Norbert Elias quotes

Norbert Elias was a German sociologist, renowned for his research on the process of civilization and the development of Western society. His most famous work, "The Civilizing Process," examined the evolution of social manners and power structures. He greatly influenced the fields of sociology and history with his interdisciplinary approach. Here are 5 of his quotes:

Death is a problem of the living. Dead people have no problems.

Norbert Elias

A heightened control of the affects, developed in society and learned by the individual, and above all a heightened degree of autonomous affect control, was needed in order for the world-picture centred on the earth and the people living on it to be overcome by one which, like the heliocentric world-picture, agreed better with the observable facts but was at first far less satisfying emotionally; for it removed human beings from their position at the centre of the universe and placed them on one of many planets circling about the centre.

Norbert Elias

If the present study has any significance at all, this results not least from its opposition to this mingling of what is and what ought to be, of scientific analysis with ideals.

Norbert Elias

But at that particular stage in the development of these more object-related than self-related conceptual instruments for exploring extra-human nature, it was apparently not possible to include in the investigation, and to reflect upon, this civilizational shift itself, the move towards stronger and more "internalised" self-control that was taking place within people themselves. What was happening to human beings as they increased their understanding of nature remained at first inaccessible to scientific insight. It is not a little characteristic of this stage of self-consciousness that the classical theories of knowledge representing it are concerned far more with the problems of the object of knowledge than with the subject of knowledge, with object-perception than with self-perception.

Norbert Elias