- Title
- Steven Pinker, Norbert Elias and the 'Civilizing Process'
- Creator
- Dwyer, Philip; Roberts-Pedersen, Elizabeth
- Relation
- The Darker Angels of Our Nature: Refuting the Pinker Theory of History & Violence p. 87-104
- Relation
- https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/darker-angels-of-our-nature-9781350140608
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Academic
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2021
- Description
- The Better Angels of Our Nature is steeped in what many consider to be an unwarranted optimism in the future. One of many ‘reasons to be cheerful’, Pinker tells us, is that contrary to the horrors of our nightly news bulletins, we walk the streets safer than ever before. While this is not the first time that Pinker has posited a sustained and significant decline in violence in modern societies, The Better Angels of Our Nature lays out his case in extensive if contested statistical detail, arguing that there has been a ‘tenfold-to-fiftyfold’ decrease in rates of homicide in Western Europe since the sixteenth century.¹ He appears to have been inspired to think in terms of downward trends by a graph of declining homicide rates in England, calculated by Robert Ted Gurr in 1981 and part of a broader effort by historical criminologists to quantify long-term patterns in interpersonal violence. It was their data, Pinker writes, that convinced him that there was ‘an underappreciated story waiting to be told’.² In doing so The Better Angels of Our Nature draws heavily on the work of the German sociologist Norbert Elias and his theory of ‘the civilizing process’, first set out in a book of the same name published in 1939. According to this theory, increasing mastery of psychological ‘drives’ towards impulsivity – best demonstrated by the aristocratic adoption of elaborate rules of courtly etiquette – and the spread of princely authority, centralized administration and economic ties over larger and larger territories resulted in an increasing ‘pacification’ of key societies in Western Europe by the early modern period. For many historical criminologists and crime historians, murder is understood as an impulsive, if irrational, act. In mapping homicide rates in the same era, Elias’ ideas about the development of self restraint have provided important theoretical ballast for data sets that are often uneven or incomplete. It is unsurprising, therefore, that an interpretation of Elias is also crucial to Pinker’s thesis, both to explain declining homicide rates and to convey a general sense of ‘moral progress’.
- Subject
- unwarranted optimism; civilizing process; early modern period; crime historians
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1435714
- Identifier
- uon:39796
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781350140608
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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