First published in German in the inauspicious year of 1939, untranslated into French or English until the 1970s, Norbert Elias's newly discovered masterpiece, The Civilizing Process, has been rightly acclaimed as a work that brilliantly anticipates the subsequent development of sociologically inspired historical scholarship.l It is hard for an English-speaking reader, coming across this work for the first time, to appreciate Elias's originality, when so many of his themes and his manner of approaching them have now become the stock-in-trade of social history. New perceptions of childhood; their connection with changing standards of decorum and a"rising threshold of repugnance"; the growth of privacy; the internalization of moral constraints; increasing awareness of the family's role in their development; links between changing manners and a more fundamental "change in the structure of drives and emotions" (1: 127) -all these themes in early modern social history, familiar enough today, even to undergraduates, were unheard of, at least in the United States, when The Civilizing Process first appeared in German.