The problem with Undead Texts is not that they are unscholarly; it is that they are antidisciplinary.

Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), a popular explanation of why violence has declined, relies heavily on Norbert Elias’s Undead Text The Civilizing Process (1939) for many of its key ideas. Elias himself, however, developed the ideas original to him in the way scholars do: He immersed himself in primary sources, familiarized himself with the scholarly literature, and forged a new narrative of cultural history.

Undead Texts remain crucial to the history of their fields, but their arguments and methods are no longer seen as viable.