Civilité, Citizenship and Civilisation: Cosmopolitanism in Norbert Elias's Sociology of the Political

Delmotte, Florence
(2014) XV Internaticional Symposium Civilising Processes The Legacy of Norbert Elias — Location: Universitad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (3.November.2014)

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Citizenship has always been conditioned by the belonging to the nation-state or more generally by the belonging to a political community in the meaning given by Thomas Hobbes or Carl Schmitt. The transformations summarized by the word “globalisation” have actually not removed this condition, and neither has the political integration of the European Union. The first of the Human Rights, the “right to have rights”, is still refused to undocumented migrants and to “stateless” people already depicted by Hannah Arendt. This paper is based on the idea that Elias’s processes sociology contributes both to explain and to contest such a denial. I will argue that his sociology of the political, despite its interest for the state, allows thinking citizenship or democracy beyond any bordered community. I will more precisely examine the conceptions of civilité that emerge from the work. As shown in On the Process of Civilisation, civilité first contributed to shape the ruling class in Europe from the Renaissance before being associated with what defines the belonging to state community: common manners and individual and civic rights. However, the very denials of civilité – including its denial inside or even by the state towards its own citizens, for instance during the Nazi period studied in The Germans – force to think civilité apart from the nation-state. Moreover, Elias suggests that civilité originally had something to do with an observation method that aims at tackling social relations by encouraging self-detachment and the recognition of interconnectedness. By allowing a critical and reflexive approach of the political, civilité thus enables its own questioning in a current context where it has become less evident than ever to bind individuals to any given community.
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Delmotte, F. (2014). Civilité, Citizenship and Civilisation: Cosmopolitanism in Norbert Elias’s Sociology of the Political. XV Internaticional Symposium Civilising Processes The Legacy of Norbert Elias, Universitad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/194507