Robert van Krieken
University of Sydney
Published in: Archives Europeénes de Sociologie 31(2) 1990:
353-71
The Organisation of the Soul:
Elias and Foucault on discipline and the self
Louis Mumford later highlighted the 'change of mind', the 'reorientation of wishes, habits, goals' which accompanied European society's surrender to 'the machine' (Mumford 1946: 4). The Frankfurt School theorists developed this point further with the argument that modern rationalised capitalism produces a particular, disciplined kind of psychic make-up, based on their interest in developing a psychological dimension to social theory through the integration of psychoanalysis and marxism (Fromm 1978; Horkheimer 1982; Marcuse 1969; Reich 1972; Frankfurt Institute for Social Research 1973), and it has become a truism, almost a cliché in the sociology of Western societies.(1) Michel Crozier, for example, observes not only that individuals conform to their organizational context, but also that there have been 'very striking changes in modern times'. While conformity within an organization used to be obtained through harsh and coercive means, modern organizations consist of people 'who, through their education, have already internalized a number of basic conformities and a general ability to conform easily to an organization's way' (Crozier 1964: 182). Self-disciplined, rational political and social subjects are frequently regarded as an essential pre-requisite for liberal democracy (Lasch 1973: 17; Oestreich 1982: 271), and social control in contemporary Western societies as based on self-control (Melossi 1990: 185). The enormous interest in fields such as the history of mentality, historical sociology, historical anthropology and historical psychology, in identifying what distinguishes our everyday life and our psychic world from that of the inhabitants of other historical periods, especially the middle ages (Eco 1987), illustrates the almost universal concern in current social theory and cultural criticism with 'modernity' (Bauman 1987) and the 'modern' self (Taylor 1989b), with the history and genealogy of contemporary forms of everyday experience and social interaction.(2)
The concepts and categories used in the debate have in recent years displayed a heavy reliance on the work of Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias, although few are well-acquainted with both. Foucault argued that one of the definitive characteristics of European state formation since the early modern period was the transition from a sovereign state power which operated negatively by setting limits and constraints, to a decentred disciplinary power which penetrates our souls, bodies and minds, actively transforming them and producing positive effects which turn us all into self-managing citizens. Foucault's concern was to analyse the techniques and strategies by which this disciplinary power operated, the techniques of the self which turn us, and with which we turn ourselves, into peculiarly modern subjects. Norbert Elias also insists that we should see European social history in terms of a gradual transformation of personality structure, an intensifying 'constraint towards self-constraint', in which the regulation of the human body, as well as our impulses, passions and desires, undergoes a 'civilizing process', which he explains in terms of the increasing monopolisation of violence which accompanied the process of state formation, the effects of the intensified competition between and within social groups characteristic of a market economy, as well as an accompanying historical tendency towards increasing social interdependency.
Both writers have exerted a significant influence on recent social theory and history, reinforcing Max Weber's 'iron cage' metaphor for rationalized and bureaucratized subjectivity, and adding new colour and dimension to his picture of increasingly self-disciplined individuals with the ever more complex routines of modern society built into the very core of their being. However, a coherent understanding of the topic depends on both a grasp of the very distinct forms of analysis and explanation employed by these leading theorists, and an examination of what their differing approaches can contribute to each other. To concentrate only on the very real differences in their overall orientations, explanatory concerns and conceptual apparatuses is misleading to the extent that this obscures their basically similar concern with the social history of subjectivity, and with the impact of a particular kind of society - rational, disciplinary, civilised - on the human psyche. At the same time, to simply assume a convergence around an essentially similar line of argument is to overlook how an exploration of the differences in their analytical and explanatory logic can contribute to identifying and dealing with the central conceptual and empirical problems in the historical sociology of subjectivity.
1. Social Discipline and Human Nature
Foucault and Elias agree with Weber that one can trace a developmental trend
towards increasing self- discipline, a regularisation and routinisation
of the psyche, so that one's inner 'economy of the soul' coordinates with
the outer economy of an increasingly bureaucratised, rationalised and individualised
social world. Their work converges on the notion that there has been 'societalization
of the self', a transition in European history from a social order based
on external constraint (sovereign power, traditional power) to one dependent
on the internalisation of constraint (disciplinary power, rational domination).
At the same time, they each understood the nature of the process quite differently.
Apart from his more careful analysis of the psychology of Protestantism
and the entrepreneurial spirit, Weber had a rather simple, behaviourist
approach to the impact of social institutions on individual behaviour, being
primarily concerned with tracing the social and political changes which
took place in the development of Western European states, tending to assume
that those larger changes were simply transmitted to the individuals inhabiting
the societies concerned. He focused on the impact of larger social changes,
together with particular individuals and groups on the development of the
ideas, practices and institutions concerning discipline and self-discipline,
without being concerned to tease out in any detail either the impact that
new ideas, social institutions and state agencies had on people's inner
lives, or the role that changing personality structures, changing psychologies
themselves might have played within larger processes of historical change.
For Elias this relative neglect of the impact of social changes on psychic life is a major obstacle to an adequate understanding of the development of self-discipline. A 'real understanding' of the rationalization process is Western Europe, writes Elias, is only possible 'if one takes into account too the changes of human interdependencies in conjunction with the structure of conduct and, in fact, the whole fabric of men's personality at a given stage of social development' (1982b: 285).(3) Elias's model of the historical development of personality structure is one of the increasing 'restraint' and 'constraint' of drives, impulses and affect for the sake of foresight and one's tenuous position within a increasingly complex web of social interdependency and competition. Although he argues in principle that drives and impulses are socially formed (1982b: 285), his constant emphasis on constraint versus spontaneity has built into it an assumption of a 'natural' aggressiveness, spontaneity of affect, lack of inhibition about ones body, and so on, all the characteristics of children. Like Hobbes (1983: 72), in the body and substance of his analyses Elias presents humans as fitted for society by discipline rather than by nature, and portrays society as opposed to nature.
Foucault also examined the role played by the object of disciplinary techniques, individual subjectivity, in the historical development of discipline, highlighting the importance of the regulation of subjectivity and the production of 'docile bodies' for our understanding of the early modern state, but his understanding of the relationship between society and nature is very different (Smith 1984: 384-6). The major point in his critique of the 'repression hypothesis' (Foucault 1981) was that the new disciplinary power did not simply oppose individual needs and desires, but owed their success precisely to their ability to 'free' psychic and libidinal energy in the very process of tieing it to the productive concerns of a rationalising capitalist economy. In this sense he has more in common with writers such as David Riesman (1950), Christopher Lasch (1977) and Richard Sennett (1977) than Elias, who perceives a gradually increasing social and psychological distance between childhood and adulthood, a gradually strengthening super-ego. For Lasch contemporary psychology is characterised by a different, but precisely weaker rather than stronger super-ego, more subservient to its irrational, pre-oedipal elements, which modern consumer culture has managed to structure itself around, and which binds us even more firmly to conformity.
A central characteristic of Elias's portrayal of the Middle Ages is that the 'balance' between external and self-constraint was not only weighted towards the former, but also that whatever constraint there was appeared to have only a limited effect on the containment of affect and impulse, so that they would often 'break through', as it were, that constraint, and this seems to constitute the 'instability' of medieval emotional life. In other words, in medieval society we appear to have had a system of relatively ineffective external constraints, which were not internalised and did not produce the kind of super-egos capable of keeping affect and impulse consistently in check. The problem here is that for Elias self-constraint and the super-ego are precisely the final product of the effects on the human psyche of external constraints, of one's web of interdependency or the constraints exercised upon children by adults. Most children, he writes, 'are molded into conformity with a certain standard by external pressure and compulsion' (1982a: 128). If we ask why medieval external constraint was not internalised and 'converted' into self-restraint, there are two possible answers to be found in Elias himself. First, the sheer amount of external constraint has increased, the social world has simply become more complex with increasing competition, functional specialisation and denser webs of social independency, and individuals can only function within that complexity by making a significant proportion of their everyday life 'automatic', requiring no thought (1982b: 232-3). Second, the nature of the external constraint characteristic of denser webs of social interdependency is different from that of medieval social relationships, in terms of both its content, restricting bodily impulses, emotional outbursts, and so on, and its position within a more complex web of strategies of social and political competition. Elias emphasises the greater calculability of more stable monopolies of force, the greater need for foresight and the location of ones emotions within the field of their social consequences.
Both points are asserted rather than argued, largely because Elias is more enthusiastic about demonstrating the ineffectiveness of medieval social constraint in restraining affect and impulse than he is about delineating exactly how it operated. It is unclear why each individual is 'constrained from an early age to take account of the effects of his own or other peoples actions', or why 'the social existence of the individual who gives way to spontaneous impulses and emotions' should be more 'threatened' than one who does not (1982b: 236) simply because the 'chain of effect' of ones actions is longer or more complex.(4) Medieval culture had, in many respects, a stricter set of social norms which one would think required as great a supervision of ones emotions for fear of eternal damnation, offending ones neighbours, and so on, and most portrayals of medieval village life convey a sense of the subordination of individual identity and expression to the demands of the collectivity (Shorter 1975: 44-53; Blum 1971; Benton 1977; Gurevich 1988: 79; Chartier 1989). The strongest version of this argument has been put recently by Hans Peter Duerr (1988), who reasons that all human societies regulate emotions, bodies and behaviour more or less strictly, that in smaller-scale, 'traditional' societies the degree of interdependency was even higher than it is today, and the constraint imposed on individuals correspondingly greater.
One can argue on Elias's behalf to say that the decisive element is not so much the length of chains of interdependency in itself, but more the fact that this will in turn generate greater social advantage and strategic gain for those able to moderate their affects (1982b: 236). Rather than a 'push' factor, then, which is what Elias appears to emphasise in formulations such as the 'constraint to self-constraint', what is perhaps more historically significant is the 'pull' factor of the greater attraction of self-constraint, its greater possibilities for gain and improvement in more functionally differentiated societies, less constrained by the set formulas of traditional authority, to use Weber's terminology. One commentary has thus argued that 'the impact of figurations on people's conduct and mentality can ultimately be explained by a general theory of power', because 'people strive for power, and if self-control generates an increase in power vis-a-vis others, people will control themselves more' (Flap & Kuiper 1981: 283), and another argues in similar terms that at least some people will perceive the advantages to be gained from self-discipline, and their subsequent success within competitive networks will itself be a force compelling others to do the same (Bogner 1989: 50).
Foucault also perceives this element of the active participation of the disciplined in their own discipline, but at the same time he is concerned with quite different changes in the nature of the 'push', the external constraint, itself. He sees it as having been transformed from one operating simply to confine and limit within collective identities, to one which articulates and gives expression to an 'interior' of the human psyche, one which, unlike medieval culture, includes individual subjectivity in its field of operation, thus creating the whole possibility of the internalisation of constraint, the development of a super-ego, the disciplining of the self. As I have argued elsewhere, the history of the super-ego cannot be seen in isolation from the history of the ego, being intimately linked to the development of individuality and the cultural encouragement of a sense of autonomous self-hood (van Krieken 1989a). Rather than a change in the balance between external and self-constraint, then, Foucault paints a picture of a shift from one type of external control or form of power, one which did not allow one to even imagine 'selves' and worked only to confine behaviour and action within particular limits, to an external control which made the interior of one's psyche the object of its disciplinary attention.
The key example here is that of changes in the practices of confession, where rendering the penitent's intentions visible became more important than simply atoning for the sin, constituting a shift in emphasis 'from satisfaction following confession to interior discipline preceding it' (Bossy, 1985: 127). It was this kind of exposure of one's impulses and affects within a structured field of social relationships which encouraged 'the systematic monitoring by the individual of his own life' (Bossy 1985: 127) and the internalisation of constraint, rather than its repression or containment. In fact, as Alois Hahn has argued, the exposure of the self is intimately related to its constraint. The more one knows oneself the better one can control oneself; the more others express their real selves, reveal their emotions, confess their true nature, the more they can be controlled (Hahn 1982: 426). Elias's notion of the removal 'behind the scenes' (1982a: 121) of affect and impulse works best for the examples he chooses, bodily functions, physical violence, and table manners, but less well for more complex emotional states such as love, caring, honesty, steadfastness, for which the concern in confession and the subsequent confessional culture, culminating in the twentieth century in a therapeutic culture, was much more their exposure and revelation to public view.
2. Civilizing Process and Civilizing Offensives
In Weber the picture of medieval society was one of little islands of disciplined
activity among monks and soldiers, with Protestantism, capitalist forms
of work organisation and bureaucracy then breaking down the walls of the
monastery and the army barracks, as it were, to include all members of society
within a methodical conduct of life. For Foucault, in contrast, the development
of discipline was more dependent on the mobilisation of the whole range
of disciplinary techniques within particular institutional settings - schools,
workhouses, hospitals, factories, the confession - and the impact of the
knowledge developed by the human sciences themselves, which together were
more instrumental than Protestantism, and joined with the impact of capitalist
work organisation and bureaucracy to transform our sense and experience
of subjectivity. One could simply combine their approaches and perceive
their different historical emphases as a product of focusing on different
aspects of the same, complex and differentiated process of development towards
a particular kind of social discipline - most of the Weber/Foucault comparisons
appear to imply this kind of approach (O'Neill 1986; Gordon 1987). Certainly
there are a number of common themes running through all their work, particularly
the importance of monasticism as a model for a methodical conduct of life
(Treiber & Steinert 1980; Asad 1987; Kieser 1987), and the practices
of the Church, Catholic and Protestant, in implementing that model within
the general population.
However, Elias undermines this cosy possibility in the sense that he looks for changes in the nature of social relationships, in social figurations, which in themselves 'require' different forms of behaviour, different personality structures, and in the process comes to represent a very different logic of historical analysis. The problem here is the role one ascribes to particular events, institutional arrangements or human interventions in the course of history. Elias concedes that 'it is no doubt fruitful and even indispensable to see history...as a mosaic of individual actions of individual people' (1982b: 4). Nevertheless, he goes on to say, when faced with a choice between a form of inquiry focusing on 'how this or that man gained power', and one examining the social changes underlying the transformation of the institution of the king or prince into 'absolutism', analysing 'which social structure, which development in human relations, made it possible for the institution to sustain itself in this form', it is the latter approach which grasps 'the plane of historical reality on which the civilizing process takes place' (1982b: 4). Elias is not alone when he says that rationalization affects 'the level of drives and affects no less than the level of consciousness and reflection' (1982b: 326), but he is then led to a very particular kind of analysis and explanation of the development of self-discipline when he goes on to say that 'the motive force of this change of individual self-steering is provided...by pressures arising out of the manifold intertwining of human activities...bringing about shifts in the form of relationships and in the whole social fabric' (1982b: 326).
In one sense this resonates with Foucault's emphasis on the diffuseness of power, its polymorphous character and its location in a broad range of everyday relationships, rather than in a centre such as the state (Gleichmann 1988: 454), but at the same time there is for Elias a more direct, unmediated relationship between a particular social figuration, a specific patterning of social relationships, and the personality structures and forms of interaction which they produce in individual actors. When he writes that 'to an increasing degree, the complex functioning of Western societies, with their high division of labour, depends on the lower agrarian and urban strata controlling their conduct increasingly through insight into its more long-term and more remote connections' (1982: 249-50, emphasis added), the social conditions are presented as explaining the change in personality and behaviour. What other writers have regarded as historically significant in determining the course of European social history, such as the appearance of particular ideas, beliefs and world-views, the actions of powerful individuals or groups, or the appearance of fundamentally different power relationships, social institutions or organisational forms, Elias is usually concerned to explain sociologically as themselves the effects of the changing structure of social relationships, as dependent rather than independent variables. Despite Elias's theoretical commitment to the idea that one can never say that 'figuration A had inevitably to result in figuration B' (1970: 163), in The Civilizing Process there is nonetheless an inevitability to his sense of the 'necessity' of the development of foresight and self-restraint within denser webs of social interdependency. The possibility that people might simply fail to respond to the 'constraint towards self-constraint', and that this constraint might then be consciously and deliberately given more directly coercive and institutional forms, or, perhaps more importantly, that it might not, is not suggested by Elias's formulations, even though that appears to be precisely a central characteristic of the histories of education, poor relief, criminal justice, religion and work, of the development of the 'well-ordered police state' (Raeff 1975: 1983). For Elias the question of why behaviour and emotions change 'is really the same as the question why their forms of life change' (1982a: 205), and this characteristic of Elias's explanatory logic takes it very close to what Robert Nisbet has called the 'sociological fallacy' inherent in developmentalism, namely 'the belief that the causes and essential forces of social change may be derived from the elements of social structure' (Nisbet 1986: 68).(5)
Although there are similarities between Elias's and Foucault's reluctance to identify a subject of power, and both see the dynamics of power as lying more within the fabric of everyday life, Elias places a heavier emphasis on requirements emanating from increased competition and social interdependency, when for both Weber and Foucault there is an intermediate step to the process, the 'translation' of those requirements into Protestant asceticism, rational bureaucracy, and disciplinary techniques. It is the very particular, disciplinary nature of this translation process from the sixteenth century onwards that Weber and Foucault consider so important, and which Elias de-emphasises in favour of the notion of a civilizing process. Both share Elias's sense of self-discipline emerging as a strategy of self-advancement for ruling social groups, the court aristocracy, the administrative and legal elite, the bourgeoisie (see also Spiegel 1988), but they move in a quite different direction when it comes to the question of its emergence among the working class. At that point it becomes more a matter of a coercive imposition of discipline through either human agency or historically specific social institutions: state intervention, religious ideology, bureaucracy, work organisation, disciplinary techniques, which defined what constitutes the proper organisation of the soul, and constituted the mediating instance between the 'requirements' of the social figuration and changes in individual behaviour and social interaction.
When Elias writes that 'the "circumstances" which change are not something which comes upon men from the "outside": they are the relationships between people themselves' (1982b: 276), the obvious response is that for many European workers and peasants change did indeed come upon them from the 'outside', in the shape of lawyers, judges, police officers, inquisitors, teachers, employers, and so on, all giving their own particular form to 'the civilizing process', turning it into a civilizing offensive (Kruithof 1982; Mitzman 1987; Verrips 1987; Franke 1988), and it is no small task to maintain the argument that the activity of entrepreneurs and the representatives of state and church should be understood simply, or even largely as the product of 'changing social relationships'. In this sense Elias is at odds not only with Weber and Foucault, but also with much of the historiography dealing with the both the middle ages and the early modern period. Historians of religion, for example, tend to emphasise the constitutive role played not only by Puritans and Calvinists (Hill 1952), but also by the Catholic Church in christianizing rural Europe, through the Inquisition and Counter-Reformation confessional and educational practices (Delumeau 1977), a process which entailed wrenching people from ancient social and familial customs and modes of thought, constituting them more as individuals responsible for their own feelings, thoughts and actions, and thus contributing to the formation of a state-citizen relationship. Even when Roger Chartier makes use of The Civilizing Process to highlight the historicity of psychic makeup, his analytic logic is ultimately very different from that book when he speaks of self-discipline and mastery over the emotions as having been 'instituted' by the state (Chartier 1989: 16). John Bossy has also argued that 'the Bishops of the Tridentine Church have more positive achievements to their credit than they are often allowed: from the parish register to the primary school they were laying many of the foundations of the modern state, and perhaps they have as good a claim as English puritanism to have "eradicate[d] habits which unfitted men for an industrial society"' (Bossy, 1970: 70). For the urban elites of Western Europe at least, increasing social interdependency in itself was not 'requiring' foresight among workers and peasants, especially poor, vagrant and criminal ones, with any success at all, making it necessary for them, through the town council and later the national state, to intervene in some way to generate such a responsiveness to the lengthening chains of interdependency within an apparently recalcitrant population. Robert Muchembled also sees the constraint imposed on their own bodies and impulses by the aristocracy as having been subsequently 'imposed on the masses' (Muchembled 1985: 207), painting a grim picture of the early modern period as a process of systematic destruction of popular, rural culture by both state and church, accomplished through 'the constraint of bodies and the submission of souls' (Muchembled 1985: 187; see also Mandrou 1975).
The changing legal practices of both secular and church authorities in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were highly significant in transforming the legal system from one designed to resolve community conflicts, and acting largely in response to those conflicts, to one in which the central authorities - town, state and church - took a much more active role in defining what constituted a crime or offence, and gave those authorities a more active role in everyday life (Moore 1987; Bouwsma 1973; Given 1989). Was this an automatic product of increasing competition and interdependency? Or was it a very specific response, one of a range of possible options, chosen by particular actors? It would be difficult to uphold the assertion that the practices of lawyers, state officials, church inquisitors, preachers and pedagogues were the only possible response to increasing functional differentiation, interdependency, competition, and so on, if indeed they were a response to the 'constraints' of those developments at all, or that they did not play an important, to some degree autonomous role in the formation of individual consciousness. Yet these are precisely the implications of Elias's concentration on 'social figuration' as the main, if not only, explanatory variable, and his insistence on the 'blindness' of history, that 'the social fabric...and the actual course of its historical change as a whole, is intended and planned by no-one' (1982b: 356). Clearly the disciplining of the population was planned by someone at various points in European history, by clergy (Schilling 1987; Tentler 1974: 1977), state educators (Dreáen 1982), inquisitors (Delumeau 1977; Moore 1987; Given 1989), town councils issuing sumptuary legislation (Greenfield 1915; Dorwart 1971; Jütte 1981, 1984; Raeff 1975, 1983; Vink 1989), founders of workhouses (Weißbrod 1981) and systematic poor relief (Lis & Soly 1984; Michielse 1990), political theorists such as Thomas More and Jeremy Bentham, and the organisation of work (Thompson 1967). The civilizing process can thus be regarded more accurately as a project, as 'a conscious proselytizing crusade waged by men of knowledge and aimed at extirpating the vestiges of wild cultures - local, tradition-bound ways of life and patterns of cohabitation' (Bauman 1987: 93). The differences between medieval and early modern disciplinary power were those of a transition from power relations rooted in communal village relations, exercised 'matter-of-factly', without conscious deliberation and direction, to an apparatus of power in which discipline was consciously planned, designed, implemented and imposed on a reluctant population. Civilization denoted 'above all else a novel, active stance towards social processes previously left to their own resources, and a presence of concentrated social powers sufficient to translate such a stance into effective social measures' (Bauman 1987: 93). Philippe Aries argues in similar terms, that 'the state and its system of justice increasingly intervened, at least in name, and in the eighteenth century also in fact, in the social space that had previously been left to communities' (Aries 1989: 2-3). If we jettison the Boschian view of the Middle Ages and grant an effectivity to medieval social constraint, European social history can nonetheless continue to be perceived in terms of a particular transformation of social order from one based on external constraint to one located more within individual souls, in the sense that state formation itself contributed to the breaking down of old, communal forms of social order, which was then responded to by forms of state intervention establishing both a new form of social order and a particular socialization process, one based on the state-individual (citizen) relationship, rather than, say, commune-church, or village-lord. Two doubts are raised by a consideration of the disciplinary activities of individuals, groups and institutions, particularly when one focuses on a topic notably absent from the work of all three writers, but central to early modern European history, the persecution of witches. First, one may question whether attempts to control religious beliefs and behaviour should sensibly be seen as the outcome of the 'necessity for...long-term thinking and the active attunement of individual conduct to some larger entity remote in time and space' (1982b: 249). Mario Erdheim argues, for example, that the persecution of witches was precisely a product of the continued working of aggression and violence in social life, a result of the disintegrating effects of state formation, increasing social differentiation, urbanization, and so on (Erdheim 1982: 396). As he puts it, 'the civilizing process not only makes a culture more complex, it also dismantles existing structures, allows them to become impoverished. The individual must therefore learn to adjust not just to greater complexity, but also to the withering of culture' (Erdheim 1987: 152; also Breuer 1988; Mnch 1984: 283-3). Second, if one recognizes that selves have genders as well as histories, it becomes clear that the 'individual' positioned in Elias's ever-longer chains of interdependency, planning and calculating the gains to be had from self-restraint, was male, counterposed to women constructed as species being, as mothers, nurturers, objects of desire, menstruators, the Other (Honegger 1987; de Beauvoir 1957; Ortner 1974). The disciplined self, able to achieve strategic gain from a subordination of emotion to instrumental ends, was masculine in the sense that femininity was perceived as the embodiment of emotion and physicality, its ultimate expression rather than the product of the restraint of emotion. This is partly why the specific objects, or rather victims of the civilizing process as it manifested itself in the witchhunts were most often women, rather than simply the emotional life of generalised individuals. Only some emotions and expressions of embodiment came to represent femaleness, it is true, but this only serves to highlight the problem in Elias that he overlooks the possibility of being 'civilized', as women undoubtedly were both supposed and expected not to be, through a very particular integration of emotions and the body with social identity, rather than their polar opposition.
The mere existence of disciplinary strategies does not, of course, establish their causal effects, and the apparent correspondence between those strategies and interventions and eventual changes in psychic make-up might therefore be misleading. The striking thing about sumptuary legislation, for example, is the number of times the various laws had to be re-issued, and one can question the ultimate impact of attempts at Christianization and social discipline (Scribner 1987). John Bossy emphasises that the attempt at 'turning collective Christians into individual ones...was very commonly a failure' (Bossy 1983: 62). The thought of Catholic clergy was often 'magicalised' by popular beliefs in the process of attempting to Christianise the rural populace, and it is more accurate to see the relationship between elite and popular culture as a two-way process of mutual interaction than as a one-way one of acculturation (Gurevich 1988: 90-91; Wirth 1984). Aron Gurevich has emphasised that 'we cannot ascertain how and to what extent homo naturalis was in fact transformed into homo Christianus (1988: 101), and if ordinary people did in fact become self- disciplined Christians, it was not necessarily or only because of the inquisition, the sermons and confessional-box exhortations of the clergy, or the social impact of workhouses and schools, but possibly also for quite different reasons, to do with the fabric of their everyday experiences, a 'rational' response to the problems emanating from that experience. Giovanni Levi has argued along these lines in his examination of Italian peasant life, establishing that the rationality specific to the peasant world was expressed both in resistance to the spread of the new society, the laws and regulations of the modern state, and also 'actively engaged in transforming and utilizing both the social and the natural world' (Levi 1988: xv).(6)
This does not make it necessary to dismiss the disciplinary intentionality of the interventions of state and church agencies, but to place them in context, and to examine what was going on in the hearts and minds of peasant and working-class men, women and children in response to the disciplinary techniques of the inquisitors, the judges and lawyers, the social workers and the teachers, to perceive them as having an active role in the process, and to query rather than simply assume the ultimate effect of disciplinary strategies. Elias, on the other hand, appears to assume that the dynamics of this conflictual interaction between 'legislators and interpreters' and their subjects can be easily read in terms of 'probabilities', without imagining what the other possibilities might have been, when what is important is precisely the strategic switching-points in history (Weber 1946), the times when decisions were taken to pursue one of a range of possible options, with those decisions then taking on an institutional solidity of their own, transforming them in turn into structural constraints possessing all the force of a natural given.(7) Such historical 'switching points' will only be identified and their explanatory adequacy tested when our historical sociology includes a systematic and on-going confrontation between the notion of a civilizing process, and that of a civilizing offensive (whether it be by human agents, techniques, or forms of organising and structuring social life), when we respond to the tension between Elias's view of how the changes in personality structure were intimately related to particular mechanisms and processes of social development, and the perspectives and evidence not only of Weber and, in part, Foucault, but also of those historians and historical sociologists who perceive the development of a disciplined organisation of the soul as more disputed terrain, as a more autonomous, consciously and deliberately pursued, perhaps contingent, and thus in some senses more interesting historical phenomenon.*
* This essay has arisen out of research supported by the University of Sydney through its Special Studies Program. Earlier versions were given during 1989 at the Graduate School of social Science, Universities of Amsterdam and Leiden, and the Institute for Psychology, Free University, Berlin, and I would like to thank those who offered their comments and criticisms.