Essays II: On Civilising Processes, State Formation and National Identity

NORBERT ELIAS (1897-1990) was one of the greatest sociologists of the twentieth century. He studied with Alfred Weber in Heidelberg and served as Karl Mannheim's assistant in Frankfurt. On Hitler's coming to power, he went into exile, first in France and then in Britain. His magnum opus The Civilizing Process received little attention when it was published in Switzerland in 1939 and only after Elias's formal retirement in 1962 were most of his other books and essays published. International intellectual celebrity came to him right at the end of his long life. RICHARD KILMINSTER is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Leeds; STEPHEN MENNELL is Professor of Sociology at University College Dublin.

• Norbert Elias, 1897-1990; Note on the text; Civilisation; What I mean by civilisation: reply to Hans-Peter Duerr; The civilising of parents; L'espace prive - 'private space' or 'private room'?; Foreword to Horst-Volker Krumrey, Entwicklungsstrukturen von Verhaltensstandarden; Technisation and civilisation; Power and civilisation; Processes of state formation and nation building; Towards a theory of communities; Afterword to Meike Behrmann and Carmine Abate, Die Germanesi; Inquest on German Jewry; The charismatic leader; Gentlemen and tarpaulins; Drake and Doughty: a paradigmatic case study; Public opinion in Britain; National peculiarities of British public opinion; Fear of death; Has hope a future?; Textual variants; Bibliography; Index.

"The enterprise of publishing the collected works of Norbert Elias under the editorship of Richard Kilminster and Stephen Mennell by University College Dublin Press is an extremely important contribution to the contemporary intellectual and academic scene. Norbert Elias was one of the most original minds in the human and social sciences in the 20th century - his work covers not only a very broad range of sociological topics starting with his classical The Civilising Process and later The Court Society, but also many topics ranging from sociology of knowledge to sociology of sport and analysis of historical processes; the broad philosophical problems, such as the idea of the place of the progress of symbolic dimensions in social life. This is really a monumental enterprise, very worthwhile and very constructive, presenting a great challenge to the contemporary intellectual and academic scene - and UCD Press should be congratulated in undertaking this enterprise." S. N. Eisenstadt Jerusalem, 24 July 2008 "Too easily the editors and readers of Books Ireland take it as given that Irish publishers' books are mostly about Ireland or by Irish writers. We wish it were not so because we think our publishers are of world class, and a shining exception and exemplar is this series of eighteen volumes of the life's work in English - some of his work was written in German - of Elias (1897-1990) whose major theme was the theory of civilising processes - Norbert is very interesting on the subject as well as on the dynamics of sports, social (and especially male) bonding, violence and football hooliganism. These books are in the very best tradition of design, with acid-free paper, sewn bindings, cloth boards, coloured endpapers, spine labels and acetate jackets." Books Ireland Nov 08