Norbert Elias And Empirical Research

Norbert Elias has been recognized as one of the key social scientists of the 20th century at least in sociology, political science and history. This book will address Norbert Elias's approach to empirical research, the use of his work in empirical research, and compare him with other theorists.

This edited collection brings together texts that discuss current major issues in our troubled times through the lens of Norbert Elias’s sociology. It sheds light on both the contemporary world and some of Elias’s most controversial concepts. Through examination of the ‘current affairs’, political and social contemporary changes, the authors in this collection present new and challenging ways of understanding these social processes and figurations. Ultimately, the objective of the book is to embrace and utilise some of the more polemical aspects of Elias’s legacy, such as the exploration of decivilizing processes, decivilizing spurts, and dys-civilization. It investigates to what extent Elias’s sociological analyses are still applicable in our studies of the developments that mark our troubled times. It does so through both global and local lenses, theoretically and empirically, and above all, by connecting past, present, and possible futures of all human societies.

This book locates Elias's work clearly within the development of sociology and also against the background of current debates. Between the 1930s and the 1980s he developed a unique approach to social theory which is now beginning to take root in contemporary social research and theory. Since the translation of his work into English began to accelerate in the 1980s, a growing number of books and articles on topics including health, sexuality, crime, national and ethnic identity, femininity and globalization, in a variety of disciplines, make positive reference to Elias as an authority on the history of emotions, identity, violence, the body and state formation.

Norbert Elias has been recognized as one of the key social scientists of the 20th century at least in sociology, political science and history. This book will address Norbert Elias's approach to empirical research, the use of his work in empirical research, and compare him with other theorists.

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. It is originally written in English. Two later additional sections have been translated by Edmund Jephcott.

Few sociologists of the first rank have scandalised the academic world to the extent that Elias did. Developed out of the German sociology of knowledge in the 1920s, Elias’s sociology contains a sweeping radicalism which declares an academic ‘war on all your houses’. His sociology of the ‘human condition’ sweeps aside the contemporary focus on ‘modernity’ and rejects most of the paradigms of sociology as one-sided, economistic, teleological, individualistic and/or rationalistic. As sociologists, Elias also asks us to distance ourselves from mainstream psychology, history and above all, philosophy, which is summarily abandoned, although carried forward on a higher level. This enlightening book written by a close friend and pupil of Elias, is the first book to explain the refractory, uncomfortable, side of Elias’s sociological radicalism and to brace us for its implications. It is also the first in-depth analysis of Elias’s last work The Symbol Theory in the light of selected contemporary developments in archaeology, anthropology and evolutionary theory.

This book will compare the approach and works of Norbert Elias, well known for his analysis of the civilizing process, his work on sport and violence and, more largely, his figurational approach, with other important social theories both classical and contemporary.