Introduction

Loïc Wacquant shares with Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu an interest in the mechanisms through which political, socioeconomic and cultural change leads to the transformation of human habitus in the modern world. There are few existing social analysts who have done more than Wacquant to place the neglect and deprivation of life in the urban periphery on the policy and research agendas of the social sciences. In drawing attention to the violence and de-pacification of the ‘hyper-ghetto’ in the US, and the ‘degraded ecology’ of the banlieues and marginal communities of Western Europe, the research agenda that is wrapped up in his analysis of advanced marginality is complementary to Elias's historical sociology of the processes that create divisions between the established and the outsiders in the modern world (Elias, 1982; Elias and Scotson, 1965). There seem to be real synergies between the two theoretical perspectives that this chapter explores.

There is a sense in which the Eliasian thesis on the civilising process has been waiting for Wacquant's emerging analysis of advanced marginality to boost its contemporary relevance: to sketch out a framework for understanding the circumstances that lead to de-civilising tendencies in present-day societies governed by neoliberal market principles. While Elias's developmental theory of the civilising process describes the consequences for social relationships and mentalities resulting from the pacification of society, he did not consider to any significant extent the contradictions of that process, and the theory has continued to appear less than convincing in accounting for the conflict, violence and disorderly features of Western society, both historically and today. Indeed it has often appeared to be a theory exclusively about the socially integrative aspects of modernity, about the sensibilities of the established to the neglect of documenting the experience and emotions of the outsiders.

It has been obvious for some time that what Eliasian process-sociology needed to preserve its currency was a coherent theory of the decivilising processes inherent in neoliberalism and global society. Eliasian sociology should be able to explain in a single theoretical structure the association between processes of pacification in contemporary Western societies with evidence of the deep-rooted disorder, violence and decay that disfigure marginal pockets of most large cities in the US and Europe today. Wacquant's analysis of advanced marginality, it is argued here, contributes to developing a rather neglected aspect of the civilising process.