Walka klas w społeczeństwie dworskim

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 hösche Gesellschaft [The Court Society]. The internal struggles of this elite are presented as a special form of guration, which Elias calls ‘court guration’ to indicate the processual nature of the phenomenon. The departure point for the author of the article’s further reec-tions is the premise that these conicts are similar to class struggle in the Marxist sense (particularly the analyses contained in Marx’s earlier writings). As a result, gurational 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 ofa revolutionary character.