Early Writings

Ranging in date from Elias's teenage years before the First World War to the 1930s, the writings in this volume previously unpublished in English include the essay 'On Seeing in Nature', his doctoral dissertation 'Idea and Individual', a response to Karl Mannheim's famous paper on cultural competition, and a number of short stories contributed to a newspaper. Other essays collected together here concern primitive art, the sociology of German anti-Semitism, kitsch style and the age of kitsch, and the expulsion of the Huguenots from France. This edition includes as an appendix a draft outline of Elias's Habilitation thesis begun under Alfred Weber. Early Writings have been translated from the German edition, Fruschriften, published by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt/Main as volume 1 of the Norbert Elias Gesammelte Schriften, 2002.