In the second volume of his book, the volume that is called State Formation and Civilization. Elias tries to come up with an explanation of the civilizing process. He tells us, how many small territories that occupied the part of Europe, that we call today, France. Slowly but surely united to form a larger whole. That Process of State Formation took many centuries before it was completed, with the Rule of Louis the 14th, the Sun King, at the end of the 17th century. Following [INAUDIBLE] here, Elias describes this process as a gradual development of a monopoly over the means of violence by a decentralized state. And the development of a monopoly over the means of taxation over the same state. Taxpayers money is needed to pay the officials that are interested with the means of violence. And those officials are needed to force the people to pay their taxes. So, you can say that the two monopolies pre-suppose one another. And that may explain in part, why it took such a long period of time for this structure to develop. Elias writes hundreds of pages to describe the ups and downs in this Process of State Formation. Sometimes, one is reminded reading the book of the ups and downs in the process of the formation of European union in our own days. Episodes when the former antagonists seem to melt together under the influence of centripetal forces, are alternated with periods when the centrifugal forces become stronger. And they seem to fragment, what began to look like a structure with some stability. But, in the end of this long and very torturous process, the outcome is unmistakable. We witness the appearance of the french nation state as we still know it today. One of the outcomes of this process is that, the ordinary citizens, and I mean, everybody except the state officials, who control the means of violence. The ordinary citizens are discern. They are forced, from now on, to resolve their internal conflicts in a peaceful way. Because the use of violent force by them, is not legally forbidden. You could say, the citizens are pacified and they're are pacified in a forceful way. And again, this external force to stay away from violent solutions becomes, after some generations, internalized. People develop a sort of Non-violent when they are confronted with acts of violence. They are shocked. They are dismayed. They feel embarrassed, ashamed. But maybe, I should add here that, for modern people, brutal violence is not only a source of shame. It may sometimes also be a source of fascination and in its simulated forms, it may even be a source of pleasure, sometimes. Our contemporary popular culture. The box office movies. The computer games. The most popular video series. They all testify to that ambivalence, repugnance of violence and at the same time, a kind of, fascination with violence. But one thing is certain, and that is, that in everyday life, people learn to situationally control their inner most aggressive impulses. They are not allowed anymore to react with violent means. But there are so many other and more subtle ways to fight your enemies. Using the discoveries of his former book on the core society of [INAUDIBLE], Elias now, describes how the courgers succeeded on outwitting their adversaries under the new conditions. Those descendents of a waring class. Those grandsons of a military elite are now forced to continue their struggles under the strict rules, of a kind of choreography that was enacted around the king of France. And it's here at the court of [INAUDIBLE] that new behavioral standards are developed. The highest prizes now, are reserved for those who know, when you have to hide your aggressive feelings, and when you can outmaneuver your enemy. It's like a game of chess, you must foresee the moves of your adversary even before he thought of them. You must be strategic. You must be extremely rational. And most of all, you should master your impulses. You should only play out your advantage at the moment, when the time is ripe. So at this court, we can see a social constraint towards self-constraint. And over a longer period of time, those internal controls become automatically operating. Self-steering mechanisms that constrain people from the inside. Now, the middle class people observe with admiration, the behavioral innovations at the court. And they try to imitate those upper class people. And soon, those codes of conduct trickle down from the highest classes of society, into the lower ranks. In this way, the standards that one's very typical of only a small segment of society, the elite, the top of society are more, and more generalized. And so, models of civilized behavior are now circulating through the entire society.
