Norbert Elias in Troubled Times

“Beautifully written, this book engages thoughtfully with current issues within a solid understanding of their historical background. It covers a hugely impressive range of topics, developing an innovative mobilisation of Elias’s sociological perspective that will underpin a wide variety of new research efforts. In a world becoming increasingly interdependent and complex, this book provides an essential guide to developing the kind of understanding of the world in which we live required for a genuinely democratic politics.”
--Robert van Krieken, Emeritus Professor, The University of Sydney, Australia

“Readers will encounter in this volume an unusually wide-ranging collection of innovative papers that revisit core Eliasian ideas, provide new insights into violence and war, and explore through diverse empirical cases the classical analysis of relations between established groups and outsiders. The result is an inventive study which is essential reading for students of the endlessly surprising consequences and challenges of the global integration of modern societies.”
 --Andrew Linklater, Emeritus Professor of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, UK

This edited collection brings together texts that discuss current major issues in our troubled times through the lens of Norbert Elias’s sociology. It sheds light on both the contemporary world and some of Elias’s most controversial concepts. Through examination of the ‘current affairs’, political and social contemporary changes, the authors in this collection present new and challenging ways of understanding these social processes and figurations. Ultimately, the objective of the book is to embrace and utilise some of the more polemical aspects of Elias’s legacy, such as the exploration of decivilizing processes, decivilizing spurts, and dys-civilization. It investigates to what extent Elias’s sociological analyses are still applicable in our studiesof the developments that mark our troubled times. It does so through both global and local lenses, theoretically and empirically, and above all, by connecting past, present, and possible futures of all human societies.

Florence Delmotte is Research Associate at the Belgian Foundation for Scientific Research (FNRS) and Professor of Political Science at Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles, Belgium. 

Barbara Górnicka is Research Fellow in Sociology at University College Dublin, Ireland, where she completed her doctoral degree in 2016.