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Not ignoring Norbert Elias

Norbert Elias (June 22, 1897 to August 1, 1990) was a Jewish German scholar who managed to get to England by 1935. He had studied with Karl Jaspers, but later switched from philosophy to sociology. In 1939 the work which later established his reputation, was published in German, (but not, apparently in English til 1969). This was

The Civilizing Process, Vol.I. The History of Manners, (1969), and The Civilizing Process, Vol.II. State Formation and Civilization,  (1982).

Norbert was concerned to trace and understand the change in people between the medieval period, and current times. He seems to have understood it as a critical change in manners: that is, to use his examples, how men learned to use a handkerchief rather than their own sleeve to blow their nose, or, another example, which Elias may (I am not sure) have been the one to bring back to popular consciousness, the torture of cats and its falling out of fashion. This went from a popular pastime to a repugnant thought for most people, and the process interested Elias, as an indication of other changes.

A commentator on Norbert's ideas quotes an essayist, to make a point about manners, that they must seem natural, and the quote is meant to clarify an aspect of manners in society.

"It is essential to learn to appear just as much at ease in one's dress suit in the presence of Royalty as one does in one's crepe de chine pajamas in one's dressing room in the presence of a Persian cat." This example is in the book, 
(Norbert Elias and Human Interdependencies, Thomas Salumets ( 2001).  

The social ease exemplified in this quote,  can be a product of self-knowledge, but that insight was not available to Elias, who, in keeping with the intellectual fashions of the time, looked for explanations in studying the exterior of human life.  Thus he reduced a legitimate query into why people are uncomfortable in some situations, to a question about manners. 


Norbert Elias  never realized his own uncomfortableness in social situations reflected his interior life as an intellectual.  It is  likely his history of manners began as a quest for self-knowledge, and the experience at least, of this social unease, directed his choice of topic.  This summary is a probable conclusion based on the typical  introspective temperament, and some sense of how chance affects choice. 

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