Of Discipline and Civilization: a Roundtable Discussion on the Legacies of Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault

When one considers the proximity of their concerns, it is perhaps surprising that the works of Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault have not been more systematically compared and discussed. However, the differentiation of disciplinary knowledge (particularly the boundary that separates philosophy from social theory), com-pounded by parochialisms fostered by the cult of the intellectual, have delayed this process far past its due. This conversation, which began in 2008 at a conference on the works of Elias and Foucault at the University of Hamburg, is, in this regard, an effort to make up for lost time. Fashioned from hours of discussion recorded on an afternoon at the University of Amsterdam in June 2009, (enriched and clarified by the editor and participants in several rounds of polishing and revision), the discus-sion that follows seeks to draw out conflicts and convergences between the trajecto-ries of thought we know as Eliasian and Foucauldian.