reluctant to use violence against others save in exceptional circumstances.“ (Menell 1992:29). The most important to be seen as civilized is to live with others in an orderly, well organized, just, predictable and calculable society. According to Sigmund Freud it means to have a considerable feeling of self-satisfaction. After all it produces the disapprobation of others, as well.

Elias’ understanding of civilization is more reflected and objective, as he points out: „I have not been guided in this study by the idea that our civilized mode of behaviour is the most advanced of all humanly possible modes of behaviour, nor by the opinion that 'civilization' is the worst form of life and one that is doomed.“ (Goudsblom 1998:45). It can't surprise hat Elias sensed the allegation of eurocentrism by the german ethnologist Hans Peter Duerr as unjustifiable and quite misplaced. (Treibel 2000:289).

It was Duerr who started a big controversy with Elias. Elias wants to gain access to the main questions of the civilizing process by obtaining a clearer picture of how the behaviour and affective life of Western people slowly changed after the Middle Ages. Duerr's central work 'Der Mythos vom Zivilisationsprozess' (The Myth of the Civilizing Process) was an answer on Norbert Elias. He wants to show that the civilizing process is a myth which draws a wrong picture of the civilizations from other times and countries which easily can be used to legitimate colonialism, as the intention seems to be to civilize so called „kulturarme“ people. In Duerr’s eyes Elias describes the 'predominance of the West' as a 'predominance of the 'shaping of the drive structure'. Duerr accuse Elias of misinterpret the medieval sources, as well. (Duerr 1994)

In order to evaluate the points of critic on Elias it is the best to have a closer look on his theory.

The change of the people’s modes of behaviour in the last centuries is the central object in Elias studies. In fact this is what he describes as the 'psychical process of civilization'. As he points out, it might be that the idea of a psychical process extending over many generations appears hazardous and dubious to present-day historical thinking. It is not possible to decide in a purely theoretical, speculative way whether the changes in psychical makeup in the course of Western history took place in a particular direction. So it is necessary to attract documents of historical experience to verify or to falsify

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such theories. By doing this, „we see how in the course of centuries the Standard of human behaviour on the same occasion very gratefully shifts in a specific direction. We see people at table, we see them going to bed or in hostile clashes. In these and other elementary activities the manner in which the individual behaves and feels slowly changes.“ (Goudsblom 1998:40). This so called psychogenesis goes hand-in-hand with the 'civilizing process' of the society (the so called sociogenesis) and both can't be understood if considered independently. Elias shows, that the specific process of psychological 'growing up' in Western societies is nothing other than the individual civilizing process to which each young person, as a result of the social civilizing process over many centuries, is automatically subjected from earliest childhood. He presents this phenomenon as a kind of 'sociogenetic law' which makes the individual, in the short history of his or her life, passing once more through some of the processes that his society has traversed in its long history. Therefore, every historical phenomenon, human attitudes as well as social institutions, did actually once develop. Investigating the sociogenesis and psychogenesis reveals the mechanism of historical changes. (Goudsblom 1998)

Most important in the civilizing process of the Western societies is the sociogenesis to what we call a 'state'. The key question is, „how did the extremely decentralized society of the early Middle Ages, in which numerous grater and smaller warriors were the real rulers of Western territory, become one of the internally more or less pacified but outwardly embattled societies that we call states?“ (Goudsblom 1998:42). One aspect of the history of the state's formation and structure is the monopolization of force. This means concrete historical processes that, from the time when the exercise of force was the privilege of a host of rival warriors, gradually impelled society towards this centralization and monopolization of the use of physical violence and its instruments. With monopolization of force as the point of intersection of a multitude of social interconnections, the whole apparatus which shapes the individual, the mode of operation of the social demands and prohibitions which constitute his social makeup, and above all the kinds of fear that play a part in his or her life are decisively changed.

A society where all physical violence is monopolized in the state formation and the individual has to control itself makes the life’s of its citizens ,affekt- und lustloser" (affect- and listless). Arpàd Szakdolczai tries to explain impulsive and cruel behaviour,

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like it took place in Nazi Germany, as a relaxation, an escape among civilized persons in a civilized society. According to Elias the relaxation must not happen through a rise of individual violence, but can also take place in violence and sex containing imaginations or media products. There is an inflection point in history, where impulses and tendencies that before had to be warded off now become acceptable and are even cultivated. After this, Szakdolczai explains the third level, which concerns the conditions under which the civilizing process can turn against itself. The question is no longer simply a paradoxical compromise between the civilizing process and its opposite, but where the impulses undermine fundamental mechanisms of the civilizing process in an effectively, purposefully and explicitly way. That is the level where the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century are located: they are very closely related to the previously mentioned inflections of the civilizing process. Here the 'barbaric' impulses get fully externalized. Monopolization of violence by the state may result in the overall civilization of society and in certain cases; these civilised canons may nevertheless exclude certain categories of citizens from protection who will then be exposed to all the violent resources of the state monopoly. In the worst case the regime may mobilize the entire machinery of the state to persecute and annihilate this target group. (Swaan 2001).

A main question raised by sociologists and historians as well is how it can happen that a modern and ‘civilized’ state uses its force for exclusion and at the end genocide of certain categories of citizens. According to Elias is a very core aspect of the civilizing process, that sometimes a contrary current manifests itself: while the state continues to monopolize the exercise of violence, and promotes and protects civilized modes of behaviour and expression, at the same time it perpetrates massive and organized acts of extreme violence towards specific people. The paradigm of such counter-current in the civilizing process is Nazi Germany. Abraham de Swaan summarises: „At the heart of Elias's thinking is the twofold movement of rationalization and bureaucratisation on the one hand, and regression, breakdown, increasing barbarism on the other.“ (2001:267). These processes of rationalization and bureaucratisation have been necessary for organized mass killing, which occurred after preceding stages: registration, concentration, deportation and exploitation. Elias points out the big advance in effectively by rationalization and bureaucratisation of the so called “Endlösung” in the gas chambers compared with the pogroms and military procedures of the past. The high

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