Book project: Norbert Elias and Violence
Edited by: Tatiana S. Landini (Universidade Federal de Sao Paulo, Brazil) and François Dépelteau (Laurentian University, Canada)
To be published by Palgrave Macmillan
In 2013 and 2014, we launched the books Norbert Elias and Social Theory and Norbert Elias and Empirical Research. In the first one, we published texts comparing Norbert Elias to many important authors (Epicurus, Freud, Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, Mannheim, From, Arendt, Bauman and Bourdieu) and, on the second one, many important topics were analysed by using Elias´s framework (such as literature, capital punishment, prisons, sexual violence, life and death, court, state formation, relations between the sexes and sports).
In this new book we aim to focus on an important issue on Elias´s oeuvre: violence. The topic of violence permeates most of his books, with more or less emphases. Nevertheless, this topic is also very controversial in his writings. For his critics, Elias didn’t give enough attention to a problem that plays such an important role on modern societies and its formation. By focusing on pacification as an important direction of the civilizing process, Elias would have missed key aspects of this same civilizing process, such as violent processes of colonization, development of weapons of mass murder to be used in wars between and within states, and so on (though he talked about these topics a good deal in his later works). Readers sympathetic to his work, on the other hand, reinforce the key role played by violence during state formation processes, the possibility of decivilizing processes or spurts, changes in the balance between external constrain towards self-constraint, etc.
Violence is not presented in any definitive way in Elias´s books, thus opening the door to many interpretations and debates. State formation, the directions of civilizing and decivilizing processes, pacification, spurts of violence, war and aggression as a human condition, etc., are all topics related to violence that Elias discusses in his many books and that still need to be more debated and clarified.
We should welcome texts that analyse any of the above topics, or others related to violence on Elias´s oeuvre. We also welcome texts that used Elias´s framework to discuss any kind of violence or national situation in our contemporary world. As Elias used to say, theory and empirical research cannot be separated. Our final goal is to present texts that bring interesting light on the topic of violence through Elias´s eyes.
We welcome contributions from all the disciplines. Texts should written in English and be limited to 20 pages (Times New Roman 12, double space), including bibliography.
Deadline for receiving the texts: 1 August 2015.
Please submit your text by email (on Word) to:
Tatiana S. Landini (tatalan@uol.com.br)
François Depelteau (fdepelteau@laurentian.ca)