ABSTRACT

This chapter concerns an independent scholar who derived from similar sources and held a similar ambition, Norbert Elias. It concerns mainly with Civilization and its Discontents, for that bears most directly on the tragedy of European civilization. The chapter aims to identify the kinds of explanations for political and social phenomena in general that Sigmund Freud derives from psychoanalysis. According to Freud, sociology "can be nothing but applied psychology", by which he meant psychoanalysis. Like Freud, Elias invokes the principle that ontogenesis recapitulates phylogensis. He calls this the "sociogenetic ground rule". According to Elias, in this sociogenetic ground rule lies the key to the question why some peoples or groups of people appear to us as "younger" or more "childlike", others as "older" and more "grown up". According to Elias theory, the relationship between the cultivation of aristocratic manners and the formation of the absolutist state are necessarily connected as two sides of the one civilizing process.