This article deals with Norbert Elias’ historical sociology. In the first place, it asserts the civilizing process theory is pretty much based on objects from the written culture produced by European Courts in the 17th and 18th centuries: the articles of the Encyclopédie, the memoirs of writers and manuals of civility. In this approach I consider that separating the construction of sociological models from the corpus of specific documents from the Ancien Regime results in a dichotomic appropriation of the knowledge process, which is far away from Elias’ perspective. Finally, this paper analyzes Norbert Elias’ contributions to contemporary historiographic thinking, as well as the concepts of mentality, private life and the notion of childhood in Philippe Ariès.