The Court Society

NORBERT ELIAS (1897-1990) was one of the greatest sociologists of the twentieth century. He studied with Alfred Weber in Mannheim and served as Karl Mannheim's assistant in Frankfurt. On Hitler's coming to power, he went into exile. His magnum opus The Civilising Process received little attention when it was published in Switzerland in 1939 and it was only after Elias's formal retirement in 1962 that most of his other books and essays were published.

Norbert Elias: biographical note; Note on the text; Introduction: sociology and historiography; Preliminary notes on the problem to be studied; The structure of dwellings as an indicator of social structure; Characteristics of the court-aristocratic figuration; Etiquette and ceremony: conduct and sentiment of human beings as functions of the power structure of their society; The binding of the king through etiquette and status chances; The sociogenesis and development of French court society as functions of power shifts in society at large; On the sociogenesis of aristocratic romanticism in the process of courtisation. On the sociogenesis of the French Revolution; Appendix I On the notion that there can be a state without structural conflicts: [reflections on the National Socialist state]; Appendix II On the position of the intendant in the estate management of the court aristocracy, with particular reference to the economic ethos of the court aristocracy; Bibliography; Index.