ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses three elements of Norbert Elias' work, some of which continue to raise many eyebrows, particularly the first element. Some people even get angry about it because it clashes with common sense; it seems to contradict what everyone can read in the newspapers. The military was very much part of these developments. First, as the centralization of nation-states progressed, fighting and warring as an everyday experience, the way it often was in the Middle Ages, gradually disappeared. Linklater has pointed to the implications of Elias' general theoretical work on social configurations and processes for the study of international relations, which is obviously one of the key disciplines for the study of the military. Linklater starts with the observation that Elias was unusual in placing international relations at the centre of sociological analysis. Norbert Elias and John Scotson authored a relatively small study of power relations in two English neighbourhoods in the 1960s.
