NORBERT ELIAS: BIOGRAPHY, THOUGHT, WORKS - CULTURE VOCABULARY - 2025

Norbert Elias (1897-1990) was a sociologist considered the father of figurative sociology. In his lifetime he analyzed the relationship between emotion, knowledge, behavior and power, and studied the development of civilization in Western Europe using evolutionary parameters.

Elias lived through the two world wars of the 20th century. In the First he had to fight at the front, a fact that made a deep impression on his life. In the Second, as a Jew, he was forced into exile. Worse luck ran his parents, especially his mother, who was interned in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Source: By Rob Bogaerts / Anefo, via Wikimedia Commons

The war prevented him from reading his doctoral thesis, but Elias made a career out of some of the most important universities on the continent, including the British one at Cambridge.

Among his works, The Process of Civilization stands out. Considered his most important work, it did not attract much attention until the late 1960s. It is from that date that Norbert Elias became a reference in his field of studies.

Biography

Norbert Elias came to the world in Breslau, then Germany and today Poland. He was born on June 22, 1897, into a Jewish family belonging to the small bourgeoisie of the town.

Elias's family owned a textile company, which gave him a fairly prosperous economic situation. In that sense, they were perfectly situated within the economic boom experienced in Germany at the end of the 19th century.

Early years

Elias was an only child. His time at school soon demonstrated his intelligence. He stood out in a first stage, for his taste for reading and, already in adolescence, he opted for classical German literature and philosophy. According to himself, his favorite authors were Schiller and Goethe.

World War I

The beginning of World War I interrupted his secondary studies. At 18, he was drafted straight from school, without any transition.

For months, he only dedicated himself to rehearsing parades and, later, he was assigned to a broadcasting unit in his hometown. After this, he had to march to the north of France, to the war front line.

In that area he experienced the bloody trench warfare, although, in theory, his task was to repair the transmission lines.

At the end of 1917, Elias returned to Breslau, becoming part of a regiment. His work there was health, as a nurse-aide. Finally, in February 1919, he was demobilized.

According to his writings and his biographers, this war experience greatly marked the personality of the young man. Elias developed a rejection of any identification that was based on conflict. Despite the fact that France was the enemy, Elias felt no hostility towards that country and rejected political nationalism.

Instead, he developed a strong adherence to Germanic culture, although he was also attracted to and interested in the rest of the continent's cultures. In this sense, there are those who consider him one of the first global Europeans.

college

At the end of the war, Elias enrolled at the University of Breslau. Following the wishes of his father, he chose the careers of medicine and philosophy. Within these studies, he did an internship to obtain a degree in obstetrics. However, he eventually gave up medicine and decided to dedicate himself exclusively to philosophy.

In 1924 he made the first reading of his thesis. His poor reception forced him to delete and revise several aspects, despite not agreeing with the criticisms. Disagreements with his thesis supervisor, whom he had criticized in the text, led him to interrupt his studies. Family financial difficulties also weighed in that decision.

Elias worked for two years with an industrialist, until, in 1925, as the family's economic situation improved, he moved to Heidelberg to resume his university studies.

It is during this stage that Elias discovered sociology. He began the elaboration of a thesis directed by Alfred Weber and was related to other professionals in the field. In 1930 he became assistant professor at Mannheim in Frankfurt and changed the director and subject of his thesis: court society.

Exile

Another historical event greatly affected Elias's academic career: the Nazi victory in Germany. In 1933, he made the decision to flee the country. The Mannheim Sociological Institute had been forced to close and Elias was unable to present his thesis. In fact, it was not published until 1969.

Before fleeing, he had participated in the German Zionist Movement, something that placed him in the crosshairs of the Nazis.

His destination was Switzerland, although he soon left for Paris. There he opened a toy workshop with other exiled Germans. In those years he survived on the profits generated and only published two sociological studies. Despite his efforts, he failed to gain a foothold in the French academic world.

Given this, in 1935 he decided to go to London. In the British capital he received the support of a group of Jewish refugees and a scholarship from the London School of Economy. Thanks to these supports, he began his best-known work: Über den Prozess der Zivilisation.

This work involved a three-year research project. Elias consulted treatises and social manuals ranging from the Middle Ages to the 18th century. His intention was to carry out a sociological analysis starting from history.

Second World War

The same year as the beginning of World War II, 1939, Elias published the first edition of his book on the process of civilization. This success, however, was clouded by the European situation and that of his family.

His father died first, and then his mother was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

For his part, Elias entered the London School of Economics, but was unable to take advantage of that position. He was immediately interned on the Isle of Mann, where the English had created a camp for refugees of German origin. There he remained six months. His contacts managed to free him and Elias settled in Cambridge to resume his teaching activity.

Recognition

It is in England that Elias finally established a stable residence. There he lived for almost 30 years, with brief interruptions. In that country he was a professor at the University of Leicester, where he participated in the Department of Sociology until he retired.

Besides, between 1962 and 1964, he was professor of sociology at the University of Ghana, publishing in 1969 his thesis on The previously abandoned court society. The second edition of The Process of Civilization gave him great recognition and, for the first time, he achieved fame in the intellectual fields.

From that date, Elias became a regular guest at all universities in Europe. In 1977, he was awarded the Adorno Prize and between 1978 and 1984 he worked at the Interdisciplinary Research Center of the Bielfeld University in Germany

Last years

Norbert Elias moved to Amsterdam in 1984. In the Dutch capital he continued his work for six years. On August 1, 1990, Elias died in that same city.

Thought

Despite the fact that Norbert Elias is currently a benchmark in sociology and other social sciences, his recognition was slow in coming. Only in the last years of his life and, in particular, after his death, has he become a classic in these matters.

Elias's thinking tries to overcome the dichotomies between various established concepts: the collective and the individual, the public and the private, or between psychology and sociology.

Finally, it ends up recognizing the individual through the recognition of the "other." His ideas put interaction with the collective as the foundation of society.

Figuration

Figuration is one of the key concepts in Elias's thinking. By means of this concept he tried to eliminate the existing separation between the individual and the society that prevents them from being considered integrated entities. For Elias, all human beings are, at the same time, individuals and society.

The author did not conceive that society had developed as a result of structural forces that affect the behavior of each person, but rather by historical processes led by individuals.

The result of these processes are figurations, which can appear between two individuals or from collectivities, such as the nation.

Elias describes these figurations as the ways of thinking, acting or interacting of individuals at a given moment. Likewise, they mark what is considered normal or not and what is due or improper.

Objectification of social figures

Elias put a lot of emphasis on analyzing the relationships between individuals with the society of which they are part. In this sense, in his work he considers that, normally, people are aware of themselves by placing themselves in front of the “others”. Thus, they understand those others as "objects."

This means that the individual sees social figures (the neighborhood, the school, the family…) as if they had their own existence beyond being made up of individuals like themselves.

In this way, it tends to reify these social structures, as if they were complete entities instead of being made up of different people.

Individual-Society Relationship

The aforementioned led Elias to consider what the individual-society relationship is and what behaviors are specific to each one. For him, sociology had to acquire a new approach and re-elaborate some concepts in order to offer a representation that is more adjusted to reality.

This new approach should be aimed at eliminating the egocentric image and replacing it with a vision of interdependent individuals, which, for the author, was society. This would end the objectification that prevents people from clearly understanding their own social life.

Ultimately, it is about ending the individualism that separates man from the society to which he belongs.

Thus, Norbert Elias' vision was that a more global vision should be acquired, admitting that each human being is not an "object", but is linked to other individuals, relating to them with reciprocal purposes and intentions.

Social pressure

Achieving this change in focus would mean, for the sociologist, a revolution in the social perspective. It implies that each person recognizes themselves as part of the social world and leaves common sense thinking behind. At the same time, he considered it essential to learn to recognize the pressures exerted by "social figures".

Elias used history many times to apply it to sociology. In this sense, he explained how in the premodern world the human being explained nature as a projection of the human. Later, with the arrival of science, he changed these explanations for others based on knowledge.

Given that, for Elias, sociology must emancipate the human being, one of its obligations is to make it known that social constraints are nothing more than those that man exerts on himself.

The social and historical conditions are fundamental for these constraints to exist, since they are not natural and, therefore, they are not unquestionable laws.

Plays

Norbert Elias was the author of more than 20 works, the most prominent being The Process of Civilization. Most of them were written in his mother tongue, German, despite working in England for several decades.

The process of civilization

Norbert Elias's best known work was undoubtedly Über den Prozess der Zivilisation (The Process of Civilization, 1939). At first it did not have much impact, but the second edition in 1969 was quite successful.

Published in two different chapters, Elias carried out an analysis of how European societies had evolved. Thus, it started from medieval and warrior times until reaching modern and scientific times.

In the work, he made a reflection on the public and the private, on repression, taboos and culture. Many have seen references to Marx, Freud, and Max Weber in their conclusions.

Elias analyzed how codes of social conduct had varied throughout history and how they had been a fundamental part in the formation of States, the legitimate use of violence being one of their constitutive elements.

For the author, this control of violence leads to increasing levels of self-control. In his work, he affirmed that when the state is unable to maintain order and law, revolutionary outbreaks are almost inevitable.

The court society

The Courtesan Society was Elias's thesis under Mannheim's direction. This work began to be elaborated between 1930 and 1933, but the author had to abandon it when he fled from the Nazi Germany. Only in 1969 could he publish it, 36 years later.

The thesis was about the origins of the modern world. For the sociologist, if one wants to understand the origin of modernity, it is essential to look back at the Renaissance. It was at this historical stage that European structures changed and consolidated.

Fundamental sociology

Although the title of the work may be misleading, Elias directed this work to established sociologists. In it, he critiqued the approach to this social science, explaining what his opinion was about how it should develop.

Logics of exclusion

One of the more practical work carried out under Elias' direction was this analysis of a Leiscester suburb. In the work, the marginalization of the population and the social consequences that this generates are analyzed.

Complete bibliography

1939 - Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation

1965 - The Established and the Outsiders

1969 - Die höfische Gesellschaft

1970 - Was ist Soziologie?

1982 - Über die Einsamkeit der Sterbenden in unseren Tagen

1982 - Scientific Establishments and Hierarchies

1983 - Engagement und Distanzierung

1984 - Über die Zeit

1985 - Humana conditio

1986 - Quest for Excitement

1987 - Die Gesellschaft der Individuen

1987 - Los der Menschen

1989 - Studien über die Deutschen

1990 - Über sich selbst

1991 - Mozart. Zur Soziologie eines Genies

1991 - The Symbol Theory

1996 - Die Ballade vom armen Jakob

1998 - Watteaus Pilgerfahrt zur Insel der Liebe

1999 - Zeugen des Jahrhunderts

2002 - Frühschriften

2004 - Gedichte und Sprüche

References

1. EcuRed. Norbert Elias. Obtained from ecured.cu
2. Muriel Belmes, Paula. Norbert Elias: the individual and society as a process. Recovered from elseminario.com.ar
3. Urteaga, Eguzki. Life and works of Norbert Elias. Recovered from dialnet.unirioja.es
4. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Norbert Elias. Retrieved from britannica.com
5. Scambler, Graham. Sociological Theorists: Norbert Elias. Retrieved from grahamscambler.com
6. Elwell, Frank W. The Sociology of Norbert Elias. Retrieved from faculty.rsu.edu
7. Mennell, Stephen. Norbert Elias (1897-1990). Retrieved from norberteliasfoundation.nl