Abstract
Elias' concepts of civilizing and decivilizing processes have been widely discussed in terms of their relevance to the 20th and 21st centuries. However, this paper will take a longer-term perspective to investigate these processes.
By examining a phenomenon unique to the early modern period in Europe, witchcraft prosecutions, the concept of the long-term civilizing process may be interrogated in terms of opposing decivilizing tendencies. Early modern witchcraft trials represented a particularly brutal and widespread example of societal violence which spanned across the period that Elias had identified as being crucial in the European civilizing process.
The bloodlust and viciousness with which so many individuals were targeted in this particular period reflect an apparent irregularity in the long-term trends of social behavior; what on the surface could be regarded as a decivilizing process within the wider civilizing process. The concept and characteristics of the 'witch' represent the ultimate 'uncivilized' creature and yet the consistent social response is violent and unrestrained: torture, public humiliation and execution were a frequent hallmark of these state-sanctioned prosecutions.
While belief in witchcraft was not universal and undebated, it was a widely held belief, which was disseminated throughout the continent by respected authors and thinkers. It was this period of modernization and 'rationalization', not the 'barbarous' medieval period, which saw this form of collective violence.
The question remains: how could such a stark irregularity have risen and continued to thrive across the early modern period in which the 'chains of interdependence' were apparently increasing? The proposed solution is here to consider that these events did not contradict the principles of the rational, 'scientific' and civilizing thought that was beginning to emerge during this period but were in fact an extension of it. What may have begun on a local level as an individual feud or accusation of witchcraft born out of social resentment was transferred into the bureaucratic machine of the legal system where those who did not fit could be eliminated.
Similar to Zygmunt Bauman's assessment of bureaucracy and the Holocaust, the witchcraft trials, and in particular the mass accusations, indicate an institutional violence that was the product of a bureaucratic process. The modernizing and civilizing trends of the Early Modern period therefore perversely introduced a system of violent execution and torture that, rather than indicating a decivilizing trend, was integral to the overall civilizing process that suppressed the social deviant.
What led to a decline in prosecutions was not a repulsion towards the character of such prosecutions but rather the declining belief amongst the political and social elites in the existence of witches themselves. New more visceral enemies were becoming the focus of state bureaucratic forces, with religious considerations becoming secondary to the social upheaval and requirements of emergent empires and increasing urbanization.