Norbert Elias

Abstract

Norbert Elias was born into a German Jewish family in Breslau, Germany,¹ in 1897. His most important study entitled The Civilizing Process (in its English translation) was first published in Switzerland in 1939. To an outsider, the idea of a German Jew writing on the subject of ‘civilization’ on the eve of the Second World War may seem more than just a little unusual. Perhaps even more so when one begins to learn of Elias’s life history: how, at eighteen, he encountered the carnage of the First World War as a soldier on the Western and Eastern fronts; how he was forced to flee from the Nazis to exile in 1933; how, after seeing his parents for the last time in 1938, his mother was murdered at Auschwitz. However, as one learns more of Elias’ life history and his intellectual development, it becomes easier to understand why he chose the topic of civilization to be the central focus of his major work: it exemplified the balance between involvement and detachment which was to become a hallmark of his studies. It is clear that Elias was, in part, driven by the dramatic social changes which were occurring at the time he wrote. Indeed, in the Introduction to The Civilizing Process, his ‘involvement’ with the subject is explicitly stated:

the issues raised by the book have their origins less in scholarly tradition, in the narrower sense of the word, than in the experiences in whose shadow we all live, experiences of the crisis and transformation of Western civilization as it had existed hitherto, and the simple need to understand what this ‘civilization’ really amounts to. But I have not been guided in this study by the idea that our civilized mode of behaviour is the most advanced of all humanly possible, nor by the opinion that ‘civilization’ is the worst form of life and one that is doomed. All that can be seen today is that with gradual civilization a number of specific civilizational difficulties arise. But it cannot be said that we already understand why we actually torment ourselves in this way.²