Class Struggle in Court Society

Abstract

The article discusses the social differentiation of the elite at the French court in the era of absolutism, as depicted by Norbert Elias in his book Die höfische Gesellschaft [The Court Society]. The internal struggles of this elite are presented as a special form of figuration, which Elias calls ‘court figuration’ to indicate the processual nature of the phenomenon. The departure point for the author of the article’s further reflec-
tions is the premise that these conflicts are similar to class struggle in the Marxist sense (particularly the analyses contained in Marx’s earlier writings). As a result, figurational analysis, based on Elias’s historical sociology, is shown to be a particularly useful category in studying the social differentiation lying at the base of social change, that is, in analysing both long-term processes of social change and rapid processes of
a revolutionary character.