NEC News

In the open-access article “The dialectic of civilisation: Norbert Elias, the triad of controls, and social-ecological transformation,” recently published in the journal Culture, Practice & Europeanization, Matthias Schmelzer examines the contemporary relevance of Norbert Elias’s theory of civilisation. The article investigates to what extent Elias’s “triad of controls” — control over the self, over others, and over nature — is suited to understanding current ecological, economic, and political crises. At the same time, it argues that this theoretical framework remains incomplete without an explicit political-ecological extension.

Starting from the thesis that economic growth can historically be understood as a specific manifestation of the civilising process, the article highlights its ambivalent effects. While growth has contributed to the stabilisation of modern societies, it simultaneously generates “destabilising effects — ecological overshoot, social fragmentation, and affective exhaustion.” Under conditions of fossil modernity, civilisational progress thus partially turns into its opposite. The article calls for a dialectical redefinition of transformation and civilisation theory. Post-growth is not understood as a “decivilising regression,” but as a possible reconfiguration of the triad — oriented towards collective self-limitation, localised interdependencies, and “convivial autonomy.” In doing so, the article contributes theoretically to socio-ecological transformation research and to the further development of Eliasian process sociology in the Anthropocene.

The article was published in the academic journal Culture, Practice & Europeanization (CPE), volume 10(2), 2025, as part of a special issue on Norbert Elias’s process sociology entitled A climate of (de-)civilisation?, edited by Bernd Sommer, Marta Bucholc, and André Saramago.

Here is the publication.