[1] The first volume, The History of Manners, traces the historical developments of the European habitus, or "second nature", the particular individual psychic structures molded by social attitudes.

Elias traced how post-medieval European standards regarding violence, sexual behaviour, bodily functions, table manners and forms of speech were gradually transformed by increasing thresholds of shame and repugnance, working outward from a nucleus in court etiquette.

The internalized "self-restraint" imposed by increasingly complex networks of social connections developed the "psychological" self-perceptions that Freud recognized as the "super-ego".

First, Elias explains that throughout time, social unity increased its control over military and fiscal power until possessing the monopoly over it.

Elias and his supporters responded that he had never intended to claim that social regulations or self-restraining psychological agents would be institutions singular to Western modernity, it is just that Western culture developed particularly sophisticated, concise, comprehensive, and rigid institutions apparent for instance in its decisive technological advances when compared to other cultures.