Norbert Elias is one of the most important and influential social
thinkers of the twentieth century. Towards the end of his life he
completed a major study of German society and culture in which he
used his key ideas to analyse the development of the country in
which he had lived for many years. "The Germans" is Elias's last
great work and it displays all of the breadth, brilliance and
originality of his other major writings.
Through a skilful interweaving of empirical evidence and
theoretical reasoning, Elias explores the ways in which the
particular features of German personality, social structure and
behaviour, arose out of Germany's past. Proceeding chronologically
from the Enlightenment to the present day, he draws particular
attention to the devastation wrought in the seventeenth century by
the Thirty Years' War; Germany's late unification compared to
countries such as Britain and France which were unified much
earlier and, as a result, enjoyed a much less discontinuous pattern
of history and social development; and the series of wars under the
leadership of the militaristic ruling strata of Prussia during
which German unification eventually took place. In the course of
this unification, he argues, large sections of the middle classes
abandoned the humanistic values which had hitherto predominated in
their social circles and became "brutalized."
Elias then examines the weakening of state control in Germany after
the First World War and the emergence of the private armies of the
"Freikorps, "destabilizing the fledgling Weimar Republic and
contributing to a terrorist movement that strove for the
restoration of authoritarian rule. He argues that these events,
whichculminated in the rise of Hitler and the Holocaust, occurred
as a result of decisions made in a context of national crisis by
ruling groups which enjoyed widespread popular support, especially
among the middle classes.
"The Germans" is a classic work. It will be welcomed by students
and researchers in sociology and social theory, politics, modern
European history and German Studies.
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