On the Process of Civilisation (Collected Works of Norbert Elias)

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.

NORBERT ELIAS (1897-1990) was one of the greatest sociologists of the twentieth century. He studied in Breslau and Heidelberg and served as Karl Mannheim's assistant in Frankfurt. In exile after 1933, first in France and then in Britain, he wrote his magnum opus The Civilizing Process. His whole oeuvre is now appearing in new scholarly editions in the Collected Works in English. Stephen Mennell is Professor Emeritus of sociology at University College Dublin; Eric Dunning is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Leicester; Johan Goudsblom is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam; Richard Kilminster is an Honorary Research Fellow in Sociology at the University of Leeds.