The Established and the Outsiders: 32 Second Edition

The Established and the Outsiders was first published in 1965. It grew out of a study of a community near Leicester in the late 1950s and early 1960s by John Scotson, a local schoolteacher interested in juvenile delinquency. But in the hands of Norbert Elias, one of the century′s great sociologists, this local study was reworked to illuminate social processes of general significance in human society generally – including how a group of people can monopolise power chances and use them to exclude and stigmatise members of another very similar group (for example through the poweful medium of gossip), and how that is experienced in the collective `we-images′ of both groups. Ten years later Elias dictated, in English, a long new introduction for the Dutch translation of the book. This ′Theoretcial Essay on Established and Outsiders′ spelled out how the theory could be applied to a whole range of changing patterns of human inequality: to relations between classes, ethnic groups, colonised and colonisers, men and women, parents and children, gays and straights. For many years it was thought that parts of the English text of this important essay had been lost, but they came to light in 1994 after Elias′s death in 1990, and the essay is now published in English for the first time in this volume.

— Stephen Mennell