Norbert Elias

Norbert Elias was a German-born sociologist best known for The Civilizing Process (1939), a long-term historical study of how standards of manners, bodily conduct, and emotional self-restraint developed in European society from the medieval period into modernity, alongside the centralization of state power and monopolization of violence. Elias argued that these changes were interconnected, tracing a shift toward increasingly internalized self-control as social interdependence grew more complex, an approach he called figurational or process sociology because it treated individuals and society not as separate entities but as bound together in webs of interdependent relationships that change over time. Largely overlooked for decades after its first publication, the book was rediscovered from the 1970s onward and became a major influence on historical sociology.