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In recent times, especially under the influence of postmodernism,
culture has often been construed as a critique of modernity. This
wide-ranging and comprehensive collection of readings shows that
such issues have always been at the centre of thought about the
relationship between culture and civilization The readings are
divided into three sections, linking the civilization debate to
political theory, to the cultural debate and to the sociology and
anthropology. The substantial extracts included give students a
rare chance to engage at length with classic texts to appreciate
the nature of the battle between the Enlightenment and its critics
which has shaped current thought. Classical Readings on Culture and
Civilisation presents essays from Immanuel Kant, Adam Ferguson,
Thomas Jefferson, Alexis de Tocqueville, Friedrich von Schiller,
Friedrich Nietzche, Georg Simmel, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, Emile
Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Lucien Febvre, Alfred Weber, Robert E. Park
and Norbert Elias.
This text explores four major features of human society in their
ecological and historical context: the origins of priests and
organised religion; the rise of military men in an agrarian
society; economic expansion and growth; and civilising and
decivilising trends over time.
This text explores four major features of human society in their
ecological and historical context: the origins of priests and
organised religion; the rise of military men in an agrarian
society; economic expansion and growth; and civilising and
decivilising trends over 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.
In recent times, especially under the influence of postmodernism,
culture has often been construed as a critique of modernity. This
wide-ranging and comprehensive collection of readings shows that
such issues have always been at the centre of thought about the
relationship between culture and civilization The readings are
divided into three sections, linking the civilization debate to
political theory, to the cultural debate and to the sociology and
anthropology. The substantial extracts included give students a
rare chance to engage at length with classic texts to appreciate
the nature of the battle between the Enlightenment and its critics
which has shaped current thought. Classical Readings on Culture and
Civilisation presents essays from Immanuel Kant, Adam Ferguson,
Thomas Jefferson, Alexis de Tocqueville, Friedrich von Schiller,
Friedrich Nietzche, Georg Simmel, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, Emile
Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Lucien Febvre, Alfred Weber, Robert E. Park
and Norbert Elias.
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'.
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.
In 1962 Norbert Elias was invited as a temporary professor at the
University of Ghana in Legon, Accra. He taught, employed fieldwork,
travelled, and met many people in postcolonial Africa. When Elias
left Ghana in 1964, he had laid the basic groundwork for a
fundamental sociological argument on human societies. The volume on
hand is a selection of his unpublished writings based on these
experiences. Together they touch upon not only the well-known
criticism of Eurocentrism and a developmental perspective but also
what could be considered the core of Elias's work: the concept of
civilisation. In a foreword, Dieter Reicher and Adrian Jitschin
have endeavoured to explain and break down the relations of Elias's
African experience to the rest of his work and biography. They also
clarified some misleading interpretations of Elias's time in
Africa. Finally, Arjan Post has uncovered the previously unknown
fascinating story of Elias' encounter with Malcolm X in an
epilogue.
In 1984, the celebrated sociologist and historian Norbert Elias
convened a major conference on 'Civilisations and civilising
processes' at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (University
of Bielefeld). Participants included the most distinguished and
influential scholars in historical sociology and world history.
This book will make available, for the first time in one place, the
papers presented by the speakers and, even more interestingly, the
transcripts of discussions at the symposium. This conference
brought together eminent and internationally reputed scholars of
macro-history and historical sociology including Johann P. Arnason,
Elias, Hans-Dieter Evers, Johan Goudsblom, Keith Hopkins, William
H. McNeill, and Immanuel Wallerstein. This highly informative
encounter between various leading scholars of humanity's global
social history has never before been published, although it was
completely recorded on paper and in tape recordings. Its
publication in one volume should be an important event for all
students of the long-term structural transformations of humanity.
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.
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.
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.
The International Sociological Association recently voted Norbert
Elias's The Civilizing Process as one of the top ten works of
sociology in the twentieth century Elias's masterwork, his other
writings, and his influence on the field of sociology are the
subjects of this book. It is a readable and thoughtful intellectual
portrait of Elias, generally regarded as one of the outstanding
social thinkers of this century. His Civilizing Process traced the
'civilizing' of manners and personality in Western Europe since the
late Middle Ages, and shows how it was related to the formation of
states and the control of violence. His later writings, often
scattered about and difficult, range from sport to human relations,
through the changing relations between men and women to time, the
growth of knowledge and the sciences, to the prospects of nuclear
war. Mennell examines the full range of Elias's work and presents
it in a cogent and accessible manner, all in a book which is a
"pleasure to read."
So close geographically, how could France and England be so
enormously far apart gastronomically? Not just in different recipes
and ways of cooking, but in their underlying attitudes toward the
enjoyment of eating and its place in social life. In a new
afterword that draws the United States and other European countries
into the food fight, Stephen Mennell also addresses the rise of
Asian influence and "multicultural" cuisine. Debunking myths along
the way, All Manners of Food is a sweeping look at how social and
political development has helped to shape different culinary
cultures. Food and almost everything to do with food, fasting and
gluttony, cookbooks, women's magazines, chefs and cooks, types of
foods, the influential difference between "court" and "country"
food are comprehensively explored and tastefully presented in a
dish that will linger in the memory long after the plates have been
cleared.
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The Germans (Hardcover)
Norbert Elias; Edited by Michael Schroter; Translated by Eric Dunning, Stephen Mennell
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R3,214
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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.
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.
The emergence of the professional naval officer was related both to
the necessities of naval warfare and to the structure of society on
land. Originally warships were manned by two separate sets of
commanders - gentleman soldiers skilled in fighting, and
'tarpaulins' of humbler social origin skilled in navigation and the
manual skills of sailing. Elias traces the onboard conflicts
between them, from Drake's famous insistence that the gentlemen
'haul and draw' with the sailors, to the gradual merging of the two
hierarchies by the end of the eighteenth century. The innovation of
the midshipmen - boys of gentle birth who both learned the manual
skills of the sailor and received the education of a gentleman -
gave crucial advantage to the British Royal Navy over the French
and Spanish, in which the greater rigidity of social barriers
ashore prevented a similar solution afloat. Planned but never
completed by Elias, this book has been reconstructed from his
mainly unpublished typescripts.
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.
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