social reform. They
had derived it from civilit, the word used since the 16th century to describe courtly
behaviour, partly to distinguish the latter from the more rough and ready standards of
medieval nobles which had been signified by the term courtoisie. This terminological,
conceptual and social development occurred primarily in France, Elias suggested,
because French society began to undergo processes of state-formation and unification
early on and because the French court was more open to bourgeois outsiders than its
counterparts in Germany.
By comparison with France and Britain, Germany emerged as a unified nation-state
relatively late. The members of its French-speaking court circles were more localized,
highly socially exclusive and contemptuous of the German language. In that context,
civilization became for bourgeois intellectuals the first national middle class in
Germany a term which signified superficiality, ceremony and politeness in contrast
with the inner depth and solidity which they regarded as their own principal virtues.
They expressed the latter through the term Kultur. The antithesis in Germany between
Zivilisation and Kultur was solidified when the country became nationally unified in the
second half of the 19th century and when, correspondingly, the power of bourgeois (and
working class) strata including now larger commercial and industrial segments grew.
This residue of ambivalence towards civilization and all it signified was further strengthened when the First World War was fought against Germany in its name. In that way,
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a degree of disdain for civilization became for a while a prominent strand in Germanys
specific brand of nationalism. Independently of whether and how far it is right or wrong,
Eliass analysis is, as one can see, far removed from the crude ideas of which Jack Goody
is justly critical. The same holds good, in my opinion, regarding Eliass 1930s analysis
of the Sonderweg and the analysis he developed after the Second World War of the breakdown of civilization in the Weimar Republic and the correlative rise of the Nazis (Elias,
1989; 1996).
According to Elias, the linguistic and cultural diversity of the German-speaking
peoples in the Middle Ages and the size of the territory they occupied made state-unification more difficult for them than it was for their more homogeneous French and
English contemporaries who occupied smaller territories (Elias, 1939; 2000: 2617).
When the Germans did unify in the 19th century, it was through war and under the
aegis of the militaristic Prussians, a process which led military models to predominate
among the formerly humanistic middle classes. Such militarization was accompanied
by barbarization, processes which help to explain Germanys key role in triggering the
First World War. In the crises which followed Germanys loss of the war, a profusion of
paramilitary and terrorist groups the Freikorps, the Sturmabteilungen (SA), Konsul
arose and de-stabilized the Weimar Republic. In that context, the state lost its violencemonopoly and a breakdown of civilization was superimposed on the already occurring
processes of militarization and barbarization (Elias, 1996). Elias certainly used the
concept of regression in this connection but he used it, as one can see, in a strictly testable
sociological sense.
Assuming that my interpretation of Elias is substantially accurate, how can one explain
how an eminent scholar such as Jack Goody gets so much of it wrong? A clue is, I think,
provided by the fact that I first began to hear counter-arguments to Elias of the kind Jack
Goody puts forward here from both anthropologists and sociologists in the 1950s, some
of them as distinguished as Jack. The fact that such arguments have endured for more than
40 years suggests that we are dealing with a set of deeply-held beliefs perhaps even an
ideology shared by sociologists and anthropologists who were born in the first decades
of the 20th century and who lived through and in some cases had direct experience of one
or both of the world wars, the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust. In a word, they learned
to be suspicious of and reacted against anything that smacked of ideas such as progress
and western superiority. Possibly working in the same direction and perhaps most evident
in the early writings of Talcott Parsons was the implicit idea that nation-states are
enduring, harmonious systems (Parsons, 1951) which do not need to be studied historically or developmentally because ideas of social evolution have fallen foul of the
evolution of ideas (Parsons, 1937). So deeply entrenched did these sorts of ideas and
attitudes become that many anthropologist and sociologist members of these generations
have been unable to see the pathbreaking originality of Eliass synthesis and the fact that
he produced an empirically based testable theory which transcends or circumvents most
of their objections. It is not, of course, a theory of everything. As Elias himself made
clear, it merely constitutes a partial breakthrough relative to earlier theories.
Notes

1 I would have thought it wrong for Jack Goody to write as if there were a single
anthropological tradition. Surely there are several such traditions, one of them, as
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2
3

5
6

9
10

embodied in the work of Leslie White (1959), Julian Steward (1955) and the early
work of Sahlins and Service, in some ways similar to the work of Elias.
The principal fruit of our collaboration was Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure
in the Civilising Process, 1986.
I met Jack Goody at Conferences held in Paris by LEntretien Franklin, a body of
which we both became Directors. I suspect that it may have been our French colleagues manifest interest in and admiration for Eliass work, together with the
Eliasian papers given in that context by Stephen Mennell, Jason Hughes and myself,
which may have stimulated Jack Goodys interest in Elias in the first place.
I have followed the German convention here of always starting nouns with a capital
letter. Strictly speaking, Jack Goody should have used the singular form a Naturvolk here, or the plural, Naturvlker.
Apart from the individual level, civilizing (and de-civilizing) processes take place,
according to Elias, on what I like to call the societal, cultural area and global levels.
In The Constitution of Society (1984: 241), Anthony Giddens suggests contra Elias
that: (i) There is . . . no discernible correlation between linguistic complexity and
the level of material advancement of different societies; and (ii) . . . some features of
social activity found in oral cultures, such as those associated with kinship institutions, are exceptionally complex. This misses the point for two reasons. The first
is that, whilst the languages of people in structurally simpler societies may be as or
more complex grammatically than the languages of people in structurally more
complex societies, by virtue of their divisions of labour the latter have a greater
number and variety of languages, e.g. those of the different occupational specialisms.
The second reason is the fact that, in many simpler societies, kinship institutions
virtually constitute the social totality.
Elias sought to avoid the charge of committing the ontogeny reproduces phylogeny
fallacy through what he called the sociogenetic ground-rule. This holds that
individuals, in their short history, pass once more through some of the processes that
their society has traversed in its long history (2000: xi, 410). What Elias means is
that, in any society, in order to attain the standards set by adults, which have themselves been attained in the course of the societys history, individuals have to pass
through a personal civilizing process but not through each of the sequential stages
of their societys civilizing process.
See my paper Working with Elias: Reminiscences of Elias View of the SociologyAnthropology Interface delivered at the Conference on Elias and Anthropology,
University of Metz, France, September 2002.
Norbert Elias, Zur Soziologie des deutschen Antisemitismus, Israelitisches Gemeindeblatt, 13 December 1929 11 Kislev 5690.
The discussion which follows involves a considerable oversimplification of a complex
and data-rich analysis.

References

Elias, N. (1929) Zur Soziologie des deutschen Antisemitismus, Israelitisches

Geimeindeblatt, 13 December 1929(11 Kislev 5690).
Elias, N. (1939) ber den Prozess der Zivilisation: Soziogenetische und Psychogenetische
Untersuchungen. Basle: Haus zum Falken (2 vols).
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Elias, N. (1978) What is Sociology? London: Hutchinson.

Elias, N. (1989) Studien ber die Deutschen: Machtkmpfe und Habitusentwicklung im
19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Elias, N. (1994) Reflections on a Life. Cambridge: Polity.
Elias, N. (1996) The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Cambridge: Polity.
Elias, N. (2000) The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations
(revised, single integrated edition, edited by Eric Dunning, Johan Goudsblom and
Stephen Mennell). Oxford: Blackwell.
Elias, N. (2001) On the Sociology of German Anti-Semitism (Introduction by Eric
Dunning, Herman Korte and Stephen Mennell. English translation by Eric
Dunning and Stephen Mennell), Journal of Classical Sociology 1 (2 September).
Elias, N. and E. Dunning (1986) Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the
Civilising Process. Oxford: Blackwell.
Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity.
Horowitz, I.L. (1966) Three Worlds of Development: The Theory and Practice of
International Stratification. New York: Oxford University Press.
Macleod, W.M. (1931) The Origin and History of Politics. New York. (Cited in Elias,
1939, 2000.)
Parsons, T. (1937) The Structure of Social Action. New York: Free Press.
Parsons, T. (1951) The Social System. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Sahlins, M. and E.R. Service, eds (1960) Evolution and Culture. Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press.
Steward, J. (1955) Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
White, L.A. (1959) The Evolution of Culture. New York: McGraw Hill.
ERIC DUNNING is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Leicester and Visiting Professor at
University College Dublin and the University of Ulster at Jordanstown. He studied sociology under Norbert
Elias at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels, later coming to write Quest for Excitement (Blackwell,
1986) and several articles with Elias. Dunnings main research interests are in sport and violence, and the
Holocaust. His latest books are Sport Matters: Sociological Studies of Sport, Violence and Civilisation (Routledge,
1999), Handbook of Sport Studies (Sage, 2000) co-edited with Jay Coakley, and Fighting Fans: Football Hooliganism as a World Phenomenon (University College Dublin Press, 2002), co-edited with Patrick Murphy and
Ivan Waddington. He is also co-author of Barbarians, Gentlemen and Players (Martin Robertson, 1979), The
Roots of Football Hooliganism (Routledge, 1988), Football on Trial (Routledge, 1990) and Sport and Leisure in
the Civilising Process (Macmillan, 1992). Address: University of Leicester, 14 Salisbury Road, Leicester, LE1
7QR, UK. [email: ed15@le.ac.uk]

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