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Civilization, Happiness and the Thinking Millipede: A Commentary on Norbert Elias’s Spontaneity and Self-consciousness

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Excitement Processes

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Abstract

When Elias chose the polarity between spontaneity and self-consciousness in his text on the future of leisure, he came, in contrast to the thinking of some Frankfurt-school-theorists, to the conclusion that more spare-time as a consequence of technological progress might well lead to more directness of emotional experience. 1) How can we understand the core idea of this paper against the background of Elias’s already published opus? 2) Having written on the emotional costs of highly productive Western societies myself, I would like to compare Elias’s newly found text with my own solution. 3) How could such a book be written today, considering that technology and the economy have since then dramatically changed?

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Quest for Excitement in Unexciting Societies, first published in 1969, and Leisure in the Spare-Time Spectrum (first published in 1971) form part (as Chaps. 2 and 3) of the book Quest for Excitement (Elias and Dunning 2008[1986]).

  2. 2.

    I am grateful to Dieter Reicher who made me aware of the profound implications of this connection between Elias and Bücher.

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Acknowledgements

I want to thank Jonathan Fletcher, Amsterdam, not only for his generous and invaluable help with the English translation of the original German version of this, but also for his perceptive sociological comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Graz, Austria

    Helmut Kuzmics

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  1. Helmut Kuzmics
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Correspondence to Helmut Kuzmics .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Goethe-University Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

    Jan Haut

  2. Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin, Ireland

    Paddy Dolan

  3. Karl-Franzens-University of Graz, Graz, Austria

    Dieter Reicher

  4. Universidad Europea Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Raúl Sánchez García

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Kuzmics, H. (2018). Civilization, Happiness and the Thinking Millipede: A Commentary on Norbert Elias’s Spontaneity and Self-consciousness . In: Haut, J., Dolan, P., Reicher, D., Sánchez García, R. (eds) Excitement Processes. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-14912-3_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-14912-3_4

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