Volume 29, Number 16 · October 21, 1982
Clockwork History
By Geoffrey Barraclough
Power and Civility: Volume II of "The Civilizing Process"
by Norbert Elias, translated by Edmund Jephcott
Pantheon, 376 pp., $22.50
Norbert Elias is one of those shadowy figures, not uncommon in our ambivalent society, hovering indecisively on the nebulous frontier between obscurity and fame. In this respect his position is not unlike that of Eric Voegelin, another octogenarian German scholar, who also was a refugee from Hitler's Germany, though in more fundamental ways, as we shall see, Elias and Voegelin stand at opposite ends of the contemporary intellectual spectrum. Both have suffered long periods of neglect; both have subsequently been extravagantly praised.
Review, 3006 words
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