The main purpose of Elias's magnum opus was to explain the emergence of European civilized self-representations as embodied in the changing ‘threshold of repugnance’ towards violent and nonviolent harm as well as in new social expectations of propriety and self-restraint in everyday life (Elias 2012 [1939]). The study set out to understand large-scale shifts in social and political organization which were intertwined with greater revulsion to violent punishment and with attendant social expectations regarding table manners and levels of selfcontrol with respect to elementary bodily functions. Elias maintained that higher levels of synthesis in the social sciences were essential in order to understand the interlocked reconstitution of public institutions and collective emotions over the last few centuries. He argued that fundamental changes within the leading European states gave rise to global established– outsider figurations that had transformed all human societies. Later chapters will supplement Elias's synthesis by providing a more detailed examination of the earlier comment in the Introduction about how the relationship between European state-formation, overseas colonial expansion and the development of international society has defined the global political order. The immediate task is to provide an overview of Elias's explanation of the European civilizing process.

The scale and originality of the Eliasian sociological endeavour are evident in the analysis of how civilized sensibilities and emotions emerged from the relations between the formation of state monopoly powers, competition between social classes, internal pacification, increased economic interdependence and the growing complexity of the social division of labour. Some brief comments about Elias's place in the classical sociological tradition were made in the Introduction. They are developed here by comparing his approach with Marx's historical-materialist analysis of monopolizing processes in capitalist industrial societies. The aim is to explain Elias's breakthrough to greater comprehensiveness in social-scientific inquiry. He argued that the Marxian examination of class struggles to gain monopoly control of the means of production provided new insights into how power struggles and social conflicts shaped both pre-capitalist and modern capitalist societies. Largely missing from the investigation, he added – reflecting the influence of Weber's definition of the state – was the examination of struggles between social groups for monopoly control of the instruments of violence.