Der Staat als (einzige) Form politischer Integration? Über Elias’ „Etatismus“ (Teil 1 / 2)
(2017) Das Staatsverständnis von Norbert Elias — ISBN: [978-3-8487-3610-2], 87-101, published
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- Authors
Majastre, Christophe 
- Abstract
- Norbert Elias is hardly perceived as a theorist of the political, and one can be tempted to reduce the political to the state in his work. Just like most of the sociologists in the 20th century, his thought would be deeply marked by that particular form of political integration that is national state (Bourdieu). Furthermore, he gives a first role to the war both in the sociogenesis of the state and in the nation-states’ development. Above all he reveals the civilising dimension of the state, founded on the pacification of internal social conflicts. As a result, a bounded political community based on the distinction between the friend and the enemy (Schmitt) seems to constitute the inescapable horizon of the political. The first part of the chapter deals with such an interpretation of Elias’s theses. We think that it fully deserves attention, despite its quite “provocative” character, when Elias’s work can be read as a severe plea against all forms of nationalism. Other strong arguments nourish an alternative interpretation, which is exposed and discussed in the second part of the chapter. Briefly, the political cannot be reduced to the state precisely because the state is not only a survival unit (Lars Bo Kaspersen) founded on war with the outside and on peace inside. The state, Elias reminds us, corresponds “only” to a particular stage in the process of monopolizing of power, and/but the state is itself an unfinished, evolving process. In many cases, the national integration that makes the state a nation-state, sometimes long after the first unification, has to be linked to the democratization of politics. Moreover, the growing interdependence trend, which had once led the sociogenesis of the state, has led to its final overtaking in second half of the 20th century. As a result, two connected questions finally appear of great importance: the one of a post-national (if not post-statist) democracy, and the question of the civilising processes specifically related to the realm of international relations (Linklater).
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Citations
Delmotte, F., & Majastre, C. (2017). Der Staat als (einzige) Form politischer Integration? Über Elias’ „Etatismus“ (Teil 1 / 2). In Erik Jentges (ed) (ed.), Das Staatsverständnis von Norbert Elias (pp. 87-101). Nomos.