Elias typically lists very few references; indeed, frequently there will only be one, perhaps to an obscure book published many years ago. If one complained to Elias that he had failed to address the contemporary literature, or suggested that he was out of date, he would reply that you had a fetish for the new, that just because a book is old it does not mean that it may not still be the best treatment of a problem. And, conversely, new books did not necessarily represent an advance simply because they were new. It was the intrinsic cognitive worth of the book that counted, not whether it was currently a la mode. He worked within a very long scientific time scale, detached from current orthodoxies.
Richard Kilminster & Stephen Mennell – Norbert Elias (via thepovertyoftheory)