Search results for ""Author Norbert Elias""

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.

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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.

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"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.

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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.

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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'.

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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.

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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'.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Almost half of the 28 essays in this volume have not been published in English before, and many of the others were little known. Some directly express Elias' dissatisfaction with the ahistorical, present-centred trend of modern sociology. Others scintillatingly show how wide ranging were Elias' own sociological interests. Topics include, among many others: the work of Theodor W. 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.

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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.

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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.

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"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.

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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.

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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.

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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' 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.

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This is Elias's last great work in which he used his key ideas to analyse the development of the particular features of German personality, social structure and behaviour.

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Now available in paperback, Mozart is a brilliant study of the great composer's life and creative genius, written by one of the most important social thinkers of our time. In Mozart, Elias provides insight into this case of tragic conflict between personal creativity and the tastes of a society which sought to control it.

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Nobert Elias (1897-1990) is described as one of the great sociologists of the 20th 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 collection of Elias's most important writings, and includes many of his 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.

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