This article discusses the different meanings that Elias ascribes to fantasy and reality and those deducible from his method of working. The undeniable contrast between the two concepts must be qualified. Elias preferred to use the term reality-congruent instead of reality, meaning the knowledge of it that is possible. As for fantasy, it must be di...
Norbert Elias’s theory of civilising processes has been received only marginally in the USA, one of the obstacles being the absence of figurational or process studies of American society. In the first decade of this century this situation was changed by the publication of Stephen Mennell’s The American Civilizing Process (2007) and Cas Wouters’ Sex...
America’s power position in the world – although less unchallenged than it once was, or perhaps because of that – has made it especially susceptible to hypocrisy and collective self-delusion, to what the Greeks called hubris; this continues to lead its foreign policy into unanticipated disasters. The syndrome is discussed with special reference to ...
