Comparing Norbert Elias and Mikhail Bakhtin: The History of Laughter and the Civilizing Process

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is twofold. The first is to examine the work of Norbert Elias and Mikhail Bakhtin, which focuses on the social histories of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It does so by making explicit reference to each of the writers’ most seminal works: Elias’s The Civilizing Process (1978 [1939]) and Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World (1984 [1940]). The second aim is to reflect upon the evident similarities between Bakhtin’s focus upon the “suspension” of “established orders” and the “temporary liberation” of “truths” during carnival—and in Elias’s later revisions that he made to the overall “direction” of The Civilizing Process, which incorporated the emancipation of previously prohibited forms of conduct and the controlled release of emotions: in short, what Elias referred to as the theory of informalization processes. My argument extends to consider the potential contribution of Elias’s thinking on carnival as a pre-leisure space in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Above all, the work of Bakhtin exemplifies the need to recognize the release of emotions evident over the long term, as previously argued by Elias in the “general trends” of the civilizing process. It does so by outlining a number of ways in which a comparison of Elias and Bakhtin may further enhance figurational sociology and also historical approaches to social theory.