The word ‘civilisation' is special in the West: ‘By this term Western society seeks to describe what constitutes its special character and what it is proud of: the level of its technology, the nature of its manners, the development of its scientific knowledge or view of the world, and much more.'1
The word was first coined in the 1750s. Whether it was invented in England or France is a matter of debate, but it took off rapidly. It was closely associated with the Age of Enlightenment and the new understanding of history as progress.
The link with modernity was sealed in the nineteenth century, when civilisation became the motor of both progress and history. It became synonymous with the very idea of Europe and its right to rule over subaltern peoples. However, the horrors of the twentieth century made the equation of Europe with civilisation untenable. After 1945 civilisation increasingly had a negative meaning that was associated with Eurocentrism and colonialism. More recently, the word has returned as an analytical category; retooled for the Global Age, it is closely associated with the emergence of neo-liberalism.One of the most enduring features of civilisation is that it is the product of a process whereby violence is tamed and overcome. The belief that Europe had undergone a profound transformation in its manners within a short period of time was crucial to the understanding of civilisation when the word was invented. For Voltaire, writing in 1751, Louis XIV ‘succeeded in making of a hitherto turbulent nation a peaceful people dangerous only to its enemies... Manners were softened.'[962] [963] This process is referred to as the ‘civilising process', the means by which we have become civilised. The major theorist of the civilising process was the German sociologist Nobert Elias (1897-1990). Elias posited the idea that European modernity and the decline of violence in the post-medieval West were due to the development
of increased internal and external control. From Freud he took the idea that civilisation was not simply a certain level of social and political organisation but the end of a historical process in which primitive societies are transformed by the sublimation and control of violence.
Following Weber, he related this to the controls exercised by increasingly centralised state bureaucracies. For Elias, the external social controls exercised by the state gradually over time were internalised by individuals into self-restraint. People learned to restrain their emotions and manners became increasingly differentiated, refined and civilised. The key change in the West occurred in the early modern period when new codes of etiquette controlled impulses and outbursts of emotion. The princely court acted as a model for society through its ability to impose rigid standards of behaviour on the aristocracy. Warriors were turned into courtiers; violent instincts were tamed and suppressed. For Elias, Louis XIV's Versailles ordered by its rituals and fastidious manners was the archetypal academy of social and self-discipline. It was in France that civility first began to take on the connotations that the term ‘civilisation' enjoyed during the Enlightenment.The objections of Eurocentrism, Whiggishness and an exaggerated view of the reach of the state may make the civilising thesis seem outdated, but it retains support among distinguished historians and scientists. Its supporters point to the historical data on trends in the homicide rate.[964] Rates, measured in terms of deaths per 100,000 inhabitants per annum, were as high as 20 homicides per 100,000 in the late Middle Ages, dropping to around 10 in 1600 and ending in the historically lowest rate recorded of 1 per 100,000 in the mid twentieth century. Some clear patterns emerge from the data: first, deaths from interpersonal violence have declined significantly in the past six centuries. Second, there is little change in the long run in the age and sex of violent offenders. Homicide has historically been a masculine phenomenon: killers are overwhelming men and their victims overwhelmingly male. Societies with a high homicide rate are characterised by high rates of maleon-male violence, usually resulting from clashes over honour.
Third, this fall was highly differentiated in its rate of decline between region and social class.There are two major flaws in associating the civilising process with early modernity, one chronological and one environmental. First, it requires that we juxtapose the violent Middle Ages with the modernity of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But the view of the late Middle Ages as an age of robber barons and private wars is a nineteenth-century one. In the Middle Ages aristocratic violence was tempered by the code of chivalry and the laws of war, and cities developed sophisticated mechanisms of social control, which were embodied in civic ritual. On closer scrutiny the statistics suggest that the late Middle Ages witnessed one of the sharpest falls in the homicide rate in European history. Second, the civilising thesis fails to account for regional variation. Most of the homicide data come from northwestern Europe, but in 1600 only about 20 per cent of Europeans lived on its north-western fringes. Italy had much higher rates of violence than elsewhere in Europe. But early modern Italian states were certainly not characterised by a lesser overall level of state bureaucracy and judicial control. In fact, the inhabitants of Italian Renaissance cities were exposed to levels of social and economic interdependency far in advance of anything comparable in the north.
The idea that homicide rates fell uniformly and consistently in the early modern period is misleading because the statistics hide the extreme levels of violence caused by civil war. In France, during the Wars of Religion (1562-98) and Germany during the Thirty Years War (1618-48) population loss may have been as much as 20 per cent and 30 per cent respectively. Rather than a steady and gradual decline, homicide rates soared and then fell sharply during the early modern period. Across Europe, rates increased from the middle of the sixteenth century, peaking in the first half of the seventeenth century.
This was followed by a very steep decline in the second half of the seventeenth. In England rates doubled or tripled between late 1570s and early 1620s and did not return to mid-sixteenth-century levels until the last decade of the seventeenth.This chronology raises the question as to why Europe was pacified so rapidly after a century of noble revolt, popular insurrection and civil war? It was not due to state repression. In recent years our understanding of the early modern legal system has undergone a ‘Copernican Revolution', which has revealed the pervasive tolerance of interpersonal violence. The ubiquity of pardons and the encouragement of arbitration were underpinned by the spread of Roman law and its principle that crimes of blood could be satisfied by a monetary compensation. Even the more punitive English common law - which was responsible for 75,000 executions in the period 1530-1630 - overwhelmingly targeted thieves, who accounted for 87 per cent of the victims. ‘All the textbooks report that Louis XIV subjugated the aristocracy by luring them to Versailles and tantalising them with the status shorn of power, while transferring their authority to bureaucratic agents. But could such deep-seated dissatisfaction really have turned so rapidly to placid indifference? And what about all the aristocrats out in the provinces?'[965]
Violence requires social sanction and operates within a moral ambience, and for these reasons the state is not the sole regulator of its boundaries. All kinds of everyday violence - squabbles over honour, wife-beating, masculine competition and rites of passage - are conducted according to socially agreed limits. Violence is rooted in feelings and beliefs, and these are shaped by experience and the social environment, and thus the boundaries of violence can shift rapidly. Murder is of particular significance because it is indicative of the distribution of conflict in society more generally. Its frequency has much to tell us about social relations because murder is ‘emblematic of the less deadly but more frequent battles of will that occur in tens of thousands of comparable relations everyday'.[966] Today one feature of modern homicide patterns is radically different from the past: killers today are overwhelmingly drawn from the most deprived social groups. High homicide rates in the past reflect the propensity of the social elite to employ violence in pursuit of its political and economic interests. This chapter explores how and why that changed. It argues that there was an explosion of violence in the sixteenth century as state and society changed. It traces the emergence of the response to the problem of violence and the invention from the mid seventeenth century of what contemporaries termed civil society. Finally, it looks at the origins of the term ‘civilisation' and argues that from its inception it was closely related to the problem of violence.