Elias’s Ghanaian Essays ReicherDieterJitschinAdrianPostArjanAlikhaniBehrouz (eds) Norbert Elias’s African Processes of Civilisation: On the Formation of Survival Units in Ghana. New York: Springer, 2022, 255 pp. ISBN: 978-3658378486

A major obstacle to an accurate understanding of the influence that the period Norbert Elias spent in West Africa had on his thought has been the fact that his writings on processes of civilization in Africa have remained unpublished, available only for those able to access the Elias archives in Marbach. This obstacle has been removed by the publication of Elias’s Ghanaian essays. In this review essay I examine how Elias’s essays reveal a crucial development in his understanding of civilizing and decivilizing processes, as being driven by the organisation of human social groups as ‘survival units’, in which civilizing processes are in fact always counter-balanced by contradictory tendencies in the opposite direction, towards violence and decivilizing processes. These essays suggest a new reading of Elias’s writings from the 1970s onwards, one that brings to the foreground the tension between relatively advanced intra-state and relatively underdeveloped inter-state civilizing processes.