Elias, Norbert (1897–1990)

Norbert Elias was a German-Jewish sociologist born in Breslau, Silesia (then Germany, today Poland). After studying philosophy in Breslau and a temporary involvement in Zionism, Elias turned to sociology, first in Heidelberg and then in Frankfurt, where he completed his Habilitation in 1933; a re-worked version, translated as The Court Society, was not published before 1969. Like so many others, he left Germany in 1933 after the Nazis came to power. After two years in Paris, he went to England in 1935, where he completed his magnum opus, The Civilizing Process. Years of internment on the Isle of Man and years of work in adult education and group therapy were followed by his first academic post in England at the University of Leicester (1954–1962). Long overdue official recognition of his work and person took place in the 1970s, when a fruitful reception climate shaped by the crisis of academic Marxism renewed interest in a longue durée history of body and psyche.

Elias's contribution to the study of consumer culture is manifold but was never intended to be labeled as such. Four lines of departure for the fruitful application of his insights can be located, as discussed next.

Deriving from the central conclusion of Elias's research on the European transformation of upper-class habits and affect structure from the wild, rather unrefined feudal past to the more inhibited, pacified, and refined ways of behavior of a courtly aristocracy in the eighteenth century, we might obtain a more realistic picture of the gains and losses also experienced by the majority of people living in the contemporary, postindustrial consumer society, compared with extreme positions that hold it to be either a hedonist paradise or a late-capitalist hell in disguise. Although Elias was accused by adherents to the Frankfurt school (e.g., Buck-Morss 1978) of neglecting both exploitation in the workplace and permissiveness in the sphere of modern mass consumption, he was aware of the huge difference between courtly face-to-face communication and bourgeois transaction guided by the dynamics of money, profession, and commodities. In his later sketch of “informalization” processes occurring in the twentieth century (developed in collaboration with the Dutch sociologist Cas Wouters), Elias took into account the higher visibility and ease of the expression of emotions corresponding to a more liberal attitude to sex, authority, and pleasure in consumption by adopting the formula “controlled de-controlling of emotions.”

In particular, Elias has contributed to a better understanding of the dynamics of status competition, distinction, extravagance, and lavishness, of assimilation and demarcation, practiced between members of ruling classes and aspiring upwardly mobile people of bourgeois origin. Elias's concept of “habitus” can be compared to that of Pierre Bourdieu, but while the latter concentrated on style and taste, the former dealt with the “affective household” of a person as a whole.

Elias developed a historical sociology of sports and leisure. He called the corresponding process one of sportization, English counterpart to French courtization. The Quest for Excitement aims at the acting out of civilizational tensions by way of sporting activities and, mimetically, by watching violence-controlled team competition. This balanced expression of affects takes place in largely unexciting mass societies and forces people to a complex self-steering process between the risk of boredom and the risk of physical harm, which is often prevented by sticking to rules of “fairness.”

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