Quest for Excitement

Elias effectively founded the modern sociology of sport in collaboration with Eric Dunning in the 1960s and 1970s. They argue that in highly constrained, 'civilized' societies, sports are to be understood not in terms of 'relaxation' but rather of the need for pleasurable excitement and its pleasurable resolution. Volume 7 in University College Dublin's Collected Works of Norbert Elias series.

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

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.