The word culture is defined as being “a particular civilization at a particular period”, better still “the ideas, customs, and art of a particular society'”. Many scholars have attempted to define culture, what elements can be identified within it, how it can be analysed and quantified, so allowing man to measure his own personal, and by extension, society's level, of civilised attainment. One scholar, Norbert Elias, in his book, The Civilizing Process, seeks to address this problem of man's cultural development and his level of civilised attainment.
Elias draws attention to the differences, between the German usage of the word Zivilisation and the English and French word civilisation. In English and French, civilisation describes “the significance of their own nations for the progress of the West and of humankind…” whereas, “in German… Zivilisation means something… comprising only the outer appearance of human beings, the surface of human existence."Elias goes on to explain that the word, which more closely relates to “pride in their own [German] achievements”, is the word, Kultur. In essence, Kultur is applied only to those achievements of an intellectual, artistic and religious nature and not in addition, as in English and French, to those accomplishments of a political, social or technical character. Elias sees civilisation as playing down national differences by highlighting the commonality of mankind. Kultur, however, stresses “national differences and the particular identity of groups”. The words kulturell and kultiviert (cultivated) are closer in their meanings to the word civilisation, although kulturell refers to “the value and character of… human products”, while kultiviert refers to “the intrinsic value of a person.”
Through an evaluation of the German civilising process, Elias makes clear the unique structures which conditioned German cultural development during the early modern period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Such structures had long ceased to be significant within French and particularly English society; language is one such structure which binds a people into a nation, but in the case of German society language acted was a separator of peoples. The upper or aristocratic classes of early modern German society spoke French, the bourgeois and lower classes spoke German. In England and France the task of learning or study was undertaken by the ruling aristocratic class, but in Germany education was the domain of the non-ruling “servers of princes”, in effect an impotent bourgeois intelligentsia.
