From Week 3: Norbert Elias, The Court Society

In his book The Court Society, the Swiss sociologist Norbert Elias took on the ambitious task of explaining both the rise of state power and the genesis of modern emotions. In particular, Elias wondered how it had been possible for European monarchs to 'domesticate' the nobles who were formally subject to their rule; Elias also wondered how it happened that Europeans acquired the ability to restrain their basic emotional impulses--to resist the urge to strike with deadly force when insulted, and so forth. Elias believed that these two transformations were closely related to one another and linked by the institution of the royal court. Accordingly his thesis had two elements:

The first element had to do with court as an instrument of social control. Elias noted that Europe experienced a long-term shift, beginning in the high Middle Ages and continuing through to eighteenth century, in the balance of power between nobility and monarchy to the advantage of the latter. For a variety of reasons, this process accelerated in the sixteenth century -- among the causes of this acceleration were bureaucratization of government and changes in military technique that required greater regimentation of field commanders and the soldiers they commanded. Taken together, these transformations diminished the autonomy and intensified the subordination of noble families that had previously a high degree of independence from any sort of central, controlling agency. Naturally, these transformations also provoked resistance. In France, the Fronde was the final death spasm of the independent French nobility; from then on French nobles were dependent on the King for income and prestige.

As the principle instrument for dispensing income and prestige, the royal court enabled kings to exercise power over their nobles. In France, especially, Louis XIV transformed his court into an instrument for exercising his power over the nobility. Pressure to attend the king at court was great; once at court, however, nobles faced the ruinous cost of conspicuous consumption; all this made them more and more dependent on the king’s favor. Louis, in turn, used these demands to tighten his grip over them. As a result of these new circumstances, the measure of noble status changed: in earlier centuries, nobles had measured one another by the age of their lineages, their wealth and their ability to wield power in the provinces where they lived. Now proximity to the king was all important. Hence the importance of court ritual: Louis used the ceremonies of Versailles—his lever, his strolls in the park, his coucher—to show who was in and who was out; from Louis’ perspective, it was a system of divide and rule in which ceremony, not war, was the principal instrument of power. Elias therefore spoke of Versailles as a “gilded cage”.

The second aspect of his argument had to do with the transformation of emotions. At issue for Elias was a shift from “social constraint toward self-restraint”: prior to the sixteenth century, there were few instruments in place for controlling affect—the expression of emotion in behavior. If you were angry with someone, you attacked him; if you were please with someone, you embraced him; and so on. What few constraints existed were external, social: others constrained you from acting impulsively on your emotions. By the nineteenth century, Elias argued, people had no only learned to control their affect, they had also learned to internalize those controls, so that by the time they reached maturity, they no longer needed to be told that it was inappropriate to immediately stab someone who insults you. In between was a long process, in which the emotions were gradually domesticated, first by the imposition of external, social controls, then eventually by internal, psychological ones.

In short, Elias was describing the evolution of manners. In his view, court society played a crucial role in this transformation, too. It was school of manners in Europe, after all, and its influence on conduct rippled throughout European society. For evidence of the transformation, Elias turned to advice books—manuals written for untutored non-nobles on how one should behave at court among courtiers. In these manuals, Elias detected a shift in what he called the “threshhold of disgust”. In the late medieval manuals, Elias found that behaviors such as blowing one's nose were described much more frankly than would be the case later on. He also found that the manuals recommended behaviors that in later centuries would been rejected as impossibly boorish. Behind these transformations lurked the court society, whose inhabitants were constantly elaborating new rules of behavior in order to distinguish themselves from newcomers—the sort of people who needed manuals to know how to conduct themselves. Eventually, the manners developed at court percolated down through society. Thus a social dynamic stimulated the formation of psychological structures on a societal scale.