Norbert Elias and Modern Sociology

Knowledge, Interdependence, Power, Process

Eric Dunning, Jason Hughes

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781780933399
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Ensayos en sociología

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. This book explores the interplay between the making of Elias as a sociologist and the development of his core ideas relating to figurations, interdependence, and civilising processes. Focusing on the relevance of Elias's work for current debates within sociology, the authors centrally consider his contributions to the sociology of knowledge and methodology. Dunning and Hughes locate the work of Elias within a discussion of the crisis of sociology as a subject, and compare his figurational approach with the approaches of three major figures in modern sociology: Anthony Giddens, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. This highly readable and engaging book will be essential reading for students and scholars of sociological theory and methods.

1

Working with Elias

Our task in this chapter is, firstly, to introduce readers to Elias as a person and, secondly, to develop a view of how and why he came to develop an approach to sociology which still continues to be regarded in certain quarters as outmoded, or at best as esoteric, and yet which in other circles has gained growing acclaim, and has come to be considered as one of the most innovative and important contributions to sociology of the twentieth century. In relation to this undertaking, this chapter is about working with Norbert Elias in a number of senses. It is about the fact that Eric Dunning studied and worked with Elias intensively and in person from 1956 to 1978 (the year Elias left England and returned to the continent), and somewhat less intensively from 1978 to 1990 – the year in which Elias died. Dunning’s experience of working closely with Elias will be drawn upon as a source of biographical data, and as a means of providing a fuller sense of the interplay between ‘Elias the person’ and ‘Elias the sociologist’. This chapter is also based upon Jason Hughes having been introduced to Elias’s work by Dunning and the fact that the two of us have extensively ‘worked with’ Elias’s ideas and approach in relation to a range of different topics.

In addition, this chapter is about some of the issues surrounding others ‘working with Elias’. We think a book such as this is necessary in part because of the somewhat enigmatic position Elias’s work currently occupies within the discipline. As we suggested earlier, since his death in 1990, Elias has come increasingly to be regarded as one of the leading sociological figures of the twentieth century, a ‘classical’ sociologist on a par with earlier figures such as Comte, Marx, Durkheim and (Max) Weber. And yet this growing recognition of Elias’s importance has thus far not been matched by a corresponding rise in his influence on subsequent generations of scholars. While the numbers are growing, including outside of what might be called the traditional centres of figurational sociology in Leicester and Amsterdam, relatively few sociologists have come to ‘pick up the baton’ and participate in the ‘relay race of knowledge’ that Elias envisaged; his work still remains somewhat at the margins of the discipline. Our central aim here is thus partly to make sense of this enigma, but also to play our part in redressing it through developing one of the core arguments advanced throughout this book as a whole: namely that, despite the impression held by some that his work is a relic from a bygone age, Elias’s contributions to the subject represent a basis – but by no means the only one – for a move beyond the fragmentation and crisis in which sociology currently finds itself engulfed, as we outlined in the Introduction to this book. To commence this line of argument we first turn to Elias the person, exploring in particular the interplay between his biography and the development of his distinctive sociological approach.

Norbert Elias: A brief biography and some autobiographical insertions

Norbert Elias was born in June 1897 in Breslau, a city of some 500,000 inhabitants in the eastern part of the then recently unified German Kaiserreich, that is ‘Imperial Germany’. Following Germany’s defeat in the Second World War, Breslau was incorporated into Poland and given the name of Wrocław. Elias lived a long life and died in his home in Amsterdam in August 1990. In September 1999, a commemorative plaque was ceremonially unveiled on a wall of one of the houses in Wrocław where Elias had lived as a child.

Elias was of Jewish descent. His father, Hermann, was a prosperous textile merchant, and he and Elias’s mother, Sophie, were sufficiently well off to be able to send the young Norbert to Breslau’s distinguished humanistic Johannesgymnasium. In English, it was what we used to call a ‘grammar school’. There, Elias received a German classical education, above all a grounding in Latin, Greek, French, mathematics, science and such classics of German literature as the works of Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Mörike and Eichendorff. This classical education was repeatedly put to good use by Elias in the course of his long and eventually distinguished career.¹³ In 1987, he was to publish a volume of poems, two of them in English, under the title Los der Menschen (‘The Human Lot’) (Elias 1987b).

At the Johannesgymnasium, Elias became the member of a select group which met with a teacher to discuss the works of Kant. It was while at the Johannesgymnasium that he formed the ambition to pursue an academic career and learned that, as a Jew, he would encounter stiff hurdles in seeking to pursue his goal. The First World War broke out in August 1914 and, after graduating from the Johannesgymnasium in 1915, Elias enlisted in the Kaiser’s army, joining the Signals Corps and seeing action on both the Eastern and the Western fronts. From that point in 1915 onwards, Elias’s experiences provide some clues regarding why he developed a sociological interest in such problems as: (i) violence and civilisation; (ii) the relations between individuals and the societies they form, also referred to as the ‘agency-structure dilemma’; (iii) the related problem of the relations between ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ phenomena; and (iv) the relations between ‘the private’ and ‘the public’ parts of social life. Kilminster (2007), Russell (1997) and, indeed, Elias himself (1994), have related this orientation to his Jewish origins and socialisation within the relatively non-oppressive Jewish culture. Elias’s own vivid words are revealing in regard to how he formed his sociological perspective. In a series of interviews conducted by Arend-Jan Heerma van Voss and Bram in Amsterdam in 1984, he replied to their probing about the First World War by saying concerning his recollections of the years before 1914 that he had felt very secure in that period largely as a result of the prosperity of his parents and their love for him, especially his mother’s. He continued:

in the world in which I lived … I never heard the rumbling of the approaching thunderstorm. For me the world only changed with the war. I still cannot really quite understand how I coped with this situation; the change from the complete security of my family to the complete insecurity of the army. Suddenly my parents were no longer there. (Elias 1994: 14)

Regarding his years spent on the Western-front, Elias said:

I still remember the dugout. We lived underground … It wasn’t just a trench, more like a mole’s burrow. I still remember very vividly wooden steps going down, and then there were two narrow rooms deep down under the earth. When there was a near miss, lumps of earth came down the steps, the whole thing shook, and anyone outside was hit. I do not think that I was even in the most advanced trenches, because our task was to maintain the telegraph lines between the front trenches and headquarters. We were always sent out to mend the wires which were constantly being hit, and sometimes, during a barrage, one simply went into a shell crater and tried to sit it out … I remember one comrade being wounded next to me, and we had to bring him back … I have a vivid recollection of going to the front, of dead horses and a few dead bodies and that underground shelter … Then there is some feeling of a big shock, but I cannot recollect. I cannot even remember how I got back. (Elias 1994: 26–27)

Like many young soldiers in the First and Second World Wars, whichever side they were on, Elias was not only traumatised by his war experiences but radicalised as well. He had been politicised as early as 1913 as has been shown by Hackeschmidt (1999). That was the year in which Elias joined the German radical Zionist youth organisation, the Blau-Weiss Bund (Blue-White League), a context in which he was to meet such subsequently prominent social/cultural science figures as Erich Fromm and Leo Strauss. Hackeschmidt suggests, in our view persuasively, that parts of Elias’s theory such as aspects of ‘his figurational model and his scholarly credo of “handing on the torch”, can be traced back … to his days in Blau-Weiss’ (Hackeschmidt 1999: 73). Hermann Korte (1988: 63ff) has suggested that the Zionist radicalism of this phase in Elias’s life is to be attributed largely to the effects on him of the war. In our view, however, to that has to be added the frequent radicalism of youth, especially of an ‘outsider group’ which is what the Jews in Germany at that time were. As Kilminster (2007: 26ff) shows, Elias himself later acknowledged the part which being a member of a ‘stigmatised outsider group’, especially of a radicalised younger generation who had come to doubt the wisdom of their parents, played in the shaping of his sociological thinking. Most important of all, however, is the fact that, by 1929 at the latest, and although he had earlier been associated with the secular part of Blau-Weiss, Elias was coming to abandon his youthful idealism for a more hard-headed realism. Before the 1914–18 war and in 1919 and 1920, he could dream of setting up a utopian society in Palestine but, by 1929, in an essay ‘On the Sociology of German anti-Semitism’, he had reached the conclusion that:

in the present social state, there is no chance of a therapy, of a full-scale healing of the social body from the evil of anti-Semitism. The surge of anti-Semitism is the function of economic and social developments that cannot be altered by the small group of German Jews and scarcely influenced by them to any degree. The Jewish community in this regard is far more driven than driver. From such an understanding and in conjunction with other experiences, one can draw the conclusion that a social order in which a group of gifted, often spiritually and intellectually rich and creative people are consciously downgraded, devalued and so powerfully crippled is not worth preserving and must be fought against. It can also lead one to decide to go to Palestine, because the fight for a national home for Jews appears more promising than the fight for social equality for Jews in Germany. For those who are unwilling to draw such conclusions, there remains only resignation. A clear understanding of one’s own position is preferable in any case to self-deception. That is, one thing always remains possible for German Jews as an answer to anti-Semitism: they can accustom themselves to the unobtrusive, determined and self-aware demeanour that is the only way of behaving appropriately in their position. (Authors’ translation of German original; see Elias 2006a: 83 for alternative translation).

The German Jews, he had written in 1929, had had three options: to fight for a better social order in Germany; to fight for a Jewish state in Palestine; or, resigning themselves to their lot, to steer an unobtrusive path through a life increasingly scattered with minefields.

The years following the First World War were a period of great instability, tension and unrest in Germany. Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated in the wake of the humiliating military defeat, and the Weimar Republic was formed. Large sections of the officer corps, many rank and file soldiers, and a large proportion of the old imperial upper and upper middle classes held the new republic, its parliamentary institutions, and its socialist/social democratic leaders in contempt. They called the republic a ‘pig-sty’. There were attempts to overthrow it from the far Left and the far Right. From the Right, there was the so-called ‘Kapp Putsch’ of 1920 and the ‘Hitler-Ludendorff Putsch’ in Munich in 1923. And, under the influence of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, a ‘Soviet Republic’ (Räterrepublik) was formed in Munich in 1918 and, at the same time in Berlin, there was an uprising by the ‘Spartakists’ led by the ‘Communists’ Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg. Both uprisings were put down by the ‘official’ army of the Weimar state and the Freikorps, fighting bands formed of demobilised officers and men from the disbanded army and navy. The Freikorps were politically to the right. They formed the backbone of an underground terrorist organisation, ‘Konsul’, which killed large numbers of people, possibly 1,000, in the early years of Weimar (Elias 1996: 186). One of their victims, wrote Elias:

was my schoolfellow, Bernhard Schottländer, a completely unathletic, highly intelligent person, who, with his thick spectacles, looked like a young scholar even as a first-former, and who tended to communism after reading Marx, and whose corpse, if I remember rightly, was found in Breslau’s city moat, tied up with barbed wire. (Elias 1996: 186)

After the suppression of the Freikorps, the stability of the Weimar Republic was further undermined by the hyperinflation of 1922–23. In August 1922, it took over 1,000 marks to buy a US dollar. By October, that figure had risen to 3,000 and by December, 7,000 (Evans 2003: 104). Depreciation of the currency became increasingly compelling, taking on more and more the character, in Elias’s terms, of a ‘blind’ or ‘unplanned social process’. Richard Evans captured its unintended dynamics when he wrote:

Anyone who wanted to buy a dollar in January 1923 had to pay over 17,000 marks for it; in April 24,000; in July 353,000. This was hyperinflation on a truly staggering scale, and the dollar rate in marks for the rest of the year is best expressed in numbers that soon became longer than anything found ev...