The Civilizing Process stands out as Norbert Elias' greatest work, tracing the "civilizing" of manners and personality in Western Europe since the late Middle Ages by demonstrating how the formation of states and the monopolization of power within them changed Western society forever.

This is Elias's last great work in which he used his key ideas to analyse the development of the particular features of German personality, social structure and behaviour.

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.