source: http://www.belmont.edu/sociology/stuff/files/THelias.htm

The Social Constraint towards Self-Constraint

A Social Order
 The observer of the civilizing process finds himself confronted by a whole tangle of problems.  To mention a few of the most important at the outset, there is, first of all, the most general question.  We have seen that the civilizing process is a change of human conduct and sentiment in a quite specific direction.  But, obviously, individual people did not at some past time intend this change, this "civilization," and gradually realize it by conscious, "rational," purposive measures.  Clearly, "civilization" is not, any more than rationalization, a product of human "ratio" or the result of calculated long-term planning.  How would it be conceivable that gradual "rationalization" could be founded on pre-existing "rational" behavior and planning over centuries?  Could one really imagine that the civilizing process had been set in motion by people with that long-term perspective, that specific mastery of all short-term affects, considering that this type of long-term perspective and self-mastery already presuppose a long civilizing process?

 In fact, nothing in history indicates that this change was brought about "rationally," through any purposive education of individual people or groups.  It happened by and large unplanned; but it did not happen, nevertheless, without a specific type of order.  It has been shown in detail above how constraints through others from a variety of angles are converted into self-restraints, how the more animalic human activities are progressively thrust behind the scenes of men's communal social life and invested with feelings of shame how the regulation of the whole instinctual and affective life by steady control becomes more and more stable, more even and more all embracing.  All this certainly does not spring from a rational idea conceived centuries ago by individual people and then implanted in one generation after another as the purpose of .action and the desired state, until it was fully realized in the "centuries of progress."  And yet, though not planned and intended, this transformation is not merely a sequence of unstructured and chaotic changes.

 What poses itself here with regard to the civilizing process is nothing other than the general problem, of historical change. Taken as a whole this change is not "rationally" planned; neither is it a random coming and going of orderless patterns.  How is this possible?  How does it happen at all that formations arise in the human world that no single human being has intended, and which yet are anything but cloud formations without stability or structure?

 The preceding study, and particularly those parts of it devoted to the problems of social dynamics, attempts to provide an answer to these questions.  It is simple enough: plans and actions the emotional and rational impulses of individual people, constantly interweave in a friendly or hostile way.  This basic tissue resulting from many single plans and actions of men can give rise to changes and patterns that no individual person has planned or created.  From this interdependence of people arises an order sui generis, an order more compelling and stronger than the will and reason of the individual people composing it.  It is this order of interweaving human impulses and strivings, this social order, which determines the course of historical change; it underlies the civilizing process.

 This order is neither rational—if by "rational" we mean that it has resulted intentionally from the purposive deliberation of individual people; nor "irrational"—if by "irrational" we mean that it has arisen in an incomprehensible way.  It has occasionally been identified with the order of "Nature;" it was interpreted by Hegel and some others as a kind of supraindividual "Spirit," and his concept of a "cunning of reason" shows how much he too was preoccupied by the fact that all the planning and actions of people give rise to many things that no one actually intended.  But the mental habits which tend to bind us to opposites such as "rational" and "irrational," or "spirit" and "nature," prove inadequate here.  In this respect, too, reality is not constructed quite as the conceptual apparatus of a particular standard would have us believe, whatever valuable services it may have performed in its time as a compass to guide us through an unknown world.  The immanent regularities o social figurations are identical neither with regularities of the "mind," of individual reasoning, nor with regularities of what we call "nature," even though functionally all these different dimensions of reality are indissolubly linked to each other.  On its own, however, this general statement about the relative autonomy of social figurations is of little help in their understanding; it remains empty an ambiguous, unless the actual dynamics of social interweaving are directly illustrated by reference to specific and empirically demonstrable changes . . .

The compulsion of competitive situations drove a number of feudal lords into conflict, how the circle of competitors was slowly narrowed, and this led to the monopoly of one and finally—in conjunction with other mechanisms of integration such as processes of increasing capital formation and functional differentiation—to the formation of an absolutist state.  This whole reorganization of human relationships went hand in hand with corresponding changes in men's manners, in their personality structure, the provisional result of which is our form of "civilized" conduct and sentiment.  The connection between these specific changes in the structure of human relations and the corresponding changes structure the personality will be discussed again shortly.  But consideration of these mechanisms of integration is also relevant in a more general way to an understanding of the civilizing process.  Only if we see the compelling force with which a particular social structure, a particular form of social intertwining, veers through its tensions to a specific change and so to other forms of intertwining, can we understand how those changes arise in human mentality, in the patterning of the malleable psychological apparatus, which can be observed over and again in human history from earliest times to the resent.  And only then, therefore, can we understand that the psychological change involved by civilization is subject to a quite specific order and direction, although it was not planned by individual people or produced by "reasonable," purposive measures.  Civilization is not "reasonable;" not "rational," any more than, it is "irrational."  It is set in motion blindly, and kept in motion by the autonomous dynamics of a web of relationships, by specific changes in the way people are bound to live together.  But it is by no means impossible that we can make out of it something more "reasonable," something that functions better in terms of our needs and purposes.  For it is precisely in conjunction with the civilizing process that, the blind dynamics of men intertwining in their deeds and aims gradually leads towards greater scope for planned intervention into both the social and individual structures—intervention based on a growing knowledge of the unplanned dynamics of these structures.

B The Division of Labor
But which specific changes in the way people are bonded to each other mould their personality in a "civilizing" manner?  The most general answer to this question too, an answer based on what was said earlier about the changes in Western society, is very simple.  From the earliest periods of the history of the Occident to the present, social functions have become more and more differentiated under the pressure of competition.  The more differentiated they become, the larger grows the number of functions and thus of people on whom the individual constantly depends in all his actions, from the simplest and most commonplace to the more complex and uncommon.  As more and more people must attune their conduct to that of others, the web of actions must be organized more and more strictly and accurately, if each individual action is to fulfil its social function.  The individual is compelled to regulate his conduct in an increasingly differentiated, more even and more stable, manner.  That this involves not only a conscious regulation has already been stressed.  Precisely this is characteristic of the psychological changes in the course of civilization: the more complex and stable control of conduct is increasingly instilled in the individual from his earliest years as an automatism, a self compulsion that he cannot resist even if he consciously wishes to.  The web of actions grows so complex and extensive, the effort required to behave "correctly" within it becomes so great, that beside the individual's conscious self-control an automatic, blindly functioning apparatus of self-control is firmly established.  This seeks to prevent offenses, to socially acceptable behavior by a wall of deep-rooted fears, but, just because it operates blindly and by habit, it frequently indirectly produces such collisions with social reality.  But whether consciously or unconsciously, the direction of this transformation of conduct in the form of an increasingly differentiated regulation of impulses is determined by the direction of the process of social differentiation, by the progressive division of functions and the growth of the interdependency chains into which, directly or indirectly, every impulse, every move of an individual becomes integrated.
A simple way of picturing the difference between the integration of the individual within a complex society and within a less complex one is to think of their different road systems.  These are in a sense spatial functions of a social integration which, in its totality, cannot be expressed merely in terms of concepts derived from the four-dimensional continuum.  One should think of the country roads of a simple warrior society with a barter economy, uneven, unmetalled, exposed to damage from wind and rain.  With few exceptions, there is very little traffic; the main danger which man here represents for other men is an attack by soldiers or thieves.  When people look around them, scanning the trees and hills or the road itself, they do so primarily because they must always be prepared for armed attack, and only secondarily because they have to avoid collision.  Life on the main roads of this society demands a constant readiness to fight, and free play of the emotions in defense of one's life or possessions from physical attack.  Traffic on the main roads of a big city in the complex society of our time demands a quite different molding of the psychological apparatus.  Here the danger of physical attack is minimal.  Cars are rushing in all directions; pedestrians and cyclists are trying to thread their way through the mêlée of cars; policemen stand at the main crossroads to regulate the traffic with varying success.  But this external control is founded on the assumption that every individual is himself regulating his behavior with the utmost exactitude in accordance with the necessities of this network.  The chief danger that people here represent for others results from " someone in this bustle losing his self-control.  A constant and highly differentiated regulation of one's own behavior is needed for the individual to steer his way through traffic.  If the strain of such constant self-control becomes too much for an individual, this is enough to put himself and others in mortal danger.

This is, of course, only an image.  The tissue of chains of action into which each individual act, within this complex society is woven, is far more intricate, and the self-control to which he is accustomed from infancy far more deeply rooted, than this example shows.  But at least it gives an impression of how the great formative pressure on the make-up of "civilized" man, his constant and differentiated self-constraint, is connected to the growing differentiation and stabilizing of social functions and the growing multiplicity and variety of activities that continuously
have to be attuned to each other.

The pattern of self-constraints, the template by which drives are molded, certainly varies widely according to the function and position of the individual within this network, and there are even today in different sectors of the Western world variations of intensity and stability in the apparatus of self-constraint that seem at face value very large.  At this point a multitude of particular questions are. raised, and the sociogenetic method may give access to their answers.  But when compared to the psychological make-up, of people in, less complex societies, these differences and degrees within more complex societies become less significant, and the main line of transformation, which is the primary concern of this study, emerges very clearly: as the social fabric grows more intricate, the sociogenic apparatus of individual self-control also becomes more differentiated, more all-round and more stable.

C The Distribution of violence and its passions
But the advancing differentiation of social functions is only the first, most general of the social transformations which we observe in inquiring into the change in psychological make-up known as "civilization."  Hand in hand with this advancing division of functions goes a total reorganization of the social fabric.  It was shown in detail earlier why, when the division, of functions is low, the central organs of societies of a certain size are relatively unstable and liable to disintegration.  It has been shown how, through specific figurational pressures, centrifugal tendencies, the mechanisms of feudalization, are slowly neutralized and how, step by step, a more stable central organization, a firmer monopolization of physical force, are established.  The peculiar stability of the apparatus of mental self-restraint which emerges as a decisive trait built into the habits of every "civilized" human being, stands in the closest relationship to the monopolization of physical force and the growing stability of the central organs of society.  Only with the formation of this kind of relatively stable monopolies do societies acquire those characteristics as a result of which the individuals forming them get attuned, from infancy, to a highly regulated and differentiated pattern of self-restraint; only in conjunction with these mon6polies does this kind of self-restraint require a higher degree of automaticity, does it become, as it were, "second nature."

When a monopoly of force is formed, pacified social spaces are created which are normally free from acts of violence.  The pressures acting on individual people within them are of a different kind than previously.  Forms of non-physical violence that always existed, but hitherto had always been mingled or fused with physical force, are now separated from the latter; they persist in, a changed form internally within the more pacified societies.  They are most visible so far as the standard thinking of our time is concerned as types of economic violence.  In reality, however, there is a whole set of means whose monopolization can enable men as groups or as individuals to enforce their will upon others.  The monopolization of the means of production, of "economic" means, is only one of those which stand out in fuller relief when the means of physical violence become monopolized, when, in other words, in a more pacified state society the free use of physical force by those who are physically stronger is no longer possible.

In general, the direction in which the behavior and the affective make-up of people change when the structure of human relationships is transformed in the manner described, is as follows: societies without a stable monopoly of force are always societies in which the division of functions is relatively slight and the chains of action binding individuals together are comparatively short.  Conversely, societies with more stable monopolies of force, always first embodied in a large princely or royal court, are societies in which the division of functions is more or less advanced, in which the chains of action binding individuals together are longer and the functional dependencies between people greater.  Here the individual is largely protected from sudden attack, the irruption of physical violence into his life.  But at the same time he is himself forced to suppress in himself any passionate impulse urging him to attack another physically.  And the other forms of compulsion which now prevail in the pacified social spaces pattern the individual's conduct and affective impulses in the same direction.  The closer the web of interdependence becomes in which the individual is enmeshed with the advancing division of functions, the larger the social spaces over which this network extends and which become integrated into functional or institutional units—the more threatened is the social existence of the individual who gives way to spontaneous impulses and emotions, the greater is the social advantage of those able to moderate their affects, and the more strongly is each individual constrained from an early age to take account of the effects of his own or other people's actions on a whole series of links in the social chain.  The moderation of spontaneous emotions, the tempering of affects, the extension of space beyond the moment into the past and future, the habit of connecting events in terms of chains of cause and effect—all these are different aspects of the same transformation of conduct which necessarily takes place with the monopolization of physical violence, and the lengthening of the chains of social action and interdependence.  It is a "civilizing" change of behavior.

The transformation of the nobility from a class of knights into a class of courtiers is an example of this.  In the earlier s here where violence is an unavoidable and everyday event, and where the individual's chains of dependence are relatively short, because he largely subsists directly from the produce of his own land, a strong and continuous moderation of drives and affects is neither necessary, possible nor useful.  The life of the warriors themselves, but also that of all others living in a society with a warrior upper class, is threatened continually and directly by acts of physical violence; thus, measured against life in more pacified zones, it oscillates between extremes.  Compared to this other society, it permits the warrior extraordinary freedom in living out his feelings and passions, it allows savage joys, the uninhibited satisfaction of pleasure from women, or of hatred in destroying and tormenting anything hostile.  But at the same time it threatens the warrior, if he is defeated, with an extraordinary degree of exposure to the violence and the passions of others, and with such radical subjugation, such extreme forms of physical torment as are later, when physical torture, imprisonment and the radical humiliation of individuals has become the monopoly of a central authority, hardly to be found in normal life.  With this monopolization, the physical threat to the individual is slowly depersonalized.  It no longer depends quite so directly on momentary affects; it is gradually subjected to increasingly strict rules and laws; and finally, within certain limits and with certain fluctuations, the physical threat when laws are infringed is itself made less severe.

 The greater spontaneity of drives and the higher measure of physical threat, that are encountered wherever strong and stable central monopolies have not yet formed are, as can be seen, complementary.  In this social structure the victorious have a greater possibility of giving free rein to their drives and affects, but greater too is the direct threat to one man from the affects of another, and more omnipresent the possibility of subjugation and boundless humiliation if one falls into the power of another.  This applies not, only to the relationship of warrior to warrior, for whom in the course of monetarization and the narrowing of free competition an affect-moderating code of conduct is already slowly forming; within society at large the lesser measure of restraint impinging upon seigneurs initially stands in sharper contrast than later to the confined existence of their female counterparts and to the radical exposure to their whims of dependents, defeated, and bondsmen.

 To the structure of this society with its extreme polarization, its continuous uncertainties, corresponds the structure of the individuals who form it and of their conduct.  Just as in the relations between man and man danger arises more abruptly, the possibility of victory or liberation more suddenly and incalculably before the individual, so he is also thrown more frequently and directly between pleasure and pain.  The social function of the free warrior is indeed scarcely so constructed that dangers are long foreseeable, that the effects of particular actions can be considered three or four links ahead, even though his function is slowly developing in this direction throughout the Middle Ages with the increasing centralization of armies.  But for the time being it is the immediate present that provides the impulse.  As the momentary situation changes, so do affective expressions; if it brings pleasure this is savored to the full, without calculation or thought of the possible consequences in the future.  If it brings danger, imprisonment, defeat, these too must be suffered more desolately.  And the incurable unrest, the perpetual proximity of danger, the whole atmosphere of this unpredictable and insecure life, in which there are at most small and transient islands of more protected existence, often engenders even without external cause, sudden switches from the most exuberant pleasure to the deepest despondency and remorse.  The personality, if we may put it thus, is incomparably more ready and accustomed to leap with undiminishing intensity from one extreme to the other, and slight impressions, uncontrollable associations are often enough to induce these immense fluctuations.

 As the structure of human relations changes, as monopoly organizations of physical force develop and the individual is held no longer in the sway of constant feuds and wars but rather in the more permanent compulsions of peaceful functions based on the acquisition of money or prestige, affect-expressions too slowly gravitate towards a middle line.  The fluctuations in behavior and affects do not disappear, but are moderated.  The peaks and abysses are smaller, the changes less abrupt.

We can see what is changing more clearly from its obverse.  Through the formation of monopolies of force, the threat which one man represents for another is subject to stricter control and becomes more calculable.  Everyday life is freer of sudden reversals of fortune.  Physical violence is confined to barracks; and from this store-house it breaks out only in extreme cases, in times of war or social upheaval, into individual life.  As the monopoly of certain specialist groups it is normally excluded from the life of others; and these specialists, the whole monopoly organization of force, now stand guard only in the margin of social life as a control on individual conduct.

Even in this form as a control organization, however, physical violence and the threat emanating from it have a determining influence on individuals in society, whether they know it or not.  It is, however, no longer a perpetual insecurity that it brings into the life of the individual, but a peculiar form of security.  It no longer throws him, in  the swaying fortunes of battle, as the physical victor or vanquished, between mighty outbursts of pleasure and terror; a continuous, uniform pressure is exerted on individual life by the physical violence stored behind the scenes of everyday life, a pressure totally familiar and hardly perceived, conduct and drive economy having been adjusted from earliest youth to this social structure.  It is in fact the whole social mould, the code of conduct which changes; and accordingly with it changes, as has been said before, not only this or that specific form of conduct but its whole pattern, the whole structure of the way individuals steer themselves.  The monopoly organization of physical violence does not usually constrain the individual by a direct threat.  A strong, predictable compulsion or pressure mediated in a variety of ways is constantly exerted on the individual.  This operates to a considerable extent through the medium of his own reflection.  It is normally only potentially present in society, as an agency of control; the actual compulsion is one that the individual exerts on himself either as a result of his knowledge of the possible consequences of his moves in the game in intertwining activities, or as a result of corresponding gestures of adults which have helped to pattern his own behavior as a child.  The monopolization of physical violence, the concentration of arms and armed men under one authority, makes the use of violence more or less calculable, and forces unarmed men in the pacified social spaces to restrain their own violence through foresight or reflection; in other words it imposes on people a greater or lesser degree of self-control.

 This is not to say that every form of self-control was entirely lacking in medieval warrior society or in other societies without a complex and stable monopoly of physical violence.  The agency of individual self-control, the super-ego, the conscience or whatever we call it, is instilled, imposed and maintained in such warrior societies only in direct relation to acts of physical violence; its form matches this life in its greater contrasts and more abrupt transitions.  Compared to the self-control agency in more pacified societies, it is diffuse, unstable, only a slight barrier to violent emotional outbursts.  The fears securing socially "correct" conduct are not yet banished to remotely the same extent from the individual's consciousness into his so-called "inner life."  As the decisive danger does not come from failure or relaxation of self-control, but from direct external physical threat, habitual fear predominantly takes the form of external powers.  And as this fear is less stable, the control apparatus too is less encompassing, more one-sided or partial.  In such a society extreme self-control in enduring pain may be instilled; but this is complemented by what, measured by a different standard, appears as an extreme form of freewheeling of affects in torturing others.  Similarly, in certain sectors of medieval society we find extreme forms of asceticism, self-restraint and renunciation, contrasting to a no less extreme indulgence of pleasure in others, and frequently enough we encounter sudden switches from one attitude to the other in the life of an individual person.  The restraint the individual here imposes on himself, the struggle against his own flesh, is no less intense and one-sided, no less radical and passionate than its counterpart, the fight against others and the maximum enjoyment of pleasures.

 What is established with the monopolization of physical violence in the pacified social spaces is a different type of self-control or self-constraint.  It is a more dispassionate self-control.  The controlling agency forming itself as part of the individual's personality structure corresponds to the controlling agency forming itself in society at large.  The one like the other tends to impose a highly differentiated regulation upon all passionate impulses, upon men's conduct all around.  Both—each to a large extent mediated by the other—exert a constant, even pressure to inhibit affective outbursts.  They damp down extreme fluctuations in behavior and emotions.  As the monopolization of physical force reduces the fear and terror one man must have for another, but at the same time reduces the possibility of causing others terror, fear or torment, and therefore certain possibilities of pleasurable emotional release, the constant self-control to which the individual is now, increasingly accustomed seeks to reduce the contrasts and sudden switches in conduct, and the affective charge of all self-expression.  The pressures operating upon the individual now tend to produce a transformation of the whole drive and affect economy in the direction of a more continuous, stable and even regulation' of drives and affects in all areas of conduct, in all sectors of his life

 And it is in exactly the same direction that the, unarmed compulsions operate, the constraints without direct physical violence to which the individual is now exposed in the pacified spaces, and of which economic restraints are an instance.  They too are less affect-charged, more moderate, stable and less erratic than the constraints exerted by one person on another in a monopoly-free warrior society.  And they, too, embodied in the entire spectrum of functions open to the individual in society, induce incessant hindsight and foresight transcending the moment and corresponding to the longer and more complex chains in which each act is now automatically enmeshed.  They require the, individual incessantly to overcome his momentary affective impulses in keeping with the longer-term effects of his behavior.  Relative to the other standard, they instill a more even self-control encompassing his -whole conduct like a tight ring, and a more stead regulation of his drives according to the social norms.  Moreover, as always, it is not only the adult functions themselves which immediately produce this tempering of drives and affects; partly automatically, partly quite consciously through their own conduct and habits, adults induce corresponding behavior-patterns in children.  From earliest youth the individual is trained in the constant restraint and. foresight that he needs for adult functions.  This self-restraint is ingrained so deeply from an early age that, like a kind of relay-station of social standards an automatic self-supervision of his drives, a more differentiated and more stable "super-ego" develops in him, and a part of the forgotten drive impulses and affect inclinations is no longer directly within reach of the level of consciousness at all.

 Earlier, in warrior society, the individual could use physical violence if he was strong and powerful enough; he could openly indulge his inclinations in many directions that have subsequently been closed by social prohibitions.  But he paid for this greater opportunity of direct pleasure with a greater chance of direct and open fear.  Medieval conceptions of hell give us an idea of how strong this fear between man and man was.  Both joy and pain were discharged more openly and freely.  But the individual was their prisoner; he was hurled back and forth by his own feeling of nature.  He had less control of his passions; he was more controlled by them.

 Later, as the conveyor belts running through his existence grow longer and more complex, the individual learns to control himself more steadily; he is now less a prisoner of his passions than before.  But as he is now more tightly bound by his functional dependence on the activities of an ever-larger number of people, he is much more restricted in his conduct, in his chances of directly satisfying his drives and passions.  Life becomes in a sense less dangerous, but also less emotional or pleasurable, at least as far as the direct release of pleasure is concerned.  And for what is lacking in everyday life a substitute is created in dreams, in books and pictures.  So, on their way to becoming courtiers, the nobility read novels of chivalry; the bourgeois contemplate violence and erotic passion in films.  Physical classes, wars and feuds diminish, and anything recalling them, even the cutting up of dead animals and the use of the knife at table, is banished from view or at least subjected to more and more precise social rules.  But at the same time the battlefield is, in a sense, moved within.  Part of the tensions and passions that were earlier directly released in the struggle of man and man, must now be worked out within the human being.  The more peaceful constraints exerted on him by his relations to others are mirrored within him; an individualized pattern of near-automatic habits is established and consolidated within him, a specific "super-ego," which endeavors to control, transform or suppress his affects in keeping with the social structure.  But the drives, the passionate affects, that can no longer directly manifest themselves in the relationships between people, often struggle no less violently within the 'individual against this supervising part of himself.  And this semi-automatic struggle of the person with himself does not always find a happy resolution; not always does the self-transformation required by life in this society lead to a new balance between drive-satisfaction and drive-control.  Often enough it is subject to major or minor disturbances, revolts of one part of the person against the other, or a permanent atrophy, which makes the performance of social functions even more difficult, or impossible.  The vertical oscillations, if we may so describe them, the leaps from fear to joy, pleasure to remorse are reduced, while the horizontal fissure running right through the whole person, the tension between "super-ego" and "unconscious"-the wishes and desires that cannot be remembered-increases.

 Here too the basic characteristics of these patterns of intertwining, if one pursues not merely their static structures but their sociogenesis, prove to be relatively simple.  Through the inter dependence of larger groups of people and the exclusion of physical violence from them, a social apparatus is established in which the constraints between people are lastingly transformed into self-constraints.  These self-constraints, a function of the perpetual hindsight and foresight instilled in the individual from childhood in accordance with his integration in extensive chains of action, have partly the form of conscious self-control and partly that of automatic habit.  They tend towards a more even moderation, a more continuous restraint, a more exact control of drives and affects in accordance with the more differentiated pattern of social interweaving.