Enlightenment rationality and civility emerged from court-society discipline of affect

Evidence

Respect for rules, censorship of feelings, and control of spontaneous impulses marked dominant Enlightenment conceptions of rationality (or at least one of its dominant strains). As Norbert Elias has long pointed out, Enlightenment rationality thus constituted – and took itself to be constituting – a dramatic shift from the affective states promoted first by religious and then by absolutist states. Civility, Elias emphasizes, is inseparable from, really a complex product of, the transformation of warrior (and I would add church-dominated) into court society with the attendant shifts and persisting postulations in morals and manners, sensitivities and sensibilities. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 220

Categorization

• DEFINE: Traces ‘civility’ to its Eliasian origin as court-society self-restraint, a useful conceptual anchor for the book’s contact/civility critique.
• XREF: Elias’s court society argument parallels the kind of anticipatory-status-discipline the reader studies; the civility-as-affect-control genealogy could generalize to how privileged groups police self-presentation.