Elias in the Footsteps of Hobbes?

Abstract

It is not uncommon for links to be drawn between the work of Norbert Elias and that of a slightly earlier German sociologist, Max Weber, to whom Elias owes a great deal. In this paper we go back much further and explore some similarities between, on the one hand, Elias’s work on the connection between the development of the state and the development of constraints on individual behaviour, which he refers to as a civilising process, and, on the other hand, the seventeenth century work of the English political thinker Thomas Hobbes on the connection between the development of sovereignty and the development of more disciplined subjects. We also seek to source these similarities in the two thinkers’ common debt to the early modern intersection between neo–Epicureanism and neo–Stoicism. None of the similarities we discuss are straight forward or certain – Elias rarely mentions Hobbes in his published work – so we make a point of highlighting differences between them as well as similarities, which is to stress the question mark in our title.