Norbert Elias has been described as among the great sociologists of the 20th century. A collection of his most important writings, this book sets out Elias' thinking during the course of his long career, with a discussion of how his work relates to that of other sociologists.

Originally published in 1991 and now reissued by Continuum International, this book consists of three sections. The first, written in 1939, was either left out of Elias's most famous book, The Civilizing Process, or was written along with it. Part 2 was written between 1940 and 1960. Part 3 is from 1987. The entire book is a study of the unique relationship between the individual and society--Elias's best-known theme and the basis for the discipline of sociology.

This book contains Elias's broadest statement of the fundamentals of sociology, in important respects very different from the discipline as it is institutionalized today. In his vision, sociology is concerned with the whole course of the development of human society. Translated by Grace Morrissey, Stephen Mennell, and Edmund Jephcott. Edited by Artur Bogner, Katie Liston, and Stephen Mennell.

This book presents key conceptualizations of violence as developed by Norbert Elias. The authors explain and exemplify these concepts by analyzing Elias’s late texts, comparing his views to those of Sigmund Freud, and by analyzing the work of filmmaker Michael Haneke. The authors then discuss the strengths and shortcomings of Elias’s thoughts on violence by examining various social processes such as colonization, imperialism, and the Brazilian civilizing process—in addition to the ambivalence of state violence. The final chapters suggest how these concepts can be used to explain difficulties in implementing democracy, grappling with memories of violence, and state building after democracy.

This book provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the key aspects of Norbert Elias's work.

Few sociologists of the first rank have scandalised the academic world to the extent that Elias did. Developed out of the German sociology of knowledge in the 1920s, Elias’s sociology contains a sweeping radicalism which declares an academic ‘war on all your houses’. His sociology of the ‘human condition’ sweeps aside the contemporary focus on ‘modernity’ and rejects most of the paradigms of sociology as one-sided, economistic, teleological, individualistic and/or rationalistic. As sociologists, Elias also asks us to distance ourselves from mainstream psychology, history and above all, philosophy, which is summarily abandoned, although carried forward on a higher level. This enlightening book written by a close friend and pupil of Elias, is the first book to explain the refractory, uncomfortable, side of Elias’s sociological radicalism and to brace us for its implications. It is also the first in-depth analysis of Elias’s last work The Symbol Theory in the light of selected contemporary developments in archaeology, anthropology and evolutionary theory.

A discussion of techniques used by rulers to assert leadership and social control includes a comparison of the regimes of Louis XIV in France and Adolf Hitler in Germany

The Civilizing Process stands out as Norbert Elias' greatest work, tracing the "civilizing" of manners and personality in Western Europe since the late Middle Ages by demonstrating how the formation of states and the monopolization of power within them changed Western society forever.

This new edition of this classic text from one of the major figures of world sociology includes an introduction published in English for the first time. In Norbert Elias's hands, a local community study of tense relations between an established group and outsiders becomes a microcosm that illuminates a wide range of sociological configurations including racial, ethnic, class and gender relations. The Established and the Outsiders examines the mechanisms of stigmatization, taboo and gossip, monopolization of power, collective fantasy and `we' and `they' images which support and reinforce divisions in society. Developing aspects of Elias's thinking that relate his work to current sociological concerns, it presents the