Norbert Elias

Norbert Elias (22 June 1897 – 1 August 1990) was a German-born sociologist who later took British citizenship. He is best known for his work on civilizing and decivilizing processes.

Life and career

Elias was born in Breslau (now Wrocław), then part of Prussia's Silesia Province. His father, Hermann Elias, was a textile businessman originally from Kempen (now Kępno), and his mother, Sophie Elias (née Gallewski), came from Breslau's Jewish community. After finishing secondary school in 1915, he volunteered for the German army during World War I, serving as a telegrapher on both the Eastern and Western fronts. Following a nervous breakdown in 1917, he was deemed unfit for combat and reassigned as a medical orderly in Breslau.

That same year, he began studying philosophy, psychology, and medicine at the University of Breslau, with additional terms at Heidelberg (where he attended Karl Jaspers's lectures) and Freiburg in 1919 and 1920. He dropped medicine in 1919 after passing the preliminary exam.

To fund his studies after hyperinflation reduced his father's wealth, he took a job in 1922 as head of the export department at a local hardware factory. In 1924, he earned a doctorate in philosophy with a dissertation titled Idee und Individuum, supervised by neo-Kantian Richard Hönigswald. Frustrated by neo-Kantianism's neglect of social factors—which caused a serious dispute with his supervisor—he turned to sociology.

Until 1925, Elias was deeply active in the German Zionist movement and a leading intellectual in the Jewish youth group "Blau-Weiss." During this time, he met fellow Zionists including Erich Fromm, Leo Strauss, Leo Löwenthal, and Gershom Scholem. In 1925, he moved to Heidelberg, where Alfred Weber accepted him as a habilitation candidate for a project on the development of modern science, titled Die Bedeutung der Florentiner Gesellschaft und Kultur für die Entstehung der Wissenschaft.

He abandoned this project in 1930 to become Karl Mannheim's assistant at the University of Frankfurt. After the Nazi takeover in early 1933, Mannheim's institute was forced to close. Elias's already-submitted habilitation thesis, Der höfische Mensch, was never formally accepted and was only published in 1969 in a much-expanded form as Die höfische Gesellschaft.

In 1933, Elias fled to Paris. His elderly parents stayed in Breslau; his father died in 1940, and his mother was deported to Theresienstadt in August 1942, then transferred to Treblinka and murdered the following month. During two years in Paris, he worked as a private scholar on a scholarship from the Amsterdam Steunfonds and tried to earn extra money by organizing a workshop making wooden children's toys.

In 1935, he moved to Great Britain, where he wrote his major work, The Civilizing Process, completed by 1939, supported by a scholarship from a Jewish refugee relief organization. In this book, he described the Nazi genocide of the Jews as a "decivilizing spurt" of a decaying civilization. Drawing on historical etiquette manuals, he traced how the modern self emerged within a "civilized" body, equating civilization with bodily control.

In 1939, he reunited with his former supervisor Mannheim at the London School of Economics, becoming a senior research assistant. When the LSE evacuated to Cambridge in 1940, and a German invasion seemed imminent, Elias was interned for eight months as an "enemy alien" in camps in Liverpool and on the Isle of Man. During internment, he organized political lectures and staged a play he had written, Die Ballade vom armen Jakob, with music by Hans Gál (published in 1987).

After his release in 1941, he returned to Cambridge. Near the end of the war, he worked for British intelligence, interviewing hardened Nazis among German prisoners of war. He taught evening classes for the Workers' Educational Association and later extension courses at the University of Leicester.

With his Frankfurt friend, psychoanalyst S. H. Foulkes, he helped develop the theoretical foundations of Group Analysis and co-founded the Group Analytic Society in 1952. He also trained and worked as a group therapist. On 22 February 1952, he became a British citizen.

At the late age of 57, in 1954, he finally secured his first stable academic post at University College, Leicester (soon the University of Leicester), first as a lecturer and later as a reader in sociology. Together with his friend Ilya Neustadt, he helped build the university's sociology department into one of the largest and most influential in the country.