Norbert Elias has been recognized as one of the key social scientists of the twentieth century. The contributions collected in Norbert Elias and Social Theory discuss the specificities, the strengths, and the limits of Elias's sociology by considering its similarities and its differences with other important classical (Epicure, Freud, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel) and contemporary (Manheim, Fromm, Arendt, Bauman, and Bourdieu) social theories. Editors François Dépelteau and Tatiana Savoia Landini have compiled an essential and comprehensive volume on a quintessential thinker.

Offering a fascinating survey of Elias's life and writings, Dennis Smith traces the growth of his reputation. He is the first author to confront Elias's work with the contrasting theories of Talcott Parsons, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault and Zygmunt Bauman. He also illustrates how Elias's insights can be applied to understand Western modernity and social and political change. Smith shows why Elias is important for sociology, but he is also clear sighted about the limitations of Elias's approach.

This book will compare the approach and works of Norbert Elias, well known for his analysis of the civilizing process, his work on sport and violence and, more largely, his figurational approach, with other important social theories both classical and contemporary.

This new edition of this classic text from one of the major figures of world sociology includes an introduction published in English for the first time. In Norbert Elias's hands, a local community study of tense relations between an established group and outsiders becomes a microcosm that illuminates a wide range of sociological configurations including racial, ethnic, class and gender relations. The Established and the Outsiders examines the mechanisms of stigmatization, taboo and gossip, monopolization of power, collective fantasy and `we' and `they' images which support and reinforce divisions in society. Developing aspects of Elias's thinking that relate his work to current sociological concerns, it presents the

Few sociologists of the first rank have scandalised 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. 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 The Symbol Theory in the light of selected contemporary developments in archaeology, anthropology and evolutionary theory.

This book endeavours to bring the sociology of Elias to a new and wider audience through offering accessible explanations of some of his key ideas.