Democracy as a global transformation of society and individuals in Norbert Elias

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to map within the books A sociedade dos indivíduos, Norbert Elias por ele mesmo and Envolvimento e alienação, as well as in the collection Escritos e ensaios, Norbert Elias’ discussion on democratization as a process of global transformation of society. Always suggesting long-term analyses, he showed that the core of civilizational processes were made up of the conflicts around the decentralization of power. Thus, the search for better ways of distributing resources and opportunities of power were, over the past five centuries, in the center of the conflicts and tensions that have produced many changes and/or expectations of changes in contemporary societies. He demonstrated that it is not possible to understand the processes of democratization without taking into account the various configurational games that establish themselves among the many groups struggling to enter the political arena in order to build new opportunities of power.