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“... Norbert Elias died in Amsterdam in 1990, shortly after his 93rd birthday. His achievements were recognised only late in life. He was 57 when he first gained a permanent university post, and his work was not widely known until the late Sixties. When the recognition came it was abundant, however: honorary doctorates, prizes and decorations from European governments ...”

“... else, is altogether too wide. A narrower view of what violence is about is to be preferred. The Elias/Dunning and Hargreaves volumes go to the opposite extreme. Both are concerned almost exclusively with sport in Great Britain and a very large part of both texts is devoted to football violence, especially among spectators at soccer matches. Some of the ...”

“... of centuries of cruel behaviour. Slowly and painfully there occurred a change in manners which Norbert Elias, writing in the age of the Nazi death camps, has termed the ‘civilising process’. As a popular message, it reached a high point of formulation in the Enlightenment. In its earliest manifestations, before the entry of aboriginals onto the ...”

“... and a general disregard for the Other. Soon we find resonating to this anecdote the works of Norbert Elias, and our own perceptions of ethnographic barriers between cultures. The little etiquette book people give you when you go to Japan contains, among many other daunting prohibitions, a ban on blowing the nose in public. If this seems hard to ...”

“... a very contemptuous manner’. In The Civilising Process, first published in 1939, the sociologist Norbert Elias argued that between the 13th and the 18th centuries an increasing repugnance was felt about certain bodily functions. Elias reckoned that attitudes to things like spitting, shitting or wiping one’s nose ...”

“... more than invent yet another name for the world in which we are living. Serious scholars, like Norbert Elias or Reinhard Bendix, have turned to the past as the key to the present. Some try to develop what they like to call Marxism, though Jürgen Habermas is one of the very few who do so with any degree of originality. Raymond Aron’s name must be ...”

“... hands dirty so the rest of us don’t have to.In The Civilising Process (1939), the sociologist Norbert Elias described the acts of ‘concealment’, ‘segregation’ and ‘removing out of sight’ as crucial to modern social organisation. They protect the consumer or citizen from understanding the true cost of their choices and enable the ...”

“... arguing that the body is socially constructed he has been followed more recently by, among others, Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and Mary Douglas. To these we must now add Fragments for a History of the Human Body, a collection edited by Michel Feher, with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi. The book is in three volumes, containing in all 48 ...”

“... friends. Social exclusiveness as such is not an issue here: John Röhl and Isabel Hull, following Norbert Elias, have shown what we can learn by looking at court society and the aristocratic milieu. The problem arises when the part is confused with the whole, MacDonogh’s symbol of the 19th-century flight from East to West is Junker families selling off ...”

“... the acts of dressing and going to bed had strictly-choreographed ceremonies to accompany them. As Norbert Elias observed in his classic study The Court Society, aristocrats pursued the status that came from proper performance in the rituals of court life with the cool rationality of stockbrokers pursuing profit. Louis XIV himself revelled in the ...”

“... grasping by a corner is a topic of great significance. It is the one expounded so memorably by Norbert Elias in The Civilising Process. According to Elias, in the 17th century, as a result of the strains attending the setting up of absolutist states, there rose up (or at any rate rose much higher) an ‘invisible ...”

“... body; and the capitalist state has in consequence been allowed to people itself with what Norbert Elias called homo clausus: the privatised bourgeois individual, self-excluded from a public life. Such principled passivity, Outram contends, has permitted that state encroachment upon the body which Foucault (himself the obsequist of the ‘death of ...”

“... fruitfully with the theoretical big guns: Philippe Ariès on changing attitudes towards death, Norbert Elias on the ‘civilising process’, and Foucault on the emergence of the ‘carceral society’. In the last two thirds of the book, the balance tilts towards a more purely political account, in which parliamentary debates and administrative ...”

“... high level of peace and security, along the lines laid out so forcefully and influentially in Norbert Elias’s The Civilising Process? To his credit, Fisher does not end his book with a bang, and the frequent elegance and non-judgmental quality of his observations should lead the open-minded (and, dare I say, disinterested) reader to all sorts of ...”

“... order these things somewhat better in the Council of Europe, where Stephen Mennell, a disciple of Norbert Elias, began work on All Manners of Food. The slow-baked book that has finally emerged reads like a series of essays on pertinent food topics in cultural history rather than a comprehensive account of what has been eaten, and why, in Britain and ...”