Norbert Elias

Norbert Elias (born 22 June 1897 in Breslau, now Wrocław, and died 1 August 1990 in Amsterdam) was a German sociologist of Jewish background who later became a British citizen. His work, rooted in the German tradition of historical sociology, looks at how power, behaviour, emotion and knowledge change over time. His best-known contribution is figurational sociology, a framework that has made him one of the most influential sociologists of the twentieth century, although for decades he worked on the margins of the discipline.

He was the son of a textile businessman and a mother from Breslau's Jewish community. After serving in the First World War and suffering a breakdown, he studied philosophy, psychology and medicine. He earned his doctorate in philosophy in 1924 under Richard Hönigswald, but grew frustrated with neo-Kantianism's neglect of social life and turned to sociology. In those years he was active in the German Zionist movement. In 1930 he became assistant to Karl Mannheim in Frankfurt, but the Nazi takeover in 1933 closed the institute and left his habilitation thesis unaccepted; it appeared only in 1969 as The Court Society. That year he fled to Paris, and his mother was murdered at Treblinka after deportation from Theresienstadt.

He moved to Britain in 1935 and wrote The Civilizing Process, published in 1939. The book traces how, from the Middle Ages to the modern era, manners, taboos and the control of impulses shaped European habits and personality together with the wider social order. During the war he was interned as an enemy alien. He taught at Leicester, where he won a permanent post only in 1954 at the age of fifty-seven, taught in Ghana between 1962 and 1964, and spent his last years in the Netherlands.

Elias rejected the image of an isolated individual confronting a society that acts on him like an external force. People form networks of interdependence, and entities such as the family, the state or the school are patterns of relations between people. The mistake, in his view, lies in reifying these concepts and treating them as mysterious or natural things. He called for a sociological 'Copernican revolution' that would replace this self-centred picture with one that studies the links between micro and macro levels, and he argued against rigid boundaries between disciplines.

His reputation grew after The Civilizing Process was republished in 1969. Later scholars have seen in his work on desire and repression a precursor of Michel Foucault. He received the Theodor W. Adorno Prize in 1977 and the Amalfi Prize in 1987. His claims about the modern sporting ethos, written with Eric Dunning, have been challenged by studies of medieval tournaments.