Rethinking The Civilizing Process Through The Dawn of Everything

Abstract

Contemporary widespread ontological insecurity and the legacy of the enlightenment find their origin in the civilizing process. Elias’s magisterial opus, providing a detailed and exacting examination of the European transition from a war of all against all to feudal, state society, thoughtfully explores the contradictions and trade-offs involved in what the moderns so confidently, stridently, and often destructively termed “civilization.” This Eurocentric history provides convincing evidence that a leviathan in the form of a strong central state with a monopoly on taxation and the use of force is the outcome of the medieval struggle over land and power among competing warlords. Yet such an analysis of the human condition impoverishes the imagination. Archeological and anthropological evidence has found many indigenous groups living perfectly well without a central state apparatus, sustainably, for thousands of years. While the civilizing process brought about a more constrained, less precariously violent society in the West, it masked and ornamented the violence perpetrated against those deemed less civilized. Yet this designation of “less civilized” ironically derives from their lack of a need for a central state, as they developed forms of social organization not founded on violence. This presentation places Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process into dialogue with David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything. One might argue that greater ontological security might be found in a return to the roots of the enlightenment, in the influence of the unusually brilliant Wendat statesman named Kandiaronk.