Showing papers by "Alvin W. Gouldner published in 1981"
TL;DR: The discussion between de Swaan and Alt bears on but conflates two issues of considerable import as discussed by the authors, the agoraphobia problematic and the civilizing process, a term of uncertain irony with which Norbert Elias characterizes the emergence of our modem era.
Abstract: The discussion between de Swaan and Alt bears on but conflates two issues of considerable import. One, the agoraphobia problematic, has importance because it touches on that intimate savagery now blandly described as "the relations between the sexes". The second is the "civilizing process," a term of uncertain irony, with which Norbert Elias characterizes the emergence of our modem era. While connected, the two are scarcely more identical than a cat and dog who become blurred in battle. The civilizing process is, we might say with only a touch of indelicacy, Norbert Elias's somewhat belated entry into the Dijon contest that Rousseau won when, against the common sense of his time and the optimism of its philosophes, Rousseau churlishly insisted that modern progress was not of one piece and that the new burgeoning of the sciences and arts did not necessarily entail a civilizing cultivation of human manners and relationships. Marx was later to submit a convergent report in the idiom of political economy, observing that the advance of technology was accompanied by a growing reserve army of the unemployed and a spreading alienation.
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