Introduction; Tatiana Savoia Landini and Francois Depelteau SECTION I : UNDERSTANDING ELIAS 1. Main Principles of Elias's Sociology; Tatiana Savoia Landini 2. Five misunderstandings of Elias's Thought; Nathalie Heinich 3. Ariel or Caliban? The Civilizing Process and its critiques; Francois Depelteau, Enio Passiani and Ricardo Mariano SECTION II: ELIAS AND CLASSICAL SOCIAL THEORY 4. The Epicurean in Elias; Anna-Louise Barbara Evers 5. Elias, Freud and the Human Sciences; Bernard Lahire 6. Contradiction and Interdependency: the sociologies of Karl Marx and Norbert Elias; Chris Powell 7. Past and Present in Sociological Theory: similarities and differences between Emile Durkheim and Norbert Elias; Enio Passiani 8. Norbert Elias and Emile Durkheim: seeds of a historical sociology of knowledge; Hector Vera 9. Irony as vocation; Marta Bucholc 10. Taking up the torch from Max Weber: Norbert Elias and the challenging of classical sociology; Markus Schroer and Jessica Wilde 11. From Elias back to Simmel; Leopoldo Waizbort SECTION III: ELIAS AND CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL THEORY 12. Norbert Elias and Karl Manheim: contrasting perspectives on the sociology of knowledge; Richard Kilminster 13. Under the Shadow of the Authoritarian Personality: Elias, Fromm, and Alternative Social Psychologies of Authoritarianism; Tim Berard 14. Norbert Elias and Hannah Arendt on Philosophy, Sociology and Science; Philip Walsh 15. Individualization and social dis/integration in "postmodernity": A comparative note on Zygmunt Bauman and Norbert Elias; John Flint and Ryan Powell 16. Comparing Elias and Bourdieu as relational thinkers; Francois Depelteau 17. From figuration to coordination: an analysis of social interdependence mechanisms; Jean-Hugues Dechaux