Norbert Elias

<p>Few sociologists of the first rank have scandalized the academic world to the extent that Elias did. Developed out of the German sociology of knowledge in the 1920s Elias’s sociology contains a sweeping radicalism which declares an academic ‘war on all your houses’. His sociology of the ‘human condition’ sweeps aside the contemporary focus on ‘modernity’ and rejects most of the paradigms of sociology as one-sided economistic teleological individualistic and/or rationalistic. As sociologists Elias also asks us to distance ourselves from mainstream psychology history and above all philosophy which is summarily abandoned although carried forward on a higher level. </p><p>This enlightening book written by a close friend and pupil of Elias is the first book to explain the refractory uncomfortable side of Elias’s sociological radicalism and to brace us for its implications. It is also the first in-depth analysis of Elias’s last work <em>The Symbol Theory </em>in the light of selected contemporary developments in archaeology anthropology and evolutionary theory.</p>