In "The Established and the Outsiders", Elias and Scotson explain differences in power and rank between two very similar groups - both working class - in a local community studied in the early 1960s. They show how one group monopolised sources of power and used them to exclude and stigmatise members of the other, pinpointing the role of gossip in the process. In a later theoretical introduction, Elias advanced a general theory of power relations, applying the established-outsiders model to changing power balances between classes, ethnic groups, colonised and colonisers, men and women, parents and children, gays and straights. A further theoretical development in the last year of his life is an essay inspired by Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mocking Bird", published here in English for the first time.

Between the end of the Second World War and his death in 1990, Elias published almost 60 articles on a wide range of topics. About a third of them have not previously appeared in English, and many of the rest were widely scattered and difficult to obtain. They are being published in three thematic volumes, all edited by Richard Kilminster and Stephen Mennell. In this volume, Elias develops his sociological theory of knowledge and the sciences - in the plural - to counter what he sees as the inadequacies of traditional philosophical theories. Included are savage attacks on the philosophy of Karl Popper and its damaging influence, a brilliant essay on scientific establishments, and essays on Thomas More and the social uses of utopias.

Like his father Leopold, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was dependent on a court aristocracy in whose eyes he was little more than a domestic servant. Unlike his father, however, his personal makeup was already that of the freelance artist who sought to follow the flow of his own artistic conscience and imagination rather than the courtly conventions and standards of the day. In "Mozart: the Sociology of a Genius", Elias paints a portrait of this extraordinarily gifted artist born into a society that did not yet possess either the concept of 'genius' or (at least in music) that of freelance artist. The apparent contradictions of his character - the refined elegance of his compositions and the coarseness of his lavatorial humour - reflect his uncomfortable and eventually tragic straddling of two social worlds. The volume also includes two major essays on cognate topics, previously unpublished in English: on the courtly painter Watteau's "Embarkation for Cythera", and on 'The fate of German Baroque poetry: between the traditions of court and middle class'.

This volume contains two of Elias' shorter books. "The Loneliness of the Dying" is one of his most admired works - drawing on a range of literary and historical sources, it is sensitive and even moving in its discussion of the changing social context of death and dying over the centuries. Today, when death is less familiar to most people in everyday life, the dying frequently experience the loneliness of social isolation. "Humana Conditio", written in 1985 to mark the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, has never before been published in English. 'Human beings', writes Elias, 'have made the reciprocal murdering of people a permanent institution. Wars are part of a fixed tradition of humanity. They are anchored in its social institutions and in the social habitus of people, even the most peace-loving'. Elias' meditation on the human lot ranges over the whole of human history, to international relations and the future of humanity.

Almost half of the 28 essays in this volume have not been published in English before, and many of the others are little-known. Some directly express Elias's dissatisfaction with the historical, present-centered trend of modern sociology. Others scintillatingly show how wide-ranging were Elias's own sociological interests. Topics include, among many others: the work of Theodor Adorno; sociology and psychiatry; psychosomatic illness; human emotions; communities in long-term perspective; the changing balance of power between the sexes; African art; football; and even pigeon racing. Edited by Richard Kilminster and Stephen Mennell.

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.

Philosophers and social scientists have for decades - centuries even - tied themselves in knots over the supposed problem of 'individual' versus 'society', and its offshoots such as 'agency' and 'structure'. Elias shows the falsity of problem, which ought to be easily resolved by thinking in terms of processes extending over the generations - though in practice the baleful influence of philosophy leads to its constant resurrection. "The Society of Individuals" consists of three essays, the first written in 1939, the second dating from the 1940s and 1950s, and the third a final reflection composed in 1987 only three years before Elias' death. In each, Elias takes the discussion to a new level, demonstrating that individualisation is an inherent component of the personal socialisation process and of inter-generational civilising processes, exploding the myth of the 'We-less ego', and introducing important conceptual innovations, including 'I-identity' versus 'We-identity' and the 'We-I balance'.

Ranging in date from Elias's teenage years before the First World War to the 1930s, the writings in this volume previously unpublished in English include the essay 'On Seeing in Nature', his doctoral dissertation 'Idea and Individual', a response to Karl Mannheim's famous paper on cultural competition, and a number of short stories contributed to a newspaper. Other essays collected together here concern primitive art, the sociology of German anti-Semitism, kitsch style and the age of kitsch, and the expulsion of the Huguenots from France. This edition includes as an appendix a draft outline of Elias's Habilitation thesis begun under Alfred Weber. Early Writings have been translated from the German edition, Fruschriften, published by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt/Main as volume 1 of the Norbert Elias Gesammelte Schriften, 2002.

Elias effectively founded the modern sociology of sport in collaboration with Eric Dunning in the 1960s and 1970s. They argue that in highly constrained, 'civilised' societies, sports - as well as a spectrum of other cultural and leisure activities - are to be understood not in terms of 'relaxation' but rather of the need for pleasurable excitement and its pleasurable resolution.The topics range historically from the violence of the ancient Greek Olympic Games to foxhunting, early forms of football, and the question of why Britain proved to be the cradle of so many modern sports. And, today, what are the effects of achievement striving in elite sports? Why has spectator violence become such a problem? Why do so many sports retain the character of a 'male preserve'? Originally written in English, this volume has been thoroughly revised by Eric Dunning and includes one hitherto unpublished essay by Elias and a new essay by Dunning, bringing up to date his interpretation of football hooliganism.

Nobert Elias (1897-1990) is among the great sociologists of the twentieth century. Born in Germany, Elias earned a doctorate in philosophy and then turned to sociology, working with Max Weber's younger brother, Alfred Weber, and with Karl Mannheim. He later fled the Nazi regime in 1935 and spent most of his life in Britain. He is best known for his book, "The Civilizing Process," wherein he traces the subtle changes in manners among the European upper classes since the Middle Ages, and shows how those seemingly innocuous changes in etiquette reflected profound transformations of power relations in society. He later applied these insights to a wide range of subjects, from art and culture to the control of violence, the sociology of sports, the development of knowledge and the sciences, and the methodology of sociology.
This volume is a carefully chosen collection of Elias's most important writings and includes many of his most brilliant ideas. The development of Elias's thinking during the course of his long career is traced along with a discussion of how his work relates to other major sociologists and how the various selections are interconnected. The result is a consistent and stimulating look at one of sociology's founding thinkers.

Studies on the Germans, Volume 11 of the Collected Works, was first published in German in 1989, exactly 50 years after Elias' most famous work, On the Process of Civilisation. The essays in the book were written independently of each other over three decades. In this new edition, Elias' original English text of the extremely important essay 'The breakdown of civilisation' is published for the first time. Other essays include those on duelling and its wider social significance, as well as on nationalism, civilisation and violence, and post-war terrorism in the Federal Republic of Germany. All the essays have been newly annotated by the editors, especially to make clear many historical references that Elias, unrealistically, assumed his readers would understand without further explanation.

In this profound book, Elias characteristically turns an ancient philosophical question - what is time? - into a researchable theoretical-empirical problem. What we call 'time' is neither an innate property of the human mind nor an immutable quality of the 'external' world. Rather it is an achievement of the human capacity for 'synthesis', for using symbolic thought to make connections between two or more sequences of events. In the course of human social development, that capacity has itself changed and developed. It is originally written in English. Two later additional sections have been translated by Edmund Jephcott.

Translated by Grace Morrissey, Stephen Mennell and Edmund Jephcott, volume 5 of the "Collected Works of Norbert Elias" contains Elias' broadest statement of the fundamentals of sociology, in important respects very different from the discipline as it is institutionalised today. In his vision, sociology is concerned with the whole course of the development of human society. Especially important are the 'game models', which demonstrate the connections between power ratios, unintended consequences, unplanned long-term processes and the way people perceive and conceptualise the social processes in which they are caught up in interdependence with each other. This edition contains two extra chapters previously unpublished in English, one of them a substantial discussion of the legacy of Marx.

"Involvement and Detachment" is much more than a discussion of 'objectivity' in the social sciences. It is Elias' major exposition of his sociological theory of the growth of knowledge and the sciences as an aspect of overall human social development. The essay 'The fishermen in the maelstrom' takes its title from a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, and is used to illustrate how fears have to be overcome in order for 'reality-adequate' knowledge - necessary to tackle the dangers from which the fears arise - to accumulate. Discussions of rising dangers in international relations show how far the theory of civilising process is from being a model of unilinear 'progress'. Two fragments on 'The great evolution' discuss the long-term development of the various levels of scientific knowledge - physical, biological and social. Originally written in English, it includes various passages omitted from the previous edition.

This classic study of the life of the nobility at the royal court of France, especially under Louis XIV, has long been out of print. Recognised by historians as the benchmark for studies of early modern courts, which were an important but long neglected phase in the growth of the 'civilising' constraints imposed on people in increasingly complex networks of interdependence. Elias shows how courtiers - and finally even the king himself - were entrapped in a web of etiquette and ceremonial, how their expenses, even down to details of their houses and households, were dictated by their rank rather than their income. Includes appendix on the parallels between factional competition at the royal court and within Hitler's regime. Originally published in German in 1969 as Die hofische Gesellschaft.

Dieser Text aus dem Nachlass von Norbert Elias offenbart die Fruchtbarkeit der soziologischen Auseinandersetzung mit Lebensthemen und ihrer zivilisationstheoretischen Verarbeitung. Er thematisiert die Probleme der menschlichen Sinngebung, Sinnerfullung und Sinnentleerung - vor allem angesichts unserer weltweit von Kriegerkanons durchtrankten Orientierungsmittel. Die Manuskriptversionen wurden behutsam bearbeitet und um eine Einleitung von Hans-Peter Waldhoff sowie ein editorisches Nachwort von Christoph Egen erganzt.

The Established and the Outsiders is a classic text from two major figures in the world of sociology. Developing a series of theoretical concepts essential to the understanding of such sociological configurations as ethnic and gender relations, Norbert Elias and John L. Scotson analyze the effects and experiences of those within--and without--the boundaries of traditional society. Through the evaluation of community, the authors apply microcosmic study to macrocosmic philosophy and planning; mutual identification and functional democratization are among the topics discussed in this context. Offering its first English language introduction, the second edition of this enduring work remains requisite reading for students and scholars of social theory, sociology, and anthropology.

"The Symbol Theory, volume 13 in "The Collected Works of Norbert Elias", situates the human capacity for forming symbols in the long-term biological evolution of Homo sapiens, showing how it is linked through communication and orientation to group survival. Elias proceeds to recast the question of the ontological status of knowledge, moving beyond the old philosophical dualisms of idealism/materialism and subject/object. He readjusts the boundary between the 'social' and the 'natural' by interweaving evolutionary biology and the social sciences. "The Symbol Theory" provides nothing less than a new image of the human condition as an accidental outcome of the blind flux of an indifferent cosmos. Elias' Introduction now includes previously unpublished passages written in the days before he died.

Eleven of the 18 essays by Norbert Elias collected in this volume have not been published previously in English, and several of the remainder were not easily obtained. The themes of this volume represent major extensions of and reflections upon the ideas first advanced in "The Civilizing Process". The topics include violence and civilisation; the civilising of parents; privacy; conflict and change within communities; public opinion and national character in Britain; the charismatic leadership of Adolf Hitler; and the fear of death.

Vol. 17 of the Collected Works can serve as an excellent introduction to Elias's thinking overall. In the last decade of his life, Elias gave many interviews in which he discussed aspects of his work, rebutting many common misunderstandings of his thinking and further developing ideas sketched out in his writings. Besides a selection of these 'academic' interviews (many of them not previously published in English, or not published at all), the book contains his essay in intellectual autobiography and a long interview in which he talks about his own life.

Vol. 18 of the Collected Works, besides including the consolidated index to the Collected Works as a whole, contains two substantial supplements: a long and important critique on Freud written in the last weeks of Elias' life, not previously published in English; and an essay, not previously published in any language, on the anthropologist-philosopher Lucien Levy-Bruhl and the problem of 'the logical unity of humankind'. Both essays fill important gaps in Elias' work, and deal with common criticisms of his thought.

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.

The last major work by one of our century's most influential social theorists, "The Germans" is a penetrating account of German social development, from the seventeenth century to the present. Enhanced by his deep understanding of other Western European nations, Norbert Elias's incisive analyses of nationalism, violence, and the breakdown of civilization will be an indispensable resource for those interested in modern European history and sociology and in European studies.

edited with an Introduction by RICHARD KILMINSTER, University of Leeds "It transcends conventional disciplinary boundaries--between the life sciences and the social sciences, as well as between empirical science and philosophy. . . . He displays a great sensitivity for language, both as an object of study and as a means of thought and expression. . . . [A] most ambitious book. . . . Few readers will fail to be impressed by the breadth of vision and the clarity of expression. For many, the book may supply a welcome, undogmatic antidote to skepticism." --Contemporary Sociology Norbert Elias, one of the prominent figures in international sociology and social science, draws together three central themes in The Symbol Theory. At the first level, Elias introduces symbols in relation to language, knowledge, and thought. He presents a fresh glance into areas of inquiry normally associated with cultural anthropology and semiology. Second, Elias focuses on symbols that are also tangible sound-patterns of communication. And finally at level three, he addresses theoretical issues about the ontological status of knowledge, moving beyond traditional philosophical dualisms such as subject/object and idealism/materialism. The Symbol Theory extends Elias' theoretical ideas into the boundaries of cultural and physical anthropology on one side and evolutionary biology on the other. In addition, he demonstrates the potential of sociology as a unifying human science which pulls in data from various disciplines--history, psychology, economics, political science, and anthropology. Though Elias is primarily a sociologist, his work is known across all the social sciences. This volume is essential reading for all those who have followed his earlier work and to students and professors of social theory, communication, sociology, anthropology, and general social science.

This is Volume 3 in the "Collected Works of Norbert Elias", translated by Edmund Jephcott. Recognised as one of the most important works of sociology in the last century, "On the Process of Civilisation" has been influential and widely discussed across the whole range of the humanities and social sciences. This sumptuous new edition, completely revised with many corrections and clarifications, includes colour plates of all the 13 drawings from "Das Mittelaterliche Hausbuch" to which Elias refers in his famous discussion of 'Scenes from the life of a knight'. Beginning with his celebrated study of the changing standards of behaviour of the secular upper classes in Western Europe since the Middle Ages, Elias demonstrates how 'psychological' changes in habitus and emotion management were linked to wider transformations in power relations, especially the monopolisation of violence and taxation by more increasingly effective state apparatuses.