Norbert Elias

Norbert Elias (June 22, 1897 — August 1, 1990) was a German sociologist, famous for his development of “Process Sociology” or “Figurational Sociology”. His book Über den Prozess der Zivilisation (1939; The Civilizing Process) described the growth of civilization in Western Europe.

Life

The plaque for Norbert Elias in Wrocław

Norbert Elias was born on June 22, 1897 in Breslau, Germany (today’s Wroclaw, Poland) to Hermann and Sophie Elias. His father was a businessman in the textile industry and his mother, as usual at the time, a housewife.

After passing the abitur in 1915 he volunteered for the German army in World War I and was employed as a telegrapher, first at the Eastern, and then at the Western front. After suffering a nervous breakdown in 1917, he was declared unfit for service and was posted to Wroclaw as a medical orderly. The same year, Elias began studying philosophy, psychology, and medicine at the University of Wrocław, in addition spending a term each at the universities of Heidelberg (where he attended lectures by Karl Jaspers) and Freiburg in 1919 and 1920.

To finance his studies after his father's fortune had been reduced by hyperinflation, he took up a job as the head of the export department in a local hardware factory in 1922. In 1924, he graduated with a doctoral dissertation in philosophy entitled Idee und Individuum supervised by Richard Hönigswald, a representative of Neo-Kantianism. Disappointed about the absence of the social aspect from Neo-Kantianism, Elias decided to turn to sociology for his further studies.

During his Breslau years, Elias was deeply involved in the German Zionist movement, and acted as one of the leading intellectuals within the German-Jewish youth movement "Blau-Weiss" (Blue-White). During these years he became acquainted with other young zionists like Erich Fromm, Leo Strauss, Leo Löwenthal, and Gershom Scholem.

In 1925, Elias moved to Heidelberg, and in 1930 became assistant of Karl Mannheim at the University of Frankfurt. However, after the Nazis came to power in early 1933, Mannheim's sociological institute was forced to close. The already submitted habilitation thesis entitled Der höfische Mensch ("The Man of the Court") was never formally accepted and not published until 1969. In 1933, Elias fled to Paris. His elderly parents remained in Breslau, where his father died in 1940; his mother was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp where she probably was killed in 1941.

During his two years in Paris, Elias worked as a private scholar supported by a scholarship from the Amsterdam Steunfonds Foundation. In 1935, he moved on to Great Britain, where he worked on his magnum opus, The Civilizing Process. In 1939, he met up with his former supervisor Mannheim at the London School of Economics, where he obtained a position as Senior Research Assistant. In 1940, when an invasion of Britain by German forces appeared imminent, Elias was detained at internment camps in Liverpool and on the Isle of Man for eight months, on account of his being German (even though he was a Jew).

Upon his release in 1941, Elias moved to Cambridge. He taught evening classes for the Workers' Educational Association (the adult education organization), and later evening extension courses in sociology, psychology, economics, and economic history at the University of Leicester. He also held occasional lectureships at other institutions of higher learning. While in Cambridge, he trained as a group therapist under the psychoanalyst Siegfried Heinrich Foulkes, another German emigrant, with whom he co-founded the "Group Analytic Society" in 1952 and worked as a group therapist.

In 1954, he moved to Leicester, where he became a lecturer at the University's Department of Sociology, until his retirement in 1962. At Leicester, his students included Martin Albrow and Anthony Giddens.

From 1962 to 1964, Elias taught as professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Ghana in Legon near Accra. After his return to Europe in 1965, he based himself in Amsterdam but traveled much as a visiting professor, mainly at German universities. His reputation and popularity grew immensely after the republication of The Civilizing Process in 1969. From 1978 to 1984 he worked at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Bielefeld.

Elias was the first ever laureate of both the Theodor W. Adorno Award (1977) and the European Amalfi Prize for Sociology and Social Sciences (1987).

Elias died at his home in Amsterdam on August 1st, 1990.

Work

Elias focused his work on the relationship between power, behavior, emotion, and knowledge. He significantly shaped what is called “Process Sociology” or "Figurational Sociology."

Figurational Sociology

Throughout his career Norbert Elias was largely ignored until the 1970s when he was rediscovered by a younger generation of sociologists. His late popularity can be partially attributed to the fact that his concept of large social figurations or networks explains the emergence and function of large societal structures without neglecting the aspect of individual agency. In the 1960s and 1970s, the overemphasis of structure over agency was heavily criticized by the then-dominant school of structural functionalism.

When Elias' work found a larger audience in the 1970s, at first his analysis of the process was misunderstood as an extension of discredited "social Darwinism," the idea of upward "progress" was dismissed by reading it as consecutive history rather than a metaphor for a social process. Elias however offered new paradigm for sociological thought, the one that opposed both the structural-functionalist and methodological-individualist tendencies in sociology. He devised a new concept of analyzing social life, the one that provided a more systematic and effective approach to analysis society.

There are several distinctive features of Elias’ sociology:

• Societies are composed of individuals who engage in intentional actions, but the total outcome of their action is often unintended. The task of sociologists is to analyze the transformation of the action from “intentional” to “unintended”.
• Human beings can only be understood in their interdependencies with other human beings. Sociologists thus need to study not individuals but the “relations” between the individuals.
• Sociologists need to study the processes in the society – “relations” rather than “states”.
• Human societies need to be studied in historical context, consisting of long-term processes of development and change.
• Sociologists need to detach themselves from emotions involved in analysis of certain sociological problems - the process Elias called the ‘destruction of myths’.

The Civilizing Process

Elias' most important work is the two-volume The Civilizing Process (Über den Prozess der Zivilisation). Originally published in 1939, it was virtually ignored until its republication in 1969, when its first volume was also translated into English. The work was rather ambitious, trying to trace the development of manners and personality in Western Europe since the late Middle Ages.

The first volume of The Civilizing Process describes the historical developments of the European habitus, or "second nature," the particular individual psychological structures molded by social attitudes. Elias traced how post-medieval European standards regarding violence, sexual behavior, bodily functions, table manners, and forms of speech were gradually transformed by increasing thresholds of shame and repugnance, working outward from a nucleus in court etiquette. The internalized "self-restraint" imposed by increasingly complex networks of social connections developed the "psychological" self-perceptions that Freud recognized as the "super-ego." The second volume of The Civilizing Process looks into the causes of these processes and finds them in the increasingly centralized Early Modern state and the increasingly differentiated and interconnected web of society.

Other work

The Quest for Excitement, written by Norbert Elias with Eric Dunning, and published in 1986 has proved a seminal work for the sociology of sport, and of soccer in particular. Elias also wrote poetry, publishing several books of his poems.

Legacy

Due to historical circumstances, Elias had long remained a marginal author, until being rediscovered by a new generation of scholars in the 1970s. From that time he eventually became one of the most influential sociologists. His Process or Figurational Sociology eventually grew into a school of sociology, becoming particularly strong in Europe.

Publications

• Elias, Norbert. 1984 (original published 1970). What is Sociology? (original title Was ist Soziologie?). Columbia University Press. ISBN 0231045514
• Elias, Norbert. 1991. The Symbol Theory. London: Sage Pub. ISBN 0803984197
• Elias, Norbert. 1995 (original published 1990). Reflections on a life (original title Über sich selbst). Polity Press. ISBN 0745613837
• Elias, Norbert. 1996. Die Ballade vom armen Jakob. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag. ISBN 3458191658
• Elias, Norbert. 1998. The Germans. Columbia University Press. ISBN 0231105630
• Elias, Norbert. 2000 (original published 1939). The Civilizing Process (original title Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation). Blackwell Publishing Limited. ISBN 0631221611
• Elias, Norbert. 2001 (original published 1982). The Loneliness of the Dying (original title Über die Einsamkeit der Sterbenden in unseren Tagen). Diane Publishers Co. ISBN 075678512X
• Elias, Norbert. 2001 (original published 1939). The Society of Individuals (original title Die Gesellschaft der Individuen). Continuum International Publishing Group. ISBN 0826413722
• Elias, Norbert. 2006 (original published 1969). The Court Society (original title Die höfische Gesellschaft). University College Dublin Press. ISBN 1904558402
• Elias, Norbert. 2007 (original published 1983). Involvement and Detachment. Contributions to the Sociology of Knowledge (original title Engagement und Distanzierung. Arbeiten zur Wissenssoziologie I). University College Dublin Press. ISBN 1904558429
• Elias, Norbert. 2007 (original published 1984). An Essay on Time (original title Über die Zeit. Arbeiten zur Wissenssoziologie II). University College Dublin Press. ISBN 1904558410
• Elias, Norbert and Dunning, Eric. 1994 (original published 1986). Quest for Excitement. Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process. Blackwell Pub. ISBN 0631192190

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Heinich, Nathalie. 2002. La sociologie de Norbert Elias. Paris: La Découverte. ISBN 2707138304
• Kilminster, Richard. 2007. Norbert Elias post-philosophical sociology. Routledge. ISBN 0415437067
• Krieken, Robert van. 1998. Norbert Elias. University of Sydney. Retrieved on October 10, 2007, from <http://www.usyd.edu.au/su/social/elias/book/cover.htm>
• Loyal, Steven, and Stephen Quilley. 2004. The sociology of Norbert Elias. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521827868

External links

All links Retrieved October 20, 2007.

• The HyperElias website - A complete list of all works by Norbert Elias, in all languages, published and unpublished, as well as many full text items and abstracts
• The Norbert Elias Foundation website
• Online interview from the Dutch television organization VPRO
• Site on Norbert Elias and Process Sociology at the University of Sydney

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