Quest for Excitement

NORBERT ELIAS (1897-1990) was one of the greatest sociologists of the twentieth century. He studied with Alfred Weber in Heidelberg and served as Karl Mannheim's assistant in Frankfurt. On Hitler's coming to power, he went into exile, first in France and then in Britain. His magnum opus The Civilising Process received little attention when it was published in Switzerland in 1939 and only after Elias's formal retirement in 1962 were most of his other books and essays published. International intellectual celebrity came to him right at the end of his long life. ERIC DUNNING is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Leicester

"The enterprise of publishing the collected works of Norbert Elias under the editorship of Richard Kilminster and Stephen Mennell by University College Dublin Press is an extremely important contribution to the contemporary intellectual and academic scene. Norbert Elias was one of the most original minds in the human and social sciences in the 20th century - his work covers not only a very broad range of sociological topics starting with his classical The Civilising Process and later The Court Society, but also many topics ranging from sociology of knowledge to sociology of sport and analysis of historical processes; the broad philosophical problems, such as the idea of the place of the progress of symbolic dimensions in social life. This is really a monumental enterprise, very worthwhile and very constructive, presenting a great challenge to the contemporary intellectual and academic scene - and UCD Press should be congratulated in undertaking this enterprise." S. N. Eisenstadt Jerusalem, 24 July 2008 "Too easily the editors and readers of Books Ireland take it as given that Irish publishers' books are mostly about Ireland or by Irish writers. We wish it were not so because we think our publishers are of world class, and a shining exception and exemplar is this series of eighteen volumes of the life's work in English - some of his work was written in German - of Elias (1897-1990) whose major theme was the theory of civilising processes - It is particularly happy that the first of these titles should find an Irish publisher since we are perforce specialists in the matter of social establishments or ascendancy - the existence of an 'Irishtown' outside many of our towns speaks of literal outsidership. The frequent use of the word 'exciting' in advertising and criticism seems to go unnoticed and Norbert is very interesting on the subject as well as on the dynamics of sports, social (and especially male) bonding, violence and football hooliganism. These books are in the very best tradition of design, with acid-free paper, sewn bindings, cloth boards, coloured endpapers, spine labels and acetate jackets." Books Ireland Nov 08

• Norbert Elias, 1897-1990; Note on the text; Introduction, Norbert Elias; The Quest for Excitement in Leisure, Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning; Leisure in the Sparetime Spectrum, Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning; The Genesis of Sport as a Sociological Problem, Part 1, Norbert Elias; The Genesis of Sport as a Sociological Problem, Part 2, Norbert Elias; An Essay on Sport and Violence, Norbert Elias; Folk Football in Medieval and Early Modern Britain, Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning; Dynamics of Sport Groups with Special Reference to Football, Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning; The Dynamics of Modern Sport: Notes on Achievement-Striving and the Social Significance of Sport, Eric Dunning; Social Bonding and Violence in Sport, Eric Dunning; Sport as a Male Preserve: Notes on the Social Sources of Masculine Identity and its Transformations, Eric Dunning; Football Hooliganism as an Emergent Global Idiom, Eric Dunning; Appendix; Bibliography; Index.