Civilizing Process

In a 1983 article in Past & Present , Lawrence Stone presented evidence that showed a precipitous drop in the homicide rate in England from the 14th to the 20th century.

Why? Stone thinks that Elias’s Civilizing Process had something to do with it: “Yves Castan has shown with great brilliance the operation of the concept of honnetete’ in the eighteenth century, how the stress on civility, politeness and propriety spread down from intellectual aristocratic salons to wider sectors of society.The taming of upper-class violence by the code of the duel after the late sixteenth century was followed by the transformation of manners in the late seventeenth century, and then by the humanitarian ideology of the Enlightenment. First launched by intellectuals, lawyers, nobles and bourgeois, the theory is that these new attitudes slowly penetrated all sectors of society, with the result that interpersonal physical violence has been on the decline in all areas of life.”

Sociological factors might also figure in. Feudal society emphasized honor and status, and thus crimes against persons were viewed with horror. Crimes in bourgeois society are directed ore against property. He speculates that one can see a shift from crimes against persons to those against property “as society modernizes.”