Reflexive Historical Sociology

Arpad Szakolczai

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415190510
• eBook ISBN: 9781134656141
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book reconstructs and brings together the work of a number of social and political theorists in order to gain new insight on the emergence and character of modern Western society. It examines the intersection point of social theory and historical sociology in a new theoretical approach called "reflexive historical sociology".

There is analysis of the works of Max Weber, Michel Foucault, Norbert Elias, Eric Voegelin and a number of others. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 examines the works of Eric Voegelin, Norbert Elias, Lewis Mumford and Franz Borkenau. Part 2 is concerned with the major conceptual tools such as experience, liminality, process, symbolisation, figuration, order, dramatisation and reflexivity, and themes such as the history of forms of thought, subjectivity, knowledge and closed space and regulated time. Finally, the book examines the most important insights of the thinkers discussed, concerning the historical processes that led to modernity.

Part I

Reflexive historical sociologists

Introduction to Part I

Reflexive historical sociologists are social thinkers who were engaged in detailed empirical and long-term historical studies in their self-reflexive quest for understanding modernity. It would seem that such an undertaking, involving not only much of the social sciences but also history and philosophy, would lie beyond the realm of possibilities for single individuals living and working under modern academic conditions. Yet, apart from Weber and Foucault, there are a series of other thinkers who meet most or all of the criteria.

Starting with the social sciences, there is Albert Hirschman who was born in 1915 in Berlin and who began his academic career as an economist of development before moving into political science and producing mile-stone theoretical works (Hirschman 1959). He also wrote a series of widely-read and influential historical books that gave an original interpretation about the emergence of modern economic society (Hirschman 1977, 1991).

One could continue with Reinhart Koselleck who was born in 1923. He was a German political scientist who became famous through the method he worked out for the history of thought called Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Koselleck 1985, 1989; Tribe 1989) and who also wrote an influential interpretation of the emergence of modernity focusing on the role of intellectual clubs as his doctoral thesis (Koselleck 1998 [1959]).

There is also the sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt, who was born in Poland in 1923 and received a somewhat unusual introduction to the work of Weber through Martin Buber. As a result, his work became oriented to the comparative study of civilizations and their dynamics. The first major results of his research are contained in the classic book The Political Systems of Empires (Eisenstadt 1963) while, in the last decades, his research focused on the question of the axial age civilizations (Eisenstadt 1986, 1995, 1998).

As far as historians are concerned, one may start with two Germans who fit into the best Weberian traditions. The first is Otto Hintze (1861–1940) who was the great comparative institutional historian of Prussia. Hintze and Weber were contemporaries and shared a common interest in the joint emergence of absolutism and Protestantism. Hintze’s work became amajor resource for much work in historical sociology. Gerhard Oestreich (1910–1978) further pursued some of the themes pioneered by Hintze and Weber, focusing on reason of state, police and social disciplining as key moments in the emergence of modernity.

The line can be continued with two French historians who were quite well-known and influential, yet their names create some perplexity, as they did not belong to the Annales school which became almost synonymous with French historiography in the twentieth century and which was strongly influenced by structuralist Durkheimian sociology. They are Philippe Ariès (1914–1984) and Alphonse Dupront (1905–1990). Ariès was a ‘Sunday historian’, ignored by the establishment, working at a centre studying the population problems of the third world who was not given a proper academic position in France until his last years. Yet, animated by an original and profound vision of the destiny of modernity, he undertook long-term reconstructive historical studies of Western attitudes and mentalities regarding to the most important experiences of human life like childhood, family, education, sexuality and death in a series of highly-influential works (Ariès 1974, 1975, 1977, 1993). In contrast to Ariès, Dupront was very much part of the academic establishment. Between 1971 and 1976, he was first president of the new University of Sorbonne (Paris-IV). However, even though his colleagues recognized his extraordinary achievements, his name is much less known than those of the Annales historians, partly because he had a tendency to hide his most important works in relatively obscure publications or even keep them in manuscripts and partly because his interests and methods were different from the dominant, structuralist and secular concerns of his contemporaries. His main interest was in religious experiences, which he studied not in the manner of positivism but as the outbreak of obscure unconscious forces. His historical studies were strongly influenced by concepts and concerns taken over from anthropology and Jungian analytical psychology.

The subset can be closed by two historians of the Low Countries, the Dutchman Johan Huizinga (1872–1945) and the Belgian Henri Pirenne (1862–1935). Huizinga gained his degree in philology studying Sanskrit texts, before he became a historian. He wrote works much influenced by, and much read in, the social sciences (especially Huizinga 1955), and also a widely-read work belong to the ‘crisis literature’ of the 1930s (Huizinga 1936). His most important work, however, was the Autumn of the Middle Ages which rooted the Renaissance, as a movement of spiritual revival, in a period of dissolution of order, the collapse of the Middle Ages. Pirenne was a historian of the Middle Ages, writing an influential work of the emergence of medieval cities. His most important book was Mohammed and Charlemagne, which was based on the highly controversial thesis that the joint appearance of two movements of spiritual revival, the Carolingian Renaissance and Islam, had its roots in a period of dissolution of order, the long decline following the collapse of the Roman Empire.

Finally, there is a historian of ideas with similar concerns, Norman Cohn who was born in 1915. Cohn was one of those thinkers who were trying, shortly after the Second World War, to dig out the joint intellectual origins of the totalitarian mass movements and ideologies and the idea of progress from their own personal

experience. However, he not only produced one of the most important and original works of this literature, The Pursuit of the Millenium that studied the movements from their medieval origins, but stayed with the theme, and after revisiting his earlier work, leaped further back in history and traced the apocalyptic form of thought to its Zoroastrian origins (Cohn 1993).

Though all these thinkers produced works that are not only extremely valuable sources for reflexive historical sociology but also reflect place in this discipline, in this first part of the book the life-works of four other thinkers will be reconstructed in detail. This is partly due to evident limitations of space and the subsequent need to rank and select. It was furthermore decided that only those thinkers will be covered whose work has already been closed. In the end, four thinkers were singled out for attention as it seemed that their work individually had special importance and that the small group, taken together, was quite homogenous. They were Eric Voegelin (1901–1985), Norbert Elias (1897–1990), Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) and Franz Borkenau (1900–1957).

It seemed that the character, depth and breadth of the work of these four thinkers was closest to the kind of tradition for which the inspiration or the spark was derived from Nietzsche (1844–1900), the classic formulation of the problem and body of work was provided by Weber (1864–1920) and the most important and influential contemporary contribution was given by Foucault (1926–1984). The four thinkers produced, just like Weber or Foucault, an outstanding contribution in every single dimension of reflexive historical sociology. As opposed to most of the other historians or philosophers belonging to the field, they have accomplished important empirical studies and even complementary work in journalism. As opposed to most of the other protagonists of the field, their historical work did not stop at the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but went back in time to the collapse of the Roman Empire, the axial age or even beyond. Finally, the vision they presented about the emergence of modernity was particularly convincing and influential and specifically centred on the two main themes of reflexive historical sociology; the historicity of the forms of subjectivity and the historicity of forms of thought.

Part I therefore reconstructs the dynamics of the life-works of Mumford, Elias, Borkenau and Voegelin. It follows the methodological considerations as laid out in Chapter Two of my previous book, Max Weber and Michel Foucault: Parallel Life Works.

The major principles of this reconstructive analysis are very simple. They amount to the treatment of an intellectual trajectory as aperformance where the actual script is the curriculum vitae, using the concept of liminality as developed by Victor Turner. The central idea is that most breakpoints of an individual life are not that difficult to identify. In most cases they correspond to the major ‘rites of passage’ in one’s life and are available in any reasonably accurate and detailed curriculum vitae. In our contemporary world, due to the excessive formalization and emptying of all rites of passage, it is forgotten that such rituals do not simply perform a formal-legalistic function but are emotional and experiential breakpoints, liminal experiences. Dates

of initiation, maturation, appointment, promotion and publication are not just trophies to be collected in a curriculum vitae but provide the emotional and existential context of the work. They have a fundamental impact on the form in which it is eventually put, on the character of the projects pursued, the style in which the books and papers are written, or the polemics in which they are embedded in their reception. Such formal occasions, like inaugural speeches, also present an opportunity and pose a challenge to reflect on one’s own work. Experiences that directly have a professional character must be complemented with other experiences like illness, death or war whose relevance may be less apparent but nevertheless could be just as central, for much the same reasons (see also Greco 1998, Rinken forthcoming, Rossbach forthcoming).

The four chapters of Part I will have unequal lengths. The Borkenau chapter is the shortest, because of the paucity of available information. Next comes the Mumford chapter, partly for the opposite reason as Mumford is the only one of the four for whom we have a published biography, an autobiography, and a series of other autobiographical works. The two longer chapters are on Elias and Voegelin. This is partly due to the amount of material available on them, reflecting their relative importance. But their work is also closest to the line of research as represented by Weber and Foucault.

Part I ends with a long concluding section which makes a detailed comparison between the intellectual trajectories of all six thinkers.

1
Norbert Elias

Norbert Elias was born on 22 June 1897 in Breslau (now Wroclaw), in Silesia. Though the town now belongs to Poland and he was born into a middle-class Jewish family, he was brought up as a German.

His early years were marked by profound, almost timeless stability and security. Being the only child in the period of the ‘child king’ (Ariès 1975), and in a Jewish bourgeois environment which was famous for the huge amount of loving attention paid to children, he had a childhood which was particularly rich and rewarding emotionally.¹ The sense of stability also extended to the surrounding world, where he felt completely safe, and where ‘[o]ne could not imagine that the world would ever be different’ (RL: 13). In the autobiographical interview, he immediately connected this sense of stability to his later ability of persisting with his work for decades, despite the almost complete lack of recognition (RL: 14).

The only threatening events in his childhood were the illnesses which he caught with great regularity and which only reinforced maternal care around him. His fragility had a significant consequence as his parents considered that he was unfit for formal schooling and hired a private teacher. Because of this, he started independent work, in the sense of reading and browsing through a huge number of books on his own, at a very early age (RL: 3, 84–5). No doubt it was through these readings that he soon felt the world of his town and family to be suffocating, below his intellectual level, and he wanted to escape as soon as possible (RL: 6–7).

The opportunity came eventually and with a vengeance. The outbreak of the First World War represented the wholesale collapse of his entire world, a ‘change from the complete security of my family to the complete insecurity of the army’ (RL: 14). The shock was so great that, in his biographical interview, Elias kept returning to the event saying that he still could not understand how he had been able to cope with it at that time; that most of his memories seem to be forgotten, blocked; and that his pre-occupation with historical change must be rooted in these experiences (RL: 14–15, 26–8). This is the first, but not the last, occasion when Elias would have particular difficulties in reliving his own past.

Like all his classmates, Elias enlisted as a volunteer as soon as hefinished secondary education and remained in the army until the end of the war (Korte 1997:74). He was released from military service on 4 February 1919 and immediately started his higher education at the University of Breslau. In fact, he had already been enrolled on his eighteenth birthday, 22 June 1915, just before going to the front.

Though the main facts about the studies for his first degree are well known, the most important impulses and reading experiences of the period remain surprisingly clouded in silence even in the autobiographical interview. Elias enrolled jointly in medicine and philosophy, following gentle parental encouragement to read the former, but after his first medical exams in April 1919, he decided to concentrate on the latter (Korte 1997:75).

His professor of philosophy in Breslau was the well-known neo-Kantian Richard Hönigswald, whom Elias much respected but whose approach he could not accept. His formation was broadened and amplified by the two summer semesters he spent in Heidelberg (1919) and Freiburg (1920). The first of these took place at a particularly liminal moment of his life. It was the first year after the First World War, right after his first regular university semester in Breslau, in a new environment where he was only a visiting student and just after he made a commitment to focus on philosophy (Korte 1997:75–7).

The most important experience of the Heidelberg semester was his encounter with Jaspers for whose seminar he prepared a presentation on the current debate about ‘civilization’, studying the writings of Thomas Mann. Given that Jaspers had a degree in psychiatry and belonged to the faculty of medicine, though already more interested in philosophy (he became a professor of philosophy in 1921), he was an evident choice to be associated with. During a long walk, Jaspers also ‘initiated’ Elias to Max Weber, of whom he had not heard before (RL: 35, 83; Korte 1997:77–8). In Freiburg, Elias listened to Husserl (Korte 1997:77), and gained an understanding which, though critical, was very different from the extremely negative view pronounced by Hönigswald (RL: 92). However, it remains the case that, apart from these few bits and pieces, very little is known of the main formative experiences of Elias.

One can only conjecture that a main reason for this silence was not simply his war experience but also his participation in the Zionist movement. Though he participated in the activities of the Youth Movement before the war (Hackeschmidt 1997), his deep commitment came only after and particularly when he was named as leader of the Breslau group in November 1918 (Korte 1997:83). Elias certainly omitted this chapter of personal history in the biographical interview, just as he was very sparing in details about his formative experiences. Based on the available information, and focusing on the breaks in Elias’s career during these and later years and on the character of his trajectory, I will attempt a short, hypothetic reconstruction of these influences.

The question of intellectual formation, especially in terms of reading experiences, is central to this book. This is the way in which the launching could become possible of a certain type of highly innovative research project, which involves a long-term commitment but therefore also implies loneliness and neglect, and is subsumed in the expression ‘untimeliness’. Elias himself was always much concerned about the conditions of possibility of sequences of events. Indeed, this was his definition of a process and a question central to the last piece of work he ever wrote, the unfinished Introduction to The Symbol Theory. It is only fair to ask therefore: what made the work of Elias possible? But while for most other protagonists of the field, the detailed reconstruction of these experiences is possible through the available pieces of evidence, for Elias most of this information is missing. All what we know is the clearly-identified influence of Freud which, somewhat mysteriously, is never dated, and the candid remark made in a letter (see in Goudsblom 1977:78) about the lack of his in-depth familiarity with much of sociology while writing The Civilizing Process. The remark about sociology can be easily misunderstood, as by that time Elias was evidently profoundly familiar with both the accepted authorities of German sociology of the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: Reflexive Historical Sociologists
• Part II: Visions of Modernity
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography