The Civilizing Process stands out as Norbert Elias' greatest work, tracing the 'civilizing' of manners and personality in Western Europe since the Middle Ages, and showing how this was related to the formation of states and the monopolization of power within them. It comprises the two volumes originally published in English as The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization, now, in a single volume, the book is restored to its original format and made available world-wide to a new (...) generation of readers.In this new edition, the original text is extensively revised, corrected, and updated. The Revised Edition reveals anew and afresh the greatness of Elias' masterpiece. (shrink)

As a work of social theory, I would argue that it belongs in a class with the writings of Habermas and Arendt". -- Jay Bernstein, University of Essex This is one of the most original and important works of contemporary European thought.

In 1993 and 1994, The New York Review of Books published two tenaciously argued essays by Frederick Crews attacking Freudian psychoanalysis and its aftermath in the so-called recovered memory movement. The first reviewed a growing body of evidence indicating that Freud doctored his data and manipulated his colleagues in an effort to consolidate a cult-like following that would neither defy nor upstage him. The second, published in two parts, challenged the scientific and therapeutic claims of the rapidly growing recovered memory (...) movement, maintaining that its social effects have been devastating. Crews traced that movement to Freudian precedent - not just to Freud's abandoned "seduction theory" but also to the most essential assumptions of psychoanalysis itself. The response was tremendous: issues flew off the stands, and therapists, patients, scholars, philosophers, and others whose lives had been touched by Freud's ideas responded in one of the largest waves of letters the Review had ever seen. Twenty-five of these were published, with Crews's deft and forceful replies. Most are gathered here, together with Crews's original essays, a new introduction describing the genesis of his pieces, and an epilogue considering the debate and its reverberations. The result is a fierce, contentious, and startling book that rocks the foundations of one of the century's governing ideas. (shrink)

Cornelius Castoriadis's theory of sublimation is not only innovative within the Freudian tradition, but opens up the domain of inquiry as to society's process of radical social institution. Sublimation is indeed socialization, not merely aesthetic cathexis. A specific sort of sublimation that may be said to mobilize the project of autonomy is linked to philosophy both because it is implicated in a process of interminable interrogation, and because it involves the psyche's practical and poetic engagement with the creation of new (...) imaginary forms. Philosophy's task, in this sense, is to consider thought from the standpoint of the unthought, a daring task that cannot ultimately take place without one's fully-fledged acceptance of one's own finitude. (shrink)

Explores the relationship between philosophers' and psychoanalysts' attempts to discover how man thinks and perceives himself.