Norbert Elias

Norbert Elias was born in 1897 in Breslau, Germany, to parents of Jewish and Polish descent, and passed away in 1990 in Amsterdam. He studied philosophy, psychology, and sociology under the guidance of Jaspers, Rickert, Husserl, and Alfred Weber. In 1924, he earned his doctorate with the dissertation "Idee und Individuum. Eine kritische Untersuchung zum Begriff der Geschichte" ("Idea and Individual. A Critical Examination of the Concept of History"). In 1930, he became an assistant to Karl Mannheim in Frankfurt. In 1935, he was forced to leave Germany and initially settled in Paris, then moved to London, where he worked as a psychotherapist and an expert in adult education. In 1941, he lost his mother in a concentration camp. From 1954, he taught sociology at the University of Leicester. Besides his seminal work "Über den Prozess der Zivilisation" ("The Civilizing Process"), published in 1939 and initially overlooked for three decades, he authored several other works, including: "Die höfische Gesellschaft. Untersuchungen zur Soziologie des Königtums und der höfischen Aristokratie" ("The Court Society. Investigations into the Sociology of Kingship and Court Aristocracy") (1969); "Was ist Soziologie?" ("What is Sociology?") (1970); "Die Gesellschaft der Individuen" ("The Society of Individuals") (1987); "Studien über die Deutschen" ("Studies on the Germans") (1989); "Über die Einsamkeit der Sterbenden" ("On the Loneliness of the Dying") (1982); "Mozart. Zur Soziologie eines Genies" ("Mozart. On the Sociology of a Genius") (1991); "The Symbol Theory" (1991); and "Die Ballade vom armen Jacob" (1996). The publication of his complete works began in 1997 in Frankfurt and is expected to include 19 volumes.