Norbert Elias, (born June 22, 1897, Breslau, Ger. [now Wrocław, Pol.]—died Aug. 1, 1990, Amsterdam, Neth.), sociologist who described the growth of civilization in western Europe as a complex evolutionary process, most notably in his principal work, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation (1939; The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners).
Elias studied medicine, philosophy, and sociology and taught at the universities of Heidelberg (1924–29) and Frankfurt (1930–33). With the rise of Nazism, however, he fled to France, and in 1935 he settled in England, where he remained until 1975.
Über den Prozess der Zivilisation is a detailed study that examines the gradual development of a generally accepted code of manners and social conduct and the attendant growth of structured states in which rulers centralized the legitimate use of violence. The book attracted little attention when it was first published (in Switzerland), and Elias returned to teaching at the University of Leicester (1954–62) and at the University of Ghana (1962–64). His magnum opus was successfully reissued in 1969. Among his other works are The Established and the Outsiders (1965), Die Gesellschaft der Individuen (1987; The Society of Individuals), and Studien über die Deutschen (1989; “Studies of the Germans”).
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Norbert-Elias
Principales aportes de Norbert Elias
La sociología de Norbert Elias se propone dar continuidad a la mirada del individuo como individuo en sociedad, y no como una entidad separada de ella. Es posible señalar como contracara a esta integración teórica y empírica de individuo y sociedad, la conveniencia de problematizar dos temas menos presentes en este autor: por una parte, la complejidad de los procesos internos del sujeto; por otra, la relación individual con formas estables de segmentación y diferenciación social (que puedan entenderse no sólo como procesos de cambio sino como estructuras consolidadas por ellos).
Estos dos problemas han sido presentados según las perspectivas de Ervin Goffman —como carácter representacional de la interacción (1983: 2)— y de Pierre Bourdieu —como habitus localizado según clase social (1998: 171)— respectivamente.
Norbert Elias
Norbert Elias famous for his development of Process Sociology, or Figurational Sociology. His most significant book, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation (The Civilizing Process), published in 1939, described the growth of civilization in Western Europe, providing a detailed study of the development of the accepted code of manners and social behaviors, and their process of expansion from the etiquette of nobility, or central governing authority, to the general populace.
For Elias, society consists of individuals who are in relationship to each other—a collection of evolving networks of interdependent human beings. To understand society, therefore, is not to understand the intentional actions of individuals acting based on personal motivations, but rather necessitates study of the processes of interaction and relationship among these individuals in their wider, historical context. Thus, Elias advocated the study of process in society, rather than analyzing its current state.
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Norbert_Elias
Elias began studying philosophy, psychology and medicine at the University of Breslau, in addition spending a term each at the universities of Heidelberg (where he attended lectures by Karl Jaspers) and Freiburg in 1919 and 1920. He quit medicine in 1919 after passing the preliminary examination (Physikum). To finance his studies after his father's fortune had been reduced by hyperinflation, he took up a job as the head of the export department in a local hardware factory 1922. In 1924, he graduated with a doctoral dissertation in philosophy entitled Idee und Individuum ("Idea and Individual") supervised by Richard Hönigswald, a representative of Neo-Kantianism. Disappointed about the absence of the social aspect from Neo-Kantianism, which had led to a serious dispute with his supervisor about his dissertation, Elias decided to turn to sociology for his further studies.
During his Breslau years, until 1925, Elias was deeply involved in the German Zionist movement, and acted as one of the leading intellectuals within the German-Jewish youth movement . During these years he got acquainted with other young Zionists like Erich Fromm, Leo Strauss, Leo Löwenthal and Gershom Scholem. In 1925, Elias moved to Heidelberg, where Alfred Weber accepted him as a candidate for a habilitation (second book project) on the development of modern science, entitled Die Bedeutung der Florentiner Gesellschaft und Kultur für die Entstehung der Wissenschaft (The Significance of Florentine Society and Culture for the Development of Science).
In 1930 Elias chose to cancel this project and followed Karl Mannheim to become his assistant at the University of Frankfurt. However, after the Nazi take-over in early 1933, Mannheim's sociological institute was forced to close. The already submitted habilitation thesis entitled Der höfische Mensch ("The Man of the Court") was never formally accepted and not published until 1969 in a much elaborated form as "Die höfische Gesellschaft" ("The Court Society"). In 1933, Elias fled to Paris.
His elderly parents remained in Breslau, where his father died in 1940; on August 30, 1942 his mother was deported to Theresienstadt Theresienstadt concentration camp, and on September 29 transferred to and killed in Treblinka Treblinka concentration camp, dates and places[1] Elias himself never got to know.
During his two years in Paris, Elias worked as a private scholar supported by a scholarship from the Amsterdam Steunfonds (Prof. Frijda's benefit fund). In 1935, he moved on to Great Britain, where he worked on his magnum opus, The Civilizing Process, until 1939, now supported by a scholarship from a relief organization for Jewish refugees.
In 1939, he met up with his former supervisor Mannheim at the London School of Economics, where he obtained a position as Senior Research Assistant. In 1940, the LSE was evacuated to Cambridge, but when an invasion of Britain by German forces appeared imminent, Elias was detained at internment camps in Liverpool and on the Isle of Man for eight months, on account of his being German – an "enemy alien".
Upon his release in 1941, he returned to Cambridge. Towards the end of the war, he worked for British intelligence, investigating hardened Nazis among German prisoners of war (see his essay "The breakdown of civilisation", in Studies on the Germans). He taught evening classes for the Workers' Educational Association (the adult education organization), and later evening extension courses in sociology, psychology, economics and economic history at the University of Leicester. He also held occasional lectureships at other institutions of higher learning. In collaboration with a friend from Frankfurt days, the psychoanalyst S. H. Foulkes, he laid the theoretical foundations of Group Analysis, an important school of therapy, and co-founded the Group Analytic Society in 1952. He himself trained and worked as a group therapist.
In 1954 – at the very late age of 57 – he at last gained his first secure academic post, at University College Leicester (which soon became the University of Leicester), first as Lecturer and later as Reader in Sociology. Along with his friend Ilya Neustadt, he made a major contribution to the development of the University's Department of Sociology, which became one of the largest and most influential departments in the United Kingdom. He retired in 1962, but continued to teach graduate students in Leicester until the mid-1970s.
From 1962 to 1964, Elias taught as Professor of Sociology at the University of Ghana in Legon near Accra. After his return to Europe in 1965, he spent much time as visiting professor in various German and Dutch universities, and from about 1977 based himself in Amsterdam. His reputation and popularity grew immensely after the republication of The Civilising Process in 1969. From 1978 to 1984 he worked at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Bielefeld. Elias was the first ever laureate of both the Theodor W. Adorno Prize (1977) and the European Amalfi Prize for Sociology and Social Sciences (1987). Outside his sociological work he always also wrote poetry.
Norbert Elias Foundation
Norbert Elias y la caida de la civilización
Norbert Elias and the social history of knowledge
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