Norbert Elias

Post-philosophical Sociology

Richard Kilminster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415437066
• eBook ISBN: 9781134075287
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Few sociologists of the first rank have scandalised the academic world to the extent that Elias did. Developed out of the German sociology of knowledge in the 1920s, Elias's sociology contains a sweeping radicalism which declares an academic 'war on all your houses'. His sociology of the 'human condition' sweeps aside the contemporary focus on 'modernity' and rejects most of the paradigms of sociology as one-sided, economistic, teleological, individualistic and/or rationalistic. As sociologists, Elias also asks us to distance ourselves from mainstream psychology, history and above all, philosophy, which is summarily abandoned, although carried forward on a higher level.

This enlightening book written by a close friend and pupil of Elias, is the first book to explain the refractory, uncomfortable, side of Elias's sociological radicalism and to brace us for its implications. It is also the first in-depth analysis of Elias's last work The Symbol Theory in the light of selected contemporary developments in archaeology, anthropology and evolutionary theory.

1 Understanding Elias

I am constantly being misunderstood, because people distort things to fit in with their wishes.

(Norbert Elias 1994: 37)

Elias’s language and style

It is one of the ironies of modern sociology that in the reception of Elias’s work in the 1970s and 1980s the clarity and straightforwardness of most of his writings probably worked against him. In the social sciences it is often mistakenly assumed that if something can be conveyed simply then it cannot be profound. For those accustomed to sociological language being difficult and obscure, reading Elias can be a liberating but at the same time disconcerting experience. Wolf Lepenies (1978: 63) aptly described the qualities of Elias’s writings: ‘a jargon-free concern with clarity, a careful training in sociological observation and a thoroughgoing combination of theoretical discussions with often surprising references to details’. Helmut Kuzmics (2001b: 116) has pointed out that because Elias stretched what counted as explanation in sociology away from the naturalistic ideal of science and used a number of literary sources (among other data) as evidence of emotional changes, his works have a kind of quality that might be called ‘literary’.

In contrast, the writings of Elias’s neo-Kantian philosophy teachers, from whom, as we will see in Chapter 2, he made a decisive break in the 1920s, were infamous for their obscurity. As Willey (1978: 104) comments, their writings were ‘difficult and stratospherically abstract. Esotericism invites only a small audience’. Commenting in the early 1980s on seeing for the first time in more than fifty years a copy of his apparently lost D. Phil. thesis (which was written under the supervision of Richard Hönigswald in Breslau and submitted in 1922), Elias referred to its ‘frightening philosophical idiom’ (Elias 1994: 153). Although he did not always achieve his aim, Elias’s often expressed intention was to write in such a way as to make his work as far as possible accessible also to people outside sociology. In so doing, Elias immediately exposed those sociology establishments whose members use forbidding language to set up a barrier between themselves and those outside their circle. He pointedly described ‘circles of learned people’ who communicate with each other in ‘ritualized high level abstractions which no one outside that circle can understand’. In the face of this ‘hail of abstractions’, he continued, uninitiated people are ‘often at a loss’ (Elias 1992: 180).

The straightforwardness of Elias’s prose belies the fact that it is highly controlled and carefully wrought, his sociological writings being the product of much drafting and redrafting. They are written in a language carefully cleansed of all traces of reification, static metaphysics and ‘rigid stereotypes’ (Kuzmics 2001b: 116). For example, Elias refers in The Civilizing Process to the rising thresholds of ‘shame’ and ‘embarrassment’ in European societies since the Renaissance. Johan Goudsblom has rightly remarked of the two words: ‘they are not at all technical’ (Goudsblom 1969: 147). Peter Gleichmann probably had this feature of Elias’s style in mind when he referred to Elias’s general theoretical strategy as one of ‘concept avoidance’ (cited in Mennell 1998: 256). Examples abound illustrating this characteristic of Elias’s work. He talks, for example, about party establishments when others prefer ‘the political’; or entrepreneurial occupational groups rather than ‘class fractions’; or economic specialists instead of ‘the economic sphere’; or social specialists for violence control rather than ‘repressive state apparatuses’; or means of orientation rather than ‘ideological practices’; or people instead of ‘actors’ or ‘agents’. As Goudsblom has said, referring to two other concepts studiously avoided by Elias: ‘it is not superfluous to remind ourselves that in sociology we are dealing with people. All too often sociologists … start out with an abstract conception of “social action” or “social system”’ (Goudsblom 1977a: 6).

It also quickly becomes apparent to the new reader of Elias (particularly his later writings, not so much The Civilizing Process or The Court Society) that he typically lists very few references. For the most part, he cites books from which he has drawn an empirical example or a telling quotation, and these are few. Frequently, there are only one or two, perhaps three, books cited, often obscure ones published many years ago.¹ In his last book, The Symbol Theory, published posthumously in 1991, only one book is cited – Julian Huxley (1941). For most of his academic life Elias was either outside or on the periphery of sociology establishments (Mennell 1998: ch. 1). Even as he became a central figure in sociology in a number of European countries in the 1980s and his ideas became widely accepted in sociology institutions, he himself did not feel the pressure to provide the extensive references that are taken for granted in the social science professions, or to engage in explicit oppositional debate and polemics with other writers (although he did this a little more in the later years as belated recognition brought with it criticisms from many quarters – see Goudsblom 1987a).

Scholars of Elias’s generation, writing at an early stage in the expansion of social science disciplines, were used to addressing very few other scholars. For the most part they had a good knowledge of their readers’ education and could assume common reference points. In many cases they knew their potential readers personally. So they developed a style of implicit criticism of other writers and theoretical frameworks (see Goudsblom 1987a). In the climate of contemporary sociology this feature of Elias’s writing probably also worked against him. Scientific establishments are, among other things, citation networks, in which there is no chance of entry or acceptance without citing others in the network. Then along comes Elias, who does not pay the appropriate dues, so he is viewed with suspicion, even resentment. Mike Featherstone reported a common reaction to Elias: ‘the apparent arrogance of someone who seemed to claim a new sociology, yet who must have taken a good deal from his distinguished teachers and associates – Rickert, Alfred Weber and Mannheim – yet scarcely acknowledged them’ (Featherstone 1987: 200).

This reaction tells us a great deal about the assumptions that these critics, particularly the British ones, were making. They uncritically accepted the conventional demands of the sociology establishment with regard to citations and acknowledgements. While minimal citations of current literature and research are desirable, it seems that their relative lack in Elias may have blinded people to recognizing the originality and novelty of his work. Many I suspect were so put off by this feature of Elias’s work that they failed to grasp that it was already a synthesis of many perspectives into which the insights of others had been integrated and thereby transformed, and that the way in which he wrote was an expression of the empirically established synthesis he had achieved, particularly in The Civilizing Process. In this way of writing – which is perhaps more typical of German social science and philosophy of the first half of the twentieth century – one simply leaves out all direct polemics against persons and other schools, even though these are known and understood by the author and the audience.

This feature of Elias’s style was also partly the result of a determined longterm strategy of detachment on his part. He did not want to be diverted from the primary task at hand as he saw it – empirical-theoretical research to test the synthesis which he had crafted – by elaborate in-house sociological discussions. As he said in an interview: ‘it is more productive for the future of sociology if I go on working in the laboratory as I have done before, like a physicist who would go to his labour every day and do his stint instead of criticizing other physicists’ (Elias 1985b, quoted in Kilminster 1987: 215).

Elias would focus on the problem or object of enquiry (for example, symbols, scientific establishments, Mozart, time, violence, ageing and dying, work, technization or psychosomatics – to name just a few of the subjects he investigated in his later years) and would explore it in his own way, in his own language of figurational or process sociology. Elias wrote entirely from this perspective and in his own sociological vocabulary, drawing empirical examples where necessary from a variety of sources. He was effectively testing out in various fields theories of social processes he had established empirically, mainly in the Civilizing Process, The Court Society and The Established and the Outsiders. In this respect, Elias was very consistent.

In his research Elias worked on a very long scientific timescale, detached both from current social science orthodoxies and fads and from other short-term concerns with politics and policy. As he put it in an interview: ‘If I give myself credit for anything, it is that I have never been corrupted by any fashion. I never allowed myself to say anything because it was fashionable’ (Elias 1994: 76). His longer view and high degree of detachment accounts for another feature of his style – a noticeable lack of fashionable words, expressions and catch-phrases. As he commented: ‘[T]he longevity of research recorded in books or articles is greater the simpler the exposition and the less use made of fashionable, generation-dependent code-words’ (Elias 1994: 116). It is another irony that this feature of his later writings in particular may also have worked against him. Readers, hungry for the knowing display of contemporary allusions and in-group references, would thus find his work unsatisfying.

Modernity or the human condition?

At the time of writing, the concept of modernity (in its various guises as ‘late modernity’, ‘organized modernity’, ‘disorganized modernity’, ‘high modernity’ and ‘postmodernity’) is much used in sociology. Many sociologists today also take it for granted that their discipline has as its main object of reference modern, advanced industrial societies (often referred to as the diffuse entity ‘modernity’). There is a very different approach to be found in Elias. He assumes that sociology should draw empirical evidence from a wide variety of historical and contemporary societies, both the relatively small-scale and the relatively complex. Elias will invariably illuminate changes occurring in contemporary societies with comparative evidence of societies in the distant past, not simply within the foreshortened timescale of the ‘modern’ period. This conception of sociology goes back a long way in Elias’s development. In a conference lecture in 1928 on primitive art (Elias 2005: 75) he said that ‘if one wishes to understand man, if one wishes to understand oneself – every period of history is equally relevant to us’.

For example, when discussing the highly topical subject of the changing balance of power between men and women (Elias 1987b) Elias goes back to the ancient Roman state. He shows that it was in the upper reaches of that society that for the first time married women achieved a position of equality with their husbands, even though many other spheres in Roman society, including commerce, tax-farming, literature, art and philosophy, were still male preserves (Elias 1987b: 309–10). Elias will range from ancient Rome to prehistoric hominid bands, from the absolutist courts to medieval knights or from simpler societies in Africa to the city-states of ancient Sumer. He also works with a developmental orientation that enables him both to discern the dynamic through which one kind of society changes into another and to grasp the specificity of a particular society at a given stage of development. In his willingness to define the scope of sociology widely enough so as to include the so-called ‘pre-modern’ phases of social development dealt with by historians as well as simpler societies conventionally left to anthropologists, Elias again runs counter to the current wisdom.

An example of the more common and opposing viewpoint may be found in the writings of Anthony Giddens. He follows Ernest Gellner (1964) to assert: ‘I understand sociology … to be not a generic discipline to do with the study of human societies as a whole, but that branch of social science which focuses particularly upon the “advanced” or modern societies’ (Giddens 1984: xvii; see also Kilminster 1998: ch. 7). There is a similar characterization of the scope of sociology in Habermas (1984). He writes that sociology’s theme ‘was the changes in social integration brought about within the structure of old-European societies by the rise of the modern system of national states and by the differentiation of a market-regulated economy. Sociology became the science of crisis par excellence; it concerned itself above all with the anomic aspects of the dissolution of traditional social systems and the development of modern ones’ (Habermas 1984: 4).

Approaching the scope of the discipline from a wider perspective, Elias argues in The Court Society (Elias 1983: 210) that people who think that studying the power distribution and dependence of dukes, princes and kings is unrewarding, because those positions have become marginal to our society, have misunderstood the task of sociology. Rather, it involves working with a kind of comparative research that will help modern people, including sociological researchers, to resist the temptation of demeaning past societies or simpler peoples as implicitly ‘inferior’. As we will see in Chapter 4, The Civilizing Process was partly intended to bring about readers facing their own latent (and in some cases in the 1930s in Germany, their manifest) feelings of superiority over ‘uncivilized’ peoples and outsiders generally.² By implication, this aim could be less successfully achieved by a sociology that investigated only ‘modern’ societies because such approaches already tacitly embody the assumption of civilized superiority in the first place.³ Or at least they do not make controlling for that possibility intrinsic to research.

In a nutshell, mainstream approaches today embody a sociology of modernity, whereas Elias evokes a sociology of the human condition. As he once put it, his theory of civilization ‘is essentially a theory of man, of man in the plural … and not in the singular’ (Elias 1985d: 1). He described the general task of sociology as follows:

[It is] to make people in every kind of association better able to understand themselves and others. By studying how people are associated and mutually dependent at a different stage of social development, by trying to elucidate the reasons why the mechanism of human dependence takes on this specific form at this stage, we not only contribute to a better understanding of the evolution [sic] of our own figuration. We also discern, among people living in what at first appear to be alien figurations and who are therefore alien and incomprehensible as individuals, the key positions that enable us to put ourselves in the places of people living in a quite different society, and therefore quite different from ourselves. … [W]e are able to re-establish the identification without which any contact between people – even that of the researcher with his subject, of the living with the dead – has something of the barbarity of earlier, more savage phases of human development when people of other societies were regarded as aliens and sometimes not even as human beings.

(Elias 1983: 210, emphasis added)

Elias’s position can be further clarified through a brief comparison with contemporary sociological approaches that employ the much-used concept of ‘modernity’ (see e.g. Hall et al. 1992: 2–4). These comparisons will, of course, date very quickly, but are worth making so as to bring out the specificity of Elias’s approach against that of a current orthodoxy which shows little signs of waning. The concept of modernity has been with us for a long time, but it has come to play a more central role in sociology particularly after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1989. What has been superseded since that time has been the view that capitalism was the problem and socialism the solution. Many contemporary sociologists assume either that (1) there is now effectively only one global, capitalist ‘modernity’ associated with the bloc of wealthy nations led by the USA or (2) the so-called ‘socialist’ societies of the former Soviet Union, as well as the capitalist ones outside that bloc, were both part of the wider phenomenon of ‘modernity’ and that this is the source of their common problems (Bauman 1992: 222).

In either form, this orientation lacks a comparative perspective of a kind that can provide a medium for distancing ourselves from our own habitus, sensibilities and prejudices. Hence, working within the limits imposed by the high level of abstraction which many routinely refer to as ‘modernity’,⁴ the problem of self-confrontation conceived by Elias is systematically avoided. This cuts off investigators further from a more sensitive appreciation of the shifting balances of similarities and differences between societies.

The looseness of the concept of modernity also lends itself to the politicization of sociological investigation. Indeed, in current usage the concept seems to be serving an entirely political function, which then further reinforces the equivocality of the concept. This tendency is exemplified by Stuart Hall’s (1992: 274–325) influential analysis of the impact of globalization on cultural identities. Here the combination of the concept of modernity with an essentially political stance produces a prescriptive typology of identities that is not based directly on empirical evidence. The impact of globalization is said to lead to the ‘pluralizing’ of identities, making them less fixed, particularly in societies that have immigrants from different countries. Like others who rely heavily on the concept of ‘modernity’, Hall writes about contemporary society in a curiously flat and disembodied way because his typology is not based on systematic empirical research, as Elias would insist. Hall argues that ‘identities’ (n.b. not real groups of people) are now ‘oscillating between’ Tradition (the dream of cultural purity) and Translation (the acknowledgement of difference and hybridity).

But no actual evidence is cited by Hall that the positing of this oscillation has arisen from an appraisal of evidence relating to the experiences of real groups of people. The moral-political assumption that people should be able to live with contradictory identities rather than seeking either assimilation with the dominant groups of the host nation or a separatist celebration of their own group ethnicity is projected on to the reality. Nor is there any discussion of why the assimilation option might seem unattractive to ethnic groups at this stage of the development of European nations. Nor is there any reference to the inner tensions and struggles of real people who may have decided to live out such contradictions (if they have so decided), nor to the psychic price they may be paying for it, beyond one oblique reference to the ‘costs and dangers’ involved (Hall 1992: 311). It is not difficult to perceive in this work the domination of ought over is and the subsequent structure of denial involved. Elias’s work may be seen as moving precisely in the opposite direction. (I will return to this issue again when discussing Elias’s theory of involvement and detachment in Chapter 5.)

Further, the concept of modernity, seen as the ‘principle of Western society as such’ (Kumar 1993: 392), cannot be disentangled from its extension in the theories of modernization elaborated by Parsons and Hoselitz and ot...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Understanding Elias
• 2 Origins of Elias’s synthesis
• 3 Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim
• 4 The Civilizing Process: The structure of a classic
• 5 Involved detachment: Knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias
• 6 The Symbol Theory: Secular humanism as a research programme
• 7 Concluding remarks: The fourth blow to man’s narcissism?
• Notes
• Bibliography