ELIAS, NORBERT

ELIAS, NORBERT (1897–1990), sociologist. Born in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), Elias served in the German army during World War I, and then attended Breslau University. He was an active member of Blau-Weiss, the Zionist youth organization. After earning his doctorate in philosophy at Breslau in 1924, he moved to Heidelberg to work under Alfred Weber, and then to Frankfurt as Karl Mannheim's assistant. Elias fled Nazi Germany in 1933, first to Paris and then, in 1935, to London. His father died in Breslau in 1940, and his mother perished in Auschwitz around 1941. In 1939 Elias published his seminal work Ueber den Prozess der Zivilisation (later translated into English as The Civilizing Process, 1978 and 1982). The work, largely ignored at the time, traced the process of change in standards of behavior – including those regarding acts of violence – through stages of European history, as manners and habits were transformed, in Elias' view, by changing thresholds of repugnance and increasing expectations of self-restraint. Elias linked this process to the formation of states and to the development of an interconnected society. Elias received a senior research fellowship at the London School of Economics in 1939, but he was interred during the war as an enemy alien. In 1954 he obtained a post at Leicester University, from which he retired in 1962; he was a professor of sociology at the University of Ghana from 1962 to 1964. It was only during his retirement that Elias was acclaimed as a leading figure in his field. Ueber den Prozess der Zivilisation was republished in 1969, receiving international attention. The work was not, however, received without controversy; some considered it an extension of social Darwinism, overly Eurocentric, and suggested that its premise was refuted by the events of World War II and the Holocaust. Elias wrote extensively in his later years; these works include The Established and the Outsiders (1965), What Is Sociology? (1978), The Loneliness of the Dying (1985), and The Quest for Excitement (1986), with Eric Dunning, on the sociology of sports. In 1971 he became professor emeritus of the University of Frankfurt, and in 1977 the city of Frankfurt named him the first recipient of the Theodor W. Adorno prize. In addition to other honors, he received the German Grosskreuz des Bundesdienstordens in 1986. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: R. van Krieken, Norbert Elias: Key Sociologist (1998). (Dorothy Bauhoff (2nd ed.)