Norbert Elias

A German-Jewish sociologist whose 1939 book The Civilizing Process traced how European standards of behavior around violence, manners, and bodily conduct shifted over centuries as centralizing states imposed order on their elites — a framework, figurational sociology, that became one of the most influential in the discipline. He fled Nazi Germany for Paris in 1933 and then Britain in 1935; his father died in 1940 and his mother was murdered at Treblinka in 1942 after deportation to Theresienstadt. Elias characterized the Nazi genocide as a "decivilizing spurt," and his long-overlooked book, republished in 1969, was later ranked among the twentieth century's most important works of sociology.