Norbert Elias

Elias was born on 22 June 1897 in Breslau (today: Wrocław) in Prussia's Silesia Province to Hermann and Sophie Gallewski. His father was a businessman in the textile industry. After passing the abitur in 1915 he volunteered for the German army in World War I and was employed as a telegrapher, first at the Eastern front, then at the Western front. After suffering a nervous breakdown in 1917, he was declared unfit for service and was posted to Breslau as a medical orderly. The same year, Elias began studying philosophy, psychology and medicine at the University of Breslau, in addition spending a term each at the universities of Heidelberg (where he attended lectures by Karl Jaspers) and Freiburg in 1919 and 1920. He quit medicine in 1919 after passing the preliminary examination (Physikum). To finance his studies after his father's fortune had been reduced by hyperinflation, he took up a job as the head of the export department in a local hardware factory 1922. In 1924, he graduated with a doctoral dissertation in philosophy entitled Idee und Individuum (Idea and Individual) supervised by Richard Hönigswald, a representative of Neo-Kantianism. Disappointed about the absence of the social aspect from Neo-Kantianism, which had led to a serious dispute with his supervisor about his dissertation, Elias decided to turn to sociology for his further studies.

During his Breslau years, until 1925, Elias was deeply involved in the German Zionist movement, and acted as one of the leading intellectuals within the German-Jewish youth movement "Blau-Weiss" (Blue-White). During these years he got acquainted with other young Zionists like Erich Fromm, Leo Strauss, Leo Löwenthal and Gershom Scholem. In 1925, Elias moved to Heidelberg, where Alfred Weber accepted him as a candidate for a habilitation (second book project) on the development of modern science, entitled Die Bedeutung der Florentiner Gesellschaft und Kultur für die Entstehung der Wissenschaft (The Significance of Florentine Society and Culture for the Development of Science). In 1930 Elias chose to cancel this project and followed Karl Mannheim to become his assistant at the University of Frankfurt. However, after the Nazi take-over in early 1933, Mannheim's sociological institute was forced to close. The already submitted habilitation thesis entitled Der höfische Mensch ("The Man of the Court") was never formally accepted and not published until 1969 in a much elaborated form as "Die höfische Gesellschaft" ("The Court Society"). In 1933, Elias fled to Paris. His elderly parents remained in Breslau, where his father died in 1940; on 30 August 1942 his mother was deported to Theresienstadt, and on 29 September transferred to and killed in Treblinka, dates and places[1] Elias himself never got to know.

During his two years in Paris, Elias worked as a private scholar supported by a scholarship from the Amsterdam Steunfonds (Prof. Frijda's benefit fund) and tried to gain some additional income by organizing a workshop for the production of wooden children's toys. In 1935, he moved on to Great Britain, where he worked on his magnum opus, The Civilizing Process, until 1939, now supported by a scholarship from a relief organization for Jewish refugees.

In 1939, he met up with his former friend and supervisor Mannheim at the London School of Economics, where he obtained a position as Senior Research Assistant. In 1940, the LSE was evacuated to Cambridge, but when an invasion of Britain by German forces appeared imminent, Elias was detained at internment camps in Liverpool and on the Isle of Man for eight months, on account of his being German – an "enemy alien". During his internment he organized political lectures and staged a drama he had written himself, Die Ballade vom armen Jakob (The Ballad of Poor Jacob) with a musical score by Hans Gál (eventually published in 1987).

Upon his release in 1941, he returned to Cambridge. Towards the end of the war, he worked for British intelligence, investigating hardened Nazis among German prisoners of war (see his essay "The breakdown of civilisation", in Studies on the Germans). He taught evening classes for the Workers' Educational Association (the adult education organization), and later evening extension courses in sociology, psychology, economics and economic history at the University of Leicester. He also held occasional lectureships at other institutions of higher learning. In collaboration with a friend from Frankfurt days, the psychoanalyst S. H. Foulkes, he laid the theoretical foundations of Group Analysis, an important school of therapy, and co-founded the Group Analytic Society in 1952. He himself trained and worked as a group therapist. On Febr. 22, 1952 he was naturalized as a British citizen.[2]

In 1954 – at the very late age of 57 – he at last gained his first secure academic post, at University College Leicester (which soon became the University of Leicester), first as Lecturer and later as Reader in Sociology. Along with his friend Ilya Neustadt, he made a major contribution to the development of the University's Department of Sociology, which became one of the largest and most influential departments in the United Kingdom. He retired in 1962, but continued to teach graduate students in Leicester until the mid-1970s. Among subsequently famous sociologists whom Neustadt and Elias appointed as colleagues at Leicester, were John H. Goldthorpe, Anthony Giddens, Martin Albrow, Sheila Allen, Joe and Olive Banks, Richard Brown, Mary McIntosh, Nicos Mouzelis and Sami Zubaida and Keith Hopkins. (Hopkins was subsequently Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge: his appointment to teach sociology in Leicester is one sign of the very broad conception Elias and Neustadt had of the discipline of sociology.) Students in the department included John Eldridge, Chris Bryant, Chris Rojek, Paul Hirst, Graeme Salaman and Bryan Wilson. From 1962 to 1964, Elias taught as Professor of Sociology at the University of Ghana in Legon near Accra. After his return to Europe in 1965, he spent much time as visiting professor in various German and Dutch universities, and from 1978 based himself in Amsterdam.

His reputation and popularity grew immensely after the republication of The Civilising Process in 1969. From 1978 to 1984 he worked at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Bielefeld from which he received an honorary doctorate in 1980. Elias was the first ever laureate of both the Theodor W. Adorno Prize (1977) and the European Amalfi Prize for Sociology and Social Sciences (1987). In 1986 the Große Verdienstkreuz of the German Federal Republic was awarded to him, and on his 90th birthday he was appointed Commander in the Order of Orange-Nassau by the Dutch queen. By 1998 an International Sociological Association worldwide survey of sociologists ranked "On the Process of Civilization" (revised later title) seventh among the most important books in sociology in the twentieth century. In 1990 he collected himself the Nonino prize for a 'Maestro del nostro tempo' in Italy. Outside his sociological work he always also wrote poetry.

Elias died at his home in Amsterdam on 1 August 1990. In September 2017, a bridge in the Vondelpark, not too far from where he lived, was named after him. In Almere city a street in the 'sustainable' sociologists' quarter also bears his name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Elias

Lasker# 12212221