The Civilizing Process is a book by German sociologist

Norbert Elias. It is an influential work in sociology and

Elias' most important work. It was first published in
Basel, Switzerland in two volumes in 1939 in German
as Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation.

Because of World War II, it was virtually ignored, but

gained popularity when it was republished in 1969 and
translated into English. Covering European history
from roughly 800 AD to 1900 AD, it is the first formal
analysis and theory of civilization. Elias proposes a
double sociogenesis of the state: the social development
of the state has two sides, a mental and political. The
civilisation process that Elias describes results in a
profound change in human behaviour. It leads to the
construction of the modern state and transition of man
from the warrior of the Middle Ages to the civil man of
the end of the 19th c.

The Civilizing Process is today regarded as the

founding work of figurational sociology. In 1998 the
International Sociological Association listed the work
as the seventh most important sociological book of the
20th century.[1]

Contents
1 Themes
2 Reception
3 English editions
4 References
5 External links
Themes
The first volume, The History of Manners, traces the
historical developments of the European habitus, or
"second nature", the particular individual psychic
structures molded by social attitudes. Elias traced how
post-medieval European standards regarding violence,
sexual behaviour, bodily functions, table manners and
forms of speech were gradually transformed by
increasing thresholds of shame and repugnance,
working outward from a nucleus in court etiquette. The
internalized "self-restraint" imposed by increasingly
complex networks of social connections developed the
"psychological" self-perceptions that Freud recognized
as the "super-ego".