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Newsletter of the Norbert Elias Foundation 44 Newsletter of the Norbert Elias Foundation PEOPLE CONTENTS ● Andrew Linklater, who as Woodrow People 1 Wilson Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth University has always claimed From the Norbert Elias Foundation 1 ‘I am not a sociologist’, is now teaching a lecture course that looks very much like an In the media 2 Introduction to Sociology from a figurational point of view. Female sociologists in Norbert Elias’s circle of friends by Marion Keller 3 ● On 13–16 October 2015, Cas Wouters gave a ‘Seminar on Education: Reading Norbert Recent books and articles 4 Elias, under the auspices of the Research Group ‘Education and Civilising Processes’ at the Bibliographical retrospect 11 Universidade Federal de Grande Dourados, Brazil. Recent conferences 12 Social Character and Historical Processes: A Conference ● The Managing Editor of Figurations, in Honour of Stephen Mennell, Newman House, Barbara Górnicka, has successfully completed St Stephen’s Green, Dublin, 7–8 January 2016 her PhD at University College Dublin: see the abstract of her thesis elsewhere in this issue. Symposium: Figuring Organisations: People and Processes, Business School, Dublin City University, 25 November 2015 FROM THE NORBERT ELIAS Forthcoming conferences 14 FOUNDATION Changing Power Relations and the Drag Effects of Habitus: Theoretical and Empirical Approaches in the Foundation Website Twenty‐First Century, 8–10 September 2016, Institute of Sociology at the Westphalian Wilhelms- University, Münster, Germany In December 2015 and for most of January 2016, there was a serious malfunction Comparative, Longitudinal and Historical Research on the Foundation’s website, www. Sessions at the 9th International Conference on Social Science norberteliasfoundation.nl. The site was not Methodology (RC33), down altogether, but it was impossible to enter 11–16 September 2016, University of Leicester changes to it. United Kingdom This fault has now been fixed, but it has 16th SIPCS - International Symposium on Civilising Processes, become clear that the underlying code is now 22–25 November 2016, Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo severely dated, and so in the not too distant (Ufes), Vitória, Brazil future we shall have to have a freshly designed website. Readers are invited to tell us what Obituary: Hermínio Gomes Martins 16 features they would like to see in a new website. Please send your ideas to Jonathan Issue No.44 February 2016 Figurations Fletcher (jonathan@1052amsterdam. terrorism and climate change.’ On the Kuper does argue, in a neat but com), who has offered to collate Process of Civilisation is the bedrock of over-simple dictum summarising suggestions for us. Lepenies’s argument. Elias’s argument, that ‘States forced [people] to behave, and growing Human Figurations BBC Radio 4 broadcast a series of trade encouraged them to’. (Trade four programmes on manners, past and markets also force people to do Dr Barbara Górnicka has succeeded and present, on 4–7 January. Entitled certain things – it isn’t just a matter of Clare Spencer as Administrator Behaving Ourselves – Mitchell on incentives.) The point I want to make, of Human Figurations, the online Manners, they were introduced with though, is that the general safety and journal sponsored by the Foundation. wit and insight by David Mitchell. In predictability of everyday life – a Her email address in this capacity is the first episode, the value of Norbert diminishing danger of suffering harm [email protected]. Elias’s writings was introduced by or death, whether by violence, famine, Stephen Mennell and Steven Pinker disease or whatever – plays an essential Book reviews: Human Figurations has (and Cas Wouters received a mention in part in the development of the greater adopted a new policy towards book a later programme). capacity for habitual self-control that reviews. In view of the difficulty of we called ‘civilised behaviour’. It extracting reviews from reviewers to Network: Magazine of the British also facilitates the growth of trade, whom copies of books have been sent, Sociological Association, 121 (Autumn which therefore is not an ‘independent it has been decided that in future the 2015) contained a lengthy article by variable’ but one thread in a number of journal will instead rely on receiving Tom Trueman, ‘Copse to Corpse: intertwining long-term processes. expressions of interest from potential how key thinkers become forgotten reviewers. So, if you would like to after their deaths’, about the book So how does this relate to foreign review a book for the journal, please Sociological Amnesia edited by Alex policy? Well, I would argue that the contact the Reviews Editor, Paddy Law and Eric Royal Lybeck (see West has consistently underestimated Dolan, at [email protected] and he Figurations 43). There are lengthy the value of the simple calculability will request a review copy from the quotations from Stephen Mennell’s and safety of everyday life, mainly publisher for you. essay on Norbert Elias, who – not because its leaders take too much for having been forgotten – was almost the granted something that – by and large only exception to the rule among the – they enjoy for themselves. The other IN THE MEDIA figures discussed in the book side of this coin is that they ignore (in both the English and French senses Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitschrift Simon Kuper, ‘Why safety now trumps of the verb) the whole literature on published two articles concerning Elias. freedom’, Financial Times, Weekend the social foundations of democracy. Magazine, 27–28 June 2015 In consequence, they choose – for The first, on 27 July 2015, was by other people – what they think of Wolfgang Engler, who looked back to It’s good to see Elias being cited as ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ over his 1988 interview with Elias, included enthusiastically in the Financial Times. everyday security. in Interviews and Autobiographical But, when Eric Jones tipped me off Reflections (Collected Works, vol. 17). about Kuper’s article, from its title I To be more concrete, take the example The article is entitled ‘Zivilisation heißt drew the false conclusion that it related of Syria. Yes, Assad was (before the Gegenseitigkeit: Als sich die Theorie to world affairs. Kuper writes about the outbreak of the civil war) a tyrant, but noch nicht in Gänsefüßchen einschloss’ apparent decline in violent behaviour for most people most of the time only [Civilisation is reciprocity: When in many countries, referring not just a moderately oppressive tyrant. One theory is not in quotation marks]. to Elias but also to ‘one disciple of had to keep one’s nose clean, but the Elias, the Harvard psychologist Steven risk of being killed or bombed out of The second, published on 5 January Pinker’ and to Manuel Eisner’s data one’s home was relatively small. This 2016, was by the celebrated German on trends in homicide. But he uses is not to set him on any kind of pedestal sociologist and public intellectual all this to infer that there has been a (though reflect on the fact that it is not Wolfgang Lepenies (who, at the generational shift in Western countries all that many years since he was a guest very beginning of what was to be a from the rather wild generation of the at Buckingham Palace during a state stellar career, was given the chore of 1960s, preoccupied with ‘freedom’, to visit). It is merely to say most Syrians shortening the draft of Elias’s Was ‘a new type of being: the well-behaved today, I suspect, would gladly go back ist Soziologie?). In a feature under teen’. Kuper should have read Cas to the status quo ante, to the lives they the general heading of ‘Terror is Wouters! lived before the civil war. barbarism, climate is civilisation’, Lepenies argued that ‘Our civilization Of course, Kuper may prove to be right. It is also to point to another corollary has never been completed. Europe But in the technical sense in which we of Elias’s theory, that the unleashing – first invented Western civilization. use the term, ‘civilising processes’ are whether intended or unintended – of the It must prove it anew in the face of slow, fluctuating and reversible – so, to kind of violence, danger and instability global challenges such as international echo Chou En-Lai, it is too early to say. that we now see in the Middle East has 2 Figurations Issue No.44 February 2016 precisely the consequence of generating friendships, which were characterised Gisèle Freund to Elias in Elias’s papers lower levels of ‘civilised behaviour’. by intermittent collaboration, mutual is from January 1936. Freund became support and loyalty. Despite the known for her photographic portraits of This is not to undervalue ‘democracy’. geographical distance, the friendships writers and artists. She had matriculated As Elias notes in Studies on the lasted over half a century until the at the University of Frankfurt in the Germans, a democratic political regime friends’ deaths. winter semester of 1929–30 and is more conducive to producing a completed her doctoral studies in 1935 ‘civilised habitus’ than a tyrannical 3 The preserved letters and photos at the Sorbonne in Paris. She later and arbitrary one. But that is over and document these friendships. In the repeatedly and emphatically indicated above the need for everyday physical inventory of the legacy of Norbert that Elias, and not Walter Benjamin, safety. Elias, there is a copy of the well-known was the intellectual ‘father’ of her photo by Gisèle Freund, which doctoral dissertation (see Freund’s Stephen Mennell shows Elias and his students and his essay in the 1977 Festschrift). Some of later friends Ilse Seglow and Evelyn her experimental portrait shots of Elias Anderson in the garden of Café in Paris around 1934 are preserved in FEMALE SOCIOLOGISTS Laumer. It is perhaps one of the photos the photo section of the Elias archive.
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    45 Newsletter of the Norbert Elias Foundation FIGURATIONS NEWSLETTER HAS CONTENTS GONE DIGITAL Figurations Newsletter has gone digital 1 As most of you will have already noticed, our newsletter is now distributed electronically People 2 only. The Board of the Norbert Elias Foundation was reluctant to abandon printing, From the Norbert Elias Foundation 2 but in the end financial considerations won out: the cost will be reduced by four-fifths. Robert van Krieken’s YouTube lecture channel Starting with the current issue, subscribers will In the media 2 receive their copy by email, in the form of a PDF file. If you took the trouble to print it out Cooking for Elias 3 two-sided on buff paper, the newsletter will for the moment not look very different from the Figurational Journals online 3 printed version as it appeared from 1994 until now, although we can now use colour photos. Recent books and articles 5 Figurations 45 would normally have been sent Upcoming book publications 12 to you in July, but we have been in the throes of compiling a consolidated email circulation International Sociological Association news 12 list. As well as those on the postal address list, all subscribers to the Norbert Elias Foundation Forthcoming conferences 14 blog will receive this issue of Figurations automatically. If you wish to change your email address to which the newsletter is delivered, or wish to unsubscribe, please contact our Managing Editor, Barbara Górnicka, at [email protected]. It should be noted that all previous issues of Figurations have long been available as downloadable PDFs, at http://www.norberteliasfoundation.nl/ figurations.php.
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