It has been said that sociologists must be ‘myth-hunters', tracking down pop-ular beliefs that are ill founded (Elias 1978: 50-70). Whether simply exposing such beliefs to contrary evidence deployed by academics is suf?cient to kill off myths and bring them home for mounting on the walls of our university departments is highly debateable. Nevertheless, we have a duty to call them in question, and enter into debate with those who want to keep them alive in the big-game reserve of public opinion.

In my recent book The American Civilizing Process (Mennell 2007), I set out to see how far Norbert Elias's theory of civilising and decivilising pro-cesses needed to be modi?ed in the light of American history and how far it applied unchanged to the development of the usa. His theory was originally developed mostly on the basis of the social development of Western Europe. But I think that broadly speaking, it stood up well to American evidence, and shed interesting light on several aspects of Americans' conventional narrative of their history.