The Collected Works of Norbert Elias
Patron: Sir Keith Thomas FBA
‘Norbert Elias was one of the most original minds in the human and social sciences in the twentieth century. The publication of his collected works is an extremely important contribution to the contemporary intellectual and academic scene.’ – S. N. Eisenstadt, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Norbert Elias (1897–1990) was one of the greatest sociologists of the twentieth century. He studied with Alfred Weber in Heidelberg and served as Karl Mannheim’s assistant in Frankfurt. On Hitler’s coming to power, he went into exile and his magnum opus, The Civilising Process, received very little attention when it was first published in 1939. It was only after his formal retirement in 1962 that his other books and the majority of his essays were published. They extend the theory of civilising processes in major contributions to the historical understanding of the growth of knowledge and the sciences, of sport and leisure, of art and literature, and of the interweaving of biological evolution with psychological and social developments over the whole span of human society.
The Collected Works will for the first time bring together all Elias’s published writings. He wrote in both German and English; one book and about a third of his essays will appear in English for the first time, in new translations by Edmund Jephcott. Earlier translations, and the texts originally written in English, will be carefully checked and revised for this definitive standard edition. To be published in 18 volumes, broadly following the German collected works published by Suhrkamp and including a consolidated index to Elias’s entire œuvre, the Collected Works will be indispensable for historically minded social scientists and theoretically minded historians.
Published in association with UCD Press.
All titles can be bought direct from the Press, via the UCD Press website, at a 20% discount on the published price.
Vol. 1: Early Writings
Ranging in date from Elias’s teenage years before the First World War to the 1930s, the previously unpublished writings in this volume include the essay ‘On Seeing in Nature’, his doctoral dissertation ‘Idea and Individual’, a response to Karl Mannheim’s famous paper on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.
Edited by Richard Kilminster.
2006, 234 x 156 mm 160 pp
978-1-904558-39-2 €40 £34
Vol. 2: The Court Society
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.
Translated by Edmund Jephcott, edited by Stephen Mennell.
2006, 234 x 156 mm 352 pp 978-1-904558-40-8 €60 £50
Vol. 4: The Established and the Outsiders
Norbert Elias and John L. Scotson
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.
Edited by Cas Wouters.
2008, 234 x 156 mm xx + 250 pp
978-1-904558-92-7 €60 £50
Vol. 6: The Loneliness of the Dying and Humana Conditio
This volume contains two of Elias’s 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 40th 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 peoples 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’s meditation on the human lot ranges over the whole of human history, to international relations and the future of humanity.
Edited by Alan and Brigitte Scott.
2010, 234 x 156 mm c. 256 pp
978-1-906359-06-5 €60 £50
Vol. 7: Quest for Excitement
Sport and Leisure in the Civilising Process
Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning
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.
Edited by Eric Dunning.
2008, 234 x 156 mm xvi + 320 pp
978-1-904558-43-9 €60 £50
Vol. 8: Involvement and Detachment
Elias rejects the traditional dichotomy of ‘subjective’ versus ‘objective’. Greater emotional detachment is not the achievement of heroic individuals; instead the growth of knowledge and the sciences can be understood only 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 to accumulate. 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.
Edited by Stephen Quilley.
2007, 234 x 156 mm xvi + 252 pp + 2 plates
978-1-904558-42-2 €60 £50
Vol. 9: An Essay on Time
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. Originally written in English. Two later additional sections translated by Edmund Jephcott are also included.
Edited by Steven Loyal and Stephen Mennell.
2007, 234 x 156 mm xv + 172 pp
978-1-904558-41-5 €60 £50
Vol. 12: Mozart and Other Essays on Courtly Art
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’.
Edited by Eric R. Baker and Stephen Mennell.
2010, 234 x 156 mm c. 208 pp
978-1-906359-09-6 €60 £50
Collected Essays
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:
Vol. 14: Essays I
On the Sociology of Knowledge and the Sciences
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.
2009, 234 x 156 mm c.336 pp
978-1-906359-01-0 €60 £50
Vol. 15: Essays II
On Civilising Processes, State Formation and National Identity
The themes of this volume represent major extensions of and reflections upon the ideas first advanced in The Civilising Process. The topics include: violence and civilisation; the civilising of parents; public opinion in Britain; charismatic leadership; international trends in road accidents; and the fear of death.
2008, 234 x 156 mm xxii + 289 pp
978-1-906359-02-7 €60 £50
Vol. 16: Essays III
On Sociology and the Humanities
The diverse essays in this volume express Elias’s dissatisfaction with the ahistorical, present-centred trend of modern sociology. Topics include, among many others: a theory of communities in long-term perspective; sociology and psychiatry; human beings and their emotions; the changing balance of power between the sexes; African art.
2009, 234 x 156 mm 336 pp
978-1-906359-03-4 €60 £50
The Genesis of the Naval Profession
Norbert Elias edited and with an introduction by René Moelker and Stephen Mennell.
Planned but never completed by Elias, this book has been reconstructed from his mainly unpublished typescripts. Not formally part of the Collected Works, it forms a valuable supplement to them. 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 tasks of sailing. Elias traces the on-board conflicts between them, to the gradual merging of the two hierarchies by the end of the eighteenth century. The innovation of midshipmen – boys of gentle birth who both learned the manual skills of the sailor and received the education of a gentleman – gave a crucial advantage to the British Royal Navy over the French and Spanish.
2007, 216 x 138 mm 184 pp
978-1-904558-80-4 hb €50 £40
All titles can be bought direct from the Press, via the UCD Press website, at a 20% discount on the published price.