Mill’s Ambivalence

This chapter looks at more skeptical inquiries into the nature of civilization
and its values. The attention will be less on the reified concept of civilization
itself and more on the civilizing process and its workings.
The chapter will talk about three figures John Stuart Mill, Sigmund Freud, and
Norbert Elias who are engaged in a common European discourse about
civilization from an angle different from that offered by the figures discussed
in the previous chapter.
According to Mill, civilization has a double meaning. It stands (1) for human
improvement in general, and (2) for certain kinds of improvement, namely,
those that establish the difference between civilized peoples and “savages and
barbarians.” The first sort of improvement results from the civilizing process
over extended time; the second is more recent and is accompanied by vices as
well as virtues.
Mill portrays Great Britain as the most civilized force in the nineteenth
century. Britain draws strength from its adherence to property and to powers
of mind, and from the growth of the middle class. However, he sees the
potential vice of civilization in the dominance of public opinion by an
uneducated mass and an effeminate, puffed-up upper class.
Mill is aware of the defects in the results of the civilizing process. As a
process based primarily on economic development in recent times, carrying
with it doubts as to its moral rightness, the product, civilization, was by no
means certain to persist or to develop further. It is, rather, a subject of
anxiety and doubt. (73-79)

D.Salameh
 Freud and the Heart of Darkness
Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, originally published in 1930, is about an
abstraction, rather than about particular civilizations. It reflects the European situation in
which Freud lived.
According to Freud, civilization is a repressive burden that brings unhappiness and lies
heavily on the human spirit. It is based on coercion and the renunciation of instinct and
represents the tightening of the screws of unconscious guilt. It also has its dark side.
Civilization arises in the face of a threatening reality, both outside and inside. To survive,
humans must learn to conquer their physical environment. This they do by means of
technology and eventually science. To quell internal anxiety, humans turn to alcohol, drugs,
yoga, asceticism, religion, science—and civilization. It is all in vain. Humanity by its very
nature is condemned to discontent and unhappiness.
Freud dismissed religion and reduces it to the status of a neurosis of mankind. He wants to
supplant religion with science, and thus have humanity grow out of its childhood. He wishes
for a civilization based on science and its way of thinking.
Freud asserts that the individual grew up to rational adulthood by a process of repression,
sublimation, and other such psychological mechanisms, whereby instinct was replaced by
reason, violent expression of feelings by cautious conciliation of interests. He was aware
that civilization (writing after WWI) was cracking, that it was a thin veneer over the bestial
lurking beneath each individual and all of society. (79-84)

D.Salameh
 Elias’ Civilizing Process: From Abstract to Social

In this part, we are going to look at civilization not so much as an

abstract, timeless concept, but as a process, constantly at work with
groups and in actual historical circumstances.
Elias saw civilization as a historical development, subject to empirical
inquiry. He argues that during the civilizing process, the individual and
the society change together. Each forms part of the other. A civilized
person is necessary for a civilization. What is external—the rules of
society imposed on the individual as he or she grows up—becomes
internalized in typical Freudian fashion. The task now was to apply it
historically. He focuses on manners instead of religion and on the state
as a historical necessity, a condition of the restraint of aristocratic
aggression. This led to the emergence of the middle class and with the
civilizing process the form of civilization extended to larger segments
of the society.
In sum, the civilizing process entailed a historical development in
which personality, social change, and the state are all correlated—in
unintended fashion.
Following upon Freud, he, too, implicitly undermines the claim to
superiority of the European version. The word “civilization,” he said,
“sums up everything in which Western society of the last two or three
centuries believes itself superior to earlier societies or ‘more primitive’
contemporary ones.” Going beyond Freud, however, Elias has turned
the question about civilization into an issue for social science and
historical investigation. (84-88)

D.Salameh
 Summary
From Epiphany to Threnody: A turn in the Discourse of Civilization

The three philosophers represent a turn in the discourse of civilization,

doubting its triumphant European achievements and unquestioned good.
Mills offers us an ambivalent position on civilization. He gives credit to the
idea of progress and economic development but casts doubt upon the latter’s
moral value. By questioning the basic value of his contemporary capitalist
surroundings, he also shakes the foundations of both European civilization and
the process that brings it into being.
Freud argues that civilization is necessarily repressive, and thus a carrier of
unhappiness. He worries about civilization as a flimsy covering placed over the
raging passions, which may crack at any moment. In this complicated manner,
Freud’s analysis of essential discontent is both about his own European
civilization and about any civilization and its discontents.
Elias is strongly influenced by psychoanalysis, which he placed in the service
of his work as a sociologist. Taking Freud’s account of human psychic
development, Elias uses it as a model for the way society itself develops, at the
same time shaping the individuals who comprise it. Repression of instinct is
central to both accounts. Repairing Freud’s lack of historical perspective, Elias
applies the schema to what he calls the civilizing process in Europe of the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Linking court society, the aristocracy, and
the early growth of the absolutist state, he seeks to show in empirical detail
how a refined, mannered society developed. The result was what Mirabeau and
his contemporaries in the eighteenth century came to call civilization. What
Elias adds to their concept is an emphasis on process, rather than a static end
result, and he thus weakens, if not destroys, the ideological support for
European superiority based on race or any other essentialist notion. (88-90)
D.Salameh