Volume 25, Number 3 · March 9, 1978
The Rise of the Fork
By Keith Thomas
The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners
by Norbert Elias, translated by Edmund Jephcott
Urizen Books, 340 pp., $15.00
Human Figurations: Essays for Norbert Elias
edited by Peter R. Gleichmann, edited by Johan Goudsblom, edited by Hermann Korte
Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift, 464 pp., 25 guilders (paper)
Norbert Elias is a highly original scholar whose work has been strangely neglected in the English-speaking world. In 1930 he was appointed assistant to Karl Mannheim in the department of sociology at the University of Frankfurt, housed on the ground floor of the celebrated Institut für Sozialforschung. Five years later he was a Jewish refugee in England and his academic career was in ruins. Both his parents died in Nazi Germany, his mother in Auschwitz. He held a temporary post at the London School of Economics, was detained in an internment camp for aliens, and spent a decade teaching extension courses for London University and working as a group therapist. Sociology was not then a popular subject in England and it was only in 1954 that he secured a proper academic position, this time at the University of Leicester. He retired in 1962, and is now over eighty years old.
Review, 3635 words
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