Norbert Elias: Post-philosophical Sociology

Norbert Elias

Few sociologists of the first rank have scandalized 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 ‘plague on all your houses’. His sociology of the ‘human condition’ sweeps aside the contemporary focus on ‘modernity’ and rejects most of the dominant paradigms of sociology as one-sided, static, 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 details the far-reaching and provocative core at the heart of Elias. Written by a close friend and pupil of Elias it is the first book to explain the refractory, uncomfortable side of Elias’s sociological radicalism and to brace us for its implications. Richard Kilminster is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Leeds

Norbert Elias Post-philosophical sociology

Richard Kilminster

First published 2007 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007.

“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2007 Richard Kilminster All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kilminster, Richard. Norbert Elias : post-philosophical sociology / Richard Kilminster. p. cm. 1. Elias, Norbert, 1897–1990. 2. Sociology. I. Title. HM479.E38K55 2007 301.092--dc22[B] 2007006492 ISBN 0-93930-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0-415-43706-7 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-93930-1 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-43706-6 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-93930-7 (ebk)

To the memory of Anthony Saville White, poet (1925–2006)

In history everything is relatively absolute. (Alexander Herzen)

Contents

Preface Acknowledgements

ix xiii

1 Understanding Elias Elias’s language and style 1 Modernity or the human condition? 4

1

2 Origins of Elias’s synthesis Placing Elias 8 Elias and Weimar culture 10 Elias as a synthesizer 14 Elias as an ontologist 18 Philosophy reframed 32 Modes of persuasion 36

8

3 Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim Introduction: closeness and distance 40 Intellectual affinities 43 Relationism 47 Evaluating 51 The Zurich Congress 1928 53 Issues of theory and practice 56 Epilogue 64

40

4 The Civilizing Process: The structure of a classic Introduction 72 The Kultur/Zivilisation antithesis 75 The process of historical retrieval 82 Accumulating explanatory levels 87 Socioanalysis, ‘redemption’ and progress 93

72

viii Contents

5 Involved detachment: Knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias Introduction: after Weber 101 From distance to detachment: Mannheim, Kris, Schutz and Elias 104 Involvement and detachment as a balance 114 Secondary involvement 121 Epilogue: detachment in a new key? 125 6 The Symbol Theory: Secular humanism as a research programme Introduction 131 Situating The Symbol Theory 131 Anthropological and philosophical approaches 137 The modern synthesis in evolutionary biology 141 Recent evolutionary theory and anthropology 145 7 Concluding remarks: The fourth blow to man’s narcissism? Notes Bibliography Index

101

131

150 157 181 202

Preface

This book traces the origins, reception and significance of the sociological tradition founded by Norbert Elias (1897–1990). His distinctive writings have inspired many researchers and continue to do so. New generations of social scientists are discovering the fertility of Elias’s ‘figurational’ or ‘process’ sociology in diverse fields (see summaries in Kilminster and Mennell 2002:624 and Dunning and Mennell 2003a:xxxi). The quarterly newsletter of the Norbert Elias Foundation in Amsterdam, Figurations, reports regularly on the steady flow from all over the world of published research inspired by his ideas and upon newly emerging groups of scholars who are discovering his approach. How successfully these small research groups can achieve a level of stable, cumulative research over time, informed by one or more of Elias’s theories, remains to be seen. Apart from these developments, Elias’s work generally tends to be absorbed into sociology today in a fairly random fashion as a source of useful explanatory tools for the individual sociologist. It has, nevertheless, proved fruitful empirically and led to genuine insights. And Elias’s ideas have been disseminated as a result. But this process has effectively transformed Elias into one of the many gurus of ‘social theory’ of our time. He takes his place, on seemingly equal terms, with many others in edited volumes (useful though these books are) introducing us to their lives and works. The specificity of his work, as an empirically workable synthesis, unfortunately easily gets lost. Taking Elias’s concepts ‘off the shelf’ is a hazardous pursuit in another, related, sense. They become severed from the broader significance of the sociological framework from which they have been derived and which breathes life and significance into them. Considered as a whole, Elias’s research programme tacitly contains a sweeping radicalism that has far-reaching implications that have not been fully understood. It embraces scientific attitudes and obligations which, taken to their furthest conclusions, represent considerable challenges for sociologists. And these challenges are not solely of an intellectual or rational kind. (See Kilminster 1998 and Chapter 7 of this book.) Without an awareness of this dimension, there is a danger that the conceptual borrowings – however well-meaning and even fruitful – may draw the teeth of Elias. In relation to the mainstream disciplines of philosophy, psychology and history, the factions and schools within professional sociology, as well as towards Marxism

x

Preface

and other ideologies, Elias declares a ‘plague on all your houses’. Few sociologists of the first rank have scandalized the academic world to the extent that Elias did. But his confrontations with and provocations of academic establishments are not to be dismissed simply as the product of personal animus or idiosyncrasy. We have to face the fact that they are an organic part of his perspective as a whole and need to be addressed as such (see Chapter 3). Furthermore, part and parcel of that total viewpoint is a robustly secular and realistic picture of the predicament of humankind in a hostile cosmos which, once made plain, may for many people be hard to take (see Chapter 6). One of my aims in this book is to make explicit the profoundly radical and comprehensively challenging character of Elias’s work as a whole. The 1920s in Germany, when Elias was in the early stages of developing his ideas, was a turbulent, yet paradoxically creative and culturally exhilarating, period (Chapter 2). Elias’s emerging sociological perspective incorporated from early on solutions to moral, political, scientific and generational problems thrown up by the tensions of this period. Elias’s outlook as a whole, even if it is not exactly a world-view in the politically tinged sense of the word, does have something of this character. It links scientific, political, historical, moral, personal and interpersonal commitments in a comprehensive viewpoint. For Elias, sociology was a way of life, a scientific vocation. His adult life was a total and unwavering commitment to sociology as a mission. The profound depths of Elias’s sociology emerge as one thinks through the significance of its link with the German sociology of knowledge associated with Karl Mannheim (Chapter 3); the nuances of Elias’s theory of involvement and detachment (Chapter 5); and the role of a sociologically modified Freudian psychoanalysis in his thinking (Chapter 4). In Chapter 2, I analyse the ‘onto-hermeneutic’ revolution against the egocentredness of neo-Kantianism, led by Heidegger and the fundamental ontologists. In the Weimar period the young Elias had more in common with the intellectual (but not political) direction of this movement than might at first appear. As I show in Chapter 4, the complex structure and layout of Elias’s Civilizing Process cannot be understood without an appreciation of his debts to the ‘hermeneutic’ approach to historical research advocated in general terms by those writers. Nor without this appreciation can we fully understand the origins of his opposition to homo clausus thinking in the name of a model of humans as homines aperti, which was prominent in his later programmatic writings and lectures. Elias’s participation in the Zionist youth movement Blau-Weiss came to light only after his death. I have also developed the link between Elias’s involvement with this movement and his unusually strident and relentless rejection of philosophy, which has been a source of puzzlement to many readers of his work. What partly assisted the belated recognition of Elias during the expansion of sociology in the late 1960s and 1970s in many Western countries (Kilminster 1998:ch.8) was that certain of the social, cultural and behavioural trends prevalent in Weimar Germany, which had already, so to speak, fed into the genesis of Elias’s emerging sociology, were replicated in European societies on another level. In a similar fashion, the later period also saw considerable generational and class

Preface

xi

conflict, upward mobility, cultural and behavioural experimentation, relaxation of taboos, the prominence of Marxism, and battles between ideologies and world-views. The conflicts associated with the various emancipatory movements of outsiders, in particular, provided analogous (although obviously not entirely identical) social and psychic conditions to those pertaining in the Weimar republic. Explaining these developments in a long-term perspective was at the centre of Elias’s concerns. Elias was thus uniquely placed to understand the tensions and conflicts of the 1960s, both through his theories and through his experiences. He had answers to so many of our questions about sociology, ideology, methodology, politics, philosophy, Marxism, psychology and personal relationships partly because in significant respects he had ‘seen it all before’. My own biography, which includes a nineteen-year friendship with Elias, beginning in early 1971 and ending with his death in 1990, is intertwined with the subject matter of this book. I kept in close touch with Elias during those years and worked with him in the early 1980s at the University of Bielefeld and edited his last book, The Symbol Theory. I first encountered him when, as a Masters student, I attended his weekly graduate theory seminars at the University of Leicester in early 1971. I was immediately struck by Elias’s total and unshakeable commitment to sociology – at that time a much mocked discipline. He possessed none of the ambivalence towards sociology so typical of the many left-wing sociologists in this highly politicized period. The passion that many people reserve for religious or political convictions, Elias had seemingly channelled into an allegiance to a non-partisan sociology, embodying scientific values and a long-term orientation. I have addressed the implications of this aspect of Elias’s work in my discussion of involvement and detachment in Chapter 5. What particularly intrigued me about Elias in those early days was the question of his origins, about which little was known in detail. We now know much more about Elias’s intellectual biography and have his Reflections on a Life (Elias 1994) and a number of biographical interviews. There has also been research into the character of Weimar sociology, the sociology of knowledge of Karl Mannheim, the problems Elias derived from Kantianism and the role of the Zionist youth movement in his development. But this information emerged only gradually and some of it very much later (see e.g. Blomert 1991; Kilminster 1993a; Hackeschmidt 1995, 1997; Maso 1995; van Krieken 1998; Mennell 1998). This book draws on this accumulating understanding of Elias’s origins and takes it a stage further. My reflections and interpretations have also been further refined as a result of having edited the first volume, The Early Writings, of the Complete Works of Norbert Elias, which was published in 2006 by University College Dublin Press (Kilminster 2006a and 2006b). The present book was conceived as a companion volume to my The Sociological Revolution: From the Enlightenment to the Global Age (London: Routledge 1998, 2002). There the radical core of Elias’s approach emerges in detailed analyses of the limits and flaws of a number of competing approaches in contemporary sociology, considered from a ‘figurational’ or process-sociological perspective. In the course of developing his sweeping critique of philosophy from a sociological

xii Preface point of view, Elias concentrated mainly on Kant. I also carried out in that book an investigation of a number of other philosophical schools not discussed in any detail by Elias. I argued that the historical emancipation of sociology from philosophy was very far from complete and traced the implications of this finding for understanding the character of contemporary sociology and its future development. In The Sociological Revolution I also presented evidence in support of two of Elias’s most audacious and combative judgements about philosophy. That is, that despite its grandeur and prestige, philosophy is an empty and self-justifying discipline. And for sociologists to take their lead from philosophers’ stipulations as to how sociology should be conducted is to capitulate to their power to define what is and is not cognitively significant. In the present book, I focus on the way in which those conclusions emerged as part of a gradual realization in the mind of the young Elias of the historical scope and importance of sociology. They were to shape the character and direction of his entire development as a sociologist. As I hope to show in this book, one of the keys to understanding the nature and significance of Elias’s sociology is to grasp its ‘post-philosophical’ character.

Acknowledgements

I am especially grateful to Artur Bogner, Ian Burkitt, Eric Dunning, Johan Goudsblom, Anthea Hammond, Stephen Mennell, Michael Schröter, Phil Sutton, Ian Varcoe, Terry Wassall and Cas Wouters, with whom I have shared an enthusiasm for the work of Norbert Elias over many years. They have contributed greatly to my understanding of Elias’s ideas. More recently, I have also learned from the ways in which five of my postgraduate students – Tim Bickerstaffe, Colin Cremin, Mark Davis, Jonathan Fish and Catherine Morgan – drew upon, and/or argued with, Elias in their doctoral researches. My further thanks go to the last two for their practical help in the preparation of the bibliography and the referencing of the text. Finally, the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds kindly granted me periods of study leave during which, in true Eliasian fashion, this book was drafted and redrafted many times.

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’

2

Understanding Elias

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

Understanding Elias

3

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

4

Understanding Elias

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, generationdependent 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, taxfarming, 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

Understanding Elias

5

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)

6

Understanding Elias

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

Understanding Elias

7

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 others during the 1950s (Frank 1971; Foster-Carter 1976). Elias’s concept of a process of civilization (to follow the sense of the original German title of his famous book) is not synonymous with modernization. The drawback with theories of modernization, as is well known, was the assumption that all underdeveloped countries would ultimately be expected to attain the same character of ‘modernity’ as the industrial societies of the West.5 This extension of modernity into a theory of modernization still does not lend itself to the encouragement of self-distanciation on the lines of Elias because it contains neither a socialization-civilization element nor a conception of power relations and dependencies between nations; that is, between the richer and developed nations and the less rich and underdeveloped ones (Wouters 1990; Kilminster 1998: ch. 6). Nations are taken for granted as static, isolated social systems,6 a conception that lacks a notion of partly different developmental paths and path-dependency. Hence, both the consequences of those nations’ interdependent relations and the effect of these on the investigator who will probably live in a nation-state – that is, in a relatively privileged position in the overall nexus – are suppressed. We will now turn to the first of two chapters on the origins of Elias’s perspective. Chapter 2 reconstructs some of the main features of the social, cultural and philosophical milieu of Weimar Germany. This exercise will focus the character of his work as a transformation of philosophy. Chapter 3 will establish Elias’s work also as a synthesis of perspectives. His theoretical strategy grew out of a particular strand of social science – the German sociology of knowledge. Its practitioners (including Karl Mannheim) saw their framework as an expression of the political conflicts and tensions thrown up during that period. Once this synoptic feature of Elias’s work is grasped, we will be in a better position to understand the way in which, much later, Elias and his critics consistently talked past each other. We will also be well on the way towards solving (or perhaps dissolving) the problem of ‘placing’ Elias’s unique work in the history of sociology.

2

Origins of Elias’s synthesis

‘I am extremely conscious of the fact that others have influenced me, that I have learned from others – though not only from books, but also from the events of my age.’ (Norbert Elias, cited by Goudsblom 1977b: 78)

Placing Elias One of the problems anyone introducing Elias immediately faces is that of situating his distinctive and original work within the theoretical schools, paradigms and sociological language familiar to mainstream sociologists. The difficulty of ‘placing’ him in the familiar European sociological traditions, as developed in later paradigms, has always been, as Johan Goudsblom first pointed out (1977b: 60, 77ff.), a problem for commentators. It is difficult to find a place for Elias’s sociology of figurations within the paradigms of recent sociology such as phenomenology, action theory, functionalism, structuration theory, Marxism, Weberianism, critical realism, systems theory, rational choice theory and so on. Over the course of a number of years I have read in reviews and papers or heard in seminars Elias’s work labelled variously as evolutionist, Rickertian, Simmelian, Marxoid, Comtist, Freudian, historicist and hermeneuticist, or in combinations such as evolutionary Freudianism or historicized Simmelianism. A major difficulty of interpretation lies in the fact that Elias did not assign much importance to delineating carefully his intellectual debts and situating himself in relation to other writers and schools, in the detail that sociologists have come to expect and to find in the writings of, say, Parsons, Habermas or Giddens. Elias’s work, in Featherstone’s (1987: 200) words, has a ‘born complete’ feel to it. Much of this work of debt assignment and influences has had to be done by others much later, following up clues in his writings and interviews, and drawing on broader knowledge of the state of sociology, philosophy and society in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century (Kilminster and Wouters 1995; Mennell 1998; van Krieken 1998).1 For many years prior to his long autobiographical interview and other reflections on his contemporaries in sociology and philosophy published as Reflections on a

Origins of Elias’s synthesis 9 Life (Elias 1994) and another interview in the 1980s (Heilbron 1984), Elias would avow publicly only one significant intellectual debt. In a footnote to the first volume of The Civilizing Process he acknowledged how much the study owed to the discoveries of Freud, which, he said, is obvious to the reader anyway, so did not need to be pointed out in all instances. But, characteristically, he stressed the ‘not inconsiderable differences between the whole approach of Freud and that adopted in this study’ (emphasis added). Rather than ‘digressing into disputes at every turn’ he continued, it seemed more important ‘to build a particular intellectual perspective as clearly as possible’ (Elias 1939: 249). (I discuss the role of Freud in Chapter 4.) Elias also stressed in Reflections on a Life that one of his major points of departure was his rejection of the neo-Kantian doctrines of the a priori and timeless validity (Geltung) in his protracted dispute with his Doktorvater Richard Hönigswald (Elias 1994: 91–2). Elias complained many times that the doctrine of the a priori was defeatist because it shackles human thinking forever to fixed categories and flies in the face of evidence of the advancing syntheses2 historically developed in the sciences in the light of new observations. In addition, that commitment to the principle of Geltung was inherently contradictory in a timebound world (Kilminster 1991a: xxi; Elias 1924: 26). But, as van Krieken (1998: 14–15) and Maso (1995) have shown, there is some confusion surrounding what Elias said about these issues. No Kantian at the time, including Hönigswald, ever claimed that the Kantian categories were timeless, eternal and unlearned, as Elias alleged. Many Kantians, including Hönigswald, were quite prepared to accept that the categories, as well as scientific concepts generally, had social origins and were thus in the widest sense socially learned or acquired. In retrospect, it seems that both Elias and Hönigswald would probably have agreed that establishing what is valid knowledge in the broadest sense was an important task. It was just that Elias wanted to inject a dimension of becoming into the analysis, to show how concepts and knowledge came to attain their ‘validity’ over time. As Gerd Wolandt (1977: 128) said of this episode: ‘The historically sensitive Elias did not want to acknowledge the ahistoricality of the validity theme (Geltungsproblematik).’ Others at the time were working along similar lines. In his own doctoral thesis of 1922, Karl Mannheim located the key problem: ‘There is a threatening rift between the realm of validity and the temporal process’ (Mannheim 1922: 40). In questioning the abstract, logical status of the universal of the principle of Geltung in his dispute with Hönigswald, however, Elias was also rhetorically exposing its emptiness. How could this be timeless in a time-bound world? It self-evidently cannot be. The philosophers’ insistence on that revealed to him its role as part of the professional ideology of philosophers, as he later put it (Elias 1994: 153). It was the beginning of Elias’s lifelong battle against transcendental argumentation generally which he saw as essentially a form of pseudo-authoritative argumentation, depending for its plausibility and credibility solely upon the social weight of the philosophers’ establishment (see Kilminster 1998: ch. 1).

10

Origins of Elias’s synthesis

Elias also claimed that at the time he was writing The Civilizing Process his knowledge of those writers whom we think of today as our sociological ancestors was ‘extremely deficient’ (quoted by Goudsblom 1977b: 78). But this admission has to be taken cum grano salis. Even if he did not know these writers in quite the depth that we, second and third generation, sociologists take for granted today, he nevertheless still participated in the particularly rich social scientific and philosophical cultures of Weimar Germany, in which many of these ancestors had already been discussed, absorbed, summarized and processed, and interpretations established (see Mannheim 1934: 209–28; Aron 1957; Schad 1972). At the time when Elias turned from philosophy to the nascent German sociology in the early 1920s, that discipline was in its infancy in that country, and what counted then as social science was mainly what would be regarded today as philosophy and philosophical kinds of psychology (Gleichmann 1988; Niestroj 1989). Elias’s rebellion against the neo-Kantians took him in the direction of integrating social and psychic processes in an empirical enterprise which he closely identified with the rising discipline of sociology.

Elias and Weimar culture The formative period of Elias’s intellectual development, when as a young man he was studying philosophy in Breslau and Freiburg and philosophy and sociology in Heidelberg, occurred at a time of turbulent transition in German society and in Europe generally at the end of the First World War. It was a period of social tensions, class conflict, political unrest and severe economic inflation. Generational conflict was particularly intense (Mommsen 1991: ch. 2). The political socialization of the younger generation took place in very different social conditions from those experienced by their parents. Major social transformations were producing a fundamental restructuring of social consciousness. Generational conflict developed into ‘a phenomenon affecting the society as a whole’ (Mommsen 1991: 29). (The parallel with the 1960s suggests itself, as I pointed out in Chapter 1.) Individuals and groups were socially ascending and falling (Nothaas 1931), and cultural and artistic creativity and innovation were burgeoning as new horizons and opportunities were opening up. After the First World War and during the Weimar period, European societies generally also underwent a loosening of social and behavioural restrictions compared with what went before, during which considerable behavioural experimentation went on as new behavioural codes were being developed. This was the second major wave of ‘informalization’ of the twentieth century (Wouters 1977, 1986, 1987) and it involved both social and psychic transformations in German society. This was the period known in Britain and the USA as the ‘roaring twenties’ and in Germany as ‘the golden twenties’ (Gay 1974: xii). All this is well known in outline and well documented in detailed areas such as painting, art, design, literature and theatre (Gay 1974; Laqueur 1974; Hughes 1975; Willett 1984). Peter Gay writes:

Origins of Elias’s synthesis 11 The excitement that characterized Weimar culture stemmed in part from exuberant creativity and experimentation; but much of it was anxiety, fear, a rising sense of doom. With some justice, Karl Mannheim, one of its survivors, boasted not long before its demise that future years would look back on Weimar as a new Periclean age. But it was a precarious glory, a dance on the edge of a volcano. Weimar culture was the creation of outsiders, propelled by history into the inside, for a short, dizzying, fragile moment. (Gay 1974: xii) The range of problems addressed by the generation of Weimar sociologists, philosophers, Marxists and psychoanalysts which included Elias, Mannheim, Foulkes, Arendt, Lukács and Adorno, who were caught up in these processes, was remarkably varied, vivid and fertile. The issues they faced as a generation had as much to do with politics, economics, national identity and personal moral and political commitment as with intellectual or theoretical dilemmas. Indeed, as part of the ongoing German Methodenstreit (Frisby 1976; Dunning 1986), many of the social and cultural problems were rehearsed in the guise of concept formation and methodological debate. In working out their own distinctive solutions to the problems of their generation, they had to take their distance from the overlapping earlier generations of Max Weber, Simmel, Veblen, Alfred Weber, Sombart, Cohen, Husserl, Heidegger, Jaspers and Cassirer, and others, from whom they had nevertheless learned much. The origins of the tasks Elias set himself in writing The Civilizing Process in the mid-1930s lie in the complex experiences of the Weimar period, culminating in the coming to power of Hitler in 1933 and Elias’s departure to France and exile to England in 1935. Intertwined with these developments were the relaxations of social taboos and social distance and the pushing back of the boundaries of behavioural acceptability in Germany (somewhat curtailed after 1933) which also required understanding and explanation. Elias said much later, in Reflections on a Life (1994), that it was probably the peculiarities of his conscience formation as part of the Jewish tradition, in which ‘the tabooing of their animal impulses, especially sexuality, is less oppressive’ (Elias 1994: 129) that may have played a part in enabling him to breach the dominant taboos and to perceive the ways in which civilization deals with elementary impulses.3 Steven Russell (1997: 79–80) has argued that one important way in which problems in the complex history of Jewish emancipation are reflected in The Civilizing Process is its prominent focus on the shifting relationship between the public and the private spheres, including the privatization of bodily impulses, their increasing removal ‘behind the scenes’. Historians of culture and ideas converge in locating the early 1920s as a period when a number of significant thinkers and innovators flourished in a number of fields, including the arts, architecture, design, film and literature. A significant wave of creativity blossomed among Jews who created new forms of GermanJewish culture in many fields (Brenner 1996). Within philosophy many writers (Jewish and non-Jewish) declared ‘new beginnings’ in the aftermath of the trauma

12

Origins of Elias’s synthesis

of the First World War. The overwhelming feelings of bewilderment, tragedy and crisis at the time provoked many younger people in particular to take the view that only a total renewal of thinking, a revitalization of culture, could point the way forward. It was a sensibility experienced particularly acutely among younger people of the Jewish community.4 George L. Mosse (1987: 79) mentions that significantly the first journal of the Jewish Youth Movement Blau-Weiss (to which Elias belonged) was edited by high school students, in defiance of adult supervision. The issue embodied the hope of the generation by calling itself ‘The Beginning’ (Der Anfgang). Hackeschmidt (1995: 4) confirms that new evidence suggests that Elias was a member of this movement from its inception while he was still at high school in Breslau. Like other German youth organizations (or Bünde), Jewish groups such as these rambled in the woods, revelling in nature. At the same time they sought through their close communion a ‘new beginning’ for the Jewish identity as the appeal of assimilation lost its lustre for a younger generation (Mosse 1987: 77–83; Lavsky 1996: 25–8). The Jewish youth movements, while committed to Zionism, still identified with the German nation and often even contained a ‘Volkish’ undertone (Mosse 1987: ch. 4). It was the commitment to the establishment of an autonomous Jewish state in Palestine that was the main feature distinguishing Jewish from non-Jewish youth organizations. Elias’s involvement with Blau-Weiss was not incompatible with his fundamentally secular outlook. Walter Laqueur (1989: 486) quotes a spokesman for the organization as declaring in 1918 that Zionism ‘had to be liberated from the dead weight of tradition, and that a national revival did not necessarily entail the indiscriminate adoption of outworn religious dogmas and cultural beliefs’. In terms of philosophical tendencies, the ‘new beginnings’ of the time included, as well as existentialism and fundamental ontology, the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle and the philosophy of the early Wittgenstein (Heinemann 1953; Lichtheim 1974: 246ff.; Friedman 2000). All of these in their different ways sought to make visible ‘the hidden and stifling presuppositions’ (Landgrebe 1966: 13) of Western thought as a way of trying to understand how traditional forms of thinking that seemed to have served people very well, no longer did so. A philosophical ‘renewal of the West’ was regarded as fundamental because ‘the ancient Christian-religious foundations of life had been badly shaken’(Landgrebe 1966: 147–8). This search for new beginnings found expression, too, in the new activistic Marxist paradigm of Lukács and Korsch and others, which fed on the intense class conflicts of the time. It was a paradigm which turned its back decisively on orthodox, deterministic Marxism, which was regarded as incapable of providing the underprivileged with an action orientation (Kilminster 1979). In the case of Lukács there was also present in his mythic vision of proletarian revolution, as enunciated in History and Class Consciousness (1923), a significant trace of Messianic Judaism, which invested political activity in the present with the burden of redeeming past human sufferings that had arisen out of the historical alienation of man (Rabinbach 1997). The proletarian revolution was also predicted to solve in practice on a mass scale the epistemological problems involving the

Origins of Elias’s synthesis 13 individualistic concepts of the subject and object of knowledge which the neoKantians were unable to solve in theory (Kilminster 1979: part II). More broadly, these intellectual and political trends were attempts to forge alternative visions that tried ‘to map human experience immediately following on the modern eclipse of God’ (Steiner 1978: 148). Even though many undertakings, such as the Marxism of the early Lukács or the fundamental ontology of Heidegger, contained significant religious and theological hangovers, many of the philosophical renewals recognized the ‘post-theological’ predicament (Steiner 1978: 148) of man, which had been thrown into even starker relief by the First World War and its aftermath. It is possible to detect this sensibility both in Weber’s notion of the disenchantment of the world and in his two celebrated essays of the early 1920s, ‘Science as a Vocation’ and ‘Politics as a Vocation’ (Löwith 1982). With the benefit of hindsight, one can see that Elias’s sociological direction, forged as it was in outline and overall vision in this cultural crucible, was one of the most radical of these secular new beginnings. Elias rejected myths and religious revelation in no uncertain terms, but, most significantly, sought an alternative secular vision not through the ‘authoritative voice’ (Landgrebe 1966: 148) of one or other of the philosophical ‘renewals’, but in the abandonment of philosophy altogether. For Elias, philosophy was part of the problem, not part of the solution. If Elias’s work is to be placed anywhere it is as a development out of one of those ‘new beginnings’, that is, the German Wissenssoziologie, an integrating and synthetic sociological orientation to which it bears a family resemblance. It is true, of course, that very little of Elias’s total oeuvre specifically pursued exactly the same kind of problem areas that came to be associated with the Wissenssoziologie, i.e. in debunking political ideologies by exposing their hidden interests, or assessing the role of intellectuals, it remains the case that he developed another significant dimension of this programme. Elias developed those aspects of the sociology of knowledge that called for a new sociological framework to replace the historically redundant philosophies of knowledge, method and ethics. This suggested a radical sociological-epistemological programme, not simply the exposure of political deceits and partialities (although that was important). In the sociology of knowledge the theoretical developments and moral and political issues thrown up in this turbulent period were channelled and focused, particularly by Karl Mannheim, who was an important catalyst for Elias (see Chapter 3). Therein also lies the origin of Elias’s conception of sociology as a ‘mission’, a vocation of the most vital human importance, the ardent commitment to his own version of which he never wavered for all of his long life. In the interview in Reflections on a Life Elias was asked whether in the early 1920s he had any ‘higher goal’. Did he want to make Germany into a better country or prevent another war? Elias replied: ‘What I really wanted was to break through the veil of mythologies drawn over our image of society, so that people could act more reasonably and better’ (Elias 1994: 36–7).

14

Origins of Elias’s synthesis

Elias as a synthesizer Echoes of, and parallels and similarities with, the work of other famous sociologists and psychologists abound in Elias’s work and in his figurational or process sociology generally. Similarly, there are concepts and problems common to both Elias and other traditions of social science. But somehow Elias seems to fall between all stools: his work remains stubbornly unique. In what, exactly, does this distinctive originality consist? Following Goudsblom again, I would argue that Elias managed to integrate through empirical research many seemingly incompatible perspectives into a ‘workable synthesis’ (Goudsblom 1977b: 79), a single testable model of human interdependence. This enabled him to solve in a preliminary way problems shrewdly posed, but left in the air, by the other writers in the context of the complex and conflictual reality of Weimar Germany. Central to that German experience was the gradual unravelling of the state monopoly of the means of force which had a polarizing effect on social conflicts and on politics, and raised the level of violence in the public sphere (Fletcher 1997: ch. 6; Dunning and Mennell 2003a: xv). This would have raised the level of fear images in the public consciousness, giving rise to the widely reported sense of uncertainty and foreboding felt in Weimar Germany. The problems of a generation that Elias attempted to solve in his synthesis had been thrown up by these experiences, which spilled over into Germany’s relations with its neighbours. Some of these problems were political and economic, and some were emotional, involving the forging of new behavioural codes in an increasingly democratizing society, in the sense of the shift towards relatively more even power balances between groups. Many of these practical problems were fought out in the guise of concept formation. Other issues were perceived as theoretical and methodological problems as such. The social, political and behavioural developments drove the emphases of the methodological controversies this way and that, producing complex blends of interest-laden knowledge and perspectival bias which it was the task of the sociologist of knowledge to sort out. Elias’s later theory of involvement and detachment (Chapter 5) has its roots here. To name just a few significant sociological concepts, themes, issues and problem areas that were institutionally ready-to-hand for Elias in the social scientific and philosophical cultures of his formative years: the conspicuous consumption of elites (Veblen, Sombart); ‘two-front’ strata (Simmel); the monopoly of the means of violence (Weber); rationalization (Weber); social equalization (Scheler); social ascent and descent (Nothaas 1931); competition (Mannheim, economists); social differentiation and integration (Mannheim); the internalization of what is external (Freud); the development of civilized self-restraint (Freud); sociogenesis (Mannheim, Felix Krueger), psychogenesis (Freud, Melanie Klein); and habitus (Weber; Lederer 1918). These are simply a few concepts chosen randomly to illustrate an important point. All of these, and others, Elias integrated into his sociological synthesis, as concepts or as articulating problems requiring solution. None of these components derived from his own experiences as such, but rather from other people’s attempts to conceptualize the regularities set in train by the

Origins of Elias’s synthesis 15 interdependencies between many unknown other people. The concepts were part of a social-scientific culture which preceded Elias himself and which was available to him in the institutions in which he researched and taught. In incorporating these elements, however, Elias did not undertake a great deal of conceptual work, either in the 1930s or later, to demonstrate how his use of concepts differed from those developed by other writers in different traditions. Nor how, once integrated into a synoptic framework, the meaning of their concepts was transformed by the properties of the synthesis as a whole in which the components were combined. For Elias, the integrity of the synthesis and its empirical extension were considered paramount. He always remained focused single-mindedly on this overriding aim, neglecting that kind of clarification.5 There is, however, a paradox in Elias. He polemized relentlessly (particularly in his later writings, e.g. Elias 1968, 1978a) against homo clausus, his concept for the dominant individualistic human self-image in the West that has led philosophers, in particular, astray. As Mennell (1998: 191–3) aptly said: ‘The pervasive influence of homo clausus is detected everywhere by Elias.’ As a counterweight, Elias repeatedly stressed that because people lived in interdependence with each other they were inconceivable in isolation. Hence, starting sociological enquiries from the ‘individual’ and then trying to deduce ‘society’ was both misleading and futile. One had to start with interdependent people in the first place. In his many polemics against the philosophical manifestation of homo clausus in European philosophy, he affirmed the importance of the long, intergenerational process of knowledge accumulation that exceeds the scope of the individual knowing subject – the Ego so beloved of the philosophers (see in particular Elias 1971). At the same time, Elias himself nevertheless doggedly went his own way and for the most part did not acknowledge the work of other sociologists. This feature of Elias’s thinking and acting perhaps reveals that even he was not immune to one of the self-delusions associated with the homo clausus experience, i.e. that of self-autarky (van Krieken 1998: 76).6 Dunning and Mennell (2003a: xvii) have rightly said that Elias succeeded in developing formulations in his sociology which avoided the homo clausus tendency to dichotomize ‘body’ and ‘mind’, physical body and ‘spirit or ‘soul’. Indeed, I agree, and have argued elsewhere (Kilminster 1991a: xvii–xviii) that this is a main theme, too, of Elias’s last major work The Symbol Theory. However, although that is clearly the case, it is nevertheless also true that as a person he may have found it hard to admit, even to himself, the extent of his intellectual debts to others. Not acknowledging from where he derived his concepts and inspiration, he was being inconsistent with his sociological perspective. That perspective recognizes the relative autonomy and impersonality of accumulated social-scientific knowledge, including concepts which, as high-level syntheses, have come down to us from past generations. This was something that Elias stressed over and over again. It is as though the stridency and insistence of Elias’s polemics against homo clausus were designed as much to convince himself as others. It is in this individual sense that he may be seen to have partaken of one of the self-delusions of the homo clausus experience; that is, the conviction that one is self-contained and autonomous, moving freely forward

16

Origins of Elias’s synthesis

through society and history unconnected to others. One of Elias’s often repeated phrases was that ‘I go my own way’ (see Note 6 to this chapter). Elias’s sense of himself, as a beleaguered sociologist going his own way in the teeth of considerable opposition from forces of both philosophical and sociological obscurantism, was something that he seems to have felt almost from the beginning of his career. It was a self-experience that found expression in a tendency to refer to other sociologists as ‘They’ rather than identifying himself with them as ‘We’. For example, we can note the tone of self-isolation in the following passage: And it is a scientific superstition that … one must necessarily dissect processes of interweaving into their component parts. Sociologists often no longer do this, although a number of them seem to have guilty consciences about their omission. … Sociologists, especially when they are working empirically, often use a theoretical framework quite well suited to … interweaving … But there is perhaps still a need for them to work out clearly what they are doing. (Elias 1978a: 98, emphasis added)7 Yet, despite the barrier which Elias wittingly or unwittingly erected, the reader is still drawn into his distinctive texts (particularly the programmatic and discursive books and articles) because he presents them in such a way that he does not assume the kind of detached viewpoint through which he will tell the reader, authoritatively, definitively, ‘how it is’. He does tell the reader ‘how it is’, but this is based on a testable theoretical perspective that he has previously derived from theoretical-empirical research and reflection in studies such as the Civilizing Process, The Court Society and The Established and the Outsiders. Elias invites the reader to participate in that achievement and its implications instead of just giving it to them on a plate. He draws readers in until they feel they are sharing with him in a joint project. This will involve challenging readers’ hardwon psychological defences and resistances that will tend to pull them towards ideologies, metaphysical formulations or wishful thinking in general. (This aspect of Elias’s work will be discussed at greater length in Chapter 5.) This is one of the crucial differences between Elias’s approach and that of other prominent sociologists who also write from a particular position, perspective or framework, as Elias does. When he does criticize the concepts, assumptions and limits of other sociologists Elias will always employ the third person in phrases such as ‘sociologists and their inquiries’, or similar locutions. It is as if he cannot yet bring himself to identify with the contemporary state of a discipline that he believes has not yet sufficiently strongly institutionalized standards of scientific detachment and fact orientation (Elias 1987a), even though he clearly identifies himself with sociology as such, as a perspective, as an expression of an emergent social reality sui generis (Elias 1984a). This way of writing distances him from the sociologists of the establishment but – crucially – he invites the reader, too, to get their measure. For Elias, it would be fair to say that any reader of his texts is a potential recruit to Elias’s way of doing and renewing sociology. Elias sees the readers and himself as a potential ‘We’, at odds with ‘Them’, a sociology

Origins of Elias’s synthesis 17 establishment largely unaware of its own theoretical shortcomings, which mainly stem from homo clausus assumptions or the intrusion into their work of various ‘involvements’ of a political and otherwise interest-laden kind (see Kilminster 1998: part II). With a conventional sociological text, the reader is instructed to accept the viewpoint of what Michel De Certeau (quoted by Russell 1999: 67) has called the ‘celestial eye’, i.e. the way in which the writer sees things. The works of sociologists within the mainstream sociology establishments are essentially an invitation to the reader to see things through their eyes, their authorial vision being assumed to be, if not privileged, then certainly containing an authoritative plausibility. They are part of a ‘top-down’ sociology (Kilminster 1998: 156–7) that often goes hand-in-hand with claims to special scientific expertise by scientific establishments. Members of sociology establishments, backed by claims of professional, methodological and epistemological authority, keep their distance from the object of enquiry, the materials presented and from the reader. Often this stance is backed up by the uncritical importation into the subject matter of sociology of methods and explanatory models taken inappropriately from those developed in the natural sciences. Elias calls this kind of claim to scientificity a form of ‘pseudo-detachment’ (Elias 1987a: 33) which circumvents the difficulties of doing sociology when the investigators are intimately bound up with its very subject matter. To put the contrast with Elias somewhat extravagantly but not entirely inaccurately: the sociology establishment stands for an ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ sociology whereas, in contrast, Elias offers an anticipatory kind of ‘We’ sociology. [A] predominantly descriptive approach in sociology or history stops short at the point where the people one is trying to understand are perceived merely as people in the third person. Only if the researcher advances further, to the point where he perceives the people he is studying as human beings like himself – the plane on which the actual experience of the people studied, their first-person perspective, becomes accessible – can he approach a realistic understanding. (Elias 1983: 211) The curiosity is, though, that this sociological consciousness and the new sociological ‘We’ that would make its dissemination possible have yet to come together to any great extent – at best they are only in the course of development. Allying oneself with this programme promises few immediate career opportunities. Many sociologists prefer the security of the professionalized mode of sociology where, under the wing of methodological rigour, it is possible to shelter from the demands being made by Elias. In the meantime, in anticipation of the formation of a more detached sociology of the kind suggested by Elias, he tended to regard other sociologists working in different ways to his own as ‘They’, with all the risks of misunderstanding that that entailed. This feature of Elias’s work points once again to the way in which he saw himself as embattled, struggling for a

18

Origins of Elias’s synthesis

certain kind of more detached sociology against enemies who come not only from philosophy and various ideologies and myths, but also from within sociology itself. (This self-perception was mitigated only slightly as the result of Elias’s widespread recognition on the continent of Europe in the 1970s and 1980s.) Finally, it is possible that Elias being out of step with the expectations of the sociological profession regarding the elaborate acknowledgement and documentation of sources of inspiration may also be organically related to the character of his integrating research strategy. It may not simply be a matter of his own personal idiosyncrasy (although that is important) or a feature of a particular German academic culture. There is a parallel here with the comprehensive approach to society found in the work of Elias’s colleague and friend of many years, Karl Mannheim, which may illuminate this issue. For each of them it was a working assumption that elaborate criticism of and detailed distancing from the work of others in the field was not always necessary. It was the relationship between all perspectives or styles of thought of the groups that those individuals represented that was the key, not the veracity of a given individual’s utterances or written statements. This assumption predisposed Elias towards regarding the writings of others in the field as representing different positions or perspectives within the social web (Elias 1978a: 122–33). Once one had grasped this as a tension-field, as a configuration of integrated group perspectives, then it was possible to anticipate, within certain limits, the range and character of what could be said about society. As Kettler and Meja (1995) point out, in his restless attempts to uncover the Zeitgeist, Mannheim was open to ideas and inspiration from many sources in his pursuit of a political synthesis. Although Elias’s work was not moving in that particular political direction, he did share with Mannheim the Hegelian idea that the significance of a social event, social grouping or cultural item lies in its relationship with other aspects of the developing social structure as a whole, as a field of tensions (Kecskemeti 1953: v). Subject to the further caveat that Elias would have no truck whatsoever with any talk in a sociological context of spirit (Geist), the succinct description given by Kettler and Meja of Mannheim’s way of working with concepts and research materials resonates with that of Elias: [Mannheim] would subject key concepts to a ‘change of function’. It was unnecessary to criticise others; it was enough to correct and balance what they said by drawing on something said by someone else. All participants were seen as sharing the same condition or expressing the same spirit. (Kettler and Meja 1995: 318)

Elias as an ontologist8 We need to reconstruct the earlier phases of Elias’s journey from philosophy to sociology in order better to be able to appreciate the way in which his thinking developed towards the post-philosophical synthesis that he was able to articulate so impressively in the later writings such as What Is Sociology?, Involvement and Detachment and The Society of Individuals. His experiences of the First World

Origins of Elias’s synthesis 19 War, medical training, economic inflation, working in a metal goods factory (Elias 1994: 31) and civil violence in Weimar Germany, important though they were in shaping his realistic outlook and certain emphases of his work (see Dunning and Mennell 2003a: xv), are insufficient to explain the way in which he arrived at his sociological synthesis and the specific ingredients that were integrated into it. Others were exposed to these experiences in various combinations but went down different philosophical, political and sociological paths. What may have also been significant in Elias’s intellectual development is the inspiration of thinkers, debates, books or schools of thought that he only mentions casually and which are not given prominence in his later reflections. This kind of imputation is by its nature difficult, but justifiable by the fact that during his lifetime he did not talk about certain episodes and commitments in his development, which only came to light after his death (e.g. his long involvement with Blau-Weiss). Elias’s letters to Gerd Wolandt in 1977 (in Wolandt 1977: 132) and to Featherstone in 1986 (quoted by Kilminster and Wouters 1995: 101) reveal that Elias was well aware of the different groupings prevailing in the philosophical movements of his younger days. This is not surprising, given that he was at various times either an undergraduate or postgraduate student in three of the most prestigious departments of philosophy in Germany at the time (Breslau, Freiburg and Heidelberg). In my view a strong case can be made, based on knowledge of contemporary philosophical movements and circumstantial evidence, that the attack on Cartesian rationalism, Kantianism and conventional historiography in the work of Heidegger and the philosophers of existence such as Jaspers was highly significant in Elias’s development. I think there is in fact sufficient textual evidence of common concerns and thematic parallels with fundamental ontology to justify this interpretation. Recourse to knowledge of philosophical schools of the time and circumstantial evidence are intended simply to strengthen my case. Elias mentioned in Reflections on a Life that his supervisor Richard Hönigswald was sceptical about existentialism (Elias 1994: 92) but does not say clearly what his own attitude was at the time or later. My argument is that the proto-sociological ways in which the philosophers of existence and fundamental ontologists, in particular, exposed problems with the egoistic Kantian orthodoxy and the debates they stimulated must have influenced Elias’s reflections at this time and provoked his specifically sociological solutions to them. It is significant that late in life Elias revisited, from a sociological point of view, three central themes that the existentialist philosophers had made their own: the human condition, time and death (Elias 1985a, 1990, 1992). In all those later writings he spends some time eliminating philosophical treatments of the problems. While studying for his doctorate with Hönigswald in Breslau, Elias spent the summer semester of 1920 in Freiburg, where he attended Husserl’s Goethe seminar and became reacquainted with Edith Stein, a pupil and one-time assistant of Husserl (Korte 1988: 73–4) whom Elias originally knew in Breslau (Mennell 2003: 6). She wrote two letters recommending Elias to Husserl’s assistant Felix Kaufman, describing Elias as having been ‘philosophically drilled by Hönigswald’

20

Origins of Elias’s synthesis

and as possessing ‘the usual critic’s arrogance’ which she had told him he must curb (quoted by Mennell 2003: 6). Martin Heidegger was also teaching there as Husserl’s assistant (a post he held between 1919 and 1923), and it is possible that Heidegger and Elias may even have met. Richard Wolin (2003: 216) wrote of Freiburg at this time that ‘In the early 1920s, students arrived intending to study with Husserl and within weeks would switch to auditing Heidegger’s lectures and seminars. At times, Husserl himself encouraged them to make the shift.’ Whether or not Elias did meet Heidegger or attend his lectures, we do not know. But it is a near certainty that Elias participated in debates, seminars and lectures where fundamental ontology, which was among other things a devastating and radical critique of the dominant Kantianism, was discussed. As Hannah Arendt said later (Arendt 1978: 293), although Heidegger had published very little until 1927, prior to this he had a reputation among students, so that when Being and Time appeared in that year, it was successful because ‘it merely confirmed what they had known for years. In any case, there was a great deal of common ground between the work of Husserl and Heidegger, enough it is reasonable to assume to ensure overlaps of content and dialogue in seminars. Having been on friendly terms slightly later with Arendt (a pupil of Heidegger) and at this time with Edith Stein, Elias must have had direct experience (and even insider knowledge) of the two dominant philosophical currents of the time in Freiburg – phenomenology and fundamental ontology. Many of the important features of Heidegger’s Being and Time (which contained among other things a sweeping critique of the ego-centredness of Cartesian rationalism as well as the egoism of Kantianism) first emerged in his lectures at Freiburg in the 1910 to 1923 period (Caputo 1999: 225). It is inconceivable that Elias, in the same philosophy faculty at the end of that period, would have been unaware of these controversies which focused in a daring and decisive way the broadside against neo-Kantianism in which Elias was already a very keen participant. Much later, in one of his short poems recited in a TV interview (Elias 1985e), the elderly Elias mocked the emptiness of Heidegger’s philosophy with some whimsical word play. This was the only public reference to Heidegger that Elias ever made, as far as I know. I do not think that this remark, nor Elias’s silence on the subject, necessarily excludes the possibility that the critique of Kant by Heidegger and his school nevertheless helped the young Elias to think his way out of and beyond Kant. My point is that it was the particular way in which problems with Kantianism were posed by these philosophers, including Heidegger and Jaspers, that led in a sociological direction. Interestingly, Elias had already struck up a friendship with Jaspers in Heidelberg in the summer semester of 1919 (Elias 1994: 35; Korte 1988: 73–4). Like Elias, these philosophers were rebelling against the idealism, individualism and mandarin authority of the neo-Kantian philosophical establishment of the early 1920s, whose institutional hegemony and prominence were considerable (Köhnke 1991). There was a strong component of generational conflict involved (Mommsen 1991: ch. 2). As Heinemann (1953: 167) put it: ‘The philosophies of existence are philosophies of liberation rather than philosophies of freedom.’ Heidegger ‘owes

Origins of Elias’s synthesis 21 his great influence to the fact that he is a rebel’ (Heinemann 1953: 94). Richard Wolin (2003: 229) concurs: ‘Heidegger viewed himself as a revolutionary and iconoclast, a rugged outdoorsman who was scornful of conventional academic mandarin mores.’ The ontologists were all part of a whole movement of younger intellectuals which opposed the individualistic and rationalistic neo-Kantian philosophy and its neglect of concrete realities. This opposition shaded over into politics and various hybrid positions emerged, mostly variants of social democracy with some more radical left-wing fusions (see Kilminster 1979: Part II; Willey 1978: ch.5). Even the ‘praxis’-oriented Lukács and Korsch, as Marxists, worked from concrete structural analyses of real economic power in a capitalist society. But at the core of all of these writers’ concerns was the same bone of contention. That is, that neo-Kantianism of the older generation was an idealistic, individualistic, philosophy of consciousness which, in its preoccupation with epistemology, validity (Geltung) and methodology, devalued the real world. The movement that challenged these priorities has been called the ‘ontohermeneutic turn’ (Crowell 1999: 186) in twentieth-century German academic philosophy. This consisted of a widespread incredulity towards the Kantian notions of the thing-in-itself, the knowing subject, fixed a priori categories and the idea of ‘pure knowing’ in general, as well as an acute awareness of the culde-sac of solipsism. Many of these objections and problems appeared in various combinations in Elias’s doctoral dissertation (Elias 1922). They resurfaced in the context of sociological analysis in Elias’s later writings and lectures on the sociology of knowledge (e.g. Elias 1971, 1982, 1984b). In these later writings and lectures, in the spirit of a robust sociological critique of them, Elias invoked a fluent familiarity with these concepts and issues that were so dominant in the passionate philosophical controversies of his youth. In understanding this philosophical sea change one cannot underestimate the importance of the reality-shock of the First World War as well as the experiences of post-war economic inflation and political violence in the formation of a sense of reality in the young Elias and his contemporaries (Elias 1994: 22ff.; Mennell 1998: 6–9). As Landgrebe (1966: 147) has pointed out, ‘the shattering of the optimistic cultural consciousness that occurred in the wake of the First World War created a general awareness that Europe was experiencing not only a crisis of philosophic thought but a crisis of humanity as such’ (emphasis added). However obscurely it was sometimes conceptualized, the move towards ‘existence’ by many of the generation of Elias’s philosophical contemporaries was a turn towards concrete reality and real problems facing corporeal, ‘situated’ human beings, as the existentialists put it. Everyone, it seems, had become an ontologist. The general accent on the real world was also consonant with the materialist orientation of the Marxists which led them into analysing immediate economic and political realities. This kind of work had an important influence on Elias via Mannheim’s attempt to rework Marx in the direction of a non-economistic sociology of knowledge. Elias’s essay on anti-Semitism (Elias 1929b) was written from a neo-Marxist (but non-economistic) perspective heavily influenced by Mannheim’s study on ‘Conservative Thought’. There was also an affinity between

22

Origins of Elias’s synthesis

the generalized return to the real concrete world in the philosophical culture of the time and Elias’s prior orientation towards the real, corporeal dimension of human existence derived from his early medical training. It is worth remembering that at first Elias studied medicine and philosophy together, so this might explain why he was less disposed to absorb uncritically the idealism, panlogism and methodologism of neo-Kantianism. His medical training, particularly his experience in the dissecting room (Elias 1994: 29–31, 86–90) was one important source of a firm grip on reality that immunized him against some of the rationalistic excesses of the Kantians. At the same time, the particular school of neo-Kantianism with which Hönigswald and Elias were associated (the Marburg School) was known for its focus on the concrete achievements of sciences (Beck 1967: 470). Furthermore, for the neo-Kantians in general (in opposition to the phenomenologists) there was always ‘a continuity between positive science and philosophy’ (Crowell 1999: 186). A further affinity between Elias and Marxist thinkers is the common rejection of any clear distinction between historical science and philosophy (Elias 1924: 42; Goldmann 1977: 105). On this issue Elias had something more in common with the Marxists than with the fundamental ontologists. Like the Marxists, Elias’s scientific orientation put a strong emphasis on what Goldmann (1977: 105) has called ‘the attempt to reach the maximum adequation of thought to reality’. Hence, for the Marxists (and also for Elias in a very strong sense), ‘the problem of Being, the philosophical problem, is posed within, and only within, positive research’ (Goldmann 1977: 105, emphasis in original). There is thus an interesting consistency in Elias’s outlook from his earliest days in academic life, deriving from both socio-cultural and personal sources: that is, an affinity with materialism, a respect for science and an orientation towards ontology or realism, all of which, when translated by Elias into sociological terms, produced a sociology with a sense of social structure and concrete reality. This orientation was also dynamic, with an emphasis on process and development, against the static cast of the Kantian theory of categories and sociologies inspired by it. Elias’s later insistence on studying people ‘in the round’, as embodied and economically, politically and emotionally bonded to each other in shifting patterns of interdependency (Elias 1978a), was a wholly consistent development of his overall perspective. Although he developed this perspective and moved forward in a number of directions as his career developed (e.g. the theories of civilization, scientification, levels of integration, established–outsider relations and theory of symbols), the basic secular, materialistic, reality orientation is consistently present. This orientation is very clear in Elias’s last work The Symbol Theory (Elias 1991a), where he clearly identifies with the secular humanism of evolutionary biologists such as Julian Huxley (see Chapter 6). It is an outlook on the human condition that has much in common with the philosophies of existence that sprang up in Germany in the wake of that country’s national catastrophe in 1918 and in the years immediately following (Heinemann 1953: ch. 1). Not surprisingly, many of Elias’s subsequent polemical targets were rationalists (phenomenologists,

Origins of Elias’s synthesis 23 Kantians, Parsons, Weber, ethnomethodologists) or purveyors of ideologies, religious revelation or other myths that would divert us from a realistic and more detached attitude towards nature, human societies and ourselves (Elias 1978a: ch. 2). Heidegger, like Elias, also questioned the sacrosanct subject–object dichotomy and the concept of the individual knowing subject,9 very strongly opposed relativism and threw into doubt the whole philosophical field of ethics. Heidegger also (against Husserl and the Logical Positivists) questioned the status of logic in argument and standards of proof in ways that disturbed the systematic rationalism of the dominant Kantian philosophies of the time. Heidegger posited the dissolution of logic through the idea of Nothing or Negation. In Heinemann’s (1953: 98) formulation, Heidegger argued that this strange idea is ‘experienced in modes of behaviour rather than as its object. It is revealed to us, not in acts of reasoning, but in the irrational act of anxiety.’ The result is opposed to logic, which is ‘dissolved in the vortex of a more fundamental questioning’ (Heinemann 1953: 98). In discussions, lectures and various places in his writings, Elias also drew attention to the pitfalls of the indiscriminate use of the term ‘logic’ to describe the sequential order of social development and generally exposed its unquestioned absolute status (e.g. Elias 1971: 361, 363; 1982: 24). One fact that points to the Heideggerians as an important academic inspiration for Elias’s attitude towards logic is that it decidedly could not have come from Elias’s relationship with the staunch rationalist Hönigswald, for whom, like all Kantians one may assume, logic and rationality had the highest value. This would also have been the view of the philosophers such as G.E. Moore and R.S. Peters who Elias knew in Cambridge and the LSE during the 1940s, for whom logic, rationality and respect for reasoned argument formed the cornerstone of a successful working tradition (see Kilminster 1998: ch. 1).10 In any case, by that time Elias’s views on this question were already well formed. In the course of the challenges to the philosophical orthodoxy of neoKantianism in the 1920s, many manifestos for radical new directions in philosophy (as phenomenology, Logical Positivism, fundamental ontology, philosophy of existence, philosophy of language) were published (Friedman 2000). This movement has been called ‘the second Kantian revolution’ (Mandel 1978: 261). One direction was towards what Rose (1981: 23), following Habermas, called ‘meta-critique’. Various philosophers and sociologists (including Heidegger, Mannheim, Benjamin, Gadamer) transformed the Kantian question of validity (Geltung) into a historical critique of the whole endeavour of ‘methodologism’ and, as we have seen, brought back existence, reality, life or being, debased by many of the neo-Kantians. Elias was part of this generational, oppositional movement, which he developed in a distinctive direction. The exponents of meta-critique adopted a strategy already also developed by Durkheim; that is, of deriving the Kantian categories from social presuppositions or preconditions, such as ‘social situation’, history, society, culture or Dasein. In other words, a wider range of historical conditions of possibility or preconditions than the a priori categories were entertained. Their work, remained, however,

24

Origins of Elias’s synthesis

caught up in the same transcendental circle as that of the Kantian philosophy they were striving to transcend (Rose 1981: 23). The condition of experience was seen as synonymous with the object of experience. I have argued (Kilminster 1998: 40) that although Elias participated in this innovative movement away from apriorism towards the social derivation of categories and concepts, his strategy of ‘sociogenesis’ differed from meta-critique, which he can be seen as having adapted in a more dynamic direction. The character of Elias’s sociogenetic theory of knowledge can be clarified in relation to Durkheim’s ‘meta-critical’ theory of knowledge in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. It could be argued that Durkheim simply located an abstract and static source for the Kantian categoreal universality, which he found in ‘society’. He therefore remained in the Kantian loop and unwittingly, therefore, entangled himself in a form of sociological circularity that made him vulnerable to the subsequent Kantian objection made by Gehlke (1915) and repeated later by Lukes (1975: 447–8). This was that he had confused the social causation of the categories with the faculty or capacity to think spatially, temporally and so on. which was already presupposed in his enquiry and therefore a priori after all. Elias effectively immunized himself against this standard Kantian riposte with a dynamic sociological theory of knowledge through which concepts are seen to have become ‘universal’ over many generations of social development. In Elias’s terminology, categories and concepts represent a higher level of conceptual synthesis (Elias 1992: 179ff.; Kilminster 1998: 168). Returning to the philosophical controversies of the early 1920s, in this ‘vortex of fundamental questioning’ (Heinemann 1953: 98) nothing was immune to challenge, even the autonomy of philosophy itself (Crowell 1999: 186). Again, Elias was profoundly touched by a prominent controversy that defined the philosophical and social-scientific cultures of the Weimar period. But characteristically, Elias thought it through to the end, however painful the consequences. The issue of the autonomy or otherwise of philosophy was a topic that animated agonized debates between sociologists of knowledge and philosophers in Germany at the time and which rumbled on well into the 1930s. It was in the 1920s and 1930s that the term ‘sociologism’ acquired its negative connotations in circles that rejected the more ambitious claims of sociologists to have taken over from philosophy (Curtius 1929; Grünwald 1934; von Schelting 1934, 1936; Kettler and Meja 1995: 177; Kilminster 1998: 174, 176). It formed a prominent theme in the reception of Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia which was widely regarded as challenging the autonomy of philosophy (see Kettler et al.1984: 116–18; Woldring 1986: 198–212). Hannah Arendt, in her review of Mannheim’s book (Young-Bruehl 1982: 83ff.) saw in it a dangerous threat to philosophy. She wrote as a defender of philosophy and of ‘transcendent thought’ generally (Young-Bruehl 1982: 84). A similar argument was expounded later in Herbert Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution (1941) which was a position similar to that of many Marxists of the Frankfurt School who consistently argued for the importance of an abstract, utopian dimension to thinking about society. This was justified with transcendental arguments of one kind or another (Kilminster 1979: part IV; 1998: 50–5). Elias took exactly the opposite view,

Origins of Elias’s synthesis 25 turning his back on ‘transcendence’ altogether. This did not, however (contra Pels 2003: 94–5), drive him unequivocally into the arms of modern positivism. As I will explain later in this chapter, it is a feature of Elias’s work generally that it is consistently able to fuse opposites – in this case a positivistic view of social science and a phenomenological one focussing on meaning – without being assimilable to either. The agonized debates about the status of philosophy were part of a struggle for intellectual hegemony between the ‘first generation sociologists’, as Elias characterized himself and his contemporaries such as Mannheim (Elias 1994: 80–3) and a defensive philosophers’establishment. This was a tension that was to shape Elias’s entire development as a sociologist. It explains why, particularly in his programmatic articles, Elias conveys an impression of himself and sociologists generally as an embattled or beleaguered outsider group, fighting against the powerful twin establishments of philosophy (which generates doubt and failure of nerve) and physics (which provides the fallacious general model of the ideal science) (e.g. Elias 1972, 1974, 1982, 1987a).11 The dubious status of philosophy was an issue that Elias returned to again and again, particularly in the later years, arguing in no uncertain terms an uncompromising case for its historical supersession by sociology (e.g. Elias 1971: 364). As we have seen, Elias made a decision very early on in his career not to transform philosophy from within by restructuring it in this or that direction (say towards fundamental ontology or existentialism, or a new form of Kantian apriorism on the lines of Cassirer); nor to seek its fulfilment in political action (Lukács, Korsch) but to abandon it altogether. And for Elias, this abandonment was not simply a decision to ignore philosophy in a spirit of live and let live, but is based on a scientific conviction that the entire tradition is cognitively deficient and defunct. As he later put it, with obvious Comtean overtones (see Dunning 1977) in an unpublished reply to a philosopher’s critique (Sathaye 1973) of Elias’s double article on the sociology of knowledge (Elias 1971): If one asks what is philosophy … one can say very plainly it is a halfway house between religion and science, a mix-up of untestable, but orientating and elevating beliefs and references to observable data and testable scientific theories. (Elias 1973: 6) For Elias, its demise was a long-term historical transformation in which the questions posed by the philosophers had been transposed on to another level as sociology. This process had left the practitioners of philosophy historically defunctionalized, so driving them as a defence of their profession into creating their own fields of enquiry and expertise and laying claim to them (Elias 1982; Kilminster 1998: ch. 1). Philosophers also arrogate to themselves the authority to dictate to other fields what their methods and forms of explanation should be. Elias’s position is the strong and final one that philosophy is based on an archaic form of non-empirical (transcendental) speculation that produces abstract

26

Origins of Elias’s synthesis

reflections of little cognitive value. Hence, to continue with it is self-evidently pointless. Such a strident and total rejection of philosophy of the kind we find in Elias is rare in sociology, even though other sociologists, including Marx, Comte and Durkheim in their different ways, also explicitly took their distance from philosophy (Kilminster 1998: ch. 1). In Elias’s case, though, it is the uncompromising finality of the abandonment that is unusual. So too is the dogged way in which he would not let the issue go, returning to taunt the philosophers and wavering sociologists again and again. Elias’s Jewish origins and participation in the organization of the Zionist youth movement Blau-Weiss may well have played a complex role in the formation of his tough-minded stance on the status of philosophy. Many of the prominent German neo-Kantians of the earlier generation were assimilated Jews (e.g. Cohen, Liebmann, Cassirer, Hönigswald). The thoroughgoing assimilation into German society of many of them was reflected in their varying degrees of German nationalist leanings. Peter Gay refers to Hermann Cohen, for example, perhaps the most famous of the neo-Kantians, as a ‘firm assimilationist’ (Gay 1978: 119). Gay adds that ‘what made neo-Kantianism so exhilarating to its Jewish advocates’ was that ‘they were rediscovering a giant of German culture in the company of other Germans’ (Gay 1978: 118). In addition, Kant’s critical philosophy promised a rationale that ‘permitted emancipated Jews to fit their own religious views into a universal – they hoped universally respected – scheme’ (Gay 1978: 117).12 Just before and immediately after the First World War, cracks started to appear in the edifice of assimilation. As Richard Wolin explains: In Germany during the 1920s, Jewish culture itself experienced a remarkable resurgence. To the chagrin of German Jewry, in the aftermath of the Great War, decades of rabid political anti-Semitism gained a new lease on life…. Whereas during the first half of the nineteenth century, Jews had been shunned because of their ‘backwardness’, as assimilation progressed they were scorned as parvenus who had lost touch with their own traditions. Confronted with these painful circumstances and developments, for many German Jews, dreams of successful integration went up in smoke. In fact, one may justifiably speak of a process of dissimilation: a conscious abandonment of the delusory promises of assimilation and a corresponding quest for a meaningful Jewish identity. (Wolin 2003: 28) This was a sensibility that spread among Jews generally, but particularly among the rebellious younger people. Michael Brenner talks of the ‘internal journey of dissimilation’ typical of young Jews in Weimar Germany (Brenner 1996: 81). Elias himself acknowledged later (Elias 1994: 128–9) the part which being a member of a ‘stigmatized outsider group’ played in the shaping of his sociological thinking. Many of the Jewish philosophy students of Elias’s generation, who were still denied full participation in academic life in all but a few German universities, came to question the straightforwardly assimilationist and nationalist options of

Origins of Elias’s synthesis 27 their neo-Kantian philosophy teachers. As Brenner has said of the assimilated Jewish fathers of the earlier generation: ‘Their children … no longer deemed the path of their fathers and grandfathers worthy of imitation. Instead, they pointed out that full integration into German society existed only in their fathers’ fantasies’ (Brenner 1996: 81).13 This led some, like Elias (and Martin Bandmann, Erich Fromm and Leo Löwenthal), to embrace versions of Zionism, in some cases (not in Elias’s case) in one of its Messianic, religious forms (see Hackeschmidt 1995, 1997; Rabinbach 1997). Zionism would probably have been seen by many both as the only valid nationalism for German Jews and as a rejection of the assimilationist pressure in a country that still denied them full citizenship (Wolin 2003: 15; Berkowitz 1996). It was a complex and contradictory reality for many Jews because even in the Jewish youth movements such as Blau-Weiss there was a celebration both of Jewish comradeship and Germanness; since the movement was steeped in German culture and people sang German songs (Laqueur 1989: 486). At the same time, there was an identification with the projected Jewish nation in Palestine, where Jews imagined a clearer identity and a life without stigmatization as parvenus and outsiders. In this complex process of the search for an appropriate Jewish-German identity, neo-Kantianism had to be jettisoned by many of the Jewish philosophy students in favour of the far-reaching critiques offered by other philosophies such as existentialism or fundamental ontology or fundamentally recast as ‘metacritique’. This was because it was too closely associated with the assimilated philosophy establishment of an earlier generation and with more strident forms of German nationalism associated with conservatism and anti-Semitism. Elias’s stance seems to have been a tough-minded one according to which he perceived the inherent weakness of the strategy of the older generation of liberal-minded, assimilated Jews who embraced Germanness only to be humiliatingly betrayed by continuing anti-Semitism, including stigmatization and discrimination. I am aware that any conclusions drawn about the role of Elias’s Zionist phase in the formation of his outlook must, at this stage of research into his early life, be provisional. But I think it is plausible to suggest that Elias, in a way very typical of his independent character, found confidence in the robust Zionist stance to go even further with regard to the relationship between philosophy and sociology than perhaps anyone else at the time. He rejected not only Kantianism but also the rest of German philosophy, including the onto-hermeneutic ‘new directions’ of the time (even though he learned from them) which then spilled over into a rejection of philosophy-in-general. The typical intellectual and political response (Jewish or otherwise) to the crises of the early 1920s was the replacement of the dominant Kantian philosophy with another philosophy or the subsumption of philosophy into its fulfilment through a Messianic Marxist political movement, as advocated, for example, in Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (1923). For a Jew of Elias’s independence of mind, rejecting all alternative German philosophies as well as the moribund neo-Kantianism makes sense because to accept any one of them and try to reconfigure philosophy would put himself and other Jews back into the same humiliating situation that befell the neo-Kantians.

28

Origins of Elias’s synthesis

So it would be preferable not to have anything to do with the philosophical strategy at all. If you do not compromise, then you will never find yourself on the back foot so to speak, because you refuse to play the German establishment game. Elias then gradually came to see in the conflicts and problems of the time the wider issue of the domination of people’s thinking by myths and fantasyladen deceptions and beliefs generally, which included, as well as ideologies, philosophy itself. In a series of stages through the 1920s he came to turn his back on or otherwise abandon all forms of ideology and mythology, including German nationalism, Marxism, neo-Kantianism, religion, German philosophy as a whole and, finally, philosophy as such. (His final abandonment of Zionism probably came much later, in the 1950s.) In their place he substituted a total commitment to a synoptic sociological programme conceived as a ‘mission’. But he retained a love of the German language and culture which had shaped him as a person and he continued to identify himself both as a Jew and as a German (also, he said, with some British layers in his make-up), identifications which he pointed out later were not a matter of choice for him anyway (Elias 1994: 79). For the sociological proselytizer Elias of the later years, the prestigious tradition of philosophy has to be abandoned, no matter how difficult and painful that may be, because it is no longer serviceable for providing an adequate orientation in modern societies. As he put it (with some understatement): ‘It is not easy to abandon work of such intellectual grandeur and prestige’ (Elias 1971: 364). Although not casting doubt upon the integrity of metaphysical and transcendental philosophers as people (Elias 1982: 24), Elias was sweeping in his dismissal of philosophy as a discipline.14 Many of Elias’s polemical and programmatic articles on the sociology of knowledge, written in the 1970s and 1980s, may be read as a continuous taunting of philosophers with the rhetorical question: Why do you continue with a kind of enquiry that all the evidence suggests has been historically superseded and which produces forbidding abstractions and empty generalizations? In Time: An Essay, commenting on the underlying solipsism in the continuing philosophical debate about the unknowable, he acerbically declared: A long procession of books written on these lines, a tragi-comic masquerade of wasted lives, litters humankind’s trail. If the world ‘an sich’ is unknowable, one wonders why their authors bother, often rather emphatically, to state their case. Resigned silence might be more appropriate. (Elias 1992: 125–6) Who, other than Elias, would have had the sheer audacity and self-belief to make such a judgement about the ‘wasted lives’ of transcendental philosophers? It is, of course, a judgement representative of Elias’s mature view. But no doubt his vehemence was spurred by the image of the moribund Jewish neo-Kantian philosophers of his youth, whose diligent and accommodating assimilationist strategy was humiliatingly betrayed by waves of anti-Semitism. With hindsight, it is possible to see that this emerging position was even more radical and shocking than that of Heidegger, who widely scandalized the world of Kantian

Origins of Elias’s synthesis 29 and phenomenological philosophy in Germany in the 1920s (Heinemann 1953: 93ff.; Bubner 1981: 21–31). Elias did not simply seek to rebuild philosophy on a new ontological basis to replace the exhausted traditions of Cartesian and Kantian rationalism, but to move beyond those traditions as well as fundamental ontology and all other philosophies, altogether. The ‘vortex of fundamental questioning’ (Heinemann) into which the philosophical issues resolve themselves for Elias is neither Heideggerian fundamental ontology nor revolutionary praxis à la Lukács. For Elias, it is a sociological grasp of the long-term development of human societies in which philosophically posed questions about knowledge, ethics and human being-in-the-world are reframed and transformed in a framework amenable to empirical testing. In the course of these kinds of more detached enquiries, our values, about and visions of how, society ought to be changed (initially suspended) are potentially transformed (see more on this in Chapter 4). Of course, I realize that at present there is no conclusive evidence that Elias ever wholly embraced any of the philosophies of existence or fundamental ontology either in Freiburg or earlier, but the possibility that he did not know about the main thrust of the concepts and arguments of these schools is inconceivable. The point I am making is that the philosophers associated with the ‘ontological turn’ and those inspired by them were already in the course of calling into question the individualistic Cartesian and Kantian rationalisms in a strikingly ‘sociological’ way, establishing a counter-movement in which Elias, judging both by his doctoral thesis and his later autobiographical reflections, enthusiastically participated. It was a movement that went outside Germany, to include, slightly later, the French existentialists, including Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, whose starting points – dissatisfaction with nominalism, rationalism and individualism – were broadly similar (Sartre 1936; Hammond et al. 1991; Kilminster 1993b). In his wholesale criticisms of neo-Kantianism in his youth Elias was, then, riding a critical wave that was not of his making alone. He benefited from the way in which the ontologists and existentialists had brought philosophy down to earth, and the way in which, against the ego-centred Kantian and phenomenological philosophies of consciousness, they perceived the fundamental relatedness of concrete human beings. They had also perceived the futility of solipsism and the limits of the subject–object distinction. The fundamental leap of imagination needed to move from an egoistic to a social viewpoint had already been made by the fundamental ontologists. The important difference is that they did it in a manner altogether too abstract and unscientific for the empirical aspirations of Elias. Others had begun to move in a broadly sociological direction from this position. For example, Karl Löwith’s (a pupil of Heidegger) dissatisfaction at the time with Heidegger’s abstraction ‘Being-with-others’ led him towards a notion of human networks. He commented that before it is ‘my world’, the human world is a Mitwelt, a ‘co-world’ (quoted in Wolin 2003: 81; see also Morris 1991: 383). Elias eventually went on to formulate a more fully developed notion of social interdependence and the concept of figurations of bonded human beings out of his studies in The Civilizing Process in particular. But, in relation to his original starting point and stimulus to overcome Kantian and phenomenological

30

Origins of Elias’s synthesis

individualism, he in fact had a good deal more in common with the existentialists and fundamental ontologists than would at first appear from his autobiographical reflections. (In the next chapter, in the section on the Zurich Congress of 1928, I quote one of Heidegger’s pupils, Hans Jonas, who talked explicitly about a new tendency of theory focusing on the human condition and the concrete situations in which people are inescapably bound.) To put the matter more technically, the human ‘being-with-others’ that Heidegger posited (against neo-Kantian individualism) as constitutive of human being (Harries 1978: 71) was effectively transformed by Elias through his subsequent researches into a model of people bonded together in real interdependencies that change over time, as the starting point of sociological inquiry. Much later Elias referred to this view of human bonding as the image of homines aperti (Elias 1978a: 125). Elias’s way of presenting the individual–society issue is always to replace homo clausus formulations with homines aperti formulations, so that the contradictions and individualistic paradoxes associated with homo clausus simply do not arise (Kilminster 2004). This is a way of arguing that I believe is a sociologized version of some of Heidegger’s formulations in Being and Time; or was at least originally inspired by this feature of the fundamental ontology movement prior to the publication of Heidegger’s famous text in 1927 in Husserl’s Jahrbuch, which consolidated Heidegger’s position up until then. Elias then effectively transposed the notion of Being-in-the-world into a sociological idiom slowly over time as his researches deepened and his ideas developed. Karsten Harries describes Heidegger’s departure from Husserl as follows, quoting Being and Time: Heidegger’s analysis [of solipsism and nihilism] suggests that such problems are not be solved, but to be dissolved by showing that they rest on a onesided and reduced understanding of human being. There is no need to prove that an isolated subject can break out of its isolation and make contact with independently existing things. The conception of the self as subject, which is presupposed by attempts to prove the reality of things without me, is itself deficient. “The ‘scandal of philosophy’ is not that this proof has yet to be given, but that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again.” … Similarly, being-with-others is constitutive of human being. ‘So far as Dasein is at all, it has Being-with-one-another as its kind of Being’. … There is no need of proof. (Harries 1978: 71, emphasis in original) There are echoes here of Elias’s many provocations (e.g. Elias 1971,1982) about the pointlessness of trying to bridge the gap between individual egos and society, when they are all bonded together in the first place. At a seminar on the sociology of knowledge which Elias gave at the University of Leeds in 1974, Elias talked at length about the fact that human knowledge is a long-term accumulation of many generations. In answer to students who kept asking the Cartesian question: ‘But how do I know what I know?’, Elias repeatedly replied: ‘Why do you ask

Origins of Elias’s synthesis 31 that question?’ He was essentially asserting that it is scandalous that anyone should even ask such questions when it is manifestly obvious that people are fundamentally bonded to each other and have learned what they know from others. The starting point is wrong in the first place, so why on earth do you ask such a fallacious question? Elias was consistently responding from the standpoint of homines aperti, while his questioners remained within homo clausus assumptions. Elias’s questioners were furious with what they saw as Elias’s failure to answer the epistemological question as posed. It was seen simply as evasion. The structure of the argument in Elias is comparable with that of Heidegger in this respect, although without the same content and political impetus of the latter. Elias did not resolve the issue but dissolved it into a wider frame of reference, a strategy that was as unlikely to satisfy rationalists in the 1920s as it was in the 1970s. Further echoes of Heideggerian argumentation occur in Elias’s radical and programmatic articles on the sociology of knowledge (e.g. Elias 1971, 1982). Following Bourdieu’s (1996: 62–3) interpretation of Heidegger’s argument strategy, we can also see how Elias, too, ‘plays with fire’ by insisting on the historicity of science, hence coming close to relativism. But at the same time, he accords a new kind of dynamic, emergent, ‘absolute’ significance to scientific knowledge in the conception of its ‘relative autonomy’. This, in turn, is grounded in the longer term structure of the historical process itself, which can be empirically established. He has introduced an empirically ascertainable dimension of becoming in order to transcend the dualism. The philosophical starting point for Elias’s sociological solution was memorably articulated by the Hegelian Alexander Herzen in his Letters on the Study of Nature: ‘In history everything is relatively absolute. Nonrelative absolute is a logical abstraction which becomes relative the moment it passes outside the bounds of logic’ (Herzen 1846: 345). Interestingly, in his doctoral dissertation (Elias 1922) Elias formulated this paradox in a similar way when he declared that philosophers’ efforts would remain fruitless unless they acknowledged that their claims to timeless validity must be time-bound and are therefore ‘a relative concept of absolute totality’ (Elias 1922: 48, emphasis in original). The underlying difference between Heidegger’s form of argumentation and that of Elias has, however, to be kept in focus. In the 1970s and 1980s, Elias was arguing from a sociological position backed up by massive empirical evidence (from The Civilizing Process and other studies) of the ways of living of real, interdependent homines aperti, not from an abstract concept of Dasein. Hyphenated formulations such as ‘being-with-others’, so beloved of the fundamental ontologists, thus became in Elias investigatable networks of interdependent people in dynamic figurations bonded with each other on various dimensions.15 That is Elias’s version of the ‘human condition’. As his questioners in Leeds discovered, Elias’s position can appear as evasive as that of Heidegger because Elias, too, is able to fuse opposites while being unassimilable to either of the opposing positions (e.g. relativism versus absolutism). But Elias is always at pains to contrast philosophical absolutism with sociological relativism. He has the sociologist’s sense of the part played by the power of institutionalized disciplines to shape the development

32

Origins of Elias’s synthesis

of knowledge. The ‘infrastructure of what is commonly called “history” ’ (Elias 1977: 355) into which, for Elias, the controversies ultimately resolve themselves, is not an eternal Being that grounds the world, nor a teleological historical process as in Hegel and Marx, but an empirically investigatable one that can be established and reformulated, as part of a collective research enterprise, up to the ‘next step’ in the overall process, as Mannheim (1929: 46) put it (see Chapter 3). In other words, another antinomy dissolved by Elias is that between social development and teleology. He demonstrates structured development and possible tendencies without assuming an end-state of history. Finally, for Elias that structure of history is intertwined with non-human nature. Another example in Elias of the sociological transmutation of the philosophies of being is the way in which he transforms philosophical speculations about the ‘objects’ of the different sciences and the so-called ‘modes of being’ postulated by fundamental ontologists and philosophical realists such as Hartmann and Whitehead. These speculations provided the stimulus for Elias eventually to develop a systematic and testable theory of the levels of integration (physical, chemical, biological, psychological, social) of the social and natural worlds investigated by the different sciences (Elias 1987a; Benthem van den Bergh 1986; Wassall 1990). In all these ways, Elias subverted the ontologists’ distinction between the ontic and the ontological, implicitly rejecting the whole transcendental-theological underpinning of the distinction (Goldmann 1977: 105; Steiner 1978: 86–7; Kilminster 1979: 226–9; 1998: ch. 1). The formulations of the fundamental ontologists thus represent trace elements in Elias, existing as distant presuppositions and preconditions for his research-based sociological framework which has transformed the questions those philosophers posed.

Philosophy reframed Questions traditionally grouped by philosophers under epistemology, ontology and ethics (this last field including ‘evaluative’ or ‘normative’ questions) reappear in Elias’s works transformed into a sociological idiom and related to each other in a comprehensive theory of society. I have already mentioned the transformation of ontological questions. The epistemological questions raised by philosophers were transformed into a comprehensive sociological epistemology. The evaluative questions are to be secured through the ‘detour via detachment’ (see Chapter 5). The failure to grasp this ‘post-philosophical’ feature of Elias’s thinking has sometimes led commentators to try to pull him back into the philosophy from which his life’s work was a sustained attempt at emancipation (see Maso 1995 and critique in Goudsblom 1995); or to criticize him from philosophical positions which he regarded himself as already having moved beyond (e.g. Sathaye 1973). The crucial point was that whereas Elias simply refused to enter into discussions within a philosophical discourse, not recognizing the authority of philosophy, many of his critics took that recognition for granted. The scope for misunderstanding was thus very great.

Origins of Elias’s synthesis 33 At the time of his dispute with Hönigswald in Breslau, philosophy and sociology in Germany were moving on parallel tracks, with each one less differentiated from the other than now and both less institutionalized. Their representatives discussed similar questions and often shared the same journals (Maso 1995). We must obviously beware not to project back into the earlier period a view about the relationship between sociology and philosophy deriving from our own stage of the development of a professionalized and much expanded sociology. Nor should we carelessly project Elias’s later uncompromising stance in relation to philosophy back into his early struggles with philosophers, when he may not have perceived the issues so clearly then. However, it remains the case that an important aspect of Elias’s development is the process of his break with philosophy, which began during his studies for his doctorate and which was increasingly to shape his subsequent intellectual development as well as the character of his sociological work as a whole. Let us now consider briefly the specific ways in which Elias transformed the questions previously addressed by philosophers as epistemology and ethics. His position on this is akin to (although by no means identical with) that of his friend and colleague Karl Mannheim’s tentative and ambivalent commitment to the ‘triangle of modes of discourse’ (Meja and Stehr 1990: 295): that is, the interdependence of philosophy (epistemology), ethics and sociology. For Mannheim, once one has abandoned the optimistic idea that the process of history will transcend social divisions and their problems, as well as values-informed political activism, then it becomes a question of close co-operation between sociologists and those who articulate moral principles and issues, which will include philosophers. Hence, for Mannheim, philosophers and sociologists should freely enter each other’s discourses for mutual sustenance without losing their own identities. Elias’s uncompromising abandonment of philosophy and his refusal to accept its authority is the key difference between his approach and that of Mannheim. Mannheim talked of the ‘structural autonomy of the philosophical level of problems’ (quoted by Meja and Stehr 1990: 295) in a way that Elias would never have condoned, probably for fear of playing into the hands of the philosophers’ ideology. But both agreed that sociology had implications for epistemological questions and what are called moral issues. Elias’s position was to regard the relationship between sociology and philosophy processually as one of transformation and reframing of the questions traditionally identified as epistemology and ethics to another level and tying them more closely to empirical evidence. 1. On the subject of epistemology, from early in his career when he was a doctoral student, there were indications in Elias’s work that he was moving in the direction of developing a sociological epistemology to replace the traditional philosophical one (Kilminster and Wouters 1995: 88). This transformed epistemology would relate ways of knowing to the patterns of living together of human beings and remodel the traditional issue of validity (Geltung). It was to become a form of socio-genetic enquiry that moved beyond the cryptoKantian forms of para-sociological ‘meta-critique’, although Elias could not have

34

Origins of Elias’s synthesis

put it that way at the time. This gradual realization and its specific formulation gather momentum in his work to a point where he makes a complete break with philosophy, decisively turning his back on the tradition. Elias wrote much later that ‘Traditional philosophical epistemology, in its transcendental form, it seems to me, has come to the end of its road’ (Elias 1982: 36), presumably meaning both neo-Kantianism and phenomenology. The neo-Kantian philosophy in which Elias was initially schooled nevertheless alerted him to key areas of enquiry, including the problem of the historical validity of knowledge, the issue of origins and status of universal categories and the problem of the development of knowledge, that is, its processual character (Maso 1995). There is an affinity between the conception of relationism found in Ernst Cassirer’s (1910) Substance and Function and Elias’s insistence on thinking in terms of relations and functions and not substances, something which Elias himself acknowledged (Kilminster and Wouters 1995: 101; van Krieken 1998: 12–13). However, it is not simply that Elias lifted a general relational model out of Cassirer and applied it. There is a difference between relational models employed in chemistry or physics and the ones used in Elias’s works, where he traces the relational nature of the power balances between real interdependent social groups. It is noticeable that in Elias’s doctoral dissertation there is only one quotation from then contemporary authors and this is a long one from Cassirer’s Kant’s Life and Thought (Cassirer 1918: 291–2, quoted in Elias 1922: 29–30) which Elias uses to back up an argument for the historicity of the concept and principle of Geltung. The point Cassirer makes in the quotation is that history does not follow a priori from the general laws of causality. This is because scientific ideas emerge in such complex, knotted causal sequences that singling out one thread to follow would be impossible. In an argument that anticipates the concern with sequential order in his later work on the sociology of knowledge and science and the structure of social development, Elias says that in the light of Cassirer’s point, what allows us to pass judgement on the truth of scientific ideas is: ‘[T]he dialectical process, encompassing everything that claims validity, is that particular order through which historical facts are connected to each other; it is the order of history’ (Elias 1922: 38). The classical German philosophical tradition generally, and neo-Kantianism in particular, thus constituted a point of departure for Elias’s gradual transfer of his intellectual energies into a dynamic and historical sociology, which he believed could provide a more inclusive and adequate framework for the solution of the problem of knowledge. Once Elias had begun to make this break, I would argue, his later sociological enquiries became structurally different from philosophy (Kilminster 1979: ch. 17; Kilminster and Wouters 1995: 83). It is this feature that has misled some of the contemporary commentators. Odd similarities of terminology occur and are inevitable, but the familiar philosophical terms have in Elias a transformed meaning and function. For example, when Elias later talks of ‘science-immanent’ and ‘science-transcendent’ developments when explaining the development of sciences (Elias 1974: 117) he is using the terms in a wholly sociological fashion, i.e. in a way that renders them amenable to empirical

Origins of Elias’s synthesis 35 enquiry. This feature of Elias’s writings also accounts for the frequency with which he places terms such as ‘subject(ive)’, ‘object(ive)’ and ‘Reason’ within the distancing medium of quotation marks. Here are some further examples. Discussions of values, value-relevance and value-freedom in Rickert and Max Weber may be seen as having been gradually recast by Elias as the testable theory of involvement and detachment, in which the conceptions of ‘autonomous’ and ‘heteronomous’ evaluations play a central role (Elias 1987a – more on this in Chapter 5, this volume). In this respect, he went on a different track from that of Heidegger who rejected Rickert’s philosophy of value entirely (Heinemann 1953: 99), whereas, in transforming Weber’s version, which relied heavily on Rickert, Elias effectively carried forward Rickert’s analysis on to a sociological level, rather than rejecting it. Further examples of conceptual recasting include: ‘truth’ was reconceptualized by Elias as ‘reality congruence’; ‘part/whole’ becomes ‘part-unit/unit’; ‘values’ give way to ‘evaluations’; ‘modes of being’ are transformed into ‘levels of integration’; and ‘abstractions’ are transformed into ‘symbols at a high level of synthesis’. Generally, therefore, one finds in Elias a principled avoidance of philosophical concepts and the consistent substitution of sociological alternatives which are more amenable to empirical reference. 2. On the subject of ‘evaluative’ or ‘normative’ matters in the traditional area of ethics, Elias commented very early in his career, in his first major publication, that ‘Ethical questions are routinely and very wrongly separated from other scientific questions’ (Elias 1921: 140). Later he argued that ‘wider understanding of the nexus of facts provides … the only secure basis for value-judgements’ (in Elias and Dunning 1986: 144). Elias’s total dedication to sociology as a ‘mission’, a life vocation, which comes out clearly in his autobiographical Reflections on a Life (1994), points to an intense human commitment. (It is something that he shared with Mannheim (Kettler and Meja 1995: 121).) Elias saw sociology as potentially able to assist human beings to orientate themselves in the figurations they form together and to help them control the unintended social entanglements which threaten to escalate into destructive sequences such as wars and mass killings. The figurational view of society, and Elias’s theories of civilizing processes and established/outsider relations, are implicitly underpinned by the perceived imperative of generating knowledge to help groups in achieving greater ‘mutual identification’ and thus to live in controlled co-operation or antagonism with each other. Elias argued that it was highly likely that the blind and unplanned progress that can be observed in human development could probably be explained partly by the application of reality-congruent knowledge in the survival struggles between rival societies (Elias 1977: 381; Kilminster 1991a: xx). This view endows sociology with a prodigious moral imperative, but it is an imperative in which philosophical discussions of these problems have been recast, reframed and transformed. The ‘philosophical’ dimension is preserved in Elias and taken forward on to a higher level. It means, though, that the further the sociological programme is developed the wider becomes the gap between its comparative findings about human relations

36

Origins of Elias’s synthesis

and philosophical ways of expressing and analysing moral matters and ethical systems. Writers who have failed to grasp this practical-moral aspect of his work have tended, in their criticisms of Elias, to confuse the technical and normative dimensions of some of Elias’s concepts, for example, ‘civilization’ and ‘civilizing processes’ (e.g. Leach 1986; Bauman 1979). Elias was, however, aware of the normative issue right from the start and had already, to his own satisfaction anyway, transformed the issue and the relevant concepts into a sociological form amenable to empirical investigation (Fletcher 1997: ch. 8). In Elias, the investigator returns to the ‘ought’ questions after a ‘detour via detachment’ through which they are reframed and taken on to a higher level, consonant with the wider integrating processes in the developing society as a whole. This understanding of the ‘moral’ dimension of Elias’s work is a counterweight to the unreflective and inaccurate assimilation of it into the model of ‘value-free’, sociological positivism or empiricism (e.g. Layder 1986). In those kinds of approaches, no interplay between facts and values is entertained at all, only their total separation (Kolakowski 1972: 16). One can detect this evaluative imperative even in the interstices of the seemingly more empirical of Elias’s works. For example, in The Court Society (1983) Elias comments on the historians’ fear that sociological research threatens to extinguish human freedom and individuality: If one is prepared to approach such problems through two-pronged investigations on the theoretical and empirical planes in closest touch with one another, rather than on the basis of preconceived dogmatic positions, the question one is aiming at with words such as ‘freedom’ and ‘determinacy’ poses itself in a different way. (Elias 1983: 30, emphasis added)

Modes of persuasion The more one reads Elias’s works the more aware one may become of being drawn into them almost against one’s will. Elias convinces readers (not all readers: some remain indifferent, others are hostile) not so much by ‘logical’ arguments for this or that position, as by expressing issues in such a way as to provoke readers into reflecting upon the categories or assumptions that they routinely employ in dealing with them. There are variants of this procedure in all his writings, including the programmatic articles, books and correspondence. It partly reflects the influence of psychoanalysis in Elias’s thinking. However, Elias’s all-important absorption of Freud from about 1930 onwards only reinforced this way of communicating, which has its roots earlier in his development. As we will see in detail in Chapter 4, The Civilizing Process is a particularly complex example. It embodies a distinctive mode of construction which systematically calls upon the reader to confront his or her own self and beliefs. The theory of state formation and civilization is not simply stated and then illustrated, but is successively developed in a to-and-fro movement with evidence

Origins of Elias’s synthesis 37 across the two volumes, a creative process into which the reader is systematically inducted. As we read through the picturesque extracts from historical documents about farting, bedroom behaviour, spitting, torture, the burning of cats and so on, we gain insight through this experience itself into our own feelings of shame, repugnance and delicacy derived from the standards of our own society, representing a later stage of development. Our reactions themselves exemplify the rising of the thresholds of shame, embarrassment and repugnance which Elias is demonstrating. This experience provides a form of self-corroboration that one can argue oneself out of only on the pain of considerable denial. Following on from my argument in the earlier section, ‘Elias as an ontologist’, in developing this mode of convincing readers Elias may initially have been inspired, directly or indirectly, by Heidegger’s use of rhetoric. Heidegger used language in a particular way to persuade the reader of his viewpoint by ‘making a vision appear’ (Gadamer 1986) rather than by argument as such. Karsten Harries (1978: 69) says that many philosophers were suspicious of Heidegger’s ‘blatantly metaphorical language’, but Harries argues for its importance in drawing our attention to the metaphorical basis of traditional epistemology. Heidegger ‘invites a questioning and rethinking of too easily taken-for-granted concepts’. Heidegger’s way of writing, particularly in Being and Time, was thus impressionistic in a certain sense. It was a way of suggesting truths rather than stating them. It was a way of leading the reader to the awareness of the ontologically compelling character of the human ‘being-in-the world’ that is our inescapable condition. This was something that had been hitherto hidden, due in part to the domination of the egocentred, rationalistic Kantian philosophy that now had to be jettisoned and a ‘new beginning’ in philosophy forged as fundamental ontology. As Steiner affirms, when Heidegger ‘twists and compacts the sinews of vocabulary and grammar into resistant, palpable nodes … he is trying to make luminous and self-revealing the obstinate opaqueness of matter’ (1978: 84–5). The rhetorical force of Heidegger’s texts thus made them very hard to ‘argue’ with. One reason why Edmund Husserl was so exasperated by Heidegger’s Being and Time was that he could not argue with it rationally (reported by Gadamer 1986). By a remote but not too implausible a parallel, Elias’s texts – while of course not Heideggerian as such – are also difficult to ‘argue with’ in a conventional, rational style. This is partly because of the way in which they unite various perspectives into a synthetic framework, but it is also because of the mode of persuasion embodied in their construction, which invokes the reader’s corroboration in a compelling way. Others had perceived this possibility at this time (e.g. Wittgenstein), but in Elias’s early milieu few did so more clearly than Heidegger. The question of what it means to convince someone of the truth of a statement or a finding was possibly picked up by Elias in the debates surrounding Heidegger at Freiburg and Heidelberg in the early 1920s. It is only present in Elias’s thought in a superseded sense of course, as a point of departure, as a presupposition, or as an inspiration. In his doctoral dissertation Elias said clearly that whether the historical sciences should follow the method of the natural sciences by which individual facts are subsumed under a general law ‘may be regarded from the outset as extremely

38

Origins of Elias’s synthesis

doubtful’ (Elias 1922: 25). He formulated the matter more strongly in the opening sentences of the summary of his dissertation: ‘The problem of the individual is posed by the realisation that there are facts which cannot be determined by the methods of the natural sciences. There are objects which stand in a relationship to the conditions to which they owe the possibility of conceptual definition which is unlike the relationship of the particular case to the general law’ (Elias 1924: 55). My point is that once one has begun to shift the burden of explanation in the human sciences away from the positivistic reliance on proof and deductive reasoning from law-like statements, then using other forms of explanation, understanding – and by extension persuasion – became legitimate. Or at least they could be pursued – still systematically and with rigour, to be sure – just this side of irrationalism and all that implied. It is another characteristic example, in this case in relation to the rational/irrational dualism, of Elias ‘playing with fire’. Elias seems to have seen the liberative implications of this for social science quite early on. He effectively transformed the ontologists’ use of suggestion and display rather than proof into the self-confrontational presentation of data and theoretical discussion. This was an emerging modus operandi that from the Civilizing Process onwards, following Elias’s integration of Freud, partly works on the reader’s defence mechanisms. As we will see in Chapter 5, it is this feature of the Civilizing Process (and by extension Elias’s other writings) that also makes them hard to ‘argue’ with in a formal sense. This does not mean they are beyond criticism, but simply that they have to be confronted in a way that involves not only the normal deployment of comparative evidence and theoretical reflection, but also a form of self-confrontation and self-evaluation. I would hypothesize that it is possible to detect in this intellectual movement towards the loosening of explanatory models and experimentation with different forms of persuasion and explanation, the symptoms of an accelerating informalization wave in Weimar Germany. This experimentation was part of a process of the ‘emancipation of emotions’ (Wouters 1998: 139) that was undergoing a spurt at the time. As social relations became less rigid and formal and more free-flowing, and outsider groups began an emancipation phase, power balances began to shift towards the younger generation and towards other outsider groups. On the psychic level one consequence of this was the controlled relaxing of repressed impulses, which corresponded to behavioural experiments with the limits of social taboos. The upshot was to provide the psychological wherewithal and the socially reinforced courage for younger people in philosophy and social science to begin to dismantle and rebuild the older, more rigid and dualistic, explanatory models of positivistic science and validity (Geltung) associated with the Kantian establishment. Elias appears to have responded by developing over time a social-scientific version, greatly strengthened with the later integration of psychoanalysis into his way of thinking. The catalyst for reinforcing and sociologizing this tendency in Elias’s thinking (which in fact has its roots even earlier in the influence of his Breslau Gymnasium teachers, including Julius Stenzel16) was undoubtedly Karl Mannheim. As Elias’s contemporary, he was living through and participating in many of the same political

Origins of Elias’s synthesis 39 and cultural movements. In one of Mannheim’s unpublished essays on Structures of Thinking from 1924 to 1925 (Mannheim 1925a: 252ff.) which he was working on when he and Elias first met, he distinguishes between demonstration or proof (Beweis) which is typical of the physical sciences and enshrined in the positivistic ideal; and exhibition or showing (Aufweis) as also appropriate and legitimate in the social sciences. Elias and Mannheim had, so to speak, been converging on this issue from different points even before they met.17 The importance of their relationship in the shaping of Elias’s sociological ideas will be discussed in the next chapter.

3

Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim1

‘A doctor’s knowledge of the human body, that can heal, is not an ideology.’ (Norbert Elias 1994: 109)

Introduction: closeness and distance Karl Mannheim provides the link between the diverse currents of Weimar politics, philosophy and sociology which arose out of the complex reality of Germany in that period, and Elias’s sociological synthesis. Mannheim was a significant figure in shaping Elias’s sociological outlook. Although, as we will see, Elias departs from Mannheim in significant ways, their sociologies still bear a family resemblance. Or, to use another metaphor, they are from the same stable; that is, the Heidelberg Institut für Sozial und Staatswissenschaften (InSoSta) of the 1920s. However, in establishing the link I have not assumed that the flow of inspiration was entirely one way, i.e. from Mannheim to Elias. In the extensive recent scholarship on Mannheim (Kettler et al. 1984; Loader 1985; Woldring 1986; Kettler and Meja 1993, 1995) the possibility that he may have owed something in the formation of his ideas to his close association for many years with a sociologist of the calibre of Elias has not even been raised.2 I realize, of course, that Elias’s widespread public standing in many European countries as a sociologist of the first rank is of relatively recent provenance (1970s–1980s) and it may be misleading to project that emerging status back to the period of his association with Mannheim (approximately 1925–1940). During that period and for many years after, Elias was known to only a very few people in social science and psychoanalysis. For all the years of their association, until the appearance of The Civilizing Process, Elias had published only three academic articles, two in little-known émigré journals in France and one in a Jewish newspaper (Elias 1929b, 1935a, 1935b). Mannheim, on the other hand, until his death in 1947, had published extensively, including in mainstream journals. He was an internationally renowned intellectual of professorial rank who gave talks on BBC radio, moved in establishment circles and conversed with famous people. Elias had no permanent academic position until 1954 and for most of the 1930s and all of the 1940s he supported himself on stipends from his parents and/or

Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim 41 Jewish refugee foundations, part-time teaching in further education and a research assistantship at the LSE. In the wider public sphere Elias was unknown. I would argue, however, that it is precisely the recent awareness of the stature of Elias that entitles us to re-evaluate his relationship with Mannheim and to look for clues as to what impact Elias may have had on the formation and development of Mannheim’s ideas. Reliably proving the case for intellectual inspiration from Elias to Mannheim, i.e. significant reciprocity between the two men, is, in the nature of things, difficult. While it might be misleading to project back into the mid-1920s to 1930s an acknowledgement of Elias’s intellectual status that only emerged in sociological and other circles much later, it is also questionable to assume that just because Elias was unknown in earlier days he was not a source of inspiration and stimulation for Mannheim (and indeed others). At the same time, it does not necessarily follow that because a person is unknown at a certain stage of their biography, the work they were producing at that time had a lower cognitive or scientific value compared with that of some of their more famous contemporaries. It is possible that someone’s fame could rest on popular political and cultural activity of a non-scientific kind, while the status of their longer term, social-scientific contribution is less certain. As an initial contribution towards establishing the extent of Elias’s possible influence on Mannheim, I will, in the final section of this chapter, speculate from textual and circumstantial evidence on the possible impact of Elias’s Civilizing Process at least on the revised, English-language edition of Mannheim’s Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction of 1940 and other articles and lectures by him in the late 1930s and early 1940s. There could, of course, have been creative co-operation between the two of them that shaped Mannheim’s writings during the early years of their friendship from 1925 onwards, but its extent is at present speculation. In the subsequent sections I will establish in detail the close scientific links between the sociological programmes of Elias and Mannheim in the early years of their association. This analysis will bring out, among other things, the importance of their relational epistemologies, common drive towards synthesis and the forgotten moral-practical intention embedded in their work. My analysis is primarily intended as a contribution to the understanding of where Elias came from, although it also has implications for understanding Mannheim’s work. I will present the evidence by expounding themes from Mannheim and showing the parallels in Elias. This way of presenting the material appears, therefore, to give primacy to Mannheim as the intellectual leader. In one sense this was true of the early years of their friendship in the 1920s, but less so later on. However, I am not imputing a greater intellectual importance to Mannheim generally, nor suggesting that Elias was in any straightforward sense simply one of his followers.3 On the contrary, Elias was far too independently minded for that to be the case. It is important to note that Mannheim was only five years older than Elias. I think that the enduring place of both men in the sociological canon is assured, but that the reputation of each rests on different achievements.

42

Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim

The biographies of Elias and Mannheim were closely intertwined for something like fourteen to fifteen years, i.e. from 1925 to about 1939, with a two-year break from face-to-face contact between 1933 and 1935, when Elias was a refugee in Paris and Mannheim exiled in London. Elias said in his Reflections on a Life (1994: 96) of the early days of their friendship in Heidelberg that they got on very well and liked each other and that at that time he ‘slipped unawares’ into the role of Mannheim’s ‘unofficial assistant’. For the three Frankfurt years, 1930 to 1933, their relationship was also an official one of professor/assistant. At this time Mannheim had two assistants, Elias and Hans Gerth. Mannheim was also Elias’s Habilitation supervisor at this time. It is a measure of the continuing closeness of the two men as friends that Elias dedicated the first volume of The Civilizing Process (the Preface of which is dated 1936) to Mannheim and his wife Julia Mannheim-Lang. Elias also said in his Reflections on a Life (1994: 111) that his relationship with Mannheim for all the years they knew each other was ‘virtually without friction’. After the late 1930s or early 1940s, the two apparently saw less of each other. Elias remained on good terms with Mannheim, but their contact was ‘no longer close’, as Elias (1994: 63) put it. The last time Elias saw Mannheim, the latter had just been appointed Professor of Education at the University of London (Elias 1994: 63). Mannheim was appointed to that post with effect from 1 October 1945 (Woldring 1986: 57), so one can assume that Elias last saw him some time shortly before that, perhaps during the summer of 1945. The crucial questions are in what their closeness consisted and how its various dimensions ebbed and flowed. There is a difference between the closeness of friendship (which they undoubtedly had, even if they saw less of each other in the 1940s) and scientific closeness, in the sense of a common theory of society or sociological research programme of the kind that would define a ‘school’. At certain points, Elias and Mannheim may have enjoyed each other’s company but agreed to differ about certain scientific matters (see Baldamus’s recollections in note 13 to this chapter). My hypothesis is that Mannheim was very important for Elias during the early years of their association and helped to put him on a particular sociological track (roughly, a post-Marxian, post-philosophical, relational sociology of competition, power and beliefs, an overall programme that they both shared) until he became more intellectually independent of Mannheim and carved his own niche in sociology. Elias achieved this via a distinctive integration (not just a bolting together) of Freud with a version of that structural theory of power (Blomert 1991). In other words, in their early days they were both emotionally and scientifically close and later on still fairly close as friends but more scientifically distant. The importance of Mannheim for Elias scientifically (and as a patron) can easily be established. For example, the influence of Mannheim’s study ‘Conservative Thought’ is obvious in Elias’s article on anti-Semitism (Elias 1929b). Another suggestive fact is that Elias’s observations about the perspectival significance of personal pronouns (Elias 1978a: 122ff.) were foreshadowed in a slightly different form in an unpublished essay by Mannheim (Mannheim 1925a: 195) which Mannheim was working on when they first met. In the same essay Mannheim talks

Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim 43 of a ‘monadically closed, “windowless” individual consciousness’ (Mannheim 1925a: 283), a distinctive formulation that Elias later invoked as ‘windowless monads’ in his discussion of the homo clausus experience (Elias 1968: 473). Elias’s clear identification with Mannheim’s sociology against Alfred Weber’s individualism is apparent, as we will shortly see, from Elias’s speech at the Zurich Congress in 1928. Mannheim also helped Elias’s career in practical ways by recommending him to Marianne Weber’s salon (Elias 1994: 96) and by appointing him as his assistant in Frankfurt and offering earlier Habilitation than if Elias had stayed with Alfred Weber in Heidelberg (Elias 1994: 96). One of the reasons why Elias decided to come to England in 1935, after unsuccessful attempts both to secure an academic position and start a business making toys in Paris, was that he hoped that Mannheim, who was teaching at the LSE, might be able to offer him work (recollected by Gerd Freudenthal, cited by Kettler and Meja 1993: 26). In reality, that possibility did not materialize. To anticipate some further points of my argument: after 1933 and the coming to power of the National Socialists in Germany, which forced Mannheim into exile in Britain, Mannheim’s dynamic, ‘historicist’ orientation lapsed into a comparative Weberian framework designed to inform pragmatic politics and planning (Kettler and Meja 1990: 1467). Elias’s developmental sociology formed a critical departure from that Weberian approach, which sealed Elias’s increasing scientific distance from Mannheim. From the early to mid-1930s, their work begins to diverge considerably, despite common ground between them and probable continuing, though reduced, mutual stimulation. Their emotional closeness seems to have remained intact in some form, given that there is no evidence of a break between them, even though they did not see much of each other from the late 1930s onwards. Theoretically, Elias draws on Freud in a different way from Mannheim in order to deepen his understanding of the role of fantasy and fear in the struggles between groups in society. Elias’s synthesis may be seen as a more coherent integration of psychoanalysis and sociology than that of Mannheim (Blomert 1991: part 4). Elias’s paradigm may be seen as outflanking the largely rationalistic approach to which Mannheim’s work veered, and from which Elias took his distance. Nor did Elias share Mannheim’s immediate commitment of sociology to the guiding of practical measures, particularly through planning, to effect changes in the wider society, broadly within the tradition of liberalism. Rather, Elias took a longer term, more detached view. He thus had a more circumspect attitude towards the possibilities of controlling blind social forces through planning and advocated first building up more reliable knowledge of social processes.

Intellectual affinities As I argued in the last chapter, the problem of ‘placing’ Elias in the European sociological tradition and his figurational sociology within the paradigms of recent sociology is least partially solved if we see Elias both in the context of Weimar culture and philosophy and as a participant in one of the the ‘new beginnings’ of that period: the Wissensoziologie. The origins of the sociology of knowledge

44

Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim

lie in the complex political conflicts and alignments of the Weimar period. As Mannheim himself points out, it was an expression of those developments. The works of both Mannheim and Elias are saturated with much common terminology, characteristic of that tradition generally and of Frankfurt sociology, around 1930 to 1933, in particular. Mannheim argued that in an age of increasing interdependence, sociology, as the master social science, was to mediate on the feasibility of party-political platforms, to establish an interdisciplinary orientation and a thrust towards synthesis. The importance of synthesis over analysis was a leitmotiv of the work of both men (Mannheim 1928: 224ff., 1929: 132–6, 1933a: 17ff.,193, 1940: 231ff.; Elias 1956: 24–5, 1982: 18ff., 1991a: 89ff.,120–2, 1992: 184–6,174–6). As I argued in the last chapter, Elias’s Civilizing Process may be seen as an empirical-theoretical synthesis, in which a preliminary solution was attempted to solve specific sociological problems shrewdly posed, but largely left in the air, by thinkers of the Weimar period. Mannheim’s writings, up to and including Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (English revised edition 1940, originally in German 1935), are replete with concepts, problems, formulations and terminology that we also find in Elias. Suspending for the sake of this exercise the issues of the different phases of the development of the work of the two men from which these concerns have been derived and possible reciprocity between them, it is instructive to pull out a miscellaneous selection of common polemical themes. Like Elias, Mannheim is against, or traces the limitations of, dualisms, the static philosophy of Reason, scientism, individualism, reductionism, structureless history, relativism, metaphysics, teleology, reification, the history of ideas and economism, and is also decidedly sceptical about the continuing relevance of philosophy. Like Elias, Mannheim speaks positively of structured processes; a continuum from more subjective to more objective knowledge; the connection between the survival value of knowledge and its usefulness; social reality as perspectival; the relation between interdependence and integration; the distinction between interaction and interdependence; social democratization; the function of orientation; emotion versus detachment; differentiation of functions; the range of foresight; sociological psychology; styles of thought; social diagnosis; group competition; and, as a basic problem for sociology, explaining the historical discrepancy between human mastery of nature and humans’ continuing inability to control blind social forces of their own making (I will return to the latter problem below). Space does not permit me to document these common features with the appropriate quotations and contextual references, nor to take further here the issue of whether Elias and Mannheim shared a sociological idiom from participating in a common sociological culture or whether the common features are to be explained by mutual influence of varying degrees. Both are probably true. In Mannheim, the concepts, principles and distinctions listed above and continued below are often thrown out as undeveloped insights in experimental essays, or otherwise cited to illuminate the problems of planning. Mannheim’s formulations are not always identical with those of Elias, but often embody the same idea expressed differently.

Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim 45 To continue the list of key ideas common to the works of both Elias and Mannheim: control over the self, society and nature as the three crucial conditions of all societies; the historical process through which what was external becomes internalized (the latter two problems were also located by the other ‘Frankfurt School’ associated with Horkheimer and Adorno: see Bogner 1987: 262–4); the imitation of upper-class manners by rising classes; monopolization as a source of power, including of economic means and taxation; the idea that Marx absorbed the dominant liberal view of the state of his time and infused it with negative values; how the academic division of labour in the social sciences and specialization in sociology blinds us to the interconnectedness of social phenomena; and how in the classical era of liberalism functional differentiation had outstripped the integrating social institutions, producing the illusion of separate social ‘spheres’, such as the economy. The most striking similarities are in the field of the sociological theory of knowledge. A close reading of Mannheim’s texts of the period approximately 1925 to 1933, when he was most absorbed in this area and when their friendship was at its height, reveals remarkable parallels with Elias’s theoretical articles on the sociology of knowledge and sciences, which were published thirty or forty years later (Elias 1971, 1974, 1982, 1987a). In these articles and fragments there is only one passing reference to Mannheim’s study ‘Conservative Thought’ (Elias 1971: 149–50). In these later articles (as well as in lectures and seminars that he gave in the 1970s and 1980s) Elias returned to some epistemological themes characteristic of the Weimar debates, recalling the issues and characteristic polarities in this field (e.g. ego-centredness, subject–object, rational/irrational dualism, relativism versus absolutism) with crystal clarity. The parallels with Mannheim are especially evident on the subjects of traditional epistemology, the relationship of sociology to philosophy and to history, the model for a sociological theory of knowledge and the conception of the role of sociological enlightenment in shaping human affairs. Consider, for example, these two similar quotations: The fiction of the isolated and self-sufficient individual underlies in various forms the individualistic epistemology and genetic psychology. Epistemology operated with this … individual as if from the very first he possessed in essence all the capacities characteristic of human beings, including that of pure knowledge, and as if he produced his knowledge of the world from within himself alone, through mere juxtaposition with the external world. (Mannheim 1929: 25) In … philosophical theories of knowledge, the subject of knowledge is what we symbolically represent as ‘individual’. It is modelled on a single human being who is capable of orientating himself in his world entirely on his own. … The philosopher’s subject of knowledge starts from scratch. It stands naked in the undiscovered world and begins to take it in all by itself here and now without any social antecedents. (Elias 1971: 357)

46

Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim

That Elias was apparently able spontaneously to conjure up, forty-two years later, such a similar formulation of a problem to that of Mannheim is a measure of the strength of the sociological outlook they shared.4 Mannheim provided Elias initially with a model – the sociology of knowledge – of a solution to certain problems which were in the air in Weimar Germany in the 1920s. As Mannheim himself put it (1928: 306), they were the issues facing a particular generation, defined as political, ethical, existential and philosophical problems peculiar to their common experience and fate. Mannheim was the most prominent and energetic exponent of a sociological tendency of which, I am arguing, Elias was a part and which provided the crucible in which Elias’s unique kind of non-partisan sociology, deeply committed to autonomous scientific values, was fused. The consequences of this paradigmatic affinity are important. The Mannheimian version has been subjected to a great deal of searching reconstruction and criticism, particularly from the 1970s onwards (Simonds 1978; Kettler et al. 1984; Loader 1985; Hekman 1986; Woldring 1986; Frisby 1992; Kettler and Meja 1995). The recent consensus largely rehabilitates Mannheim and defends him against the ill-informed, formalistic and politically motivated dismissals of his work. The older standard caricature of Mannheim as the arch relativist who retreated into the dubious sophistries of relationism and the role of ‘free-floating intellectuals’ in order to get out of the self-contradictory consequences of his position has been thoroughly discredited. Mannheim’s work was much more openly provisional and experimental than earlier critics appreciated and he had, in any case, anticipated many of those obvious blunders. Indeed, as Simonds (1978: 9) put it, Mannheim ‘would have had to have been both naive and obtuse to have failed to notice them’. By an interesting parallel, Elias’s work, too, has attracted considerable criticism (Kilminster 1991b; Mennell 1998: ch. 10) in a way that was foreshadowed by the controversies surrounding Mannheim. Both men, as synoptic thinkers, tended to attract criticisms from one-sided theoretical, philosophical or political stances which they had already integrated as perspectives into their respective syntheses and thereby transcended. Oddly, though, Elias’s considered comments on Mannheim written late in his life, in his Reflections on a Life (Elias 1994: 101ff.), while acknowledging Mannheim’s brilliance, unfortunately reproduce some of the standard and inaccurate critiques of Mannheim that circulated in the 1950s and 1960s. Elias repeats what has become a cliché for exposing the supposedly selfcontradictory character of the self-referentiality of the sociology of knowledge, that is Epimenides’s paradox of the liar (Elias 1994: 107). In this way, he unwittingly identified himself with a string of critics of Mannheim who have used this formalistic argument, from whom Elias would otherwise probably have wanted to distance himself (see Simonds 1978: 10). Elias also gratuitously refers to Mannheim’s relationism, as well as his conception of the free-floating intellectuals, as ‘lifelines’ designed to keep him from sinking into a morass of relativism. However, relationism was for Mannheim not a response to relativism, but rather to its opposite, absolutism, particularly the version which

Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim 47 he found, like Elias, enshrined in the Kantians’ notion of validity (Geltung) (Mannheim 1922: 39–40). There is a convergence, in fact, in the doctoral theses of both men on the need for a solution to the problem of historicity and timeless validity (Mannheim 1922: 39–40; Elias 1924: 26). For Mannheim, relativism only results from historicism if one assumes an absolute, extra-social standpoint (Simonds 1978: 11), hence working relationally is a genuine alternative to either relativism or absolutism. Elias also says that Mannheim remained a dualistic thinker committed to the being/consciousness distinction. But Elias does not acknowledge the fact that Mannheim expended a lot of energy grappling with just this problem of dualism (Mannheim 1925b: 142–4, 162–3, 1933a: 33–5), arguing against it in fact on similar lines to those of Elias himself many years later (Elias, 1971: 155–6). That is, that social existence and thought are not two different entities. The separation of being and thinking, particularly in the base and superstructure model and its variants, is fallacious because social existence, since it is comprised of sentient human beings, is never devoid of consciousness. Elias must also surely have known Mannheim’s extensive replies to his critics on the issue of the ‘free-floating’ intellectuals in his essays written in the early 1930s at a time when Elias was one of his assistants (Mannheim 1933b: 101ff.). Here Mannheim deals with the simplistic caricature reproduced all those years later by Elias. Elias must have known that the conception of the free-floating intellectuals was not integral to Mannheim’s theory of knowledge. Or did he? It is possible that Elias did not know because Hans Gerth, Mannheim’s other assistant, dealt with this part of Mannheim’s research. It is also possible that Elias never understood Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge properly right from the beginning, let alone its subtleties and nuances, to a level that that might have been achieved, say, by Gerth. It is possible that Elias and Mannheim were close as friends, but not always close from a scientific point of view. Another possibility is that Elias decided in Reflections on a Life to present a couple of standard criticisms of Mannheim, with which he thought many people could readily identify, because this was the simplest way of conveying his distance from Mannheim’s sociology and for making the central point Elias makes against Mannheim, i.e. that not all forms of knowing are ideological. Whatever the solution is to this puzzle, the irony is that in his criticisms of Mannheim in the later years, Elias scorned an epistemological principle, relationism or perspectivism, upon one form of which his own sociology of knowledge – resembling as it does that of Mannheim in important respects – also explicitly relies (Elias 1978a: 126). Let us look more closely at this key concept.

Relationism Mannheim has a working model of societies in which he envisages human knowledge as rooted in the social existence of competing human groups. As Kecskemeti (1953: 4, 10) said, Mannheim never departed from a holistic conception of social ‘structure’, but which he adapted in various ways as his

48

Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim

thought developed in different directions in Britain after 1933 and in response to totalitarianism. The ‘structure’ was a model of the social whole and it was only possible to comprehend a partial social phenomenon in terms of its place in this comprehensive whole. The structure was also inherently dynamic. Elias’s concept of a ‘figuration’ (see Elias 1978a: 130–1; 1939: 411) is not too far away from Kecskemeti’s formulation of Mannheim’s conception of ‘structure’: It was a dynamic entity. The ‘structure’ of social reality did not consist of static relationships that persisted as such, and to which any social conflict was, so to speak, extraneous. Antagonism and conflict was of the very essence of structure; the structure of social reality was the configuration of antagonistic forces which contended for supremacy and mutually shaped and influenced one another while locked in combat. (Kecskemeti 1953: 1) The key concept of the Seinsverbundenheit (existential boundedness) of knowledge focuses this central insight epistemologically. Mannheim argues that the nature of the connection of human knowledge to social existence is highly variable, and its exact character is to be left open to empirical research. One takes into account not just social classes, but status groups, generations, military, cultural, political and economic elites, professions and many other groupings when investigating world-views and ideologies. Working at the first, ‘particular’ level of ideology, it is possible to show the deceptions and disguises used to hide or dissimulate particular interests of groups. The transition to level two – the ‘general’ level of ideology – takes us into the much more far-reaching and remote historical presuppositions and basic thought categories which lie in the utterances of all groups of ideological antagonists. For Mannheim, the sociology of knowledge itself is merely a systematization of the doubt which arises from the shifting foundations of knowing, which result from modern social developments, in particular the struggles of social groups, societal rationalization and what he calls ‘fundamental democratization’ (Elias has ‘functional democratization’); that is, the reduction of vertical distance between groups in the process of growing interdependence and its subsequent integrating effects (Mannheim 1933a: 174ff., 1940: 44ff.). The idea of the ‘general’, or ‘total’, level of ideology reflects Mannheim’s perception that antagonists share common ground by virtue of their mutual relatedness or common fate, as he sometimes puts it. The term does not imply that all thinking is entirely ideological, as Elias later claimed (Elias 1994: 107–8). Mannheim talks of ‘The orientation of competitors with one another’ and ‘The opponent as the ground for self-knowledge’ (quoted in Frisby 1992: 148). Elias also embraces the same relational viewpoint, though without Mannheim’s prominent political concerns, in his figurational conception of interdependencyin-antagonism (1978a: 175) and in his comments on the social-psychological possibility of antagonists being able to perceive themselves from a higher point as ‘standing together’ (1987a: 107). In his celebrated discussion of games in What

Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim 49 Is Sociology?, Elias speaks of the interdependence of the players, which ‘may be an interdependence of allies or of opponents’ (Elias 1978a: 130). That Elias thought of conflict and contention in this relational way as a matter of course may be seen in unexpected places in his writings. For example, discussing the polarized conflicts between seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers such as Locke and Berkeley on the problem of knowledge, he finds ‘an image of man [homo clausus] common to all the contending positions’ (Elias 1991b: 108). The basic insight of the existential relatedness of thinking itself leads Mannheim to the model of a continuum of human knowledge. At one end there are statements such as 2 × 2 = 4, which is true across the many interest-related ideological boundaries, even though it still has its origins ultimately in human social existence. It is only on the basis of contrived examples such as this, and references to the formal laws of logic, says Mannheim, that philosophers have been able to make the formalistic ‘genetic fallacy’ argument seem plausible. Both Mannheim and Elias make the same point that this kind of knowledge, as well as natural science knowledge, only appears to be ‘absolute’ because it has lost the traces of its origins and become for practical purposes autonomous of its ‘original’ producers (Mannheim 1929: 268–9; Elias 1971: 357). In his later remarks about Mannheim in Reflections on a Life, Elias distances himself erroneously from what he sees as Mannheim’s total relativism on the grounds that not all knowledge (e.g. scientific and medical knowledge) can possibly be ideology. He says that this was the main bone of contention between his position and that of Mannheim (Elias 1994: 109). It is obvious, though, from reading Mannheim that he was well aware of this crucial point and did not by any means condemn all knowledge, including what Elias called ‘reality-congruent’ knowledge, to the melting-pot of ideology. In other words, both writers have a conception of the ‘relative autonomy’ of knowledge, except that Elias simply developed the sociology of natural-scientific knowledge to a far greater extent than did Mannheim, who went in a different, political, direction from these insights. For Mannheim, at the other end of the continuum are party political platforms, which are highly situational-specific and carry their interest-ladenness very close to the surface. But even these are not entirely ideological, since they do contain some nuggets of factual data about society, without which they would be incoherent and incapable of providing orientation for their adherents and understandability for their opponents. Elias presents a similar sliding-scale model (1971: 365) with highly ‘subject-centred’ knowledge at one end and highly ‘object-centred’ knowledge at the other. In keeping with his distinctive sociological appropriation of psychoanalysis in The Civilizing Process, Elias regards knowledge at the former pole as having more fantasy content (greater involvement) and knowledge at the latter more reality content (greater detachment) (see Power 2000: 42–5, 161). The realization that we always view the world from a particular point of view because all human knowledge is bounded to social existence in one way or another inevitably led Mannheim and Elias to a relational or perspectival view of society, a conception to which both were indebted to Ernst Cassirer’s relational model of the structure of various fields (Kilminster and Wouters 1995: 97–106).

50

Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim

Epistemologically, this view seems to lead in the direction of relativism, but this only results, according to Mannheim, if one takes a static view of the problem. Relationism is simply the denial that there is a standpoint outside the flux of the historical process. Mannheim says that it is only if one insists on taking an ahistorical standpoint, based typically on an idealized view of detached natural science knowledge (one end of the continuum) or in timeless, philosophical validity, that the problem of relativism arises at all. That the unfolding of the historical process is cognitively accessible only from various perspectives is itself simply an aspect of its ‘truth’: ‘the plurality of these perspectives involves … the approximation to a shifting object from shifting standpoints’ (Mannheim1924: 130). Elias’s concept of figurations contains a relational view of social existence compatible with that expressed by Mannheim as perspectivism (Rehberg 1979: 147). Elias refers to the ‘perspectival character of human relationships’ and ‘the perspectival nature of webs of human interdependence’ (1978a: 126, 127). In his discussions of the problems involved in developing a sociological theory of knowledge (particularly Elias 1971, 1974, 1982 and 1987a), Elias presents the issues in a very similar way to way to Mannheim in his essays of the early 1920s and in Ideology and Utopia. It is possible, although by no means proven beyond doubt, that these parallels stem from a close collaboration of the two men in formulating the original versions. They both juxtapose static and dynamic thinking, philosophical absolutism and sociological relativism and the individual knowing subject versus the collective, intergenerational subject of knowledge. The way forward for both of them is the building of a more fundamental and inclusive sociological epistemology (Mannheim 1929: 261–2, 271ff., 1946b: 571; Elias 1971: 357–9). This model will be sensitive to the many different kinds of knowledge on the continuum, thereby transforming the traditional model of epistemology prominent in philosophy. Once the facts mustered by the sociology of knowledge are brought to bear, it then becomes simply untenable to continue to pose epistemological matters in the older form (Mannheim 1929: 257). Similarly, Elias advocates the ‘reframing’ of epistemological problems as posed by philosophy (1982: 31), as I explained in the last chapter. Many of Mannheim’s detractors did in fact assail him from the point of view of that older ideal, and hence found his work relativistic and truth-denying, whereas he had already transformed the issues on to another level, in which the problem of ‘truth’ had been relationally and sociologically reformulated. Elias’s critics have also often tried to attack him from traditional positions, but, as with Mannheim, this is to no avail, for the same reason. Both men saw themselves as not having reached a final sociological position on the problem of knowledge, but as having at least reformulated the traditional issues in a preliminary way appropriate to the present stage of thinking. It is this common feature of their work that upsets the traditional theoretical moves and presuppositions of argument, necessitating on the part of readers a certain detachment from orthodox positions. Where this is not present, the scope for misunderstanding is very great, prompting the deluges of criticisms that subsequently fell upon both Mannheim and Elias at different times.

Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim 51 For Mannheim, one task for the sociology of knowledge is to formulate a synthesis of the complementary viewpoints and social forces (which at any stage are finite in number and empirically ascertainable) of a period, which transcends their partiality, from the standpoint of what Mannheim called the ‘next step’ in social development (1929: 46, 112). The idea that syntheses are to be continually reformulated, one preparing the ground for the next, is at the core of Mannheim’s recommendations. This principle avoids both the absolute, timeless synthesis of pure intellectualism (Hegel) or the teleological ‘identical subject–object’ of history (Lukács 1923). Mannheim’s conception retains the important idea that even if we have rejected the teleologies of Hegel, Marx or Lukács, we may nonetheless still be able to detect movements in a certain direction. As Mannheim said: ‘We need not apply teleological hypotheses to history to realise the structured character of change’ (Mannheim 1933a: 72). His formulation can usefully be compared with Elias’s discussions of the ‘structure of processes’ in the chapter ‘The problem of the inevitability of social development’ in What Is Sociology? (1978a: 164ff.) and in his article ‘Towards a Theory of Social Processes’ (Elias 1977). In the latter, he refers to the debate between those who can only see changes in the social life of people as ‘unstructured “history”’ (traditional historians) and those who see them simply as a teleological change predetermined by a specific final goal’ (mostly Marxists) (Elias 1977: 380).

Evaluating Mannheim’s sociological programme was also intended to deal with questions normally gathered together under the umbrella of ‘ethics’, ‘politics’ or ‘evaluative’ and ‘existential’ questions, to do with the ways in which humankind might achieve greater happiness and fulfilment individually and socially within what Mannheim called ‘the forms of living together of man’ (Mannheim 1957: 43). Mannheim was ambitiously trying to transcribe these issues into sociological terms: ‘If we state our problems … [sociologically] we break up the general philosophical problem into specific relationships which can be concretely observed’ (Mannheim 1940: 51). As we saw in the previous chapter, Elias had been converging towards this viewpoint even before he and Mannheim met. For Mannheim, the investigator makes a theoretical move sideways, the intention of this method being to redefine the scope and limits of assertions by politicians, philosophers and others about the possibilities of human freedom, democracy and happiness, by showing them to be coming inevitably from differing ideological perspectives. It was only through these one-sided perspectives that access was even possible to knowledge of society, all knowledge being existentially bounded. Objectivity is sought by ‘the translation of perspectives into the terms of another’ (1929: 270–1). Having made these moves, the investigator is then potentially able to evaluate the feasibility or validity of ‘ethical’ or ‘political’ issues in the form in which they were originally raised by the particular politician, party, or ideology. Mannheim refers to this theoretical journey as being able to achieve a new form of ‘ “objectivity” … in a roundabout fashion’ (Mannheim 1929: 270).

52

Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim

These analytic steps then reach a point where the process ‘becomes a critique’ (Mannheim 1929: 256). Elias’s version of the journey specifies that it is only by a ‘detour via detachment’ that sociologists can hope to gain more adequate knowledge of the structure of social events in which they themselves are also emotionally caught up (Elias 1987a: 105, 106). In Elias the psychoanalytic dimension (sociologized as part of a theory of social and psychic processes) enriches and takes further the basic perspectivist insight. But he shared the Mannheimian ambition to transcribe so-called ethical and evaluative matters into sociologically manageable terms and so put the questions raised philosophically or ideologically on to another level. This procedure would bring the investigation closer to understanding the human predicament as a whole, as a structure of interdependent relations. We will recall Elias’s point that when investigated theoretically and empirically in the closest touch with one another, the problem of the ‘freedom’ or ‘determinacy’ of individual action, as presented by philosophers, ‘poses itself in a different way’ (Elias 1983: 30). This ‘evaluative’ intention also pervades the empirical-theoretical presentations that are laid out in The Civilizing Process. Elias opens volume I with a sociogenetic enquiry, typical of the sociology of knowledge, into the origins of the deeply conservative contrast between Kultur and Zivilisation, which, in the 1920s and 1930s, was very prominent in German philosophy, social sciences and politics (Mennell 1998: 11–12). For the Germans, the former was regarded as genuine and authentic, while the latter was sometimes stigmatized as superficial and rather ‘French’. The pairing was redolent of the covert evaluative dimension of Alfred Weber’s sociology, which embraced the distinction at its core, elevated to a metaphysic. Kultur was the uniquely creative ‘spiritually tempered aggregation of symbols’ (A. Weber 1920–1921: 26), a concrete Gestalt associated with a given cultural organism or human community and the home of values. Zivilisation, by contrast, was science, technology and ‘universal validity’ (A. Weber 1920– 1921: 31) in which (and only in which) can be detected development and a ‘necessary civilizational process’. Mannheim had already discussed Alfred Weber’s contrast between the movement of Kultur and the development of Zivilisation at length in his essay ‘Historicism’ (Mannheim 1924: 114–24), adding analytically a third field which stands between the two, i.e. a ‘dialectical’ sequence. For Mannheim, this type of movement is most clearly demonstrable in the succession of philosophical systems which preserve earlier structures in a ‘new centre of systematization’. In given sequences of the social process as a whole all three movements will be combined in various ways, which can be empirically shown (Mannheim 1924: 115, 124). In this analysis, which essentially accepts Alfred Weber’s distinction and seeks to combine it analytically with a Hegelian notion of dialectic to form a more complete picture, the ideological inflection embodied in the contrast had yet to be exposed. This Elias was to do in The Civilizing Process. Nor is Mannheim’s compromise here the more thoroughgoing sociology of knowledge of ‘Competition as a Cultural Phenomenon’ expounded at the Zurich Congress in 1928 and Ideology and Utopia

Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim 53 of 1929, which specifies that the ideological dimension, the ‘existentiality’of thought, should be brought to the fore in all its variants. The Kultur/Zivilisation pairing was also embodied in Thomas Mann’s contrast between apolitical, poetic figures who pursued inner spiritual feelings and (usually leftist) people who believed in rationality and democracy, upon which Elias had given a paper to Jaspers’s seminar in Heidelberg on his first visit in 1919 (Elias 1994: 103). Among other things, the task of the The Civilizing Process is to reframe the range, applicability and realistic usefulness of these terms via the sociological enquiry into their genesis in the European civilizing process in general. Elias traces the positive and negative undertones associated with the contrast back to the differing paths of development of German and French social development, in which the isolation of the German middle classes from courtly life played an important role. Significantly, Elias returns to the concepts at the end of Volume II (Elias 1939: 429ff., 443–7) at a new level and re-poses the questions about human satisfaction, fulfilment and constraint embodied more ideologically in the antithesis which partly provided the starting point. Thus, the investigation in The Civilizing Process into the socio-genesis of the contrast between Kultur and Zivilisation was a contribution both to raising people’s awareness of their perceptions of other nations and their own national self-perceptions, and to rooting out the ideological permeation of sociological theory with those perceptions. In the latter case, Alfred Weber’s sociology was squarely in Elias’s sights.

The Zurich Congress 1928 Let us now look closely at the only recorded systematic response Elias ever made on a public occasion to any of Mannheim’s work. That is, his comments on Mannheim’s lecture entitled ‘Competition as a Cultural Phenomenon’ given at the Sixth German Sociological Congress in Zurich in September 1928 (Mannheim 1928) and now widely regarded as a seminal piece in the founding of the sociology of knowledge, and which occasioned an important and revealing debate in the history of German sociology prior to 1933 (Kettler et al. 1984: 55ff.; Loader 1985: 92ff.; Korte 1988: 99–108; Meja and Stehr 1990; Frisby 1992: 148–51, 185–98). Elias’s response provides us with important evidence of how his sociology was shaped by Mannheim’s programme. From a sociological point of view, Mannheim’s path-breaking lecture placed group competition at the centre of the study of cultural change and the development of social knowledge. Concepts that were once the subject of fierce battles of group identity gradually become the common property of all parties as the result of the power gradient between the competing intertwined groups flattening out and through group mergers. Thus, even in the midst of the most disintegrating, polarizing tendencies in theory, where all absolutes are called into question and scepticism, relativism and doubt are the order of the day, there is an accompanying reintegration movement towards synthesis, which is what all parties in the conflicts eventually desire as they inevitably come to orient themselves more to each other (Mannheim 1928: 221–6; Kilminster 1998: 162–72).

54

Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim

This lecture was a cavalry charge across the fields of sociology, philosophy, Marxism and politics. Recalling it in later years, Elias described the presentation as ‘an intellectual firecracker’ (quoted in Mennell 1998: 14). Leaving aside the complex play of political associations and local academic provocations in his lecture, the implications of Mannheim’s boldness for these fields were farreaching. Sociology was the master discipline which had as its object what he called the ‘social fact sui generis’ or the ‘general-social’ (Mannheim 1928: 195). Its central dynamic was group competition, of which economic competition was simply one prominent example, focused on by political economists such as Adam Smith and the Physiocrats (this point was also made by Elias in The Civilizing Process (1939: 35ff.) and repeated in a later article on the socio-genesis of sociology (1984a: 19–24)). Working in this way (which was a development out of Marx, but away from economic reductionism) one could demonstrate the fate of the shifting group conflicts that lie behind cultural and theoretical developments. This insight about conflict being endemic in human existence remained with Mannheim and informed his later work Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (1940: 20, 22). It was taken up by Elias and used to good explanatory purpose in The Civilizing Process (1939: 304ff.). Elias’s theory of established–outsider relations also flows naturally from this insight into conflict as basic in human social existence and not just an expression of its economic manifestation. Explicitly from The Civilizing Process onwards, Elias focuses, through the integration of psychoanalytic concepts, on the psychic concomitants of various kinds of social conflicts and their unintended integrative consequences. The concepts of ‘group charisma’ and ‘group disgrace’ (Elias 1964; Mennell 1998: 138) explain how outsider groups come to think of themselves as inferior or unworthy, by internalizing – introjecting – the image of themselves possessed by the established. In suggesting that economic relations were only one dimension of group life, Mannheim had opened up the possibility of studying the ‘whole historical person’, as one of Heidegger’s pupils, Hans Jonas, put it during the debate (Meja and Stehr 1990: 99, emphasis in original). Jonas also said that Mannheim’s presentation was part of a ‘new tendency within theory’ towards reflection on ‘the human condition, in which human beings are seen as inhabiting concrete situations to which they are inescapably bound’ (Meja and Stehr 1990: 99). (I discussed the broad affinity between Elias’s orientation and fundamental ontology in Chapter 2. This statement provides further corroboration since, as a programmatic injunction, it could have been made by Elias himself.) Mannheim had expressed this as the possibility of a science of politics based on knowledge of the mutual relatedness of, and common ground between, conflicting political participants. In this we can see the germ of the idea for the general sociological study, in a non-partisan way, of the mutual relatedness of interdependent people, which was to become the cornerstone of Elias’s sociology. Mannheim’s intentions were even then, and remained, more overtly ‘political’ than those of Elias, but at this stage their ontologies and general orientation towards society as a dynamic field of tensions and conflicts were, as far as may be discerned, virtually the same.

Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim 55 The crucial response at the lecture from the point of view of understanding Elias’s development as a sociologist was an emotional and hostile one by Alfred Weber of the Historical School (at that time Elias’s Habilitation supervisor), who wanted to retain universal categories and the creative individual, claiming that existential boundedness only applied to the content of cognition. This stout defence of the Kantian a priori and individualism was followed by a spirited exposé of what he saw as Mannheim’s questioning of the possibility of valuefreedom by bringing in Marxism by the back door: ‘Is all this any more than a brilliant rendition of the old historical materialism, presented with extraordinary subtlety? Basically it is nothing else’ (in Meja and Stehr 1990: 90). A number of other respondents, however, including Elias, welcomed Mannheim’s paper as the founding of a new framework for the cultural sciences. Elias was particularly enthusiastic: ‘Mannheim’s presentation … is indeed most decidedly revolutionary, not in the sense of a socialist or social, but of a spiritual revolution. Mannheim’s thoughts are an expression of the shattering of the dominant spiritual attitude’ (Elias 1929a: 97–8). He hails Mannheim’s presentation as a break with a previously dominant intellectual attitude, expressing a new ‘sentiment toward life’. Elias’s ironic use of this, one of Alfred Weber’s (1920–1921: 42) characteristic phrases, indicated clearly on whose side Elias stood. The new stress should not be on Alfred Weber’s ‘creative person’ but on an understanding of the fact that the fate of each individual human being is bound up with something that transcends the level of the individual, that is ‘the historical destiny of human societies’ (Elias 1929a: 98). It is this accentuation that makes emotional demands upon people. Elias continues: Whoever moves the ‘creative person’ into the centre of his reflections retains the feeling of existing only for himself, constituting, as it were, a beginning and an end. But whoever moves the historical movements of human societies into the centre of his reflections must also know that he is neither beginning nor end, but rather a mere link in a chain. This consciousness, of course, imposes on its holders considerable moderation. (Elias 1929a: 98) What is significant in Elias’s contribution is not only what it tells us about his bravely identifying Mannheim’s work against his own Habilitation supervisor, but also its tone. Even here, at a very early stage of Elias’s development as a sociologist and prior to his integration of Freud into his work, we can see his acute awareness of people as affective as well as rational. His contribution to the debate in 1928 is the only one to try to get to the bottom of why Mannheim’s paper ‘has somehow touched us all’ (Elias 1929a: 97) as Elias puts it. He regrets that the discussions have not been conducted with ‘the intensity and vehemence which [Mannheim’s] paper deserves’. The ‘revolutionary’ character of Mannheim’s presentation is that it expresses ‘a new ideal’, justifying ‘more passionate discussion’ (Elias 1929a: 97–8). He concludes that what touched people listening to the presentation was not just the ‘theory’ but the ‘human attitude’ or ‘sentiment

56

Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim

toward life’ contained in it; that is, the recognition of the ‘compelling’ character of the social and historical dimension of people’s experience of nature and, hence, by implication, of the finitude of the individual (Elias 1929a: 99).

Issues of theory and practice Writing in the 1970s, in the phase of British sociology when the issue of the purpose or point of doing sociology at all was much more on the lips of sociologists than it is today (see Kilminster 1998: 155ff.), the general impetus behind Elias’s sociological programme was precisely expressed by Stephen Mennell: Underlying all Elias’s writings, even those apparently least concerned with mundane practical problems, is a moral commitment to the calling of sociology and a belief that to understand the compelling nature of blind social processes is to increase the chances of controlling them. (Mennell 1977: 106) This elegant formulation of Elias’s version of the sociological vocation had been shrewdly read out of What Is Sociology? in the early days of the ‘discovery’ of Elias in European countries in the 1970s. Elias’s commitment can, however, be further clarified by reference to its origins (as we saw in the last chapter) and by comparison with that of Mannheim, which it closely resembles. The general stance entails that the choice of research problems in sociology should not come first and foremost from problems posed in academic books, but rather should emerge from social life itself (Mannheim 1933a: 18ff.; Elias 1984a: 21, 1969b: 144). Elias’s theory of civilizing process was a development out of the German sociology of knowledge responding to one rather serious life problem: the accumulating intra- and inter-state conflicts of the 1930s and the drift towards war (a favourite phrase of both Mannheim and Elias). They both wanted to provide a sociologicalscientific counterweight to this escalating process. The inertia of the ‘drift towards war’ was seen as an unintended product of the uncontrolled entanglements that modern European peoples had got themselves into and was likely to be repeated if nothing was done to prevent similar sequences developing again (Mannheim 1940: 138–43). These epochal problems were regarded as a recurring possibility as part of the human social predicament in complex, advanced societies. To say the least, understanding these dangerously uncontrolled processes was a very urgent task indeed. Commitment to sociology for both Mannheim and Elias – with questions of this degree of gravity at stake – was a life-and-death matter. For both, sociology was the master, synthetic social science and its pursuit was a vocation – as Mannheim once described it, a ‘mission’ (Kettler et al. 1984: 134). It was an idea common to both Mannheim and Elias, as well as others in the 1930s, that the security of social life that many people took for granted in varying degrees and in different ways in Western countries was a fragile achievement. From the temporary security of Britain in the 1930s, Mannheim said it was

Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim 57 tempting to forget that we were ‘sitting on a volcano’. Only those who had already experienced the eruption have a greater knowledge of the ‘nature and depths of the crater which is yawning beneath our Western society’ (Mannheim 1940: 5). All these considerations help make sense of Elias’s comment in the Preface (dated 1936) to the first volume of The Civilizing Process that the issues raised in the study had their origins ‘less in scholarly tradition in the narrower sense of the word, than in the experiences in whose shadow we all live, experiences of the crisis and transformation of Western civilization as it had existed hitherto’ (Elias 1939: xiv). (See also Laslett (1979: 226) for Mannheim’s views about the world crisis and national crises.) The practicalities of how sociological knowledge could be made to have a purchase on the stemming of potentially destructive social tensions (via politics, education, pressure groups, planning and the like) preoccupied Mannheim to a far greater extent than they did Elias. This was particularly true of Mannheim’s British period. Kettler et al. (1984) have pointed out that three different conceptions of the practical role of sociological knowledge may be detected in Mannheim’s writings during the 1920s and 1930s. The sociology of knowledge as: (1) a … mediating force reorienting all vital participants in the political process and generating the synthesis which makes possible the ‘next step’…; (2) an instrument of enlightenment … comparable to psychoanalysis, acting to free men and women for rational and responsible choices by liberating them from subservience to hidden forces they cannot control because they do not recognize them …; (3) a weapon against prevalent myths and as a method for eliminating bias from social science so that it can master the fundamental public problems of [the] time and guide appropriate political conduct. (Kettler et al. 1984: 29) Prior to 1933, they continue, when Mannheim had to leave Germany and came to Britain, his works show a fluctuation between (1) and (2), and increasingly after that date, as he adjusted to life in Britain, settled more into (3). I am aware that these three rationales reflect Mannheim’s more rationalistic and conventionally politicized view of society, neither of which Elias fully shared. Elias incorporates Freud in a different way from Mannheim and, as I explained in the previous chapter, Elias was ‘political’ in a different way from many of his contemporaries in Frankfurt, including Mannheim. Elias’s politics was channelled largely into Zionism at that time, rather than class struggle. Having said all that, the typology can still form a starting point for discussion. I think we can find traces of all three of these strategies, individually and in combination, implicitly or explicitly in Elias’s writings at all stages, albeit adapted in various ways. A version of strategy (1) is arguably implicit in Elias’s conception of the relational nature of social interdependencies. Members of a figuration who have achieved a measure of intellectual detachment, he says, stand a chance of better

58

Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim

grasping the pressures that all members of the figuration are putting on each other, including themselves. It is then a question of ‘their communicating their insight to the centres of power within the interlocked groups’ in order to increase the chances of alleviating the group pressures (Elias 1978a: 166). Analysing the interlocked inter-state tension between the Great Powers during the Cold War, Elias said of the representatives of the two blocs: They are not yet able to ascend the spiral staircase of knowing to the next higher level from which they will be able to perceive themselves (‘us’) and their antagonists (‘them’), as standing together on the platform below as interdependent antagonists tied to each other inescapably by the reciprocity of their menace. Neither of them is as yet able to analyse in a factual manner the roots of their hostility. (Elias 1987a: 107) In each example, however, Elias affirms only the potential of relational sociological knowledge for mitigating the conflicts by reorienting the participants. How far this can be achieved depends on the balance of tensions of the figuration itself (1978a: 166). But he never directly specified practical measures in given cases, which was apparently a principled abstention. Various remarks in Elias’s writings suggest that he believed that for the foreseeable future sociologists cannot and need not offer any more than what he calls a factual ‘diagnosis’ (also one of Mannheim’s cherished terms) of the pressures being placed upon people by their mutual relatedness. What conclusions people draw for their actions from this knowledge is up to them: ‘Sociologists are not law-givers’ (Elias 1987a: lxix). For Elias, sociology was not as yet sufficiently advanced to produce knowledge adequate, detached and synthetic enough to inform wider practical social interventions (Elias 1978a: 221ff., 1987c). This was partly because it had not yet achieved sufficient institutional autonomy to make that possible. In one place Elias does hint at what kind of role sociological knowledge specialists might have in society if that professional disciplinary autonomy had become greater. He does this via an elaborate parable about a future society where institutionalized public debates, involving autonomous knowledge specialists of all kinds, were central to the workings of the society (Elias 1984b: 280ff.). It is most significant that in the story Elias specifies that these knowledge specialists – who would include sociologists – were not permitted to enter politics. For Mannheim, on the other hand, the problem was how to bring under control, in an international context, a complex modern society in which the ‘unregulated mass of institutions is as impenetrable and as uncontrollable as nature itself’ (Mannheim 1940: 376). Mannheim wrote in 1937 that ‘hardly anyone wanted’ the war, towards which European nations were none the less tragically drifting as the result of an unintended accumulation of political, economic and psychological effects: ‘The disentanglement of this network that is strangling us can only come about through action’ (Mannheim 1940: 142). For Mannheim, the urgency of understanding the social entanglements that had led to the War so as to prevent

Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim 59 them from happening again meant that he was more willing to specify intervention, no matter how small and provisional might be his individual contribution towards a social-scientific ‘synthesis’ (Mannheim 1940: 15–35). In Elias’s terminology, and intending no pejorative connotation, Mannheim’s sociology was more ‘involved’. Elias’s observation of the direction of Mannheim’s intellectual and personal development after 1933 may well have aided Elias’s perception of the issues he later conceptualized as problems of involvement and detachment (see Chapter 5). Embracing a more detached standpoint, Elias saw his contribution to social diagnosis for the time being as developing sociological models of the long-term, unplanned developments which produce the conditions in which the short-term practice of planning and ‘all planned social development is entangled’, as he later put it (Elias 1977: 355). In the absence of any commitment in his programme to placing sociology immediately in the service of informing interventions in wider social networks, theoretical struggles assume for Elias a central significance. These comprise the battles for categories and disciplinary autonomy, which inevitably drew him into the conflicts with other academic groups, such as philosophers and historians, for which he became famous (see especially Elias 1982). Conceptual ground-clearing exercises, which exposed the dangers of philosophical hangovers, outmoded dualisms, static thinking, over-abstraction and reductionisms of various kinds, became Elias’s polemical stock-in-trade. The moral-practical impetus behind these polemics was that if sociologists built theories without purging their enquiries of such categories, they could inadvertently contribute to disorientation and, hence, to the deepening of the tensions arising from the enmeshed social conflicts that they were potentially hoping to mitigate. In the same vein, for Elias, if one does not control for the intrusion into sociology of extra-scientific political evaluations, these, too, could potentially also contribute towards the raising rather than the lowering of social tensions. Politicized knowledge generated from, say, the standpoint of only one group in complex, multi-polar relational social conflicts could potentially reinforce that particular group’s point of view, through raising the fantasy content of their thinking. This would prevent them from seeing themselves as though from the outside. In Mannheim’s terminology, such a self-perception would be a precondition for the mutual recognition of the common fate they shared with other groups. Elias expresses this mutual recognition as the possibility of the ‘mutual identification’ of participants in a conflict (quoted by Mennell 1998: 138–9), a condition that is dependent upon the balance of power between the conflicting groups. The ‘figurational’ view of society and the theory of established–outsider relations are implicitly underpinned by the perceived imperative of generating knowledge to help groups live together in controlled antagonism with each other. Compared with Mannheim, Elias operates with a much ‘longer-sighted perspective’ (1991b: 47) as he put it. He argued that this can give a certain security to decisions taken under the pressure of short-term problems and that the two perspectives have to be balanced and complemented. Now, Mannheim also said that if we are to direct social forces effectively ‘we must not remain absorbed

60

Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim

in the continued pursuit of short-run interests’ and talked of the dangers of ‘the foreshortened perspective’ (Mannheim 1940: 7, 25). But he nowhere comes near the cosmic standpoint of Elias who, towards the end of The Symbol Theory, wrote: If humankind does not destroy itself, if it is not destroyed by a meteor or another cosmic collision … the natural conditions of its existence will give humans the opportunity to tackle the problems of their life together on earth, or wherever, for a very long time to come. A future of 4000 million years should give humans the opportunity to muddle their way out of several blind alleys and to learn how to make their life together more pleasant, more meaningful and worthwhile. In the context of humanity’s future, short-term perspectives are necessarily misleading. (Elias 1991a: 146) Turning to strategy number (2) of the three strategies for the practical role of sociological knowledge, which Kettler, Meja and Stehr locate in Mannheim’s writings: ‘the sociology of knowledge as an instrument of enlightenment comparable to psychoanalysis, acting to free men and women for rational and responsible choices by liberating them from subservience to hidden forces they cannot control because they do not recognize them.’ Can we detect this principle, or perhaps a version of it, in Elias? Compare these two quotations: Technique, while freeing us from the tyranny of nature, gives rise to … new forms of dependence. … The more technique frees us from the arbitrary force of circumstance, the more we are entangled in the network of social relationships we have ourselves created. From the human point of view this ‘second nature’ is no less chaotic and menacing than the first, as long as these relationships cannot be grasped in their totality and therefore controlled. (Mannheim 1940: 374) Thus, what is formed of nothing but human beings acts upon each of them, and is experienced by many as an alien external force not unlike the forces of nature. The same process which has made people less dependent on the vagaries of nature has made them more dependent on each other. … In their relations with each other people are again and again confronted, as they were in the past in their dealings with non-human forces, with phenomena, with problems which, given their present approaches, are still beyond their control. (Elias 1987a: 10) It is puzzling how Elias was able to summon up, many years later, another strikingly similar formulation of a problem to one made by Mannheim. Whatever the explanation for this may be,5 both shared the perception that as humans have become less subservient to natural forces, they have become increasingly

Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim 61 dominated by social forces beyond their control, brought about by extensive networks of interdependencies. On this issue, my argument is that while both of them clearly also shared the hope that sociology might contribute to helping people control these social forces, Elias’s standpoint is less rationalistic than that of Mannheim and he has a more realistic conception of the extent of emancipation from social forces beyond our control that is presently possible. This realism may derive from the much closer affinity with Freudian thinking that we find in Elias’s work compared with that of Mannheim, whose liberalistic rationalism sometimes runs away with him, despite his obvious understanding of Freud. Let me substantiate these judgements. Many of Mannheim’s discussions of the problem of controlling social forces are couched in language which has a decidedly cognitive cast. He stresses the importance in effecting change of a combination of comprehension, awareness and thinking about the problem. In Ideology and Utopia he often absolutized the extent to which the individual as well as the ‘collective unconscious’ (1929: 28, 30ff.) could be controlled. He argued that once unconscious motivations which existed behind our backs come into our field of vision and become ‘accessible to conscious control’ we become ‘masters of ourselves’ (Mannheim 1929: 43). Other vaunting formulations are: ‘motives which previously dominated us become subject to our domination’; and ‘the sphere of the … rationally controllable … is always growing, while the sphere of the irrational becomes correspondingly narrower’ (Mannheim 1929: 169–70). The trend towards totalitarianism in the 1930s somewhat mitigated Mannheim’s unequivocal commitment to that kind of faith in progression. However, there are still traces of it in Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction, where Mannheim tackles the problem of bringing under control the chaotic, uncontrolled and maladjusted institutions of complex societies by a strategy of their ‘co-ordination’ by sociologically literate planners who will ‘plan for freedom’. Their task will be ‘harmonizing the instruments of social technique’, like the conductor of an orchestra, correlating the economic to the political and these to the psychological levels, via education. He advocated a ‘finer mastery of the social keyboard’ in the service of the ‘rational mastery of the irrational’. Eventually he hoped that the application of rationality would ‘provide for citadels of self-determination in a regulated social order’ (Mannheim 1940: 264, 267). Mannheim’s metaphor of citadels is interesting and revealing. A citadel is a fortress which has to be defended. Fear-images haunt Mannheim’s prose, probably provoked by the events of the time in Germany and by the experiences of social repression, persecution and exile he had himself lived through in Hungary and Germany. Behind the comparatively smooth working of the industrial system he detects the ‘lurking possibility of a resort to violence’ (Mannheim 1940: 64). He adds that workers in rationalized industrial enterprises ‘can at any moment turn into “machine wreckers” and ruthless warriors’. At the same time, anxiety generated by the international tensions of the 1930s also generates in Mannheim wish-images of social harmony, expressed as the advocacy of the planned and co-ordinated society. He wants order, control and the good adjustment of institutions and people with each other.

62

Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim

Everything seems to work smoothly in this new planned society, with the irrational and destructive side of human beings safely channelled and sublimated in appropriate social institutions and mechanisms (Mannheim 1940: 60ff.). Mannheim hoped that a co-ordinated society would maximize the possibilities of disputes being settled by compromise without resort to violence, but that it would not as a result become too organized and rationalized, thus producing a deadening conformity (Mannheim 1940: 61, 64, 196ff.). In a way reminiscent of Elias’s later observation that in the differentiated, ‘unexciting’ societies of our age, leisure activities such as sport are designed so as to produce ‘an enjoyable and controlled de-controlling of emotions’ (Elias and Dunning 1986: 44), Mannheim sees the need for the controlled sublimation of what he calls ‘pure elan’, in activities such as public celebrations and mass sport (Mannheim 1940: 63).6 The need for such institutionalized emotional outlets arises out of the ‘matter-of-factness of everyday life’ due to widespread rationalization and the ‘constant repression of impulses’ (1940: 62–3). (See Elias and Dunning1986: 63ff., 71–2.) What Mannheim seems to have overlooked – or probably denied or repressed – is that for the citadels of self-determination to be possible presupposes a very high level of individual self-restraint, perhaps beyond that yet achieved in the advanced societies of the West. In the absence of this, only further external restraint from forces of social control, perhaps even by the planners themselves, would be necessary to defend the citadels. Many years later Elias diagnosed that it was not possible (i.e. not sociologically feasible) for the foreseeable future to dispense with agencies of external social control because the level and pattern of all-round individual self-restraint which would be required to do that were not yet, at the present stage of the civilizing process, attainable (Elias 1987a: 76–7). Hence, implied in Mannheim’s model is perhaps greater authoritarianism than he probably would have admitted. (It is perhaps a danger generally implicit in the liberal aim to control the irrational through responsible elites.) As Elias put it many years later in a discussion document prepared for a research group on utopias, the paradox of rationalist utopias is that ‘while attempting to counter one type of social oppression, they imply another’ (quoted in Kilminster 1982b: 87). Elias once commented that sociology could have ‘an eminently practical side if it were done in the right way’ (Heilbron 1984: 14). The question arises as to whether he thought that Mannheim was ‘doing it in the right way’. My guess is that he did not. Elias acknowledges that in the course of Western history ‘the sector of society open to planning grows larger and larger’ (1991b: 63) because over time people incorporate the existence of unplanned and sedimented institutions into their short-term purposes. Hence, it is by no means impossible, he says, that we could make out of the blind network of social relationships something ‘that functions better in terms of our needs and purposes’ (1939: 367). But he warns that the intermeshing of the actions, plans and purposes of many people constantly ‘gives rise to something which has not been planned, intended or created by any individual’. This is a ‘permanent feature’ of social life (1991b: 62). He adds – possibly alluding to Mannheim’s work on planning which he must have known

Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim 63 about at this time – that this feature of human society ‘is ultimately immune to planning’ (Elias 1991b: 62, emphasis added).7 Johan Goudsblom has correctly referred to Elias’s ‘basic humanism or radical realism’ (Goudsblom 1977b: 81). In Germany in the years between the wars, Max Weber’s two essays Science and Politics as a Vocation focused the secular, realist outlook of many Weimar intellectuals (Heinemann 1953; Steiner 1978; Lassman et al. 1989). Neither Elias nor Mannheim, however, shared Weber’s tragic projections. Mannheim claimed to be a realist in that he was aware that planning could easily be corrupted into dictatorship and he had faced the fact that there was no utopian future beckoning (1940: 6–7). Elias’s realism is of a more ‘existential’ kind than that of Mannheim, stemming from Elias’s particular sociological/psychoanalytic understanding of human beings. He looks squarely at humankind, in all its socially determined ugliness as well as its achievements and triumphs. Elias encourages a realistic attitude towards what is individually and socially possible in practice at any stage of social development. He refers to the ‘reality shock’, through which the course of social development deals blow after blow to people’s fantasy-laden beliefs and hopes, particularly political ones. People can often derive short-term satisfaction from trying to fulfil dreams, he says, but in the long run their dreams are drained of substance and destroyed: ‘The whole of history has so far amounted to no more than a graveyard of human dreams’ (1978a: 28). Elias often implies that we may have to learn to live with a particular situation that is less than satisfactory rather than yearn for some unattainable state of affairs. He mentions only a possible ‘better’ attunement between people’s personal needs and inclinations and the ‘overall demands of people’s social existence’ (1939: 447, emphasis in original), not a complete attunement. Elias’s position on the parameters of effective action to change society finds an echo in Reinhold Niebuhr’s eloquent formulation of the dilemma: ‘O God, give us serenity to accept what cannot be changed, courage to change what should be changed, and wisdom to distinguish the one from the other’ (cited in Berki 1981: iv). For Elias, sociology ‘done in the right way’, as he put it, is uniquely placed to contribute to the latter task (‘wisdom’), thus taking responsibility for this traditional task formerly undertaken by philosophers (Kilminster 1998: ch. 3). For Elias, not all figurations will have the same scope for change and the form of a figuration will not, in any case, have been determined by the plans and intentions of its members. In some figurations, Elias maintains, the dangers and threats coming from group relations are so great that they provoke and sustain a great deal of highly involved or emotional thinking about society. These dangers can only be reduced if people’s thinking becomes less affect-laden, which, in turn, depends upon the lessening of the dangers. These self-reinforcing sequences he calls ‘vicious circles’ (Elias 1987a: 9–11, 1978a: 22, 166) or ‘double bind’ dynamics (1987a: 94ff). These social spirals constitute relations of compelling force that can precipitate revolutions and wars, with all their ‘bloodletting of human enjoyment’ (Elias, in Fontaine 1978: 243–53). The outcome of these

64

Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim

tensions could always potentially dash hopes for a sociological reorientation, despite the efforts of its practitioners: A strong wave of new ideas may influence the course of overall social development, provided that fluctuating trends in the distribution of power and consequent struggles for power do not bring reorientation to a complete standstill and destroy the impulse behind it. (Elias 1978a: 22) Finally, in Elias’s description in What Is Sociology? of the sociologist as ‘a destroyer of myths’, it is possible to recognize a version of strategy (3), that of the function of the sociologist as primarily exposing myths. Elias does not express the matter in quite the civic manner of the formulation by Kettler, Meja and Stehr (‘public problems’, ‘appropriate political conduct’) but his remarks are in the same spirit. He means by myths commonly accepted ideas, often backed by authority, which scientific groups can criticize in the name of observed realities (Elias 1978a: 52). Looking back on his days in Frankfurt during the intense political tensions of the mid-1930s, Elias recalls: ‘One was surrounded by lies, by political lies, which one could see through as ideologies, as Mannheim called them, so we were essentially myth-hunters’ (in Heilbron 1984: 16).

Epilogue A self-conscious commitment to liberalism informed Mannheim’s sociological work from his early days in Hungary, via the influence of his mentor Oscar Jaszi, something that has been demonstrated with skill and subtlety by Kettler et al. (1984: 18ff.). They also see Mannheim more broadly as part of a German humanist philosophical tradition in which seeking knowledge to inform creative action was the core of one’s spiritual being. They see Mannheim as working towards this general philosophical goal ‘[u]sing the idiom of sociology’ (Kettler et al. 1984: 161, emphasis added). This is a view of Mannheim that comes to his work from the standpoint of political philosophy and, as such, tends to underplay his commitment and contribution to sociology as such, as an empirical and theoretical discipline, with which he passionately and unconditionally identified himself. The curve of Mannheim’s development was, like that of Elias, from philosophical beginnings towards an emphatic identification with sociology and its world-historical importance. As I have argued elsewhere (Kilminster 1998: xii), the sociology of knowledge of Mannheim and Elias is a link in a long chain that stretches back to Hegel and Marx through Weber and constitutes the rightful heir of the sociological tradition. My point in the present context is that Mannheim’s work cannot be reduced to a political-philosophical thrust that he merely expressed in the language of sociology, even if those commitments played some part in the reflections that led him to sociology. Mannheim himself did ample empirical work in ‘Conservative Thought’, for example, and made considerable efforts in advocating, sponsoring

Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim 65 and supporting empirical research activity in his Frankfurt period and later. This was an overwhelming defining component of his whole enterprise. The relationship between the philosophy and the sociology in Mannheim is at best a fluctuating tension in his work, which resolves itself decidedly in the direction of sociology. Mannheim had a truly catalytic effect on others, inspiring many, including Elias, in varied empirical research directions, all of which were robustly sociological. However, it has to be said that writers close to Mannheim noted his latent philosophical motivation, as well as the fact that he never entirely severed his links with philosophy (Kecskemeti 1953: 11; Wolff 1959: 572). What is just as clear, though, is that Elias did not share those views. As we saw in the previous chapter, Elias’s abandonment of philosophy is total. Furthermore, to assume that Mannheim was primarily a political philosopher in the liberal tradition, from which springs the source of his intense and passionate commitment to sociology as a vocation or ‘mission’, assumes that the source of passion and commitment, i.e. values, must come from outside science, as Weber taught. Herein lies a further difference between Mannheim and Elias, which is reflected clearly in Elias’s theory of involvement and detachment (see Chapter 5). Mannheim did not follow through the far-reaching implications of his own programme. The comprehensive standpoint of the sociology of knowledge suggested that a one-sided adherence to liberalism, or any ideology for that matter, even in an adapted form, was somewhat problematic. Against the import of his own programme, Mannheim still embraced liberalism, which he wanted to recast for a new era, which then shaped his sociological research and reflection (Mannheim 1940: 9). This tension is seen concretely in his later work as he criticizes the traditional liberal conception of the individual in the name of a ‘sociological’ conception while still retaining the former on moral grounds. Elias seems to have taken to its logical conclusion the more radical version of the sociology of knowledge which called for a new sociological epistemology, ontology and ethics to replace philosophy. This made the questions of philosophical, scientific and particularly political, allegiances, framed in traditional terms, very problematic. This may be one of the reasons why Elias never mentioned his early sympathies with Zionism, which only came to light after his death. It would be tempting to see this omission as a conscious covering of his tracks. However, it is plausible to assume that as Elias’s commitment to the vocation of sociology deepened and intensified over the course of his development, he saw more and more clearly the one-sidedness of his previous commitment to Zionism. Then his sociological conscience and his detachment would no longer allow him uncritically to embrace it. It is possible, too, that he was unable to admit, even to himself, that he once embraced an ideology. Another major difference between Mannheim and Elias, which provides insight into both of them, is that apart from odd asides in his work (e.g. 1929: 274–5), Mannheim had no systematic conception of natural scientific knowledge as also intertwined with power and interests in society along with that of the cultural sciences. He had little knowledge of the natural sciences and excluded natural scientific knowledge from his conception of knowledge as seinsverbunden

66

Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim

(1928: 193). Mannheim’s outlook was essentially belletristic. In that sense, Mannheim’s cast of mind was more squarely in the German tradition of Kultur than that of Elias. Elias, on the other hand, knew the sciences quite well from his early medical training and kept abreast of scientific developments, as we can gather from Involvement and Detachment and The Symbol Theory. He also had practical experience of the business world and of economics, which kept his feet on the ground. For Elias, the sciences are not, and never were, ‘valuefree’. Rather, they have developed, over a long period of time, ‘autonomous’ evaluations, that is, more detached professional standards of investigation, which have become institutionally insulated from the intrusion of ‘heteronomous’ evaluations stemming from political and other interests (Elias 1987a: 39). It is these autonomous evaluations, in the context of the promotion of sociology as a science, that are the source of Elias’s passion and commitment, not, as far as can be discerned, a preconceived philosophical-evaluative position expressed as sociology (see Chapter 5 on involved detachment and ‘secondary involvement’). The dialectic between the rational and the irrational has been described as ‘the archetypal Weimar issue’ (Kettler and Meja 1990: 1463) and one which Mannheim in his British period increasingly resolved in the direction of rationalism. There are a number of generalised polemics in The Civilizing Process (Elias 1939: 406ff., 412ff., 441ff., 533) against the uncritical use of the Weberian concept of rationalization to explain the long-term trend of European social developments and specifically against Weber’s ideal-types (to which Elias counterposes ‘real types’8). My guess is that these comments were probably directed not only at Weber himself but also at Mannheim’s writings of the period in which these concepts were central (e.g. Mannheim: 1940: 39ff. – written in 1935). Elias uses empirical evidence to refute or qualify purely rationalistic interpretations of history and society and insists on seeing people as a whole and not as simply rational. He returns to the attack in Involvement and Detachment (1987a), where he subjects the rational/ irrational dualism – basic to Mannheim’s liberalistic thinking and unresolved in his thought (Kettler and Meja 1990: 1463–4) – to a fundamental critique. Elias’s argument is that the dualism is a philosophical one and of little use to describe the ubiquitous dimension of emotion in all human social relations, epitomized by the ‘figurational’ view of human bonding. In retrospect, Elias’s work may be seen partly as a psychoanalytically informed reaction to the cognitive consequences of the liberal dimension of Mannheim’s research programme, which reaction came to prominence increasingly after Mannheim and Elias’s Frankfurt period.9 Thus, an important difference between Mannheim and Elias lies in the different ways in which they incorporated Freud and faced the implications of the ‘irrational’. Elias uses Freud to deepen his understanding of the role of fantasy and fear in the struggles between competing groups, and this dimension is an organic part of his theories of civilizing processes, established–outsider relations and conception of figurations. Mannheim, too, had always been receptive to psychoanalytic concepts and employed them freely in his reflections, from at least Ideology and Utopia onwards. He knew Freud’s writings well and was married to an analyst, Julia Mannheim-Lang, with whom he collaborated closely. There

Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim 67 is also a clear awareness of the role of emotions in social life in his writings of the 1930s, although, I would argue, this awareness is always deployed in the service of informing his explorations of the possibilities of social and political intervention and planning, rather than being integrated into a theory of social and psychic processes, as such, as in the case of Elias. From the mid-1930s onwards, Mannheim’s work remained politically focused and tilted towards an over-rational view of human beings. However, for a short phase in the late 1930s to early 1940s there is a thematic change in Mannheim’s writings in which he begins to swing the pendulum in the other direction, at least for a while. Particularly in certain new chapters in Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (1940), a lecture series in Oxford in 1938 (Mannheim 1969: 255ff.), an article on ‘Mass Education and Group Analysis’ (Mannheim 1939) and some talks on ‘Ethics’ given on BBC radio (Mannheim 1943), Mannheim begins to acknowledge, in a way very reminiscent of Elias’s Civilizing Process, the importance of the following processes and problems: 1 2 3 4 5

How in social development social tensions are transformed into individual psychological changes. How drives become socially regulated through self-restraint. How people themselves change during social transformations. The state of civilizational development is reflected in the minutiae of day-today conduct. How it might be possible to achieve a society in which the inhibition of people’s desires is never more than is necessary for its collective survival.

The problem areas (1) to (5) above do not appear in precisely this form in Mannheim’s earlier works of the 1920s, when he was much more likely to face the ‘mystery’ (Mannheim 1928: 229) of the irrational, but to draw its teeth through the ‘lucidity and acuity of reason’ (Mannheim 1928: 22) as he put it. He was also certainly previously interested in the social formation of personality, as a sociological problem, for example, in his essay ‘On the Nature of Economic Ambition and Its Significance for the Social Education of Man’ of 1930 (Mannheim 1972: 230–75). Here Mannheim traced the relationship between the economic system (and only this) and the formation of human personalities. This essay, which is heavily influenced by Max Weber, consists largely of a static typology of occupations and strata found in various economic arrangements and Mannheim’s speculations about how the corresponding demands placed on people in those positions are reflected in the structure of their personalities. There is no discussion there of the development of civilized behaviour or of the relationship between social transformations as a whole and psychological changes, or of the issue of the extent to which civilized living may have placed too great a burden upon people in its demands for self-control imposed through sexual taboos and other behavioural restrictions. All the characteristically Eliasian concerns (1) to (5) occur in the cluster of Mannheim’s writings from the late 1930s/early 1940s. Specifically, Mannheim

68

Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim

asks, ‘Why did the Middle Ages and the Renaissance produce entirely different types of men?’ (Mannheim 1940: 16). He mentions that the ‘don’ts’ that adults impose upon children are in fact the ‘collective demands … the usual standards of behaviour in a given society’ (Mannheim 1939: 342–3), variations in which it is the sociologist’s task to investigate empirically. He also comments on how socially ‘prescribed dietary systems or the distinction between clean and unclean foods’ come to be justified through various rationalizations, initially through religion and then, later, ‘in terms of their hygienic value’ (Mannheim 1939: 348). For understanding how psychological changes fit with one another, Mannheim mentions three sociological mechanisms: ‘the rise of lower groups, the spontaneous imitation of the ruling classes and the modern devices for propagating new standards of thought and behaviour’ (Mannheim 1940: 24). In Mannheim’s BBC radio talks for sixth-formers from 1943 (Mannheim 1943) there are a number of phrases and allusions of an Elias-like kind that resonate with Elias’s later theory of established–outsider relations. These phrases include ‘group egotism’, ‘group pride’, ‘outsiders’ and ‘we’- and ‘they’-consciousness, which would suggest Elias’s inspiration for his later theory may originally have come from Mannheim. But one passage from these talks is suggestive of the reverse inspiration, i.e. Mannheim getting inspiration from The Civilizing Process: These instinctive tendencies are built into particular and very elaborate ways of behaviour in accordance with the customs of the particular type of society in which a person is brought up. As the child grows up, it will have to learn things that are more and more difficult. First of all there come habits of cleanliness, habits of eating, using a fork and spoon, not to speak of what we call ‘good manners’. We acquire all these external forms of behaviour quite early on – but we also learn from our environment to shape our emotions. … So the group situation plays a very vital role in shaping behaviour. This is a pretty general human situation – for primitive societies and complicated civilized ones. The important thing to remember about these habits is that they gradually become automatic, and that’s why people mistake them for instincts. (Mannheim 1943: lecture III, ‘What About Human Nature?’, pp. 7–8, emphasis in original) In Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction Mannheim affirms again a crucial point he had already made in the 1928 Zurich Congress lecture, i.e. the need to grasp economic relations simply as one type of social relations as such and, hence, to go beyond the economic determinism of the Marxists (Mannheim 1940: 18–22). With that conception in mind, Mannheim describes the intention of the new English edition of the book in another suggestive passage that evokes Elias: In this book we shall concentrate mainly on studying the effect of these genuine sociological relations and processes on the inner life and on civilization, on many aspects of the sociological conditioning of mental life which are

Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim 69 usually disregarded. … [W]e believe that it is only possible to understand the real extent of sociological influence on civilization as a whole if we call attention also to the psychological effects of the elementary social processes. … Anyone who has noticed how a tête-à-tête conversation changes both in subject and tone when an onlooker arrives, will realize how every change in the structure of society, in the function of social groups, and in the major social processes has a corresponding effect on the forms of self-expression and ultimately on the state of civilization. (Mannheim 1940: 20) The apparently Eliasian formulations that come from Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (including the above) occur in the chapters in the English edition that were written in the late 1930s and were not in the German edition of 1935 (i.e. the long Introduction, Parts III, V and VI). The German edition was written during the two-year period when Elias and Mannheim were apart (Mannheim in London, Elias in Paris) and does not directly contain discussions of this kind. My hypothesis is that in these extra chapters in the English translation (as well as in other writings from the late 1930s and early 1940s mentioned earlier) we can probably see the influence on Mannheim of The Civilizing Process, of which he had been given an advance copy, dedicated to him by Elias.10 This moment, in any case, coincided with the phase when Mannheim was independently moving towards psychoanalysis as a source of inspiration on the urgent political problem of a social diagnosis of the time.11 My guess is that the Eliasian expressions of these concerns may also reflect the influence of occasional conversations Mannheim was having with Elias in London at the time, because at this point they were still fairly close – although this is very difficult to prove. For the most part, though, Mannheim uses these Elias-like sociologicalpsychological insights only pragmatically and in a largely ad hoc fashion. For Mannheim, they inspire his reflections on planning for the optimal social arrangements which will ensure the functioning of the healthy, adjusted, ‘democratic’ person who can show initiative, responsibility and the desire for selfcultivation (Mannheim 1940: 265, 1939: 338–50). They do not form an organic part of a theory of society. Basically, at this point Mannheim assumes and works with a theory of power and conflict (as well as a methodology and a theory of politics) very close to that of Max Weber and, hence, eschews social development, as such. This comparative, ideal-typical emphasis is particularly characteristic of Mannheim’s writings after the Nazis came to power, which event undermined his previous Hegelian faith in the progressive march of history and the possibility of keeping contending groups in harmonious adjustment (Kecskemeti 1953: 3; Kettler and Meja 1990: 1463–70). The totalitarian counter-currents harked back to the past and did not fit into Mannheim’s assumptions. It is after this that Mannheim has to look, as it were, ‘outside history’ for principles or values that might tell us how to cope with the ‘aberrant forces’ (totalitarianism in Germany and Russia) that had come to the fore (Kecskemeti 1953: 3). This is a view that Mannheim had already been coming to during the

70

Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim

Frankfurt period, when his lectures contained a strong appeal for co-operation between sociology and psychoanalysis so as to get to the irrational roots of the emerging problem of authoritarian leadership in Germany (Kettler and Loader 2001b). It was out of this same national, geo-political and institutional context that Elias’s Civilizing Process was also conceived and executed. Mannheim advocated ‘historical or sociological psychology’ (Mannheim 1940: 16), echoing Elias’s appeal for a ‘historical social psychology’ in The Civilizing Process (Elias 1939: 407) published slightly earlier. Hence, in the late1930s Mannheim’s turning to Freud and to contemporary psychoanalysis (and probably The Civilizing Process) to help him explain the pathological totalitarian developments and for guidance as to what might be a healthy society and how people could be changed psychologically through upbringing and education was entirely consistent with the programme for research co-operation between psychoanalysts and sociologists he had advocated some years earlier. It also makes it highly likely that Mannheim, in the service of those aims, would have been instructed by Elias’s magnum opus. Mannheim’s quest in the late 1930s is not dissimilar in spirit to Elias’s search for an understanding of ‘decivilizing processes’ (Elias 1996: part IV; Fletcher 1997: ch. 8; Mennell 1995). But for Elias, these are not so much aberrant as a potential of all civilizing processes to go into reverse in relation to an attained stage, for specific and discernible reasons. The difference between Mannheim and Elias on this point lies in the way in which Elias integrates psychoanalytic insights dynamically and developmentally, so that the acknowledgement of the ‘aberrant’ or ‘pathological’ in history was organic to the theory. Whereas, in Mannheim, his search for ‘criteria’ for a healthy and ‘successful’ society (Mannheim 1939: 343) was an ad hoc one in the service of planning a society in such a way as to encourage more socially adjusted people who can handle representative democracy. Elias is more detached and may be seen as having remained faithful to the radical spirit of the original sociology of knowledge programme, which his work extended and developed in new directions. Elias, too, implicitly pursued criteria for a more ‘healthy’ society in the general sense and was centrally interested in the problem of excessive and unnecessary repression. This is clear from the final cadences of The Civilizing Process, where he invokes the possibility of the ‘better attunement’ of people’s needs and inclinations to the ‘overall demands of people’s social existence’ (Elias 1939: 447, emphasis in original). He returned to the same theme of ‘wasteful and uneconomical’ restraints in a later interview (Elias 1969a: 145–6) in response to questions about the loosening of constraints in the 1960s and Herbert Marcuse’s concept of ‘surplus repression’. In order to understand this complex issue, and to circumvent the ideological colourings of the question, he advocated ‘hard work and hard thinking’ (Elias 1969a: 146). In more technical terms, this amounts to comparative socio-genetic and psychogenetic enquiries which could yield the ‘universal features of human society’ (Elias 1978a: 104ff., 1987a: 226ff.), which he carefully called ‘process universals’ (my emphasis) no doubt to distance them from transcendental universals. Elias refers to them as ‘genuine universals’ (1987a: 226, emphasis added).

Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim 71 These enquiries, unlike Mannheim’s which were undertaken in his later work within a broadly Weberian framework, would be for Elias into societies at different stages of development, something Weber, and (at this stage) Mannheim, would have eschewed.12 Contrary to the tenor of his work of the Heidelberg and Frankfurt periods, in which the directionality of change, but not its teleology, was affirmed, Mannheim was quite explicit about his change of viewpoint: ‘Modern sociology does not like to speak in terms of stages because we cannot foresee in which sequence the external historical and social situations may follow each other’ (Mannheim 1938: 295). It is difficult to imagine a sociological statement further from Elias’s perspective than this. To conclude: the early years of the association between Elias and Mannheim were characterized by both emotional and scientific closeness, whereas, after the Frankfurt period, they remained fairly close as friends but became increasingly distant scientifically.13 Elias may be seen as having more consistently developed the sociological advances made during the Heidelberg and Frankfurt periods (see Mannheim 1934), which Mannheim left in abeyance after 1933, as he largely pursued more pragmatic, political and policy concerns in response to the British reality in which he found himself. The comparison between them illuminates the work of each and hopefully clarifies what is at stake if one had to choose between them. Let us now turn to The Civilizing Process in order to explore Elias’s synthesis in more depth.

4

The Civilizing Process The structure of a classic

We are born with the dead: See, they return, and bring us with them. (T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding)

Introduction Norbert Elias’s celebrated two-volume study Über den Prozess der Zivilisation. Soziogenetische und Psychogenetische Untersuchungen was originally published in 1939 by Haus zum Falken in Basel. It was little known in the anglophone world until the publication of a translation (The Civilizing Process) in 1978 to 1982.1 Few would disagree that it has now achieved the status of a sociological classic. In this monumental study, Elias traced long-term connections between changes in power balances in society at large and changes in the embodied habitus – or cultural personality make-up – of individual people, among the secular upper classes in Western Europe from the late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. Although it was originally grounded in a study of European history, the theory of civilizing processes points to linked changes in power, behaviour and habitus which can be demonstrated to have been at work elsewhere and in many other periods. In The Civilizing Process Elias set out to explain sociologically the origins of what has come to be called ‘civilized’ behaviour, which Stephen Mennell has characterized as follows: To be civilized is to be polite and good mannered and considerate towards others; clean and decent and hygienic in personal habits; humane and gentle and kind, restrained and self-controlled and even-tempered; reluctant to use violence against others save in exceptional circumstances. … Above all, though, to be civilized is to live with others in an orderly, well organized, just, predictable and calculable society. (Mennell 1998: 29) Elias’s study was an empirical investigation of the long-term social process through which behavioural codes embracing that kind of conduct became the norm for

The Civilizing Process: a classic

73

most people living in the nation-states of Western Europe and beyond (although with some unevenness within and between states). He demonstrated empirically that people did not show such consistent and all-round self-restraint in the Middle Ages and earlier periods, nor do they do so in some less-differentiated societies. The development of internally pacified societies, resulting from the emergent monopolization of the means of force by the state in modern times, and widely coordinated interdependencies within nation-states, played a crucial role in making that kind of social behaviour possible. Elias conceived of the study in a scientific spirit as an attempt at a theory of the process of civilization, not as a complete and finished one. As the German title Über den Prozess der Zivilisation makes clear, the book was intended to be ‘on’ or ‘about’ the process of civilization. The emphasis is on the Prozess of civilization. As Eric Dunning has put it, Elias saw the theory as a ‘contribution to the understanding of the development of the West rather than as a fully fledged theory’ (Dunning 1999: 42, emphasis in original). The provisional character of Elias’s theory became lost in the rather bald and compressed title of The Civilizing Process.2 By using the word Über Elias signalled that he wanted to demonstrate something in a preliminary fashion. That is, the empirical plausibility of the hypothesis that the pattern of all-round self-restraint characteristic of the behaviour of Western people (upon which so much of the predictable economic, political and cultural life depends) was not a human universal. Still less did it constitute the highest point of human achievement, as the ideologists of Western triumphalism would have it. Rather, it developed in the changing relations between interdependent people gradually over a long period of time as part of wider social transformations, including state formation processes, now forgotten. In Elias’s hands, the ‘civilizing process’ is first and foremost a technical concept referring to the long historical sequence of European peoples becoming more ‘civilized’, in the purely factual and specific sense of highly self-controlled social behaviour and steadily modulated individual affects. And since we are talking here about a process, it is obvious even from the original title of Elias’s study that there is no reason to jump to the evaluative conclusion that the civilizing process has been completed in the behavioural codes and sensibilities associated with social life in the contemporary West, but that it is a continuing process. The book begins and ends with that message. Both the epigraph on the title-page of the original German edition of The Civilizing Process and the final quotation at the end of volume II are a quotation from Holbach: ‘La civilisation … n’est pas encore terminée.’ Perhaps a more accurate, even if less euphonious, English title for the study might have been On the Process of Becoming Civilized or perhaps On the Process of Civilization. In later books and articles, Elias greatly extended the scope of the original theory (see Mennell 1998: part III). The Civilizing Process has also been translated into many languages and inspired extensive research in a number of fields (see Mennell 1998; Kranendonk 1990; van Krieken 1998). I do not intend to review this important work here. Rather, my aim in this chapter is to elucidate some features of the way in which the book was constructed, its shape and arrangement, that

74 The Civilizing Process: a classic have not always been appreciated. The Civilizing Process embraces what I have called a mode of experiential explanation, the key to the understanding of which is the manner and sequence of the theoretical elaboration and empirical materials. Elias startles, shocks and otherwise engages his readers emotionally in ways that are clearly intended to make them face their own sensibilities, dispositions and prejudices. Furthermore, Elias achieves this aim in a fashion that is wholly integral to the book’s scientific, explanatory function. I hope to show that a grasp of this aspect of the study not only makes possible a more complete understanding of The Civilizing Process, but also of Elias’s work in general. The questions of historical understanding, self-knowledge and self-experience raised in this chapter resonate with contemporary sociological discussions in hermeneutics. In turn, those debates have drawn on the twentieth-century philosophical traditions of existential phenomenology and fundamental ontology, where the matter of historical understanding was seminally raised, albeit within a philosophical discourse. In Elias’s hands in The Civilizing Process, those original debates had already formed a point of departure and thus represent a distant echo in the book. The problems they raised had already been transformed by Elias into a social-scientific idiom which rendered them amenable to empirical inquiry (see Chapter 2). Opening the first volume of The Civilizing Process, we notice immediately that it is divided into two broad parts: the first part is given over to a discussion of the terms Kultur and Zivilization and the antithesis between them, in the context of French, German and to some extent English usage and their history. (The Germany/France comparison continues throughout the first part of Volume I, even in chapters nominally about one or the other.) Then there is a second, much longer part, taking up approximately two-thirds of Volume I, with the general heading of ‘Civilization as a Specific Transformation of Human Behaviour’ (emphasis added) which contains the extracts from the manners books, with analysis. Essentially, this second part of Volume I is an exercise in the recovery of the historical amnesia that has fallen across contemporary people’s awareness of the origins of their highly self-controlled personality and behavioural sensibilities which they take for granted, and which underpin the idea of civilized behaviour and civilization. Elias is trying to recover something lost, unconscious, hidden, known but not reflected upon, in the Western psychic make-up. His way of achieving this is partly by quoting from manners books taken from different periods in such a way as to induce in his readers emotional reactions that exemplify the rising thresholds of sensibility that he demonstrates by that and other means in the book. From a wider perspective, Elias is respecting our ancestors, rather than, as is tempting, to condemn them by standards of propriety and sensibilities developed centuries later. He does this by showing that the earlier standards participated in the development of the later ones that we take for granted in ourselves. ‘In reality, our terms “civilized” and “uncivilized” do not constitute an antithesis of the kind that exists between “good” and “bad”, but represent stages in a development which, moreover, is still continuing’ (Elias 1939: 52) Elias’s study is informed by a form of historical humanism by which later generations can respectfully

The Civilizing Process: a classic

75

recover, that is to retrieve as their own, what has been forgotten in their history – in this case, specifically the unknown prior stages of their psychic development and patterns of behaviour. In passages in Volume I (Elias 1939: 51–2) Elias alludes to Freud’s terminology in Civilization and Its Discontents.3 Elias points out that it is even embarrassing for us to speak about or hear much of what Erasmus, as late as the sixteenth century, discusses about bodily functions. This embarrassment is a symptom of the civilizing process. Expressed in value-judgements about what is ‘civilized’ or ‘barbaric’ is the ‘discomfort’ or ‘uneasiness’ (Unbehagen) we may feel towards groups of people who conceal or restrain these functions less than we do. But in feeling that discomfort about the behaviour of certain groups in the present, in so far as we do, we are repelled by their different standard of repugnance, but this is in fact a standard that has also historically preceded our own, in the past of our own society. The import of this point seems to be that Western people today, in being embarrassed or repelled by certain groups and peoples whom they call ‘primitive’ or ‘uncivilized’, are effectively being embarrassed or repelled by (or are afraid of) a historically repressed part of themselves. Elias observes rhetorically: ‘Such, then, is the nature of “barbarism and its discontents”’ [Unbehagen an der Barbarei] (Elias 1939: 51). He adds that ‘in less evaluative terms’ these discontents arise out of the ‘different structure of affects’, including the different standard of repugnance, which is still to be found today in many societies that ‘we term “uncivilized” ’ (Elias 1939: 51). The question arises as to how and why Western society actually moved from one standard to the other, how it became ‘civilized’. In considering this process of civilization, we cannot avoid arousing feelings of discomfort [Unbehagen] and embarrassment. It is valuable to be aware of them. It is necessary, at least while considering this process, to attempt to suspend all the feelings of embarrassment and superiority, all the value judgements and criticism associated with the concepts ‘civilization’ or ‘uncivilized’. (Elias 1939: 51–2) It is ironic that one of the features of The Civilizing Process that makes it so memorable and celebrated – the startling and engaging extracts from manners books about eating, farting, spitting, nose-blowing, nudity and bedroom behaviour in Volume I – has actually distracted many readers from grasping other profundities in the book. As Goudsblom and Mennell (1998b: 39) aptly comment, The Civilizing Process is ‘highly readable and easily accessible at first sight, but also replete with far-reaching and often subtle implications’. I hope to be able to convey some of those implications in what follows.

The Kultur/Zivilisation antithesis This seminal antithesis dominated German sociology and philosophy in the Weimar period. Of the two concepts Elias writes: ‘They became fashionable

76 The Civilizing Process: a classic words, concepts current in the everyday speech of a particular society. This shows that they met not merely individual but shared [kollective] needs for expression. The shared history has crystallized in them and resonates in them. … The social process of their genesis may be long forgotten’ (Elias 1939: 8). He traces the origins of the terms by relating the meanings and connotations of the antithesis to the fate of the politically excluded weak bourgeoisie of Germany, compared with the way in which the middle classes of France and England were more strongly bound to the courtly tradition through closer contact with the aristocracy in court society as a whole. (In England this is Society with a capital ‘s’.) But that conclusion to the first part of Volume I is not simply announced and stated at the beginning. Elias leads the reader to it obliquely, through a discussion of what the terms meant in the history of different countries in Europe. What is difficult to convey in a bare outline of Elias’s main points is the empirical richness of the presentation here (and in the book generally). Rather than stating his conclusions at the outset, we find Elias taking us through many empirical examples as he leads us to his comparative-historical, socialstructural conclusions about the fate of the courtly aristocracy and bourgeoisie in Germany and France, as reflected in the contrast between Kultur and Zivilization. The text is peppered with literary quotations, others from political essays of various periods and from history books and much more. It is worth noting that Elias was pioneering in 1939 a broader conception of what counts as adequate empirical evidence. Many social scientists at that time, particularly those of a positivistic bent, did not regard literary and similar documentary sources as empirical in a scientific sense. As I have been arguing generally, Elias’s work is written in a theoretical-empirical idiom, in which theoretical reflections and concept formation are developed continually in relation to empirical materials. We see the same mode of working here, where, although he never claims to be exhaustive in his empirical coverage, he shows a tireless commitment to concrete, empirical evidence and a talent for the telling example. In France and England, civilization expressed the pride of the nation, the progress of West and of mankind. In Germany, in contrast, it was regarded as something useful but of the second rank, comprising only the outer appearances of human beings. For the German middle class, one could only express pride through the concept of Kultur. In France and England, civilization can include political, economic, moral, religious and technical topics, whereas in Germany Kultur refers solely to intellectual, artistic and religious concerns, which are sharply divided from political and economic matters. In France and in England civilization can refer to behaviour and accomplishments, irrespective of whether a person has accomplished anything. In the German concept of Kultur the opposite is the case: the value a person has by virtue of their existence, without any accomplishments, is minor. The word kulturell refers to products, not to a person’s value or social qualities, for which the word kultviert applies. Civilization is a dynamic concept, moving forward, and refers to people of any nation, whereas Kultur is delimiting, static, with a stress on national differences. The concept of civilization reflects, according to Elias, the self-assurance of established, settled and conquering

The Civilizing Process: a classic

77

nations that do not ask: what is our identity? Whereas Kultur mirrors the selfconsciousness of a nation (Germany) seeking to renew its boundaries. Kultur in the German case is a demarcating concept, one that reflects a national self-image. Taking the German case further, Elias maintains that the basic antithesis of Kultur and Zivilization developed as a polemic of the stratum of the German middle-class intelligentsia against the etiquette of the ruling courtly upper class. Unlike in France, the bourgeois group, including an intelligentsia, were excluded from the political life of the courtly nobility in the various principalities. So, Elias argues, when Kant talks in his Ideas on a Universal History from the Point of View of a Citizen of the World in 1784, the point of view he has in mind is that of his own group, the bourgeoisie. The courtly group were French speaking and ‘civilized’ on the French model. Hence, the distinction between Kultur and Zivilization as a contradistinction was one that arose within Germany. The distinction is between a courtly aristocracy with superficial manners and behaviour, as seen by the bourgeoisie, whose self-image is of true virtue. The opposition is epitomized in the German tradition by the distinction between people’s external ‘courtesy’ and their true virtue. The situation in the German states prior to the eighteenth century was that there was a weak bourgeoisie in small towns who were poor by French or English standards. So they had little money for literature and art. They spoke German, but the aristocrats spoke French, which then spread to the upper bourgeoisie. The German language was regarded as ugly and plebeian and it was good form to speak it with a smattering of French words. The middle-class intelligentsia (many of whom were civil servants and administrators) is thinly scattered over a large area in numerous local capitals, and so becomes rather individualized and separated from the aristocracy. With the notable exception of Goethe, this intelligentsia become ‘servers of princes’ who try to establish in the intellectual sphere a German unity which they do not possess or which does not seem realizable in the political sphere. Then, with growing prosperity, there arises a cultural flowering that produces Kant, the Sturm und Drang poets, Schiller, Goethe and others, in the 1780s, when the language began to be taken seriously and to emerge from its barbarous, ‘patois’ status. There is a small buying public of bourgeoisie for the artistic products of this group, and from this point onwards the German language becomes more flexible and richer. The characteristically German concepts of Kultur and Bildung (general education) have their origins here. This movement was no political one, but more of a cultural one. Prior to 1789 in Germany, the idea of political action was not expressed in the writings of representatives of this movement. There were, rather, only vague dreams of a unified Germany and of the natural life as opposed to the artificial, unnatural life of court society. (There was a similar movement within the French court.) Kultur against Zivilization always reflects a distinction between depth and superficiality. In Germany Kultur reflects primarily ‘the self-image of a middle class intellectual stratum’ (Elias 1939: 24). For the German intelligentsia, there was no large market for their works because the commercial bourgeoisie at this point was small. They also had no scope for political activity and those commercial concerns were not for them. So, their pride

78 The Civilizing Process: a classic and their self-image were founded on das rein Geistige, the purely spiritual, on books, scholarship, religion, art, philosophy, inner enrichment and intellectual formation (Bildung) generally. It was a bookish culture. In German cultural life there existed a stark contrast between economic and commercial life versus the spiritual sphere. This intelligentsia was part of a politically impotent German bourgeoisie, which was the ‘first bourgeois formation in Germany, developed an expressly bourgeois self-image, specifically middle-class ideas, and an arsenal of trenchant concepts directed against the courtly upper class’ (Elias 1939: 24–5, emphasis added). These concepts were directed mostly against the behaviour of the courtly upper class and only hesitantly against their political or social privileges. The concepts were pitted against ‘outward politeness’, ‘superficiality’, ‘insincerity’ and so on. Put another way, the struggle by the bourgeoisie against the nobility at this stage in German development was waged outside political life in the cultural realm. A further contrast with France, which comes to play an important role in Elias’s theory of the process of civilization, is that the French eighteenth-century intelligentsia, which includes the famous names of Diderot, Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists of the French Enlightenment, were from similar middle-class backgrounds to those of their German counterparts, but were assimilated a great deal more into courtly life. Whereas, with the exception of Goethe in small, poor Weimar, they were excluded in Germany from courtly aristocratic life. French courtly aristocratic manners and speech patterns therefore become diffused more widely into society, as they are adopted by other classes. Although the French aristocracy has great pride and the consciousness of class differences never leaves them, the walls surrounding them have more openings than in Germany. This is a consequence of the longer term development of Germany, compared with France. After the Middle Ages, there was a gradual diminishment of the territory of the German Reich: German territories were hemmed in on all sides, and strong pressure was exerted on almost all the external frontiers. Correspondingly, the struggles within Germany between the various social groups competing for limited opportunities and autonomy [Selbstbehauptung], and therefore the tendencies towards distinction and mutual exclusiveness, were generally more intense than in the expanding Western countries. … [It] was this extreme isolation of large parts of the nobility from the German middle class that stood in the way of the formation of a unified, model-setting, central society [‘Society’], which in other countries attained decisive importance at least as a stage on the way to nationhood, setting its stamp in certain phases on language, on the arts, on the manners, and on the structure of emotions. (Elias 1939: 20) The decisive consequence was that in Germany, compared with France, there was no central ‘good society’, or ‘high society’, that could set models for conduct and emotion management. As a consequence of the political exclusion of the

The Civilizing Process: a classic

79

bourgeoisie, there was a low degree of fusion between courtly-aristocratic behavioural models and values based on ‘intrinsic worth’ and the bourgeois ones based on achievement, compared with France (with England occupying a middle position in this regard). This had important repercussions for the development of German national character and language, where the middle-class models and values came to dominate.4 One consequence had decisive repercussions in the twentieth century. That is, the peculiarly German Kultur/Zivilization contrast, with all its oppositional character as a contrast of the genuine with the superficial. This opposition was originally expressed from the point of view of the excluded bourgeois contempt for the aristocracy but became gradually, as the bourgeoisie came into national ascendancy, a national contrast between Germany and France, seen from the German point of view. ‘Civilization’ and ‘civilized’ became unequivocally and pejoratively linked with French people, simply because in the experience of Germans, the majority of the French generally behaved and spoke in courtly modes, which the Germans found insincere and dishonest. This is because the longforgotten process of the fusion of middle-class and courtly manners that occurred in France had percolated to all or most groups. On the part of the Germans, this pejorative judgement of the French reflected the Germans’ direct experience of the French national character, so it seemed indubitable and to have the highest value. Thus the antithesis of Kultur/Zivilization, in the sense discussed here, became later on an indispensable part of the German self-image. There had long been German suspicion of the French because the French had recurrently invaded German territory over many years, but Elias makes a significant contribution towards supplementing the explanation of that suspicion in the twentieth century, when he writes: And so it came about that the German middle classes, with their very gradual rise to nationhood, increasingly perceived as the national character of their neighbour those modes of behaviour which they had first observed predominantly at their own courts. And, having either judged this behaviour second-rate or rejected it as incompatible with their own affect structure, so they also disapproved of it to a greater or lesser degree in their neighbours. (Elias 1939: 34) In the case of France, in contrast to Germany, all groups, including the aristocracy and bourgeois, spoke the same language from a very early stage of French history, something which facilitated, or at least did not hinder, the drawing of the bourgeois intelligentsia and other leading groups of the middle classes into court society. The enlargement of aristocratic society through assimilation in this way happened ‘without rupture as a direct continuation of the courtly aristocratic tradition of the seventeenth century’ (Elias 1939: 32, emphases added). In France, there were many more opportunities for the bourgeoisie to engage in political activity because they were not excluded from governmental posts. The class barriers here were lower and there was a great deal more social contact between the groups, so,

80 The Civilizing Process: a classic unlike the situation in Germany, the political resolution of the conflict between the aristocracy and the middle class could be reached sooner. In France it was therefore possible for a moderate opposition to exist within the courtly system. The concept of civilization has its origins in this reform movement. Elias cites Mirabeau as a critic of the superficialities of the French court, in a similar fashion to the way in which the German intelligentsia objected to this kind of behaviour. The difference was that Mirabeau was a middle-class person, within a court, acknowledging a standard, approving of it, living it, but expressing criticism of it from within a reform clique, internal to court society. Like Rousseau (who, being Swiss, was an outsider to the French court society as such), Mirabeau inverted the existing valuation of the French aristocracy that their behaviour and manners were superior to those of people in ‘primitive’ societies. Mirabeau said that everything the aristocrats held in high esteem was of no value. Homme civilisé and civilization express, for him, counter-concepts with which to criticize society, but entirely moderately, as a reformer. It is not a totally oppositional view of people and society, but is developed out of the courtly model. Rousseau, the outsider, is more radical in his social criticisms, but has no counter-concept. Elias argues that Rousseau was in fact less important for the French reform movement than might otherwise appear to be the case, but he was very important in Germany. The French radicals are within the courtly society and want to replace a ‘false’ civilization with a genuine one, whereas in Germany there is a politically neutral middle-class intelligentsia, very bookish, very learned, wanting to diverge totally from the aristocracy. Their stock-in-trade is the gebildeter Mensch, or educated man. Elias argues that the term ‘civilization’ was a reflection of a middle-class reform movement in France. It was associated, in particular, with the Physiocrats. As the long-term result of trade protectionism and good trade networks, Paris arises as the prosperous centre of French courtly life. The burgeoning of French economic life provides increasing possibilities for taxation by the kings. In addition, there was a section of the higher administration, ‘representatives of the single modern form of bureaucracy which the ancien régime had produced’ (Elias 1939: 36), which was not hereditary and in which one could not purchase office. (Elias describes these elements of the administration as ‘progressive’.) As cliques in the courts, representatives of these tendencies played a part in the reform movement of which the Physiocrats were a part. Their aims centred on protectionism among other things. Unlike the situation in Germany, the social base of the middle-class Physiocrats was court society, in which pleasing the King was the key. They argued that there are self-regulating economic laws and they did not want arbitrary intervention by rulers into their workings, because this would have irrational results. They wanted freedom of trade because selfregulation and the free play of economic forces creates benefits for all, rather than traditional regulation from above, from the local rulers. The social forces that must not be intervened in are part of an ordered process. ‘The birth pangs of the Industrial Revolution, which could no longer be understood as the result of government direction, taught people, and for the first time, to think of themselves

The Civilizing Process: a classic

81

and their social existence as a process’ (Elias 1939: 39).5 The term civilization in France is a reflection of these reform movements: ‘the idea of the homme civilisé led to a concept designating the manners and condition of existing society as a whole’ (Elias 1939: 38). It contains insights that have come from an oppositional movement of social criticism. The term ‘civilization’ was widely understood in France as part of this movement to bring about virtue and reason, that is a genuine civilization, adapted from and developed out of the aristocratic one. In France, there are diverse writers arguing in this way, all united through the medium of the ‘good society’ of the salons. Further meanings begin to accrue to the term: Civilization is not only a state, it is a process which must be taken further. That is the new element expressed in the term civilization. … [I]n the hands of the rising middle class, in the mouth of the reform movement, the idea of what is needed to make a society civilized was extended. The civilizing of the state, the constitution and education, and therefore the liberation of broader sections of the population from all that was still barbaric or irrational in existing conditions, whether it were the legal penalties or the class restrictions on the bourgeoisie or the barriers impeding a freer development of trade, this civilizing must follow the refinement of manners and the internal pacification of the country by the kings. (Elias 1939: 41–2) The idea of civilization, in none of the senses listed above, played a large part in the French Revolution of 1789 as a slogan. As the revolution becomes more moderate, however, it starts to form a rallying cry for territorial expansion and colonialism on the part of France. From that point on, Elias argues, European nations ‘came to consider the process of civilization as completed within their own societies; they came to see themselves as bearers of an existing or finished civilization to others, as standard-bearers of expanding civilization. Of the whole preceding process of civilization nothing remains in their consciousness except a vague residue. Its outcome was simply taken as an expression of their own higher gifts.’ It provided European peoples with a ‘consciousness of their own superiority’ (Elias 1939: 43). This served the colonial nations in particular as a justification for their rule, just as the ancestors of the concepts politesse and civilite served the courtly aristocracy as a justification of theirs. (See Mitzman (1987) on the ‘civilizing offensive’.) Elias concludes the first part of Volume I with the observation that the earlier phase of the civilizing process which led up to that juncture was one in which ‘the consciousness of the process scarcely existed and the concept of civilization did not exist at all’ (Elias 1939: 43). The remainder of the volume, including the celebrated analysis of the manners books relating to table manners, natural functions and so on is the place where Elias seeks to recover the forgotten social and psychological layers of experience that lie beneath the taken-for-granted Westerners’ consciousness of their innate superiority over less civilized peoples.

82 The Civilizing Process: a classic It is in this part of the book that the importance of the role of psychoanalysis is most obvious. Let us now look at how Elias undertakes this process of recovery.

The process of historical retrieval Elias has already reminded us at the beginning of Volume I that collective history has crystallized and resonates in concepts such as Kultur and Zivilization. The social process of their genesis may be long forgotten. One generation hands them on to another without being aware of the process as a whole, and the concepts live as long as this crystallization of past experiences and situations retains an existential value, a function in the actual being [Dasein] of society – that is, as long as succeeding generations can hear their own experiences in the meaning of the words. (Elias 1939: 8) The sequence of Elias’s presentation is that now he turns to ‘civilization’ (as shown in the earlier chapters to be a concept layered with particular meanings from the French experience, seen in a particular contrast in the German intellectuals and with some reference to England) to show that the kind of behaviour involved in it (tact, consideration for others, civility, politeness) represents a ‘specific transformation’ of behaviour. That is, such behaviour is not a timeless, general characteristic of humans nor the highest point of excellence humans can achieve, but is a specific kind of behaviour, developing under certain social conditions and presupposing a particular psychic make-up. In other words, he turns from a discussion of social origins to an analysis of psycho- and socio-genesis. Elias further argues that it is an advantage to focus on simple and elementary behaviour regarding universal human functions because the scope for individual variation within the social standard will be relatively small. It is here that we can observe a further dimension of his departure from Max Weber, in this case on the issue of the structured character of affective or traditional action. As Thomas (1985: 51) has pointed out, for Weber, following Goethe and Gundolf, those kinds of action represent ‘lower levels of conduct’ and as such are harder to explain and to predict. Hence, Weber’s decision to concentrate on rational action, the selection of means towards ends which expands as the process of rationalization proceeds. This makes it increasingly more amenable to sociological prediction and law-like explanation. In The Civilizing Process Elias is not only saying that that approach leaves out so much that is essentially human (i.e. controlled affect arising from human bonding); but also that through the social mechanism of increasing self-control, the ‘lower’ level of conduct and the level of ‘rational’ behaviour developed in relation to each other. In other words, even the minutiae of the ways in which human beings deal with natural functions show a structured movement over time. Returning specifically to the text, Elias continues that in the sixteenth century, the concept of civilization had not been born, but the specific stamp and function of

The Civilizing Process: a classic

83

modern usage may be seen in a work of Erasmus, De civilitate morum puerilium of 1530, a book that went to many editions. Erasmus was the codifier and the publicist for the standards of behaviour that came to be associated with the term. The book was a milestone in the way towards the transformation of the medieval chivalrous concept of civilité into the concept of civilization. Erasmus gave a sharpness and impetus to the long-established concept of civilitas, meeting a social need at the time that arose from changes in people’s lives and relations with each other. The book is about behaviour and what Erasmus terms ‘outward bodily propriety’ and contains simple thoughts delivered seriously, but with some mockery and irony. Since Erasmus faces both back towards the Middle Ages and towards the present era, the book contains attitudes that are recognizably ours. Elias repeats his point, however, that also ‘the treatise points to attitudes that we have lost, that some among us would perhaps call “barbaric” or “uncivilized” ’ (Elias 1939: 48). This is so even though the world beyond the text in many respects still resembles our own. The examples Elias gives from Erasmus include recommendations that there should be no snot on nostrils and that if you have not got a cloth the best thing to do with snot is to blow it out and tread it into the floor; do not grab food; and do not be afraid of farting and vomiting, because to hold back these functions is unhealthy. Reporting those points in summary does not convey the rhetorical force, in the context of the 1930s, of Elias quoting the learned and revered Renaissance scholar Erasmus to the effect that boys should ‘retain the wind by compressing the belly’; and advising that, ‘for it is not vomiting but holding the vomit in your throat that is foul’ (Elias 1939: 51). The lesson Elias formally draws from these quotations is that all these matters are dealt with by Erasmus matter-of-factly, with an ‘unconcerned frankness’, even though, for us, these matters overstep our threshold of delicacy. But the quotations themselves have already graphically made Elias’s point in another, more immediate, and emotionally powerful way, which, woven into his exposition, renders his proposition as a whole very hard to argue with. It is instructive to note that even at this point in Volume I (approximately onethird of the way through) Elias can still say, provisionally: ‘The question remains whether the change in behaviour, in the social process of the “civilization” of people, can be understood, at least in isolated phases and in its elementary features, with any degree of precision’ (Elias 1939: 52, emphasis added). Elias is still leading the reader here, and still not assuming that those changes in behaviour can be understood with precision. He is rehearsing the line of enquiry which has led him forward, but he is not yet revealing his conclusions. There is possibly also a rhetorical allusion to the Kultur/Zivilisation contrast of Alfred Weber (1920–1921): can I show you that the realm of Kultur, as well as the sphere of civilization, has sequential regularities after all? Wait and see. There are other advantages, one can surmise, for Elias to proceed in this way. By withholding these theoretical conclusions he does not risk a premature clash between them and the reader’s world-view or other one-sided conception of what constitutes ‘civilization’ they may hold. In a clash of viewpoints the positions

84 The Civilizing Process: a classic taken invariably become further entrenched. Rather, he takes the readers along, immerses them in his process of research, so as to bring them gradually to the point of accepting that the conclusions he eventually reaches are plausible. This process of immersion will also include challenging one to control for one’s own revulsion, embarrassment or shame – just as he had to. It is a way of working that forestalls readers from constructing too many psychological defences to protect their own deepest feelings and fundamental beliefs on the subject of what is or is not civilized behaviour. These are, in any case, going to be put into a wider perspective and thereby potentially challenged, by Elias’s theoretical conclusions. In the section ‘The Problem of the Change in Behaviour during the Renaissance’ in Volume I, Elias sees Erasmus’s previously mentioned text De civilitate morum puerilium of 1530 as representing a turning point. This treatise ‘comes at a time of social restructuring [Umgruppierung]’ (Elias 1939: 63). Like many writers before him, one thing Elias is partly trying to explain is what made the Renaissance such an exceptionally fertile period, scientifically and culturally, in so many countries in Europe. One of its most talented exemplars, Erasmus, stood at a time of transition, after the loosening of the medieval social hierarchy and before the stabilizing of the new modern one with absolutism. It is a period of increased social circulation which throws people of different origins together, and in which groups and individuals are socially ascending and falling. (This period in this respect structurally resembles the 1890s, 1920s or 1960s.) It provided secular, bourgeois intellectuals of Erasmus’s type (the humanists) with an opportunity to succeed in a bookish and cultured manner. He, and others like him, looked in two directions, back towards the medieval world, epitomized by the feudal knights in decline, and forward towards the modern world of the new aristocracies of the absolutist courts. Shifts in social relations between people are beginning to force the medieval precept of courtesy into the background. In this situation, Erasmus was able to observe society and codes of behaviour in a particularly many-sided, candid and detached fashion. He met the social need, acutely felt at the time, for guidance on the models of behaviour that the newly emerging leading elements of the upper classes were demanding of everyone. Behind Erasmus, then, are profound processes of socio-genetic and psychogenetic change, of which the documented behavioural changes, revealed by the manners books, are one symptom. That is a bald summary of Elias’s interpretation of Erasmus; what is intriguing, though, is how he presents this to us. This interpretation comes after a previous chapter which contains a detailed analysis of medieval table manners, focusing in particular on Tannhäuser’s Hofzucht. Briefly, this courtois standard is a series of ‘don’ts’, including not to spit over the table, scratch, put back chewed food into the communal bowl, clean your teeth with a knife or with the table cloth and so on, manners which today, says Elias, would be more associated with rural peasant strata. All of these behaviours, which are embarrassing or unattractive to us, were, however, bound up with the specific structure of affect management and embarrassment and shame thresholds of medieval society, and those practices are only to be regarded as ‘lacking civilization’ from the point of view of the sensibilities of our society.

The Civilizing Process: a classic

85

So, Elias has already introduced Erasmus some time earlier and gone through his prescriptions for behaviour to show how they are unselfconscious, thus indicating in general terms how far the various thresholds have advanced compared with those of our time. Having established that, he goes back to the Middle Ages to establish in a different way the structure of affects and corresponding manners subsisting there (as above) through presenting the extracts from medieval books on table manners. By showing and displaying original empirical materials this presentation supplements the simple statement that the thresholds then were lower. Elias thereby also establishes, experientially, the thresholds of shame, embarrassment and repugnance of one of the two eras – the medieval – that Erasmus straddles. He can assume that the reader, from a later stage, embraces (and thereby ‘knows’ and understands) the standards, codes and higher thresholds of the other one. Consideration of the behaviour of people in the sixteenth century, and of their code of behaviour, casts the observer back and forth between the impressions ‘That’s still utterly medieval’ and ‘That’s exactly the way we feel today’. And precisely this apparent contradiction clearly corresponds to reality. The people of this time have a double face. They stand on a bridge. Behaviour and the code of behaviour were in motion, but the movement was quite slow. (Elias 1939: 71) Methodologically speaking, as he makes clear in subsequent paragraphs, Elias is trying to establish here whether the behavioural changes observable are moving in a particular direction towards the standards of conduct and affect management characteristic of Western ‘civilization’, or whether we are observing just an accidental fluctuation. Putting the images of behaviour in a temporal series of extracts from the manners books is a way of trying to make a very slow, longer-term process visible by speeding up a segment of it through the manner of presentation itself. I think that the exposition is structured this way for another reason. It facilitates Elias making the point that whatever our evaluative judgements about it may be, we are all still implicated in the unfinished longer-term civilizing process, as attested by our reactions to what from the standpoint of present-day standards is medieval ‘coarseness’. The later stage that we inhabit is bound up with these historical preconditions. They are not just a historical oddity, or something to be dismissed as barbaric. To put the matter another way: instead of simply saying that Erasmus straddles two eras and leaving it at that, which he could just as easily have done, Elias introduces Erasmus with some general features, then says he is pivotal. Then he leaves Erasmus and goes back to the Middle Ages, absorbing the reader in the behavioural standards of that time through the images created from the empirical examples. He returns to Erasmus with the reader better equipped emotionally and not just intellectually, to understand how and why Erasmus looks two ways. Elias is moving backwards and forwards here between the affect structures of the medieval, Renaissance and absolutist periods and the one that was contemporary

86 The Civilizing Process: a classic at the time of writing The Civilizing Process, i.e. the 1930s. His ‘method’ is a way of getting the reader to experience, or perhaps to re-experience to a degree, the dominant behavioural codes of the different historical stages, from the unavoidable point of view of the current one. The Civilizing Process is thus an enquiry that is simultaneously: (1) scientific (trying to establish socio- and psychogenetic processes empirically in a detached manner); (2) replete with evaluative implications (because it questions ideological claims that ‘civilization’ is completed in the Western behavioural standard); and (3) individually challenging (as we have already seen, in a manner analogous to clinical psychoanalysis). These three levels are kept in a continuous, moving tension field throughout the book, with Elias never allowing the exposition to reduce to one or the other. This explains why The Civilizing Process is so memorable and what it is about it that can make it so emotionally demanding for many readers. The extracts from the manners books in the areas of everyday behaviour and for the consolidation phase (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) in particular, where the rules and rituals become increasingly elaborate, are laid out in a series of chapters to show, respectively, the behaviour expected of the upper class and wider bourgeois strata. They are also grouped in relation to the demonstration of the rising thresholds of, in sequence, embarrassment and repugnance (with some overlaps). In his Reflections on a Life (1994: 53–5) Elias gave the impression that he stumbled on the etiquette books (initially one by Courtin) by accident in the British Museum and gradually began to grasp their significance as a source of data when he was writing The Civilizing Process. But this observation has to be taken cum grano salis, because the idea that histories of manners and manners books could be used as a source of evidence for social structural developments had been raised in Frankfurt in the early 1930s. For example, Karl Mannheim, in a programmatic review of approaches to history writing, comments: Not that sociologists should not, and would not, pay attention to the humbler details of life, but if the earlier attempts at a Sittensgeschichte taught us a lesson, it is that an aggregation of remarkable details of daily life does not necessarily add up to more than an assortment of curiosa, unless each of the items is selected with a view to a structural scheme. (Mannheim 1933a: 52) In a similar vein, in Volume I of The Civilizing Process Elias comments on some of the surviving historical materials on the suppression of natural functions from social life: ‘What is usually lacking is the idea that information of this kind has more than curiosity value, so that it is seldom synthesised into a picture of the overall line of development. However, if one takes an overall view, a typical civilizing curve is again revealed’ (Elias 1939: 116). It thus seems highly likely that Elias knew exactly what he was looking for in the British Museum in 1935. Later in the Reflections interview, he does say that

The Civilizing Process: a classic

87

through his earlier work on The Court Society he had already been interested in manners, but he does not mention etiquette books in that connection. The possible utility of the etiquette books, as such, was a suggestion that he may have learned, if not from Mannheim, then from programmatic and other discussions that were taking place in the sociological circles of Frankfurt prompted by Mannheim. It is, of course, possible that in his comments quoted above, Mannheim was indebted to Elias, or again that they were both developing an idea that was generally ‘in the air’ at the time. Returning to the arrangement of the extracts from the manners books in the text of The Civilizing Process, Elias presents and discusses extracts relating to table manners (including utensils), speech patterns, eating meat, natural functions, nose-blowing, spitting and bedroom behaviour. The idea of two rising thresholds has already been mentioned in passing at the beginning of the earlier chapter on ‘The Problem of the Change in Behaviour during the Renaissance’, which is the chapter containing the analysis of the Janus-faced Erasmus. To repeat the point, that chapter has itself been preceded by the one on medieval manners, to show the standard that was the precondition of the one that consolidated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, via the pivotal figure of Erasmus in the Renaissance.

Accumulating explanatory levels Reading through the second part of Volume I of The Civilizing Process in which all these chapters are laid out is to experience a sequence of argument, evidence and accumulating explanatory levels that becomes denser and denser and more synoptic, as the forgotten process of civilization is successively recovered and brought to consciousness. References to internal pacification, networks of interdependency, balances of power, social constraint, self-restraint, differentiation, integration and so on, which are developed more systematically in Volume II, begin to accumulate, the meanings of which are heavily implicit, and not yet fully explicated. Reading the first volume, one becomes gradually aware that it is resonating with a gathering sense of deepening complexity and impending discovery. The study reaches a climax in Volume II, where, particularly in the chapters in Part 4, ‘Towards a Theory of Civilizing Processes’, Elias shows how the constraints of human bonding led, through the long drawn-out struggles between competing groups from the Middle Ages onwards, to the development of all-round self-restraint and the muting of drives, producing the kind of selfcontrolled, humane and considerate behaviour associated with being ‘civilized’, in the modern sense. It would not be too far-fetched to say that the experience of the individual reading the two volumes right through mirrors the whole ascending historical process which Elias is attempting to reconstruct. This is the import of Elias’s comments that the extracts from manners books are laid out by him in such way as to ‘serve to show development in an accelerated fashion. In a few pages we see how in the course of centuries the standard of human behaviour on the same occasion very gradually shifts in a specific direction’ (Elias 1939: x). In the section in Volume I where Elias comments on the arrangement of

88 The Civilizing Process: a classic extracts from the manners books on table manners specifically, there are further glosses: ‘The quotations have been assembled to illustrate a real process, a change in the behaviour of people’, and ‘We hear people from different periods speaking on roughly the same subject. In this way, the changes become more distinct than if we had described them in our own words’(Elias 1939: 85, emphasis added). The import of these remarks is that as we read through the extracts assembled in this way, we not only gain insight through this experience into our own feelings of shame and delicacy derived from the standards of our own society, but also of that experience as part of a wider social development. The decisive phase from the point of view of the consolidation of models of behaviour that are now regarded as ‘civilized’ is that of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By this time, the standard – including the manner of speech and rules for eating at table, natural functions, nose-blowing, spitting – has been consolidated by the European courtly upper classes and begun to be absorbed, with adaptations, by the rising bourgeoisie. Elias makes this general point in relation to the specific code of eating behaviour: ‘But the essential basis of what is required and what is forbidden in civilized society – the standard eating technique, the manner of using knife, fork spoon, plate, serviette, and other eating utensils – these remain in their essential features unchanged’ (Elias 1939: 89). By the nineteenth century, Elias argues, that phase of the process as a whole has been completed, but forgotten, and taken by (most) people at the time as an indubitable pinnacle of social achievement. At that point, people only want to accomplish this process for other nations; that is, to disseminate it and the standards it entails. On the basis of the empirical materials presented, Elias posits a ‘curve of civilization’, that is, a notable rise over time in the thresholds of embarrassment (shame) and repugnance, eating practices and rituals, providing a number of examples. On the repugnance threshold, Elias points out that over a long period of time from the late Middle Ages onwards, the way in which meat is served may be seen as having undergone a sequence of change. From the whole animal, or a whole bird with feathers, being carved at the table, to being carved on a side table; then, later, as specialists take over carving in the kitchen, the animal or bird disappears from view (the English custom of serving a joint of meat being a partial exception). This process corresponds to the upper classes gradually coming to regard carving as distasteful. Finally, much later, in the nineteenth century, what is served at the table has largely had its animal origins completely concealed. But the distasteful was removed behind the scenes of social life. Specialists take care of it in the shop or the kitchen. It will be seen again and again how characteristic of the whole process that we call civilization is this movement of segregation, this hiding ‘behind the scenes’ of what has become distasteful … the removal of carving to specialized enclaves behind the scenes is a typical civilization-curve. (Elias 1939: 103)

The Civilizing Process: a classic

89

The rises in the two thresholds may also be seen in the consolidation of eating rituals and in the code of behaviour associated with this basic activity. Elias places a special emphasis on pointing out how long ago our currently standard practice, involving knife, fork, spoon, plates, serviettes and so on, was more or less consolidated. All the elements were in place according to a manners book published in 1786 among the upper classes who set the standard, and the practices have continued until the present day, diffused to all groups, with one or two variations, such as different spoons for different courses (Elias 1939: 89ff.). He also draws attention to the related rule that one passes a knife to someone handle first, still taught to children today, is mentioned as good form in a manners book of Calviac from 1560. He also revels in telling us that the knife disappeared from the table in China many centuries ago and that many Chinese now regard the way in which Europeans eat as uncivilized. They say that Europeans are ‘barbarians’ because ‘they eat with swords’ (Elias 1939: 107). These little-known and startling facts are clearly designed to provoke the reader into reflecting upon the manners and standards of delicacy that they take for granted and not to regard those standards as the highest achievement of civilization, which they demonstrably are not. There is nothing intrinsically in table manners, Elias maintains, that is the self-evident result of people feeling that such rules embody a ‘natural’ feeling of delicacy. As with the modelling of speech patterns, Elias says, a limited circle (in this case, the courtly aristocracy) first develops certain standards, which are then gradually diffused to other groups (as the balance of power between strata becomes more even and they become more integrated) to produce a general standard. The reasons given for people adopting the standards and for distinguishing between what is good and bad behaviour (in table manners, for example, whether or not to take soup with one’s own spoon from the same dish as others) were always that they behave in the appropriate way because that is the way a nobleman should behave, not that it is hygienically correct to do so. This ‘rational’ explanation for the conduct is added later, once it has been consolidated, but it is not the motor of the change. The same motor of social distinction driving the civilizing curve is demonstrated in relation to extracts relating to natural functions, nose-blowing, spitting and bedroom behaviour. Conformity to these standards is psychologically underpinned by fears of arousing disagreeable associations such as shame that become attached to the contemplation of non-conformity. Summarizing the whole movement, Elias comments that socially appropriate behaviour (e.g. eating with a fork and not with the fingers, using a handkerchief, stifling farts, defecating alone) later becomes automatic for the individual – part of the habitus. He expresses the general mechanism through which this gradually occurs, specifically in relation to eating behaviour, which: became more and more an inner automatism, the imprint of society on the inner self, the superego, that forbade the individual to eat in any other way. … The social standard to which the individual was first made to conform from outside by external restraint is finally reproduced more or less smoothly

90 The Civilizing Process: a classic within him or her, through a self-restraint which operates to a certain degree even against his or her conscious wishes. (Elias 1939: 109, emphases added) Such prohibitions on conduct, which started their life long ago as markers of social rank or distinction, once consolidated into a social code and embodied in institutions, become part of a general standard of adult conduct up to which all children have to brought, through various methods of urging, punishment, command and encouragement. In other words, children of all strata are, two centuries or more later, moulded into conformity to the historically developed adult standard or code of behaviour, say, of using cutlery, handkerchiefs, toilets and so on by external pressure from adults. The control of impulses then becomes an automatic self-restraint, a ‘second nature’ (Elias 1939: 117, 141, 369) that operates even when one is alone. In the earlier, courtly phases, the restraint on drives and impulses was first imposed on people of lower rank. As social relations slowly became more levelled and less rigid,6 through the developing division of functions, people became more dependent upon each other and relatively more equal, so the socially superior came to feel shame even before their social inferiors. Only at this stage, comparatively late on, when large court-less, bourgeois classes (i.e. relatively independent classes that work, not dependent leisure classes: see Dunning 1967: 890) have become the ruling classes, does the family take on its present importance as the main drive moulding institution, taking over this function from the court. (Of course, the market, and to a lesser extent, the firm, also play their roles as agencies of socialization.) This is because in the subsequent stage the renunciation of pleasure-seeking drives is compelled less by individual persons directly, as now, and more by an impersonal compulsion coming from social interdependencies during the process of state formation. It is these pressures that make it appear that socially desirable behaviour is voluntarily produced by individuals themselves of their own free will and in the interests of their own health or human dignity.7 In other words, it is no longer possible to identify the social superiors compelling the behaviour because the compulsion has become automatic and internal. Elias profoundly sociologizes Freud when he points out (Elias 1939: 127, see also 159ff., 190, 408ff.) that only when this way of consolidating habits gains predominance among the middle classes does a conflict arise between the socially inadmissible impulses people have and the pattern of social demands anchored in the individual (expressed as the id, ego/super-ego model of the psyche). Hence, the ‘neuroses’ of which Freud spoke (and, one could add, the wider issue of the ‘discontents’ (Unbehagen) of civilization) take on a significance only in modern times, when human beings in state societies are increasingly split between private and public behaviour. (Though there were equivalents in earlier ages, connected with the levels of understanding and control of natural events.) The modern personality is one in which ego8 and super-ego functions have become increasingly differentiated from drives; that is, less accessible to them – something that is

The Civilizing Process: a classic

91

entirely the result of a social and historical process. Elias warns of the temptation of generalizing this type of individual into a human universal: Hence it is only with the formation of conscious functions less accessible to drives that the drive automatisms take on more and more that specific character which today is commonly diagnosed as ‘ahistoric’, as a human characteristic throughout the ages which is purely natural, and independent of the developmental condition of human societies. However, the human characteristic discovered by Freud in people of our own time and conceptualized by him as a strict division between unconscious and conscious mental functions, far from being part of humans’ unchanged nature is a result of a long civilizing process in the course of which the wall of forgetfulness separating libidinal drives and ‘consciousness’ or ‘reflection’ has become higher and more impermeable. (Elias 1939: 410) Put another way, the process of repression of drives that Freud showed takes place within the individual during the process of socialization is always in relation to the degree and patterning of self-control demanded in a given society and in relation to a socially specific behavioural standard. That standard has been the result of a far-reaching civilizing process. It is the super-ego that performs the function of impressing the behavioural codes upon the individual. The study of the manners books showed that there was a definite historical direction for the suppression, the ‘hiding away behind the scenes’, of everything that reminds humans of their animalistic origins. What protects people’s forgetting of this level within them is socially reinforced high thresholds of shame, embarrassment and repugnance in relation to certain natural functions and dealing with bodily violence and meat preparation and eating. One of the most important lessons Elias draws from the data and discussions in the last three chapters of Volume I, on ‘Changes in Attitudes Towards the Relations between Men and Women’, ‘On Changes in Aggressiveness (Angriffslust)’9 and ‘Scenes from the Life of a Knight’,10 is: do not judge medieval attitudes towards prostitutes, beggars, peasants or children or towards sexuality, violence or cruelty to animals, by standards derived from the affect structure and sensibilities of contemporary society. Do not condemn medieval people for what appears to us as their cruelty, coarseness or obscenity, nor on the other hand romanticize their world in a spirit of nostalgia; but allow always for the lower thresholds of shame, embarrassment and repugnance subsisting then, compared with our time. Only then, Elias strongly implies, will we be able to gain a balanced and realistic picture of that society and of ourselves. The structure of the social relations in which people at that time lived, the kind of integration and interdependence, did not ‘compel them to restrain their bodily functions before each other or to curb their aggressive impulses, to the same extent as in the following phase’ (Elias 1939: 180, emphasis added). It is a society in which ‘people gave way to drives and feelings incomparably more easily, quickly,

92 The Civilizing Process: a classic spontaneously and openly than today, in which the emotions were less restrained and, as a consequence, less evenly regulated and more liable to oscillate more violently between extremes’ (Elias 1939: 180). Even as late as Erasmus in his Colloquies of 1522, we find, in a book intended for young boys, the open depiction of a man seeking out a prostitute, which, following later sensibilities, could easily be condemned as undermining morals. Elias’s point is that because these matters have for us already been pushed behind the scenes into enclaves and embody contemporary standards of shame, we fail to see that at that time the behavioural distance between the standards of adults and children was smaller from the outset. Hence, it was a matter of course to talk candidly and openly to children in order to show them how they should and should not behave. Erasmus’s story in fact ends with the outcome of the man abandoning his sexual quest and convincing the prostitute to mend her ways. In Erasmus’s time, this is an exemplary moral outcome, to be seen in the context of adults simply not seeing the necessity of cloaking these matters in secrecy for the sake of children. This line of argument is pursued also in relation to the cruelty and outbursts of violence of knights, whose uninhibited expression of belligerence (Kampflust) was not confined and tamed by the sorts of rules and prohibitions to which we are accustomed. In an adumbration of a key theme of Volume II, Elias points out that in this society there is no central power, anchored in state organization, to compel people to exercise self-restraint to the all-round extent taken for granted in later phases. The moulding of affects that makes this all-round exercise of self-restraint possible only gradually develops after this time as people are increasingly ‘forced to live in peace with each other’ (Elias 1939: 169) over larger spatial areas and the decentralized feudal society is gradually transformed. Following his familiar tactic, Elias cites what is, for us, harrowing evidence of the affective outbursts of knights (torturing people, hacking off women’s breasts). But all the time he avoids moralizing about this, and keeps in focus his conviction that one must not impose standards of delicacy, shame or repugnance derived from our own society on to these actions. Rather, he says, ‘raping, pillage and murder were standard practice in the warrior society of this time. … Outbursts of cruelty did not exclude one from social life. They were not outlawed. The pleasure in killing and torturing others was great, and it was a socially permitted pleasure’ (Elias 1939: 163). Once one realizes that we are talking about a different, less evenly regulated, affect structure, much of what appears contradictory in medieval society can be understood. Because drives are vented more directly and freely, then people in that society, according to the evidence, will swing from joy to hatred and belligerence and back again, while at the same time to expressing intense piety, fear of Hell and penitence. Elias argues that such extreme expressions of emotion were integral to the structure of medieval society: The stronger affectivity of behaviour was to a certain degree socially necessary. People behaved in a socially useful way and took pleasure in doing so. And it was entirely in keeping with the lesser degree of social control (Regelung) and constraint (Bindung) of the life of drives that this joy in destruction

The Civilizing Process: a classic

93

could sometimes give way, through a sudden identification with the victim, and doubtless also as an expression of the fear and guilt produced by the permanent precariousnsess of this life, to extremes of pity. (Elias 1939: 164)

Socioanalysis, ‘redemption’ and progress The picture that emerges from the previous sections about the way in which Elias lays out the evidence and analysis in The Civilizing Process has important methodological implications, which are worth pursuing further. Elias’s ‘method’, if we can call it that, in this work at least, has an experiential dimension that obliges us to confront aspects of ourselves in the course of assessing empirical data about social and psychic development. Elias’s Preface to Volume I is actually dated September 1936 and was originally published as part of Volume I in 1937 (Mennell 1998: 18). In this Preface Elias refers to the precise title of the ‘Outline [Entwurf] of a Theory of Civilization’, which he included at the end of Volume II, which had not at that point (1936) been published. (Volume II was in fact published in 1939.) In the Preface he also summarizes the main points of that outline: the importance of the role of fears experienced as shame and delicacy, the formation of the super-ego and the unplanned character of the institutions that arise from the interweaving of the actions of individual people. This summary of the theory suggests that even if, by the time of writing the Preface to Volume I, he had not completely written the section in Volume II containing the Outline, he had a very good idea of what it was going to contain. These observations suggest, further, that Elias may well have worked out the theory of civilizing processes – at least in some general form – during or maybe even before, the writing of Volume I, which leads one to ponder the way in which he then chose to present it to readers. The theory is successively developed in relation to empirical evidence in a back-and-forth fashion throughout the first volume, and then drawn together in the Outline at the end of Volume II. Volume I contains, in various places, foreshadowings of the theory of civilizing processes through the use of key concepts such as interdependence, internal pacification and state formation, which figure in a more developed and connected form in the theory later on in the second volume. Could he not have stated his conclusions right away and let us take on trust that he had the empirical backing or stated them and simply added the data as an appendix? Why does he go about his task in what may seem to a contemporary reader to be a rather elaborate, convoluted and repetitive fashion? The Preface is a very important document from the point of view of understanding Elias’s rationale in constructing the study. He says there that he will not state his central ideas at the beginning because it is not possible to decide in a purely speculative way whether the changes in the psychic habitus observable in Western history took place in a particular sequence. One can infer that here he is talking about ideologically informed speculations about whether the civilized behaviour of Western peoples was the most advanced kind of conduct possible or whether it

94 The Civilizing Process: a classic was the worse form of life, and historical speculations designed to confirm those value judgements, found, for example, in certain historical works of Spengler and Toynbee (Goudsblom 1977b: 144). Elias continues: ‘Only a scrutiny of documents of historical experience [des geschichtlichen Erfahrungsmaterials] can show what is correct and what is incorrect in such theories’ (Elias 1939: x). Since his theory only took form gradually in a continuous, self-correcting, sequential process of discussion of the empirical materials presented later, of which the reader will obviously as yet have no knowledge, he says that he cannot simply summarize the structure and main ideas of the whole book at the beginning. One can surmise that his rationale is that it is important that readers grasp fully the empirical evidence and his interpretations for themselves. This is particularly important in this field, where experience and behaviour are so central to the findings and all of us are bound up in the subject matter in a uniquely unavoidable way. With a structure of this kind, he can seek to ensure that the manner in which he struggled to build the theory can be fully appreciated. It is reasonable to assume that he judged that if he laid bare, in an open fashion, the process of research, then this would strengthen the likelihood of people accepting the veracity of his conclusions. It was a way of drawing in the reader, instead of setting the author up as entirely authoritative. He writes of the central ideas in The Civilizing Process: They themselves take on a firmer form only gradually, in a continuous observation of historical facts and a constant checking and revision of what has been seen previously through what entered later into the field of observation. And thus the individual parts of this study, its structure and method, will probably be completely intelligible only when they are perceived in their entirety. (Elias 1939: x) Thus it is clear that The Civilizing Process was carefully crafted by Elias into the form in which it comes down to us. Its structure cannot be understood simply as data in Volume I and theory in Volume II, because the theory is revised and checked as he goes through the materials, before being drawn together at the end of Volume II. My argument is that Elias wants us to work through the empirical materials (including the extracts from the manners books) as well as his cumulative theory building, as a stage on the way towards grasping more fully the end-product – the theory of civilizing processes. To risk an imperfect analogy: it is as though, in The Civilizing Process, Elias, like a mathematician, wants to show the working that went into the solution of an equation. Writing in the Preface about the ‘Outline of a Theory of Civilization’ presented at the end of Volume II, he confirms that this section is a kind of theoretical summing up of ‘what previously emerged of itself direct from the study of the historical materials’ (Elias 1939: xii, translation slightly amended, emphasis added). The pattern emerges dynamically ‘of itself’ from the historical materials, i.e. the quotations from the manners books (in their thematic groupings and temporal series, interleaved with cumulative theoretical discussion) in Volume I. A form

The Civilizing Process: a classic

95

of sociological ‘realism’ is thereby presupposed. A couple of paragraphs later he apologizes for some of his unusual coinages such as embarrassment threshold, monopoly mechanism, sociogenesis and so on. There, quite consistently, he talks about the necessity of expressing in new words the new things ‘that have become visible [sichtbar … worden]’(Elias 1939: xv, emphasis added) from his study. Furthermore, the readers apprehending (experiencing) the historical materials are inevitably people whose psychic make-up and life experiences represent a later stage of development. They are thus able to perceive the psychic structures and behavioural codes corresponding to the earlier stages revealed by the process of research itself, as preconditions of their own habitus, as its historical points of departure. As Elias puts it, ‘The “civilization” which we are accustomed to regard as a possession that comes to us apparently ready-made … is a process or part of a process in which we are ourselves involved’ (Elias 1939: 52, emphasis added). Elias says that much of what Erasmus, as late as the sixteenth century, said about bodily propriety and table manners, oversteps our threshold of delicacy. He tellingly adds: ‘But precisely this is one of the problems to be considered here’ (Elias 1939: 51, emphasis added). It is clear from many places in his writings that Elias was hostile to sociological nominalism. His whole approach is broadly of a ‘realist’ character. His version of realism implies that a real historical bond of continuity may be shown to exist between past and present, in the areas he is researching, that makes possible the comprehension of the thresholds of shame, repugnance and embarrassment and the appreciation of their directional dynamic. Elias probably took for granted a broad conception of such a historical bond, which German philosophers of the early decades of the twentieth century talked about variously as the historical dialogue of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ in the study of human society and culture. This was a kind of relationship of a different order from that between investigator and investigated in the natural sciences.11 It was an idea, expressed abstractly and not in the idiom of empirical enquiry, that was also central to the schools of fundamental ontology and existential hermeneutics (Heidegger 1927; Mannheim 1922; Izenberg 1976: chs 2 and 4) that formed part of the anti-rationalist, ‘ontological turn’ in the philosophy of Elias’s youth (see Chapter 2, this volume). It was continued into contemporary sociology and social philosophy in the influential transcendental reflections of Hans-Georg Gadamer (1960, 1976a: ch. 5) on the ineliminable ‘fusion of horizons’ between present and past involved in historical documentary research, that arises out of the human historical condition (Bleicher 1980; Harrington 2001). In the form of general principles, all this is well known to contemporary sociologists. But long before the neo-Heideggerian discussions of today (important and useful though they are) about the pre-theoretical, human ‘being-in-the-world’ Elias had already transformed this abstract conception into one that lends itself to empirical research of a specific kind, an example of which we find in The Civilizing Process. When Elias refers to the ‘fundamental historicity [Geschichtlichkeit] of human beings’ (Elias 1939: 403) it is with an empirical inflection, suggesting a programme of enquiry. In the Conclusion to the second volume of The Civilizing

96 The Civilizing Process: a classic Process, as he starts a survey of his work in the two volumes from the point of view of the then present day (late 1930s), Elias affirms that ‘present events illuminate the understanding of the past, and immersion in the past illuminates the present’ (Elias 1939: 436).12 Here, the historical bond between present and past (to use the language of existential hermeneutics) has been demonstrated and exemplified in a concrete and empirical fashion. An important dimension of the enquiry is presenting the research materials and the process of investigation in such a way as to oblige the present-day reader to experience such an historical bond of continuity in relation to specific codes of behaviour and thresholds of shame, embarrassment and repugnance. Elias’s later comments on the structure of The Civilizing Process, in the Introduction13 to the German reprint edition in 1968 (Elias 1939: 449ff.), are also instructive. Here, thirty years later, he provided further recommendations for reading the two volumes, this time addressed to contemporary sociologists in the context of the proliferation of paradigms in the institutional expansion of the discipline at the time and the domination of Parsons (on these subjects, see Kilminster 1998: ch. 8). Since he wrote this piece to introduce the new German reprint, it is reasonable to assume that he was here singling out the key concepts, ideas and arguments, the themes to watch out for, before the reader embarks on the study. Like all introductions, it consists of the author providing, in the context of contemporary social and theoretical developments, their own pointers to what they consider important in the text to come. He is telling us how to read the book. These later observations by Elias confirm that he regarded Volume I as not only the presentation of findings, but also as a presentation of the process of discovery itself, and Volume II as the place where he makes explicit and detailed connections between those findings and a structural theory of society as a whole, which he then outlines at the end of Volume II. He writes of the first volume that it contains ‘an account of sociological investigations and findings, the best-known counterpart of which in the physical sciences is the experiment and its results’, which strikes me as an inappropriate analogy that unduly ‘scientizes’ Elias’s ‘method’ in the two volumes. This statement may be the result of Elias – writing in this Introduction for a professional, sociological audience – distancing himself from any connection with the hermeneutic tradition simply because it was philosophy. However, it is my view that important he had nevertheless transformed important principles about the historical existence of humans, established abstractly in that tradition, into a form amenable to sociological investigation a long time before. In the 1968 Introduction he also says that the second volume attempts to isolate ‘the factual core’ that lies beneath the ideological and evaluative meanings (which he refers to as ‘semimetaphysical’ and ‘prescientific’) of Kultur and Zivilisation. ‘This core consists primarily of the structural change in people toward an increased consolidation and differentiation of their affect controls, and therefore both of their experience (e.g. in the form of an advance in the threshold of shame and revulsion) and of their behaviour (e.g. in the differentiation of the implements used at table)’ (Elias 1939: 451, emphases added). Later (Elias 1977: 355) he referred to this factual core of long-term structural changes as the ‘deep infrastructure of history’.

The Civilizing Process: a classic

97

The partial empirical recovery of that of which people are unaware but which is still a potent social force is a feature of The Civilizing Process that also has some parallels with Karl Mannheim’s enterprise of socio-analysis (cited in Kettler et al. 1984: 82), even though Mannheim’s interest was more directly political and focused simply on what people might be unaware of in a given social-political situation in the present. From the mid-1930s onwards, both Mannheim and Elias worked with an implicit distinction between pathological and healthy states of man and society, judgements about which would be illuminated by ‘socio-analysis’, or some similar sociological-psychological enquiry, such as the one we find in The Civilizing Process. In other words, for both of them, in their different ways, the issue of what are healthy social arrangements for humans cannot be settled by ideological fiat or preference, but must be illuminated by comparative sociological enquiries into different societies, which enquiries then affect the issues of what is and what is not healthy or pathological (see ch. 3, Epilogue). With its central motif of recovery or retrieval, The Civilizing Process embodies a viewpoint on history that is broadly shared by other writers and traditions, notably those associated with forms of historicism and hermeneutics (Hamilton 1996: chs 1 and 3).14 It has echoes, for example, in Goethe’s Faust: ‘What from your fathers you received as heir/Acquire, if you would possess it!’ It is familiar to readers of Hegel, Dilthey, Collingwood, Gadamer and Oakeshott. It appears again, with a marked redemptive inflection, in Sartre, Benjamin and in strands of Western Marxism and critical theory (Kilminster 1979: 210–15; Rabinbach 1997: 30ff.) where research into the past is seen as a prelude to the restoration of meaning to history in an apocalyptic moment of collective restitution. In this tradition, knowledge is linked to the mysterious ‘triumph of translucent redemption’ (Rabinbach 1997: 32). The tradition surfaces today in Zygmunt Bauman’s flourish: ‘[L]ike the factory workers of the early nineteenth century [today’s] undifferentiated mass of sufferers cast out by the dissolving industrial society waits to be forged, through struggle, into a new power strong enough to focus upon itself the redemptive aspirations of our times’ (Bauman 1987: 8). While Elias’s sociological version is deeply respectful of our living bonds with the past, he eschews the esoteric and religious corollaries of redemptive historiography and politics. For Elias, history is not the realm of sin, destruction and evil, from which agonies human freedom will emerge. Nor, for him, is the activity of historical recovery a prelude to the redemption through political action (either of the right or the left) of past sufferings or political errors that may be revealed (cf. Sartre 1968: 98ff.; Rabinbach 1997: 30ff.). Nor is the accumulation of sociological knowledge of this kind to be in the service of a more generalized concept of redemption, in the manner of Benjamin (1973) or Adorno: ‘The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique’ (Adorno 1974: 247). Rabinbach (1997: 30–1) shows how the redemptive theme plays itself out in two strands within Judaism in the twentieth

98 The Civilizing Process: a classic century: (1) an anarchistic, religious current including, among others, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem and the Zionist Blau-Weiss movement; and (2) an anti-authoritarian Marxist version in the young Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Adorno and Walter Benjamin. In his intellectual and personal development Elias apparently came to reject both of these tendencies. Having been actively involved in Blau-Weiss in his youth (Hackeschmidt 1995, 1997, and Chapter 3, this volume) he distanced himself from it and eventually abandoned it, probably finally by the mid-1950s. Elias’s brief correspondence from London with Walter Benjamin (then in Paris) between April and June 1938 about Benjamin possibly reviewing The Civilizing Process (in Schöttker 1988; see also Korte 1988: 174–6) provides a cameo of Elias’s rejection of the second tendency, the anti-authoritarian Marxist version of Jewish Messianism. Elias and Benjamin found some common ground in a scepticism of methodology for its own sake and a commitment to trying to capture the structure of social transformations as a ‘dialectic’. But what was irreconcilable between them was Benjamin’s stubborn restatement of historical materialism as his starting point for understanding the social motor of psychological transformations, as against Elias’s clear statements that he was offering an alternative to it in The Civilizing Process. In his first letter to Benjamin, dated 17 April 1938, Elias wrote: ‘It seems to me that it is futile if one criticises or attacks psychoanalysis or any other ahistorical form of psychology from the Marxist standpoint on account of this or that detail. Before us stands the more constructive task of making comprehensible the system of historical transformations of the psyche’ (in Schöttker 1988).15 However much Elias shared the historical sensitivity of the would-be political redeemers of history, their dreams are subjected to the rigorous disciplines of realism, secularism and detachment. Having said that, however, it is possible to see in The Civilizing Process a secular form of redemption, or perhaps ‘redemption’ in a new key. In Elias’s deeply historical conception of human society there is a profound sense that people in the past (for example, medieval warrior knights) can be salvaged from present ideological devaluations and condemnations of their existence and behaviour, informed by present standards of conduct. In this example through research one retrieves from the past context the link between the habitus of knights and the conditions of their social existence. It then becomes clear how this phase formed a point of departure for later phases of social development of which we are the heirs. Thus the people of past societies can acquire a new significance. In the interplay between past and present, contemporary modes of understanding are revised, thus having, in a certain sense, ‘redemptive’ effects in the present. In Elias, this research affirms our common humanity, but without assuming that humans are equal in the sight of God, which was the theological assumption behind much of fundamental ontology and, more remotely, Marxism. Elias’s approach to the human condition is to argue that through research into people in other societies we can preserve their uniqueness and differentness, while recognizing them as people ‘with whom we are bound by an ultimate identification as human beings’ (Elias, 1983: 212, emphasis added). In its basic humanism, Elias’s historiography

The Civilizing Process: a classic

99

is not far away from a particular kind of twentieth-century secular, ‘redemptive’ historicism embodied in historical research, as described by Paul Hamilton: Theological notions of future transformation inspired by a newly significant and so prophetic past are … avoided. Historicism remains the secular record of changes in historiography, not the rainbow promising a new heaven and a new earth. Nevertheless, we can still ask why we attach value to acts of historical salvage. To call them progress is to subscribe to one version of the Enlightenment historiography. It may, after all, have been in the interests of progress that objects now salvaged were first allowed to sink into forgetfulness. (Hamilton 1996: 207)16 It is clear from the concluding sections of The Civilizing Process that Elias was aware of the complex issue of whether it could be said that progress had been achieved in human history. At the end of that book he says that only when the tensions between groups within nation-states have been mastered (with the corresponding softening of tensions within people) would there be even a chance of the suppression of impulses being restricted strictly to what is necessary for human co-existence. In later writings (Elias 1977, 1978a, 1987a) Elias addressed these questions from the point of view of relations between nation-states, which extends the scope of the problem of the fate of humankind to the global level and the timescale even further (see Kilminster 1998: ch. 6; Morgan 2001). In the future, he writes (Elias 1978a: 138–9) that human survival units may take the form of ‘amalgamations of several former nation-states’, adding in a footnote that ‘This problem [survival struggles of human groups] will remain until all former attackand-defence units have been effectively integrated into one – mankind’ (Elias 1978a: 181). But progress will not occur, if it does, in a straight line, as some Enlightenment rationalists would have it (Elias 1977: 359). This conception puts Elias close to a more or less liberal view of progress.17 In later writings Elias also raised the question of the contribution to ‘progress’ of non-rational, unplanned changes, giving the example of the long-term reduction of power differentials between groups and the improvement in the position of the less powerful over the past 200 years or so. Here too the paradox: today there is a movement towards the reduction of inequality between outsiders and the established, whether it be workers and entrepreneurs, the colonized and colonial powers, women and men. In human terms that is a progression. But at the same time this movement makes its own contribution to an increase in social and personal tensions and conflicts, which increase people’s suffering and raise doubts about the value of their striving for progress. (Elias 1977: 359)

100 The Civilizing Process: a classic In the final paragraph of Volume II of The Civilizing Process, Elias addresses the mighty question of how social and psychic discontents can be minimized and when the problem of individual fulfilment versus social obligation may be said to be truly solved. This condition is usually referred to, he says, ‘with big words such as “happiness” and “freedom” ’ (Elias 1939: 447). The rhetorical power of this paragraph lies in its ‘only then’ structure. Elias’s eloquence employs the same device that brings both Marx’s The Critique of the Gotha Programme and Freud’s The Future of an Illusion to an exultant conclusion. All three list as a crescendo what would need to be in place in society and the psyche for people to achieve a better, more fulfilled or democratic life for themselves, and each finishes on an evocative quotation. For Marx, it is only after the capitalist division of labour has been abolished and the ‘springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly’ that the ‘narrow horizon’ of bourgeois rights can be crossed and society can ‘inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!’ (Marx 1875: 320–1). For Freud, if all people could learn to withdraw their expectations of happiness in the afterlife, then they could achieve a life on this earth that is ‘tolerable for everyone and [a] civilization no longer oppressive to anyone’. Only then would they be able to say with their fellow unbelievers without regret that, ‘We will leave Heaven to the angels and the sparrows’ (Heine) (Freud 1927: 46). For Elias (1939: 447) not until all people have achieved an optimal and durable balance between their own desires and personal needs and the demands imposed by their unavoidable social existence with others can they say with justice that they are civilized. Until then, they can at best say, with Holbach, that ‘la civilisation … n’est pas encore terminée’. In these final cadences of Volume II of The Civilizing Process Elias returns to the starting point of the entire study – the ideological meanings of culture and civilization – which is put into a different perspective. Elias is at once less economistic than Marx and more sociological than Freud. The final section of The Civilizing Process is replete with statements and hints about the problem of evaluating whether the severity of social constraints and individual drive renunciation (in a given society at a specific stage of development: here Elias differs from Freud) are disproportionate to what is necessary for social functioning. Elias suggests that some rules of conduct that are built into our consciences ‘are remnants of the power and status aspirations of established groups and have no other function than that of reinforcing their power chances and their status superiority’ (Elias 1939: 446). He argues that only when the tensions between states and between groups within states have been mastered can there be a chance of the tensions within people becoming milder and less damaging to their chances of enjoyment. Only then would there be a chance for people’s affects and conduct with each other being restricted to what is necessary for human co-existence. Only then would it be possible for the social achievement of ‘a more durable balance, a better attunement, between the overall demands of people’s social existence on the one hand, and their personal needs and inclinations on the other’ (Elias 1939: 447, emphasis in original).

5

Involved detachment Knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias

‘Detachment’ and ‘involvement’ belong to the not very large group of specialized concepts referring to the whole human person. (Norbert Elias 1987a: xxxii)

Introduction: after Weber Max Weber famously declared that the vocation of sociology requires that sociologists should suspend certain values in the pursuit of the ideal of ‘valuefreedom’. This imperative, together with all the arguments and issues surrounding the relevance, ethics and politics of sociology that it prompted, have been rehearsed and discussed since Weber almost to the point of exhaustion. In the 1960s and 1970s the issue of ‘value-freedom’ shaded over into the Marx–Weber confrontation that, once Parsons had fallen out of favour, shaped a great deal of theoretical sociology in the anglophone world in that period (see Kilminster 1998: ch. 8). This confrontation was partly a theoretical one about alienation versus rationalization (Löwith 1982) and historical necessity versus cycles of charisma (Mommsen 1970, 1974). It was also a political and moral conflict about the relevance and proper task of sociology (see Kilminster 1979: 32–7). The orthodox interpretation of Weber had seen him essentially as a ‘value-free’ sociologist of modernization (Parsons 1937; Bendix 1966) and this was challenged in the 1960s and 1970s in the name of the revolutionary Marx (Zeitlin 1968). This polarization gave way in the late 1980s and 1990s, following the events leading up to and the final collapse of the Russian communist empire, to a wave of further interpretations of Weber (e.g. Hennis 1988; Scaff 1989). These drew out of Weber his ideas about the importance of a robust civic-political culture and the need for politicians of strength and integrity as a counterweight to modern individualism and subjectivism. However, in all these shifts of interpretation we can detect (transformed to be sure) the abiding Weberian issues of individual partisanship, political commitment and the possibility of an ethically neutral social science that have left important traces in contemporary sociology. All of the extensive debates in this area have remained in one way or another within an idiom (‘values’, ‘value-judgements’,

102

Knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias

‘value-freedom’) and parameters (politics, ethics and scientific authority) originally laid down by Weber. It is still possible to breathe life into this venerable subject through understanding how Elias used the all-pervasive Weberian model of science and values as a point of departure. As Alan Sica has astutely observed, Elias’s ‘independence of mind’ was such that unlike many others of his contemporaries, ‘Elias did not tremble in the shadow of Max Weber’ (Sica 1984: 50). Through a specific integration of sociology and Freud, carried out in The Civilizing Process, Elias created a theoretical framework of his own which diverged from that of Weber, from which Eliasian perspective, as we shall subsequently see, the issues as posed in Weber begin to look different. Weber’s celebrated stand on value-freedom cast a long shadow across sociology in Germany between the Wars (Lassman et al. 1989). It is obvious from reading Elias’s theory of involvement and detachment with Weber in mind that on the subject of science and values Weber’s observations must have provided a significant stimulus. In Elias’s first systematic exposition of the theory of involvement and detachment written in English in 1956 (in Elias 1987a) he, like Weber, stressed the importance of social scientists resisting the temptation to make value-judgements (‘heteronomous evaluations’ in Elias’s terminology). Rather, they should dedicate their efforts to describing the social world as it is, not how they believe it ought to be. More specifically, Elias was almost certainly affected, directly or indirectly, like many of his contemporaries, by the arguments of Weber’s two Vocation essays from the early 1920s, traces of the themes of which (transformed to be sure) may be found in Elias’s programmatic statements about the importance of developing a scientific sociology. There are, however, only a few explicit references to this particular aspect of Weber’s work in Elias’s published writings, although his original 1956 text does contain a number of allusive Weberian words and phrases in quotation marks, such as ‘evaluations’, ‘values’ and ‘value-free’. Other adumbrations of the problem area were also current in the 1920s in Germany. As Dunning (1986: 6–7) has rightly said, Elias embarked upon his sociological career at a specific conjuncture in the twentieth-century German Methodenstreit (that is, the ongoing dispute over the appropriate methods for the natural and social sciences: see Frisby 1976). On the intellectual plane this controversy stimulated debate on a number of the key problems and dualisms that Elias, like many others at the time, sought to solve, transcend or bypass in his work. In describing Elias’s theoretical strategy as bypassing various problems and dualisms thrown up in the German debates, I do not intend to imply that he thereby executed a sleight of hand with regard to the debates of his time. As I explained in Chapter 2, the bypassing arises in a principled fashion once Elias has come up with homines aperti formulations to counter the homo clausus asumptions underlying many of the discussions (see Elias 1978a: 125). These formulations, starting from the sociological assumption of interdependent people rather than congeries of individuals, then provided him with a framework in which the conventional problems and dualisms, which all embodied homo clausus assumptions, simply did not arise. The general issue of how to achieve ‘valid’

Knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias 103 knowledge of society while investigating it from within was also a very prominent issue in strands of phenomenology and existentialism in the 1920s (see Gadamer 1985). Other Kantian discussions about psychic distancing doubtless also played a part in establishing some of the problem areas (more on this later). I shall be arguing that Elias’s theory of involvement and detachment, as it relates to scientific activity,1 may be seen as having reformulated the Weberian model of values, value-freedom and scientific authority by transposing Weber’s principles on to another level. This transformation consisted in, among other things, correcting for the rationalistic and individualistic image of atomized people that Weber’s ideas contain. Elias infuses Weber’s ideas with a multi-levelled sociological model of human beings derived from theory and evidence provided in The Civilizing Process. Elias also renders historically specific the generalized model of selfautarkic humans implied in Weber’s observations on science and value-freedom. Elias suggests that only under specific societal conditions do people develop the capacity to manage their emotions in such a way, in their relations with others, as to make scientific detachment possible. Contemporary people’s far-reaching capacities for self-steering and self-regulation were taken for granted by Weber and in other basically rationalistic models of social scientific activity, such as that of Alfred Schutz (1932). Writers such as these took for granted the self-awareness, capacity for reflection and all-round conscience formation of modern people, including their own, the genesis of which has been long forgotten in the Western civilizing process. From this experience they then abstracted personality and behavioural features (rationality, reflection, self-control) and generalized these as representive of humans as such. Elias’s perspective on involvement and detachment assumes a view of people ‘in the round’ (a phrase he uses a number of times in his writings), as bodies, relatively more or less involved or detached in their activities as whole people, and the product of specific social transformations. The origins of and changes of meaning in the terms ‘involvement’ and ‘detachment’ outside their technical usage reveal a pertinent fact. These words had already accrued meanings to do with the ways in which people relate to each other before Elias adapted them for his own theory. A glance in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary reveals that the high-level, social-psychological meanings of the words ‘involvement’ and ‘detachment’ are of relatively recent provenance. In the seventeenth century there existed only concrete and specific meanings of the nouns (and the related verbs). All the concrete meanings of these words became supplemented in the eighteeenth and early nineteenth centuries with more abstract and social-psychological usages. For example, the verb ‘to detach’, in the military sense of to separate or to disengage, is first recorded as in use in the seventeenth century. But its social-psychological meaning, to disengage and separate oneself from social relations, dates from as recently as 1842, attesting perhaps to shift of habitus. The concrete, military word ‘detachment’, as a portion of an army sent on some special service, was in currency from the seventeenth century onwards. This meaning was supplemented by the abstract noun ‘detachment’, meaning standing aloof from objects or circumstances, first recorded in this sense in 1798.

104

Knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias

The verb ‘to involve’ also had a range of concrete meanings, in this case from the Middle Ages onwards, such as to envelop, to wind in a spiral form, to coil or wreath. Unlike the verb ‘to detach’, at least one of the seventeenth-century concrete meanings of the verb ‘to involve’ was recognizably of a social-relational character: that is, to entangle a person in difficulties or perplexity, to become enveloped in some condition or circumstance, or to embarrass. And its other related concrete meanings, to contain implicitly and to implicate someone in a crime, date from 1605 and 1655, respectively. But the abstract noun ‘involvement’, meaning the action or process of involving, or the fact of being so involved, in a social sense, was first recorded in that sense in 1706. In summary, the shifts in the meanings of both the central English terms chosen by Elias in his theory of involvement and detachment, as well as the related verbs, reflect a wider social process of ‘psychologization’ (Elias 1939: 397ff.) in modern times, even though the trajectories followed by each term in English were temporally slightly different. The abstract and more impersonal usages of detachment came relatively later, lagging behind comparable opposite accretions of meaning to the word ‘involvement’. Whether Elias was explicitly aware of these etymologies is not known. The relatively recent accretion of social and psychological meanings to the word ‘detachment’, coming a great deal later than the word ‘involvement’, could be a significant indicator of the trickling down into public life of an adapted form of the self-monitoring and self-aware comportment of the courtier. This would indicate a shift in the social balance of involvement and detachment as a whole occurring in the nineteenth century whereby, in an increasingly interdependent, differentiated and integrated society, there is a high survival value attaching to behaviour that comes closer to the detachment pole. What is clear, though, is that by 1956 when he wrote his ‘Involvement and Detachment’ essay, where he first systematically developed this pair as concepts, he had found ready-to-hand in English terms that had already accrued general, abstract meanings that referred to different ways in which people relate to each other. Elias says (Elias 1987a: 38, footnote 1) that his choice of the terms ‘involvement’ and ‘detachment’, at the expense of perhaps more familiar terms such as ‘subject[ive]’ and ‘object[ive]’, was made deliberately to avoid the associations contained in those terms of psychological and social attributes being separate entities. This was precisely an individualistic and dualistic assumption he wanted to avoid. One could add that the two terms chosen were probably the closest available, when placed at either end of a continuum, that could convey the manifold ways in which people relate to each other as whole people, a principle basic to Elias’s sociological work.

From distance to detachment: Mannheim, Kris, Schutz and Elias It is only in the twentieth century that we find the first explicit pairings of the terms ‘involvement’ and ‘detachment’ used as technical terms defining the poles of a social-psychological continuum. These pairings occur in certain writings from

Knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias 105 the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s by Karl Mannheim, Ernst Kris and Norbert Elias. As far as I know there was no contact between Ernst Kris and either of the other two, but an important part of the work of all three converged on a psychoanalytically informed treatment of the issue of psychic distancing. The work of all three on this subject was able to draw on the prior psychologization of the words in everyday speech. All three also took for granted a psychoanalytic conception of human beings as possessing a psychic structure of emotional self-control. This assumption is explicitly deployed in different ways in Kris and Elias as a counterbalance to the rationalistic model of people found in many philosophical models of people’s capacity for psychic distancing. In addition, Elias, in contrast to the more individualistic approach of Kris, insists on the interdependence of the psychological and social properties of humans. Elias’s understanding of the relationship between the terms as indicating a multi-levelled tension balance of psychic functions represents the core of his innovation (more on this later). In the case of Mannheim, even though his writings reveal that he understood Freud very well, there is some ambivalence surrounding the importance of people’s internal management of their emotions for understanding ‘rational’ action, including that of distancing. Hence, there is an inconsistency in his acknowledgement of the centrality for sociology of a multi-levelled model of humans which acknowledges that human beings are a type of animal. We find an oscillation between using or advocating a depth-psychological model of human beings (for example, in Ideology and Utopia and some of his essays on social psychology and group analysis from the late1930s (in Mannheim 1969: Parts 3 and 4)) and a more rationalistic (Weberian) one in many other places (e.g. Mannheim 1940, 1957). He seems to stress one or other side of this contrast, depending on the political, strategic or tactical point he is making. However, the general drift of his theory of distanciation in human relations, as well as his orientation generally, is more towards a rationalistic view of people, more towards Weber (see Chapter 3, this volume). In Mannheim’s programmatic essays on the sociology of culture, written in the early 1930s during his Frankfurt period prior to his exile in 1933, there occurs one of the early explicit pairings of the two concepts of involvement and detachment. It comes in the context of clearing the decks of false dualisms which might cloud a clear understanding of the specific social situation of the intelligentsia. Mannheim exposes sociological nominalism and realism as a false polarization, each side being, he says, as incomprehensible and doctrinaire as the other. He accepts that the nominalists’ aim is to understand the behaviour of individuals, but opposes their view that individuals can be studied as separate from their participation in overlapping groups. Then comes: ‘What makes a single being sociologically relevant is not his comparative detachment from society, but his multiple involvement’ (Mannheim 1933b: 110). In the context, Mannheim is juxtaposing the terms analytically to oppose an individualistic view of people as detached from society with the argument that what makes individuality possible is people’s multiple connections with others. He continues: ‘The process of individuation takes place in the very process in which the person becomes identified with

106

Knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias

overlapping and conflicting groups’ (Mannheim 1933b: 110). Detachment here is being used loosely to refer to an erroneous conception of isolated individuals and involvement means something like connectedness to networks of people or social institutions. Mannheim concludes that the situation of the intelligentsia is one where their multiple affiliations lead to ‘ambivalent motivations’. Detached intellectuals may not be committed to any particular party, he says, but ‘this detachment … is not absolute’ (Mannheim 1933b: 157). For Mannheim, the capacity of people to detach themselves from groups is bound up with social distance. He saw the latter as an entirely social phenomenon, produced by people themselves in their social relations (Mannheim 1933c: 207). He traced the effects of the longer term process of social democratization, i.e. the relative levelling (though by no means the total disappearance) of social hierarchies in the modern period, on social and psychic distanciation.2 Mannheim had a clear conception that social group conflicts in particular will be mirrored in the internal psychic make-up of people. Vertical distance, for Mannheim, is the principle by which hierarchically organized groups maintain their power. This principle becomes an organic part of people’s thinking, something Mannheim calls a form of ‘psychic distanciation’ (Mannheim 1933c: 210). It is also reinforced by standards of conduct, patterns of culture and language use, all of which function to keep the requisite social distance between the groups in place. A reduction in the vertical distance between social strata, brought about by the growing complexity of the social and economic process, brings about a ‘de-distanciation’ (Mannheim 1933c: 210). As groups of ‘outsiders’3 (Mannheim 1933c: 215) begin to make their presence felt in political participation, this social democratization process will manifest itself in language, customs, behaviour and ways of thinking generally. For Mannheim, in the social field genetic and processual thinking, as opposed to thinking in terms of static, hierarchically ordered models, is congruent with a more socially democratized society (Mannheim 1933c: 181–2, 217ff.). In Mannheim’s observations about de-distanciation arising out of the increasing political participation of outsiders in the state (a process which disturbs the takenfor-grantedness of hierarchical, vertical social distance) there is a rudimentary foreshadowing of Elias’s later theories of established/outsider relations and Wouters’s theory of informalization. Or at least these problem areas were laid out by Mannheim in such a way that they could be used as points of inspiration for further reflection and research. In Mannheim, however, the phenomenon of dedistanciation is explained largely by positing a simple contrast between traditional and modern society, de-distanciation being said to result from increasing social and economic complexity (Mannheim 1933c: 210). This particular theory of Mannheim’s is rather static (paradoxically, in view of his remarks about static hierarchical ordering versus genetic thinking). It lacks the dynamic sociological concepts of social differentiation and integration and the corresponding changing internal balance of psychic functions, which Elias’s later theories of civilizing processes and established/outsider relations and Wouters’s theory of informalization incorporated.

Knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias 107 Recalling discussions with Mannheim in the late 1930s in London, Peter Laslett said of Mannheim that: ‘He seemed to me to have an instinctive knowledge of how the psyche fitted into the collectivity, and how the collectivity could be, must be, descried in the individual psyche’ (Laslett 1979: 226). This insight is clearly something that he shared, as an insight, with Elias. In contrast to Elias, despite odd formulations of the issue of how ‘external’ society becomes inscribed into the ‘internal’ world of the individual (probably derived from Freud) Mannheim largely developed the principle within a Weberian framework and in relation to political issues (see Chapter 3). It is one thing to understand, as a sociological proposition, that the collectivity is in principle inscribed in the psyche in complex ways (many others had seen this by the late 1930s) but quite another to develop a testable theory of the relation, as Elias did. Furthermore, he did so through a specific and systematic integration of sociological and Freudian ideas, backed up with empirical evidence (Blomert 1991: ch. 4). It is here, in the character of his synthesis and its successive elaboration in relation to empirical materials, that the lasting contribution of Elias lies.4 In summary: Elias was able to take the Mannheimian problem of dedistanciation5 a stage further by showing: (1) the psychological mechanism of fear of social degredation that underpins both fear of others’ gestures of superiority and of lapsing into inferiority oneself (see Kuzmics 1991; Wouters 1998); and (2) how the fantasy content of established images of outsiders, as well as the latter’s internalized images of themselves, rises or falls according to the relative steepness of the power gradient of the relationship between the two groups in given cases and, hence, the stage of development of the relationship between them (see Elias 1976; Mennell 1998: 138). We can see here once again how, unlike Mannheim, Elias maintained a continuous commitment to a conception of social development in all his work. Another writer in the 1930s and 1940s who nibbled away at what today we can see were similar problems to those confronting Elias in this area was the psychoanalyst Ernst Kris. It is not known whether Elias had read Kris, nor whether he had talked or corresponded with him. (While Elias was living in London before the Second World War, Kris gave a paper at the Warburg Institute in 1937 and a lecture series at the London Institute of Psychoanalysis in the autumn of 1938 (Kris [1936]1974: 342).) There seems to have been a parallel discovery or a convergence of problems and concerns that produced different solutions. In his essay ‘Aesthetic Ambiguity’ (1948) Kris developed a theory of aesthetic experience partly in a dialogue with the now little-read English philosopher Edward Bullough’s (1912) concept of distance in the field of aesthetics.6 Bullough argued, following Kant, that for aesthetic appreciation to take place there must be a shift in ‘psychic distance’. The aesthetic experience is at its optimum if the person experiencing the work of art avoids either of two poles: either extreme identification with characters, themes or symbols in the work, or a total distancing that transforms the experience from an aesthetic one to a pragmatic or intellectualistic one. Bullough developed a continuum between the two poles, with shifts in distance being seen as matters of degree.

108

Knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias

Kris argued that Bullough was right about aesthetic experience but that his analysis would be more complete with the integration of Freudian ideas which show the internal mechanisms of the psyche that make those aesthetic experiences, in their various gradations, possible. Kris maintained that central to artistic creation is a form of controlled psychic regression, involving a ‘relaxation … of ego-functions’ (Kris 1948: 253). On the part of painters and other artists, this form of regression was ‘purposive and controlled’. Too much regression produces unintelligible symbols and at the other extreme of control the artistic result is cold, mechanical and uninspired. This theory of psychic levels represents a Freudian critique of Kantian rationalism in the aesthetic field. Its structure parallels Elias’s ‘sociologized’ Freudian reformulation of Weber’s Kantian rationalism in the field of social science (Elias 1939: 412–15). In the course of commenting on Bullough’s continuum, Kris actually paired the terms involvement and detachment as opposites at either end of a continuum, in this case one that embraced the crucial idea of individual emotional selfregulation: The response is not aesthetic at all unless it also comprises a shift in psychic distance, that is, fluctuation in the degree of involvement in action. … The aesthetic illusion requires, as was emphasized by Kant, a detachment from the workings of the practical reason. In the drama and the novel failure to attain such detachment is manifested in that extreme of identification with the characters. … In poetry, the Kantian emphasis on detachment can be expressed by Coleridge’s formula of ‘willing suspension of disbelief’. (Kris 1948: 256) In his late work on Mozart (Elias 1993: 56–63) Elias wrote, in a way not incompatible with Kris’s analysis of the importance of controlled regression in artistic creation, about ‘de-privatized fantasies’ and a ‘controlling element of the personality’ that checks the ‘libidinal fantasy-stream’ of the artist. Elias also pointed out that where this stream is relatively unchecked the resulting artistic forms can appear dislocated and disconnected, as seen in the drawings of schizophrenics (see also Kris 1945: 60). Kris had made a similar point in his classic essay ‘Comments on Spontaneous Artistic Creations by Psychotics’ of 1936: The representational creations of psychotics … follow the laws of the primary process, the ‘language’ of the id. … In the dream, as in spontaneous productions of psychotics, the ego participates only to a small degree. … In the [non-psychotic] work of art, as in the dream, unconscious contents are alive; here too, evidences of the primary process are conspicuous, but the ego maintains its control over them, elaborates them in its own right, and sees to it that the distortion does not go too far. (Kris 1936: 116; see also Kris 1945)

Knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias 109 Kris not only argued that a relaxation of ego functions that is purposive and controlled is important in artistic creation and inspiration, but he also used the expression ‘regression in the service of the ego’ in a more general sense (cited by De Swaan 1990: 164). There is a parallel between both concepts and Elias’s idea of ‘an enjoyable and controlled de-controlling of emotions’ (in Elias and Dunning 1986: 44) achieved in public spectator sports. Cas Wouters (1977, 1986, 1987, 1998) adopted the latter concept which Elias had used in that fairly restricted sense and took it up to the societal level, conceptualizing it as informalization. This concept captured the greater demands of self-control that were placed on people by the increasingly lenient and loose codes of behaviour that developed during the 1960s and 1970s as traditional taboos and constraints were relaxed (see Mennell 1998: 242). Turning now to another group of precursors, phenomenologists generally, and Alfred Schutz in particular, wrote extensively on the subject of the distance from values and prejudices required for effective social science to be possible. Their ideas are also of some importance for our understanding of the problem constellation out of which Elias’s theory of involvement and detachment emerged. Among other things, Schutz (as well as Max Weber and others) contributed to establishing an important issue in the culture of German-speaking sociologists and social philosophers between the Wars. The issue was: how is it possible to develop an objective science of society when the investigators are inextricably bound up with the subject matter, about which they have strong opinions, sometimes informed by intense value commitments? In the case of Schutz (1932), his solution to the problem was bound up with his social-philosophical conception of the transcendental features of all interaction in the Lebenswelt (see Kilminster 1998: 64ff.). He formulated as a continuum the greater or lesser degrees of closeness or impersonality implicated in people’s different attitudes towards others whom they define as associates, contemporaries, predecessors and successors. He argued that these attitudes are constitutive of social relations of ‘various degrees of intimacy and anonymity’ (Schutz 1940: 181, emphasis in original), implying a gradation of psychic distance. Schutz insisted that the ‘subjective meaning contexts’ of the social world can only be adequately comprehended if the sociologist uses ideal-types, which he describes as ‘objectivating and anonymizing constructions’ (Schutz 1932: 223). Schutz believed that the world of sociology in which such research was to be carried out was one finite province of meaning among many, an enclave within the paramount reality of the Lebenswelt. Once within such a finite province of meaning, people adopt its cognitive style and so bestow meaning and reality upon it. The key issue is formulated by Schutz in a characteristically Kantian-transcendental fashion: ‘How are sciences of subjective meaning-context possible?’ (Schutz 1932: 223, italics in original). Schutz’s solution to the problem was that social scientists must, while investigating society, ‘bracket out’ the ‘natural attitude’ (which includes values) that they possess in common with everyone else, thereby distancing themselves in a disciplined fashion from their own status and position. For Schutz, this is a

110

Knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias

shift of point of view in which the observer is no longer concerned with his or her own self, but is freed from a constant orientation to his or her own problems in favour of investigating the social world in general. The investigator does not leave the social world (impossible) but simply switches focus. As Berger and Kellner, following Schutz, subsequently characterized the starting point of the sociologist’s enquiries: ‘I now establish a greater kind of distance from the situation within my own mind’(1981: 31–2, emphasis in original). The abiding rationalism of this kind of approach, reinforced massively by the phenomenologists’ stringent methodological requirement of ‘bracketing’ out their own status, is evident. There is no acknowledgement here, nor in Schutz, of the inner struggles of emotion management on the part of the investigator that are bound up with achieving such a mental distance; nor how the extent of the person’s continuing capacity to do this in the institutional contexts of science depends upon the level of fear generated in wider social processes and tensions.7 Nor is there any conception of the pleasure and excitement that scientists may derive from the pursuit of scientific values, goals and practices particularly, as Elias stressed a number of times, when they make, or hope to make, discoveries. (I will return to this issue subsequently.) In many sociological discussions of suspending values and of value-freedom as a scientific ideal, distance and detachment are used interchangeably, although, strictly speaking, the two words contain different inflections, both as concepts and in everyday speech. As the quotations from Berger and Kellner make clear, in the context of discussions of these methodological issues (particularly by other social phenomenologists and those influenced by them, e.g. Giddens (1976) with his concept of the ‘double hermeneutic’) the word ‘distance’ refers to acts of consciousness, with the maintenance of the inner emotional balance of the individual, of which they are an expression, placed firmly in brackets. Furthermore, since the seventeenth century the word ‘distance’ has also accrued the negative and pejorative meanings of remoteness and excessive reserve (Shorter Oxford Dictionary), connotations that compromise its exclusive use in this area (Goffman’s concept of ‘role distance’ suffers somewhat in this respect); whereas the word ‘detachment’ in everyday speech has historically (prior to Elias) already developed the meaning of disengaging and separating oneself from social relations. Even the seemingly negative meaning of aloofness that is sometimes carried by the word detachment refers to aloofness from circumstances, without negative connotations. In other words, since detachment was a word that already carried associations of individuals disengaging as whole selves or as persons from social relations in a relatively neutral way, this was probably why Elias favoured it in his theory of the involvement and detachment balance. (How far his choice of the term was made with an explicit awareness of these congruencies is not known.) Turning to Max Weber’s renowned and much discussed theory of values and value freedom, Scott (1995) and Harrington (2000) have recently provided illuminating reinterpretations that have refocused the complex accumulated debates in suggestive ways. Scott maintains that Weber was not literally describing ‘value-freedom’ but rather advocated a particular orientation – the ‘ethic of

Knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias 111 responsibility’ – towards values. This would take the form of an open-mindedness on behalf of the scientist, rather than strict ‘value-freedom’. In other words, Weber was claiming for scientists the freedom from having to make value-judgements as part of a professional strategy to preserve the authority and legitimacy of the specialist knowledge produced by them. As Harrington (2000: 89) puts it: ‘When our vocation is for science, we become partisan, as it were, not to be partisan: we take a stand not to take a stand.’ In other words, for Weber, what should concern researchers is not whether they approve or disapprove of the objects of their researches, but simply the desire to grasp the particular aspect of society under investigation as nearly as possible as it is. As Weber said: ‘When the normatively valid is the object of empirical investigation, its normative validity is disregarded. Its “existence” and not its “validity” is what concerns the investigator’ (cited by Harrington 2000: 89). The authority of the social scientific specialist who endeavours to work in this way must be secured and defended by the status group of academics as part of a power base before any intervention in public debate is possible. Unlike their colleagues in the natural sciences, the social scientists’ ‘grasp of this tenuous source of power is weak’ (Scott 1995: 79). On the individual level, this strategy faces the social scientist with the challenge of both working in an inherently weak position in academic and public life while struggling to muster the courage to face up to ‘facts which may be uncomfortable and inconvenient’ (Scott 1995: 82) and describing as objectively as possible social events and processes of which he or she may approve or disapprove. Weber’s theory of values and evaluation cast a long shadow over sociology in Germany in the 1920s and its powerful legacy confronted Mannheim and Elias, among many others. In an early manuscript (1925a), Mannheim eloquently captured the sociological task in this field after Weber. Since Mannheim and Elias had just got to know each other in Heidelberg at the time that Mannheim was composing this essay, it may have played a very direct part in sowing some of the seeds that later flowered in Elias’s theory of involvement and detachment. Value-freedom is possible in sociology and social knowledge in the sense that one ought not to praise or blame phenomena to be described, or, in other words, that one ought to refrain from any valuation. But at a much deeper level, valuation cannot be excluded; namely, at the level of the perspectivity that has entered into the formation of concepts. We believe that questions for the discussion concerning value-freedom must be reformulated along these lines, and that the last word on this is far from having been spoken (cf. Max Weber). (Mannheim 1925a: 247) It will be recalled that my argument in Chapter 3 was that it was Mannheim who first focused Elias’s mind down certain tracks as he began to embrace sociology from philosophy. Here we can see one of them in the area of evaluation. Mannheim’s observations (above) were already a distillation of discussion that

112

Knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias

was accumulating at that time, from which he pointed one way forward, from a sociological point of view, beyond Weber. Mannheim had also already begun to explore programmatically the epistemological implications of perspectivism (or relationism as he subsequently called it) for the problem of values, social standpoints and evaluating (see Chapter 2, this volume). In the passage above there are also adumbrations of some later concerns discussed by Elias in connection with involvement and detachment and related matters: the problem of social blaming (Elias 1983: 7, 1987a: 7; Benthem van den Bergh 1986); the ineliminability of perspectives due to people being bound up in what they are studying (Elias 1978a: 126–8); and the issue of different kinds of values being present in scientific and everyday activities (Elias 1987a: 6). Like many other social scientists outside Marxist circles in Weimar Germany in the 1930s, Elias probably adopted the Weberian position on valuefreedom (or some version of it) as a set of working principles for scientific work and a guide to thinking and acting, which then informed his academic researches in his Heidelberg and Frankfurt phases. Indeed, it was partly this orientation which set Mannheim’s sociology department in Frankfurt between 1930 and 1933 apart from the subsequently better known ‘Frankfurt School’ of Adorno and Horkheimer (Mennell 1998: 15). In a Marxian manner they emphatically rejected ‘value-freedom’ in any form because they saw it as part of a positivistic ideology in social science that excluded partisanship on behalf of the underprivileged (Kilminster 1979: 195–201). Then, later in the 1950s, when Elias became a full-time academic for the first time, he returned to the question of objectivity in social science enquiries, in the sense that at that time he first articulated systematically in writing a perspective on these issues that he had developed over many years.8 The first systematic statement of the theory of involvement and detachment (Elias 1956) in effect reformulated the strict Weberian model of value-freedom in the light of the findings of the Civilizing Process, further psychoanalytic ideas and Elias’s teaching experience, partand full-time, in British further and higher education institutions, including in sociology departments. In a nutshell, Elias may be seen as having transposed Weber’s generalizations on to another level informed by the basic idea that people’s purposive rational conduct and capacity to exercise conscious distance from values presupposed that the continuous and more all-round self-control of affects was highly developed, taken for granted and continuously socially reproduced. More specifically, that the pursuit of science as part of the process Weber identified as rationalization was made possible in state societies by a personality in which the super-ego was highly developed. In reformulating the Weberian (and implicitly the relevant Kantian and phenomenological) ideas in this way, the problem of distance was transmuted into the problem of detachment.9 This represented a shift from seeing the scientific challenge for the individual in terms of voluntaristic acts of consciousness to regarding it as bound up with the ways in which people have to control their internal psychic functions in their relations with others. As Elias

Knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias 113 put it: ‘Basically the two concepts refer to different ways in which human beings regulate themselves’(Elias 1987a: xxxii). The capacity for detachment is bound up with the ways in which the investigator is bonded to others (affectively, politically and economically, simultaneously, in various shifting combinations (Elias 1978a: 134–45)) in institutions and in the wider social networks of pacified complex societies as a whole. In the social sciences there is more at stake for the individual scientist when adopting the second perspective than the first. In the case of the second perspective, as the investigator struggles with greater detachment in their enquiries, what is at stake may be more than facing the relativity or limits of their own beliefs or merely effecting a cognitive shift in the manner of phenomenological models. Their relations with their colleagues who have not achieved such a level of detachment may also be affected, thus increasing the pressure on the investigator to remain within the circle of involvements of the in-group whose survival is at stake. To step outside thus places further demands on the investigator. There is, in fact, in all these groups a point beyond which none of its members can go in his or her detachment without appearing and, so far as their group is concerned, without becoming, a dangerous heretic, however consistent their ideas or their theories may be in themselves and with observed facts, however much they may approximate to what we call the ‘truth’. (Elias 1987a: 15) The two perspectives of distance and detachment carry with them two different human self-images. To place the contrast in a familiar formula for heuristic purposes: one perspective (epitomized by Mannheim 1925b, 1933a; Schutz 1932) yields the individualistic problematic of ‘know thyself’ through psychic distancing, while the other, Eliasian, one corresponds to ‘face thyself’ through sociological detachment (see Elias 1987a: 39–40). In the same early unpublished manuscript from which I quoted above, Mannheim had begun the journey from the individual first-person perspective towards the plural ‘we’ and ‘they’ perspectives that we find as Elias’s starting point, albeit still with residues of a philosophical discourse. Mannheim commented that ‘[W]e can know ourselves only to the extent that we enter into existential relationships to others. The precondition of self-knowledge is social existence’ (Mannheim 1925a: 192, italics in original). In contrast with the rationalistic dictum of ‘know thyself’, Elias expressed the matter (as did Mannheim above) in a plural manner as the issue of ‘how far people are capable of “facing themselves”’ (Elias 1987a: 3, emphasis added). Here Elias’s conception of the multi-levelled personality of interdependent people is well in evidence. Elias has expressed the issue in the image of humans as homines aperti as opposed to the individualistic model of homo clausus (see Elias 1978a: 125). Mannheim’s formulation (which probably articulated a position upon which others too were converging) may well have been the initial stimulus to Elias to take the issue further in a thoroughgoing sociological direction that embraced a model of humans as capable of self-managing a complex set of internal psychical functions.

114

Knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias

Involvement and detachment as a balance Elias’s article ‘Problems of Involvement and Detachment’ (1956: 226–52) had as its epigraph part of a mannered and rather arch dialogue between two characters taken from Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon:10 Are you not prejudiced? AUTHOR: Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open. But cannot that be because one part of our mind, that which we act with, becomes prejudiced through experience, and still we keep another part completely open to observe and judge with? OLD LADY: Sir, I do not know. AUTHOR: Madame, neither do I and it may well be that we are talking nonsense. OLD LADY: That is an odd term and one I did not encounter in my youth. AUTHOR: Madame, we apply the term now to describe unsoundness in abstract conversation, or, indeed, any overmetaphysical tendency in speech. OLD LADY: I must learn to use these terms correctly. OLD LADY:

It is not a straightforward matter to discern clearly why Elias quoted this obscure and enigmatic dialogue. But it is important not to impute into both the passage and Elias’s concepts of involvement and detachment concerns derived from contemporary ‘social theory’ which may hinder us in understanding the specificity of Elias’s concepts. For example, Robert van Krieken (1998: 143–4) has offered this interpretation of Elias’s use of the passage: ‘For Elias, all scientific endeavour is characterized by this permanent tension between the reality of “prejudice”, what many sociologists refer to as the socially constructed nature of all knowledge, and the possibility of a responsiveness to the observation and analysis of an everchanging surrounding world, a balance between “involvement” and “detachment”’ (van Krieken 1998: 143). The dialogue in the Hemingway passage is not, however, about science directly but simply embodies the novelist’s understanding of the fact that people’s minds are partly conditioned by the experience of action which produces ‘prejudices’ (roughly prejudgements) and partly open to judgement. Elias probably chose the dialogue because it contained an echo (although obviously without a theory of emotional self-control) of Elias’s central idea in the article. That is, that people can regulate their affects in such a way that they can be both caught up in something they are doing (i.e.‘involved’) and in certain instances able to step back from it (i.e. to become relatively ‘detached’). To give a brief and all too simple example of their meaning in this context: a philosopher once said, ‘If Paul speaks of Peter he tells us more about Paul than about Peter.’ One can say … that in speaking of Peter he is always telling us something about himself as well as about Peter. One would call his approach ‘involved’ as long as his own characteristics, the characteristics of the perceiver, overshadow those of the perceived. If Paul’s propositions

Knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias 115 begin to tell more about Peter than about himself the balance begins to turn in favour of detachment. (Elias 1956: 39) Elias says subsequently in the article that the concepts of involvement and detachment are intended to relate to people in the round, to the whole person, including their internal emotional balance. Hence, pace van Krieken, neither ‘prejudice’ in the passage from Hemingway nor ‘involvement’ in Elias is synonymous with the contemporary term from the sociology of science, ‘the socially constructed nature of all knowledge’. Nor is ‘observation and analysis of the ever-changing world’ synonymous with ‘detachment’ as such. This misleading gloss is an object lesson in the consequences of mixing up seemingly comparable concepts from various paradigms and schools of thought. As I have argued at greater length elsewhere (Kilminster 1998: 142, 176–7), it is one of the perils of sociological life that is made possible by the institutionalization of sociology which creates the echoing intellectual milieu in which these plausible convergences and glosses can, at a certain level of abstraction, be perceived and articulated. The involvement and detachment pairing that is subsequently presented by Elias in the article is in fact offered as an alternative to the philosophical dualisms ‘rational/irrational’ and ‘subjective/objective’, which is a central theme of his presentation. The remainder of the dialogue from Hemingway implies that those are examples of concepts that are, as the character responding puts it, ‘abstract’ and ‘over-metaphysical’. The concepts of involvement and detachment, then, relate to people ‘in the round’, that is, to whole persons, including their internal emotional balance and the relations with other people which comprise their various activities. In other words, for Elias rational conduct, including exercising detachment as part of a scientific group or institution, presupposes that the individuals doing this are already adults capable of controlling their affects and steering themselves (internally and in relation to others) in such a way as to detach themselves from urgent personal problems of the moment in favour of impersonal, systematic, scientific problems. Only small babies or insane people, Elias argues, can either abandon their feelings to the here and now or, conversely, remain completely unmoved by what goes on around them. Adult behaviour lies on a scale somewhere between these two extremes, and social life as we know it would come to an end if standards of adult behaviour went too far in either direction. The sociological problem, Elias says, is to develop criteria to determine the continuum that lies between the two poles. The terms ‘involvement’ and ‘detachment’ do not refer to two separate classes of objects. Elias writes: ‘In using these terms, one refers in short to changing equilibria between sets of mental activities which in human relations with other humans, with objects and with self (whatever their other functions may be) have the function to involve and to detach’ (Elias 1956: 227). This cryptic sentence (comprehension of which is not made any easier by the omission of the first word ‘with’ in the Elias 1987a reprint) requires some explication. It invokes Elias’s conception of the triad of social controls, control of self, society and nature, elaborated later (see 1978a: 156–7 and note 13

116

Knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias

below). It also invokes Elias’s model of humans, upon which I will briefly digress in order to bring out the character and distinctiveness of Elias’s ideas about the involvement and detachment balance. The general model of human beings that Elias employs or otherwise assumes in his writings has its origins in large part in his early medical training (Elias 1994: 28–31, 86–90). It was also further shaped by the findings of The Civilizing Process and Elias’s subsequent reading in evolutionary biology and psychoanalysis, as well as by Elias’s participation in group analysis in England after the Second World War. Its specificity can be focused in two key quotations: What is decisive for a human being as he or she appears before us is neither the ‘id’ alone, nor the ‘ego’ or ‘super-ego’ alone, but always the relationship between these various sets of psychological functions, partly conflicting and partly co-operating levels in self-steering. It is these relationships within individual people between the drives and affects that are controlled and the socially instilled agencies that control them, whose structure changes in the course of a civilizing process, in accordance with the changing structure of the relationships between individual human beings, in society at large. (Elias, 1939: 409–10) Figurational sociology … is concerned with human beings in the round. It is centred on a five-dimensional image of [sic] plurality of human beings that includes the directly visible four-dimensional behavioural aspects and the ‘experiential’, thinking, feeling, drive aspects of humans which, although not directly accessible to people’s observation in the same way as bodily movements, are, nevertheless, accessible to human observation – for example, through the examination of linguistic and other symbols that carry meaningful messages from one person to others. Hence, problems of drive and drivecontrol, of emotions and emotional control, of knowledge and reflection as controllers or, alternatively, as dependents of emotions and drives – in short the experiential aspects of people – play in figurational sociology no less a part than the visible movements of people’s skeletal muscles that are singled out by behaviourists and action theorists. (Elias 1987a: 116)11 These passages yield a multi-levelled model of the embodied human personality that derives its specific character from the complex self-steering activities of people. What we call reflection, Elias says, ‘combines and often struggles with drives, affects and emotions in the steering of muscular actions’ (Elias 1987a: 115). As ‘reason’, it is celebrated by philosophers as an unchanging human characteristic. But the capacity for such intense reflection in people is only possible to that degree if they possess a particularly well-developed and allround capacity to regulate their drives and emotions internally, and if they live in regularized and relatively pacified societies. And far from being an unchanging characteristic of all humans, it is only consolidated at a comparatively late stage

Knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias 117 in social development in people for whom, internally, a longer gap exists between an impulse to act and the act itself, than existed in people in the Middle Ages. From this widening gap emerges the characteristic feature of thinking-aboutthinking so typical of learned and cultured Westerners. In Eliasian terminology, it is a personality in which the balance between id, ego and super-ego functions has become tilted towards super-ego functions producing, through the strong mechanism of the authoritative conscience, a consciousness ‘less permeated by drives’, as Elias (1939: 410) puts it. Returning more directly to the involvement and detachment balance, Elias’s cryptic remark now hopefully becomes clearer. He stated, we recall, that the terms involvement and detachment do not refer to two separate classes of objects, but to ‘changing equilibria between sets of mental activities … which have the function to involve and to detach’ (Elias1987a: 4). This is a pre-eminent example of process thinking. As continuously active people steer themselves in their relations with others, say in scientific activity, their activities are simultaneously articulating a particular dynamic internal balance of id, ego and super-ego functions. For an individual as part of a group of individuals engaged in scientific activity, this balance functions for them to detach themselves in their relations with others or other groups. When modern scientists detach themselves from the urgent personal problems of the moment in favour of impersonal, systematic, scientific problems, they take for granted being able to steer themselves in this way in relation to others as whole people, in the scientific context. It is compatible with Elias’s observations to suggest that in, say, the different context of close relationships with loved ones, or in families, the same scientists also know when and how to steer themselves via a different pattern of selfregulation of emotions and drives and corresponding movements of skeletal muscles, in such a way as to behave with more emotional expressiveness and spontaneity appropriate to such contexts. Hence, on the one hand, one could observe in a scientific lecture or seminar or experimental demonstration the scientists moderating their drives and impulses and speech patterns and muscular, bodily comportment in complex combinations so as to behave in the measured manner appropriate to such occasions. This way of behaving would include, inherently, appropriate dress codes and manners. On the other hand, later, at their young child’s birthday party, say, the same scientists will allow themselves to display more ‘involved’ behaviour, showing more immediate expression of affects and a different range of skeletal muscular movements, including different sound patterns at the level of speech. This would also include correspondingly different dress codes and manners. In this case, the internal changing psychic equilibria function as involvement. In each case, the involvement–detachment balance is tilted in one or the other direction. Elias’s point is that modern people, in the increasingly differentiated and integrated societies of the modern period, have been forced to adapt their selfsteering actions in these increasingly more nuanced, complex and variable ways in response to the social demands being made of them. To point up the specificity of Elias’s conception, let us compare it with how Alfred Schutz would have

118

Knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias

probably described the two activities of the scientist mentioned above. Consistent with Schutz’s concepts and assumptions one could say that, for him, the selfregulating emotional dimension of the scientist, their whole psychic make-up that enables them to control their skeletal muscular movements in the different socially appropriate ways, has been placed analytically in brackets. For Schutz, the two activities (the children’s party and a scientific lecture) would simply represent the individual bestowing different meanings in two different, finite provinces of meaning by effecting a switch of consciousness between the cognitive styles of each. As Elias comments, phenomenological sociologists, and other action theorists, rely on ‘a flat, one-levelled, picture [that neglects] the many-levelled character of personality’ (Elias 1987a: 116).12 One could add that in the Schutzian formulation it is not apparently possible to distinguish the specificity of science from other institutionalized activities, since all of them are meaning-endowing activities. Turning to a further aspect of scientific activity, Elias argues that it would be misleading to describe one type of sciences, namely those dealing with natural processes, as ‘value-free’, and the others, including sociology, as value-laden. Rather, he argues, in scientific enquiries different kinds of evaluation are more dominant than other kinds. He distinguishes, on the one hand, autonomous evaluations (such as an interest in the inherent order of events or fact orientation) which have become institutionalized in the natural sciences and are protected by professional standards. On the other hand, there are heteronomous evaluations which embody strongly felt human needs experienced in the immediacy of the moment. The latter evaluations prevail in the social sciences at present. Paralleling the earlier example of what Paul’s propositions about Peter might tell us about both of them, Elias says (Elias 1987a: 6) that the question characteristic of involvement is ‘What does it mean for me or for us?’; whereas questions such as ‘What is it?’ and ‘How are these events connected with others?’ are typical of a higher level of detachment. Attitudes embodying detachment have spread into the public mind and have come increasingly to overlay more involved and emotive forms of thinking about the natural world. As a result, people have come to accept and to face a scientific picture of the natural world – essentially that it is indifferent and even inimical to human purposes – that is far from emotionally comforting. But involved forms of thinking, and hence heteronomous evaluations, have not disappeared, even in the advanced countries of the West. They continue to dominate political and religious beliefs and ideals. Involved thinking also still forms part of people’s psychic make-up on a more personal level, as, for example, when they are tempted to ask what they have done to deserve the fate of falling ill – who is to blame for it? For Elias, the social sciences, and sociology in particular, await a breakthrough towards greater detachment to help humans control their interdependent social relations that are ‘experienced by many as an alien external force not unlike the forces of nature’ (Elias 1987a: 10). In the case of the non-human forces of nature, humans gradually, over many thousands of years, managed to break out of a ‘vicious circle’. That is, people had little chance of controlling their own strong

Knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias 119 feelings in relation to natural forces and to develop the greater detachment needed to understand nature conceptually, as long as they still had little control. This is because that lack of control continually generated the fears that engendered more emotional, involved ways of thinking about nature, which itself impeded the development of greater detachment which would have enabled people to control the forces. People had little chance of extending their control over their non-human surroundings ‘as long as they could not gain greater mastery over their own strong feelings in relation to them and increase their control over themselves’ (Elias 1987a: 9). Elias speculates that in relation to non-human nature, the breakthrough probably came as the result of the ‘principle of increasing facilitation’ (Elias 1987a: 9), i.e. that the more control people gained over various processes of nature, the easier it was for them to extend it. In relation to the social sciences, the problems are similar, even though what are not well controlled are not the forces of non-human nature but the social force of the tangle of extended interdependencies that bind people together. The civilizing processes that European societies have undergone were brought about by the internal pacification of states and extending social interdependencies. One effect of these massive cumulative changes in the relations between people was to create secure social spaces and highly controlled, ‘rational’ people, both of which facilitated the breakthrough in natural science and hence extension of control over nature. But, as Elias comments: ‘The same process which has made people less dependent on the vagaries of nature has made them more dependent on each other’ (Elias 1987a: 10). The very social developments that brought about the possibility of science have brought about different forms of insecurity arising from the antagonisms and tensions between groups and the unforeseen gains for some and losses for others of changes that are instituted by interlocked groups for widely different purposes. In such circumstances, it is difficult for vulnerable and insecure people to be more emotionally detached about social relations and events, to control for their own strong feelings about events that deeply affect them, when their ability to control those events is small. At the same time, it is difficult for them to extend their understanding and control social processes as long as they cannot approach them with greater detachment, which entails greater control over themselves. Hence this ‘circular movement between inner and outer controls, a feedback mechanism of a kind’ (Elias 1987a: 11) works not only in relation to natural forces, but also in people’s relations with each other, that is, in society. It is this idea of a dynamic interplay between internal and external controls, as well as the conception of vicious circles playing themselves out in different ways in relation to natural forces and social relations, that contributes to the distinctiveness of Elias’s model.13 To summarize: for Elias the human condition at the present stage of human development is such that the problem of control over natural and social forces plays itself out in different ways. In regard to people’s relations to nature, both the control of self and of external events has become relatively high, whereas in the relations between people, the socially required standard of self-control and socially institutionalized capacity for controlling those relations has remained

120

Knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias

considerably lower. This axis defines the different problems facing the natural and social sciences. The issue of people mastering their own strong feelings about society and thus controlling themselves is working on a different level because in social science the investigators are more directly part of the social patterns they are studying and thus prone to developing intense involvements.14 Some involvements may of course be bound up with positive emotions such as love of family or friends, or other groups, but some, particularly those associated with ideologies and religion can, if not suspended, come to suffuse sociological enquiries with greater involvement. The involvement/detachment balance of the sociological knowledge thus produced would be pushed more towards involvement, thereby potentially aggravating the social conflicts and tensions fuelling the fears and fantasies that are expressed in those kinds of involvement. The relationship between involvement and detachment in Elias is thus not conceived of as a ‘zero-sum’ relation; that is, it does not imply that as involvement increases, so detachment decreases. Nor is relationship one of a dualism between two mutually exclusive opposites. Rather, it is to be seen as a dynamic tension balance embodied in social activities. In many areas of social activity such as sex, loving, fighting and dying (Wouters 1999a, 1999b, 2002), there may be observed shifts to more intense involvement and more intense detachment as the tension balance reaches higher levels. Elias’s theory of the dynamic involvement and detachment balance transforms the conception of sociology as a ‘mission’ that Elias shared with Mannheim (see Chapter 3, this volume). Like many other social scientists and psychologists in the 1930s, Elias wanted to understand the dangerously uncontrolled inter-state social entanglements that were spiralling towards a world war.15 His aim was nothing less than to contribute a comprehensive understanding that might help people to avoid those processes occurring again. It was a goal of such massive human significance that it endued the pursuit of sociology with a prodigious moral imperative. But the task is not easy, he argues, due to the tenacity of involvements and because the outcomes, in either reducing the dangers and/or strengthening the institutionalization of sociology to provide a counter-weight, are uncertain due to the destructive potential of the vicious circle social spirals. (Elias sometimes referred to these processes as double-bind figurations.) Furthermore, the pursuit of sociology of this kind makes great emotional demands upon its practitioners because of the picture of themselves that they have to learn to live with. As Elias points out (1987a: 39), people’s capacity to ‘face themselves’, to see themselves as they are ‘without the shining armour of fantasies shielding them from suffering, past, present and future’ is dependent on the degree of security which they enjoy in society. He adds, ‘But it probably has its limits’ (Elias 1987a: 39). Bogner (1986: 405) comments that a disappointment implied by the analysis of the civilizing process is that it ‘contradicts the human dream of omnipotence’. At the social level, he continues, ‘human beings encounter themselves … in the sense that they are faced with themselves as part of nonintentional, blind interconnections – as beings whose life and identity is deeply affected by natural or “nature like” processes’. Elias’s work on the figurational compulsion of social interdependencies has profound implications for what we

Knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias 121 usually call ‘freedom’ and ‘happiness’, which have not been fully explored. (See, in particular, Elias 1939: Part Four, ch. VIII, 1978a: Introduction and ch. 4; Wouters 1998; and the latter part of Chapter 4, this volume.)

Secondary involvement For the most part, Elias drew back in his public statements from directly specifying social action or intervention to change society in order to control, say, the destructive escalation of vicious circles of group conflict, preferring a factual ‘diagnosis’ of the pressures being placed upon people by their mutual relatedness. He declared (again with Weberian echoes) that what conclusions people draw for their actions from relational sociological knowledge is up to them: ‘Sociologists are not lawgivers’ (1987a: lxix). The reasons Elias gave for his abstention from committing himself to specifying particular forms of practical intervention were consistent with his theory of knowledge. Sociology was not as yet sufficiently advanced to produce knowledge adequate, detached and synthetic enough to inform wider practical social interventions (Elias 1987a, 1978a: 221ff.). Sociology had not yet achieved a sufficient degree of institutional autonomy, authority and detachment to make that possible. By analogy with the development of the natural sciences, the stress in Elias is on the minimization of the fantasy content of knowledge through detachment and seeking to embed this developing body of knowledge in the institutions of sociology. This side of Elias’s work emphasizes the detached, professional sociologist, in whose advocacy there sometimes surfaces a disdain for dilettantism. For example, Elias commented that in one of his papers the historian of science Thomas Kuhn did have some sense of the development of scientific knowledge, but Elias found ‘a soupçon of amateurishness in his attempts at conceptualising it’ (Elias 1972: 126). This judgement is consistent with other criticisms Elias made of the ways in which historians handle historical data (see Elias 1983: Introduction). Kuhn’s historian’s approach to developmental change did not match up to the precision with which the professional sociologist would approach the topic of development simply because, as a historian, his focus would tend to be on events and the actions of people, viewed through the spectacles of the ideals of the individual researcher: ‘the historian apportions praise and blame’ (Elias 1983: 5). The dialectics of involvement and detachment in Elias are such that it would be a mistake to equate detachment with emotionless rationality and involvement with affect and feeling. It is a common misunderstanding of sciences that they embody a cold, calculating rationalism that is inimical to warm, close, human emotions. As we will see shortly, his concept of secondary involvement (Elias 1987a: xliv–xlv) avoided this misleading contrast, and through its application he threw new light on the subject. This common misconception of science perpetuates a misleading romantic dichotomy between reason and passion that has entered intellectual currency. For many years, but particularly recently, as part of the ‘post-modern’ sensibility (see Kilminster 1998: 110, 164, 170–1), it has even been projected back on to the Enlightenment, said to be the source of the pernicious and ‘inhuman’

122

Knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias

coldness and indifference of rationality and science. Then, by extension, this view has shaded over into a pervasive anti-science sentiment in the current period. However, as Peter Gay has pointed out: Unfortunately, historians have equated … ‘reason’ with coldness; they have caricatured the philosophes as frigid engineers, contemptuous of emotion, blind to poetry, inhabiting an empty universe stripped of all color and love, except for sex. … I am not inclined to deny that the philosophes were sometimes arrogant, sometimes calculating, sometimes cynical, sometimes cold. But none of these characteristics is central to their thought or important to the definition of the Enlightenment; its critical temper was not locked in the laboratory. It was passionate in its own right, and played a part in all irreverence, every call to rebellion, every moral tirade. (Gay 1973: 624–5) In contrast to the Romantics, Elias’s argument is that for sciences to become established and institutionally self-perpetuating many preconditions have to be fulfilled, one of which is the sustained transfer of controlled affect into ‘autonomous evaluations’ through a process of institutionalization. It is a gloss consistent with Elias’s theory to say that through a process one might call ‘involved detachment’, the practitioners of an emerging science, in the developing institutional practices in which they participate, gradually begin to be emotionally moved by specifically scientific activities and values. They come to experience pleasure and excitement in relation to activities in which they are habitually applying a standard of detachment and an orientation to factual research and to discovery, thereby developing a very strong, emotionally reinforced, commitment to the science concerned. A revealing episode from Elias’s career that bears on this issue was reported by Richard Brown (1987: 535). He recalled that at the University of Leicester in the 1950s Elias’s first-year lectures ‘included several … which became inspirational as the importance and potential of sociology were advocated with powerful conviction’. This is another example of involved detachment. However, I think it may also have provided a further source of misunderstanding and even suspicion of Elias that may have affected the reception of his work. For many people in academic circles passionate advocacy and scientific detachment are mutually exclusive. To the liberal mind that wants to keep rationality and irrationality strictly separated, Elias’s passion for greater detachment in sociology would have seemed incongruous, contradictory, even embarrassing. For that reason Elias’s approach would very possibly have been regarded as unrigorous and even as masking hidden and perhaps dangerous political biases simply because of his fervent commitment. During an interview in the 1980s with several of the editors of Theory, Culture and Society in which I participated (Elias 1985b), Elias stressed again, among other things, that the relationship between involvement and detachment must be seen as a balance (and not as a zero-sum relationship). He said that Max

Knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias 123 Weber’s work, for example, showed a keen personal involvement as well as a ‘strong capacity of detachment’, which is always the mark of the great scientist. In the course of making these remarks Elias became more and more animated and continued fervently: It’s difficult to see that involvement and detachment are not separate. I am, as you can see, very involved in what I am doing indeed, but it does not in any way lower my self-control because what I do would be worthless if I allowed my involvement to colour or taint the results of my thinking. (Elias 1985b: 96–7, see also 71–2) In his later work (Elias 1987a: xliv–xlv) Elias introduced the concept of secondary involvement which gave explicit recognition to another aspect of the conception of a tension balance between involvement and detachment. The concept of secondary involvement was developed specifically in relation to the effect of realism achieved by Renaissance perspective painters such as Masaccio, van Eyck and Velazquez. (See note 1 to this chapter.) Through detachment those painters achieved the effect of realistic perspective on the canvas, something that came to be supplemented later by a secondary involvement, whereby viewers of the paintings become involved in the aesthetic qualities of the ensemble of details assembled in the paintings. The painters provided an illusion of three-dimensional space, a feat achieved by virtue of their detachment, at the same time appealing to the viewers’ capacity for the same. The painters provided various clues in the pictures which viewers picked up, clues that were designed to arouse the feelings of the viewers whose pleasure then derived from their becoming secondarily involved in the aesthetic qualities of the way in which the elements of the picture were arranged. By analogy, the achievement of self-perpetuating involved detachment (my term) in the emerging discipline of sociology would entail that the kind of passion normally associated with political and religious beliefs and similar commitments is channelled (sublimated)16 into the pursuit of a kind of detached sociological knowledge that transcends the one-sidedness of involved viewpoints of society. Sociologists embracing such greater detachment in their enquiries themselves become secondarily involved in that activity and take pleasure from the comprehensive understanding made possible by the standpoint and to relish its potentialities. But for others in society to become secondarily involved in the comprehensive understanding of a certain kind of detached sociology is dependent upon the state of social tension that generates fears and hence the further involvements that hinder it. However, due to the intensity of the emotional struggles for an individual as part of ‘facing themselves’ that are inherent in Elias’s sociological programme, the difficulties on this level are formidable. It is clear, though, that the inner struggle is conceived by Elias to be part of the wider striving for an institutionalized sociology of a particular kind; that is, one that aims for more detached, reality-adequate, less fantasy-laden knowledge of societies. A prominent theme in his later writings in particular (e.g. Elias 1982, 1984a, 1984b, 1987a) is the way in which the social

124

Knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias

sciences have developed through groups of specialists, often against considerable odds, staking a claim to reliable knowledge of specific kinds of self-perpetuating social regularities sui generis (for example, economic regularities) that became increasingly visible and evident from the eighteeenth century onwards. That he had a conception of the potential role and importance of such specialists, including sociologists, in society is evident also from his parable about a future society where institutionalized public debates, involving autonomous knowledge specialists of all kinds, were central to the workings of the society (Elias 1984b: 280ff.). It is compatible with Elias’s conception of sociology (as I have argued elsewhere (Kilminster 1998: 178)) that at the present stage in the development of societies and of the discipline itself, sociologists committed to autonomous evaluations should conduct themselves in the following way. They should apply in their practice of sociology the criteria of cognitive evaluation and the standard of detachment which would be widely taken for granted if the discipline, as a special science, had achieved a higher degree of self-perpetuating, institutional autonomy, and a corresponding authority, than at present. In applying these criteria and the standard of detachment, we anticipate their future embodiment in a stronger institutionalization of the discipline and, hopefully, help to bring it about. I would argue that this anticipatory motif is of a different character from other conceptions of the regulative character of idealized states of affairs (for example, the ideal speech situation of Apel and Habermas, or the ‘utopian moment of the object’ in Adorno (Kilminster 1998: 50–4)). Elias does not lapse into the teleological assumption that such a state of affairs will come about.17 Nor does he endow the controlling principle of greater detachment with either an absolute metaphysical status or with a logical necessity. He is able to specify the concrete social and psychological forces and relations which would hinder or facilitate the achievement of greater self-perpetuating institutionalized standards of detachment, without assuming that a final state of total detachment may be attained. Elias’s message is, then, that although the battles for sociology are well worth fighting for, the war could in the end be lost. There are no guarantees.18 The shifting of the involvement/detachment balance more consistently towards detachment that would be entailed if sociology specialists were to achieve something approximating to the strong institutionalized detachment achieved over several centuries by the natural sciences may never happen. It is by no means inevitable that the breakthrough, via what Elias called the ‘principle of increasing facilitation’ (Elias 1987a: 34), will occur, because of the continuous possibility of the balance being pulled more towards involvement due to spiralling social conflicts, on the continental and global as well as the national levels, that are out of the control of sociologists. These would affect the standard of detachment possible in knowledge in general and within sociological institutions in particular (Kilminster 1998: 178). In sum: Elias is advocating (or at least strongly implying) that committed sociologists, if they have the inner strength and inclination, should dedicate the greater part of their life (as he did) to the pursuit of the further institutionalization of a particular kind of highly detached sociology. They should do this, however,

Knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias 125 when the short-term institutionalized results of their labours are likely to be nugatory and the long-term outcome is by no means guaranteed. But still they must work towards it. The traces here (transformed, to be sure) of Max Weber’s tough and ascetic ‘Protestant’ stance on politics and science are obvious. Elias’s dogged advocacy of a disciplined struggle for sociological detachment against the odds may also be partly explicable by his personality (although not reducible to this because it exemplified a habitus many others shared). As Michael Schröter (1993) has argued, Elias possessed to some extent a ‘Prussian’ super-ego, derived from his relationship with his conventional and law-abiding Jewish father at a stage of extreme assimilation pressures in German society.

Epilogue: detachment in a new key? My argument in this section is that evidence for the further opening up of social and psychic dividing lines in recent years as the result of a far-reaching phase of an informalization process helps us to understand contemporary attitudes towards and developments in sociological ‘methods’ and research. I shall be arguing that despite the proliferation of forms of action research and dialogic enquiries that ‘take the findings back to the people’ and more tolerance towards folk and ethnic knowledges in the current period, the pursuit of scientific detachment in Elias’s sense has not lost its importance. As Waldhoff (1994: 6)19 has plausibly argued, the ascetic echoes in Elias which I mentioned at the end of the last section are part of the strong presence in Elias’s scientific work of the dominant, super-ego-centred, fantasy-control model of scientific activity. This model is associated with the ‘disciplining’ phase of the Western civilizing process, where there is a marked asymmetry of power relations between social groups. This is the phase, culminating in the nineteenth century, when Jews and other minorities are put under aggressive pressure to assimilate, into the German state in particular. It is also the era of the ‘civilizing offensives’ associated with colonialism (see Chapter 3, this volume; Mitzman 1987). Later, as the result of a far-reaching phase of functional democratization that involved the relative levelling of power differentials within and between groups, an informalizing phase in the relations between people gathered momentum (Wouters 1977, 1986, 1998; Waldhoff 1994, 1995). During this phase (dating from the late nineteenth century onwards in a series of spurts that include the 1920s and the 1960s) as power balances became more even (though by no means anywhere near totally so), people began to resist the standardizing assimilation pressures coming from above. Arguably, this resistance reflected a more realistic grasp of the ambivalence of modern polyvalent social structures in which people were integrated ever more into further flung chains of interdependencies. As part of the first wave of this socially democratizing and informalizing movement, in the early twentieth century, Freud began to develop a new kind of human science based on a self-reflexive and less authoritarian type of relationship with his patients. Freud considered ‘both himself as well as his patients as objects of research’ (Waldhoff 1994: 6).20

126

Knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias

In the 1980s, corresponding to the tail-end of a further spurt of the informalizing trend that was bound up with the emancipatory movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Elias reaffirmed (Elias 1987a) what was implicit in his earlier formulations of the theory of involvement and detachment. That is, that the relationship between involvement and detachment must be regarded as a balance. He also experimented with the concept of ‘secondary involvement’, as we have seen, in relation to the aesthetic pleasure derived from art (although the concept could be extended to other activities). In this last period Elias showed an acute perception of the fruitful, pleasurable consequences of ‘the controlled de-controlling of controls’ in the field of social behaviour, particularly in the relaxation of traditional taboos that resulted from the social and behavioural experiments of the 1960s and the controlled excitement possible in sport and leisure events (Wouters 1977; Elias and Dunning 1986). But Elias still remained committed in his scientific practice to the fantasy-control, greater detachment, ideology-extirpating model of sociology as a science. This is clearly evident in his provocative and trenchant programmatic pronouncements in that area (see especially Elias’s tour de force ‘The Retreat of Sociologists into the Present’ (Elias 1987b as well as Elias 1978a, 1984b; Kilminster 1987). The strictness and austerity of Elias’s commitment to the importance of the struggle for detachment in sociology is particularly vivid in his interview with Peter Ludes (Elias 1984b: 283ff.) conducted in the same period in which he was writing in praise of secondary involvements, sublimation and relaxations of taboos in other areas. Here he uses the language and images of corruption, decay and defilement to describe knowledge that is dominated by involvements. In particular the word ‘pollution’ recurs, with its repressive connotations of contamination with dirt or filth. He speculates about an imaginary future society in which public debates about change are informed by more detached, synoptic knowledge that transcends specialisms and vested interests. In addition to pollution, Elias refers to knowledge that is interest-laden as ‘fossilized’ and ‘corrupted’. He also refers to a situation where partisanship has been conducive to the ‘corrosion’ of knowledge and a ‘pollution of a country’s culture’. In the imaginary society a catalyst to the reform movement was a two-volume, jointly authored fictitious book by a husband and wife entitled The Pollution of Knowledge. It was this book that demonstrated how and why ‘politicians corrupted knowledge’ (Elias 1984b: 283). In Eliasian terms, the struggle-for-detachment argument, prominent in Elias’s programmatic writings about the role and prospects of sociology, bears the marks of the psychic structure characteristic of an earlier, disciplining, stage of a civilizing process, or at least one prominent strand of it. There is, however, convincing evidence beginning to accumulate (Waldhoff 1995; Kilminster 1998: 163–5; Wouters 1998) that in the contemporary period there has been the development of a ‘Third Nature’ (Wouters) psychic structure, brought about by an opening up of the psychic dividing lines between id, ego and super-ego functions. This process has developed as part of the social dividing lines opening up further in a far-reaching phase of functional democratization and informalization and

Knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias 127 attendant social integration. The balance between functions within the psyche has, evidence is beginning to suggest, consolidated into a new, higher, pattern in which ego functions play a stronger role and the super-ego functions have been transformed. The super-ego functions, so the emerging evidence is suggesting, no longer automatically operate as they did in the disciplining phase solely to forbid and repress dangerous emotions. Now super-ego functions are involved to a much greater extent in automatically warning people, triggering pressures to take aspects of other people and of oneself more into account. The multi-levelled balance of psychic functions has thus reached a higher level of integration. This emergent new level has enabled in the current period a higher level of mutual identification between people, which corresponds to a higher level of social interdependency. In the earlier disciplining phase the particular character of super-ego functions (as part of the overall balance between id, ego and super-ego functions) was more associated with the automatic containment and repression of certain affects and impulses. This particular balance of psychic functions blocked those emotions from playing a more controlled part in the flow and balance of psychic functioning, which they arguably do now. It is highly plausible that these social and psychic developments have given rise to a different, more flexible, more malleable, pattern of internal controlling and self-regulation that is showing itself in many areas of culture. It is a characteristic kind of behaviour that many sociologists in the current period are conceptualizing as ‘reflexivity’ and ‘individualization’ (Giddens 1991; Beck 1992). The new balance of psychic functions has also manifested itself in the varieties of ‘identity politics’ and ‘sexual politics’ in the current period. People generally, including sociologists, now have a higher capacity for self-organization and self-orientation than in the formalizing/disciplining phase. They can adjust themselves in manifold ways to the increasing demands of contemporary society which arise from the extending chains of interdependency at the regional and global levels of integration. Accumulating evidence is beginning to suggest that, emotionally, people today are increasingly able to bring to the surface and control strange feelings and other previously more severely suppressed emotions. These are precisely the emotions, strange feelings and fantasies (as expressed in ideological convictions) that were always to be rigorously excluded from sociology in the greater detachment model of science advocated by Elias. The models of science that stressed the suspension of value-judgements or the controlling for involvements, associated with Weber and as adapted by Elias, presuppose a particular balance between id, ego and super-ego functions characteristic of earlier phases of the Western civilizing process. This was a balance in which super-ego functions were closely bound up with the rigorous repression of dangerous emotions. The same balance of functions may be said to have underpinned the social phenomenologists’ classical procedure of rigorous methodological ‘bracketing’ (see note 7 of this chapter). It is also a psychic pattern that had its expression in R.K. Merton’s (1968: 175, 185) strict methodological exclusion of psychology and psychoanalysis from sociology, in favour of the

128

Knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias

functionalist study of social institutions and culture.21 What I am drawing attention to here is not merely the methodological bracketing of certain questions or merely the intellectual exclusion of psychology, but rather the strictness and rigour with which what was bracketed or excluded had to be erased from the consciousness of researchers. These are highly disciplined precepts and doctrines. Modern societies have always possessed a capacity to thwart or subvert people’s plans and intentions, which has often brought about and still does, disappointment, feelings of powerlessness and a sense of personal tragedy. It is possible, however, that today, by virtue of the more ego-dominated personality balance in which the super-ego functions provide warnings about aspects of other people as well as automatic prohibitions, people can cope better with these problems. People can now, perhaps, better (but not totally) control their own strong feelings about the arbitrariness of social events and others’ actions because they can control themselves more effectively and flexibly. People have, in other words, developed a more realistic attitude towards others, themselves and towards the social events and entanglements to which they are forced to adjust themselves, although this state of affairs is not to be regarded as the final destination of human social relations. Hence, in differentiated and highly integrated societies, the suffering associated with social processes that people experience as outside their control has thereby been partially mitigated because on the psychic level people can better handle frustrations and disappointments because they can control themselves in more flexible ways. (This judgement, while plausible, remains speculative, of course, and dependent upon further research.) Within the discipline of sociology and in adjacent fields, the same processes of functional democratization and informalization and ‘Third Nature’ personality formation would appear to have already become reflected in the upsurge in recent years of types of action research, the advocacy of ‘taking the findings back to the people’, dialogic approaches, more tolerance towards literary knowledge, folk knowledge, invoking personal experience, legitimizing gay, lesbian and ethnic knowledges, concern with morality and so on, which have become widely practised or advocated in sociology (e.g. May 1996: chs 10, 11; May 2001; Seidman 1998: introduction, 347–9). These attitudes and kinds of enquiry are congruent with the experience and sensibilities of younger contemporary sociologists who are themselves bound up with the same social and psychic developments. The reflexive and democratizing tenor of the newer approaches attests to a higher degree of mutual identification having been attained in the current period. Since the institutional boundaries around sociology still remain porous, it is not surprising that sociological activities and their cognitive products have become increasingly shaped by these wider social and psychological processes. Younger practitioners in sociology are likely to experience their relations with others, inside and outside their institutional, professional sociological relations, in ways that will make the methodological imperative of greater detachment and suspension of value-judgements, pursued in its pure form alone, seem simply inflexible and even authoritarian. On the other hand, the contemporary kinds of sociological activities and preferences briefly mentioned above will only be

Knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias 129 experienced as disconcerting by sociologists who are still wedded exclusively to the greater detachment, fantasy-control, ideology banishing model of scientific activity. To them, these trends will seem strange, unrigorous and uncontrolled, constituting a dangerous blurring of the much fought-for clear boundary between scientific knowledge and personal and lay experience. This boundary was always previously policed by a more predominantly repressive, prohibiting, super-ego, the character of which, and its relationship to other psychic functions, has now been transformed as social dividing lines have opened up. It is quite consistent with Elias’s theory of civilizing processes that in an era of a far-reaching phase of an informalization process, in which an ‘emancipation of emotions’ is well underway, different forms of interactive and dialogic sociology may become possible and even be perceived as legitimate by sociologists who are otherwise committed to greater detachment. Social and psychic ‘democratization’, brought about by social integration processes, may imply a revision (not an abandonment) of our traditional view of scientific detachment in the social field. Dialogic and other similarly interactive sociological investigations and the tolerance towards personal experiences and minority knowledges are in a sense more ‘involved’ activities, in Elias’s terms. But they correspond to more informalized and reflexive relationships between researchers and the researched who are now arguably more socially integrated into society at large. That is, these sociologies represent a more reflexive relationship between, to use Elias’s original play on philosophical terminology, the ‘objects’ and the ‘subjects’.22 These kinds of enquiry are made possible in a widespread way by the overall structure of social and psychic structures at the present time. They are linked with the extended forms of identity and personal politics. The key question is: are we witnessing in sociology today the death throes of detachment in the traditional sense? In the light of the domination of contemporary sociology by methodologically rigorous, statistically informed and focused research, this would seem to be an odd question. The total victory of scientific detachment seems to be upon us. But I would hypothesize that if the above social and psychic diagnosis contains even a grain of truth, much of this research is being carried out and written up by researchers who have a different attitude towards what they are doing compared with that of the generations preceding them, and will relate to each other and to the subjects of their enquiries in more informal and flexible ways than before. Sociologists of the contemporary sensibility are likely to accept the scientific detachment, ideology-extirpating model, or some version of it, but in a less automatic, austere and martial fashion. But this will not make the enquiries they undertake in its name any the less detached in practice. The same investigators probably possess the psychic wherewithal to live with being committed simultaneously to two things: on the one hand, to a highly detached sociology geared to investigating long-term social compulsions (whether methodologically sophisticated and statistical or not) and, on the other hand, to one or other of the ‘interactive’, quasi-political, ‘involved’ sociologies. However, in embracing a higher level of more differentiated self-control, they may better be able than

130

Knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias

earlier generations of sociologists to live with this seeming incongruity. To them there will be no incongruity. People have arguably become more confident of being able to control their dangerous emotions and the related fears of loss of face and status. This has opened the way to both higher levels of involvement and detachment and of the tension balance between the two. The traditional scientific imperative was closely associated with the classical models of scientific sociology (including that of Elias in significant respects) which grew out of a disciplining phase of the Western civilizing process. But it was an ideal that, as subsequent social and psychic developments are clearly demonstrating, did not by itself signify the end-state or final destination of sociology. Its transformation in the contemporary period by no means constitutes its demise, however, but simply its continuation on a higher level. To paraphrase Elias’s judgement about the process of civilization which he made at the end of Volume II of The Civilizing Process, one might say that the process of the development of sociology is not yet complete.

6

The Symbol Theory Secular humanism as a research programme

Ontologically … knowledge, like language, belongs to the great tract of processes linking nature and culture or society. It is far from immaterial. Without social standardization of sound patterns and the deposition of its symbol function in a person’s memory tracts, the processes we summarily call knowledge would fail to materialize. (Norbert Elias 1991a: 115)

Introduction This chapter rounds off my interpretation of the radical and far-reaching character of Elias’s work through an analysis of his enigmatic last book, The Symbol Theory (Elias 1991a). I will situate this work within the corpus of Elias’s writings and explain its congruence with the overall direction of his life’s work. Edited by the present author, this book was the last extended work to be completed for publication by Elias during his lifetime. Although oddly structured1 and sometimes repetitive, it is a piece of exploratory, synoptic theorizing on an imposing scale. It weaves evolutionary biology into a broader conception of human development as continuing and shaping the process of biological evolution on to another level. In his effort to understand the human condition as a whole, Elias, more than perhaps any other major twentieth-century sociologist, was prepared to bring sociology and biology closer together. He remarks that sociologists had a vested interest in distancing themselves from biology. As part of Elias’s conception of ‘The Great Evolution’ (Elias 1987a: 119ff.), The Symbol Theory is intended to provide a synthetic framework for all the sciences, including sociology. It is an ambitious aim, to say the least. As Goudsblom has rightly said: ‘In its attempt at a grand synthesis Symbol Theory moves way beyond sociology in any strict sense’ (1992b: 283).

Situating The Symbol Theory The Symbol Theory is better understood if Elias’s connection with the German tradition of the sociology of knowledge is taken into account (see Chapter 3). As I argued there, Elias took the tradition much further, into areas abandoned

132 The Symbol Theory: secular humanism by Karl Mannheim after 1933, notably that of developing a sociological theory of knowledge and science. In The Symbol Theory Elias explores areas of science which were beyond the ken of the brilliant, but ultimately belletristic, Mannheim. Elias deepened and extended that part of the sociology of knowledge programme which called for a sociological epistemology and ontology to replace traditional philosophy. It is the trace in Elias’s work of this tradition that accounts for the style of argumentation in The Symbol Theory. Elias invariably explores a problem first by exposing the static dichotomies (say subject/object or rational/irrational) involved in customary approaches. Then he returns to them several times while expounding a wider and more inclusive alternative framework of explanation, into which the original oppositions are reframed and dissolved. Elias’s mode of discussion transposes on to another level the problems as traditionally posed. As they are absorbed into the wider sociological framework, the traditional (often philosophical) ways of talking about the issue are then exposed as simply untenable. In The Symbol Theory we can follow Elias in this strategy as he reframes and transforms the following traditional ontological and epistemological dualisms: idealism/materialism spirit/matter mind/body culture/nature consciousness/being human/animal living/non-living form/content abstract/concrete rational/irrational subject/object In discussions with Elias, he told me that he regarded The Symbol Theory as linked with the cluster of his writings on the sociology of knowledge and science, including Time: An Essay (1992, in German 1987), the collection Involvement and Detachment (1987a) and various other articles in this area (Elias 1971, 1972, 1974, 1982, 1984b). In particular, the fragments ‘Reflections on the Great Evolution’ (in Elias 1987a) and the article ‘On Human Beings and Their Emotions: A ProcessSociological Essay’ (Elias 1987c) connect closely with The Symbol Theory. In a far-reaching and radical programme, Elias establishes the sociology of knowledge in this group of writings as the historical inheritor of the field associated with the superseded traditional philosophy of knowledge, which was dominated by an individualistic conception of the knowing subject. Elias also developed a sociological model of the sciences of a kind that would today be called a realist one, although without the transcendental, philosophical inspiration of much of the current work in this field (e.g. Bhaskar 1978). On Elias’s model, each science investigates a relatively autonomous level of integration

The Symbol Theory: secular humanism 133 (the physical, the chemical, the psychological, the social) of the universe as its ‘object’, to use the terminology of philosophers. This model – which he pointedly calls a ‘science of sciences’ (Elias 1974) – provides a more differentiated, nonreductionist, structural conception of the subject matter of the sciences, and hence of the differing methods and explanatory forms appropriate to them. He offers this model – which posits a dynamic hierarchy of sciences – as an empirically usable alternative to working with the subject/object distinction (Wassall 1990, 1994). For Elias, the social sciences lag behind the natural sciences due to the prevalence within their academic establishments of heteronomous evaluations and emotional involvements, which dominate the character of the knowledge produced (see Chapter 5). Hence, the human capacity to control social processes lags behind the capacity to control natural processes, because in the natural sciences the balance long ago shifted further over into the predominance of autonomous evaluations, signifying a breakthrough to greater detachment (Elias 1987a). One prominent polemical target for Elias in this group of writings is the Kantian conception of the a priori, which he criticizes relentlessly from an empiricalsociological point of view (see Chapter 2). Neither will he have any truck with nominalists, individualists and phenomenologists, nor reductionists of any kind – economic, physicalistic or biologistic. These polemics recur in Elias’s works on the sociology of knowledge in particular and are found also in various combinations in The Symbol Theory. As I argued in Chapter 2, Elias often convinces readers not so much by ‘logical’ arguments for this or that position, as by expressing issues in such a way as to provoke people into reflecting upon the categories or assumptions they routinely employ in dealing with them. Having read The Symbol Theory, it is hard, for example, to use again, unreflectively or without qualifications, any of the dualisms tabulated above. Elias was highly sensitive to the nuances and associations of the language and concepts we employ in sociology. The Symbol Theory is partly a call to us to unlearn concepts stemming from the older dualisms in order to develop a more detached and realistic image of human beings within an evolutionary framework and timescale. This task is, however, not simply the rational one of learning a new vocabulary. It inevitably involves people having to change the picture they have of themselves, perhaps in a direction that is uncomfortable. It entails overcoming emotional hurdles. This struggle is part of what Elias elsewhere called the sociological problem of how far and under what conditions people are capable of ‘facing themselves’ (Elias 1987a: 12–14, 39–40). Already one can detect a difference of substance between this conception and the more familiar, rationalistic dictum of ‘know thyself’ (Elias 1991a: 77). In his poem ‘Riding the Storm’ (Elias 1988: 81), Elias evoked the bleak intensity of his evolutionary image of humankind thrown into an inhospitable cosmos. born from a storm of disorder nomads of time without tiding in a void without border riding the storm

134 The Symbol Theory: secular humanism For Elias, seemingly disparate social events and processes, analysed and artificially separated by the various professionally organised social science establishments and by specialisms within sociology, are in fact all aspects of the same interwoven societal process. This is an insight that goes back to his doctoral dissertation and early research under Alfred Weber, into the connection between science and perspective painting in Florence (Elias 2005: Appendix). Elias has a similar view about the relationship between human interdependence and biological nature. The Symbol Theory brings to the foreground the implications of the longer-term process of biological evolution, as a relatively autonomous, interwoven level, for the way in which we look at human beings in societies. This process is usually relegated by sociologists to the status of simply the biological background to social life in industrial societies, a stance that assumes the rather blunt and undiscriminating dualism of nature/culture. For Elias, however, a longer-term understanding of social development needs to be integrated into the overall biological, evolutionary process. The natural constitution of human beings prepares them for learning from others, for living with others, for being cared for by others and for caring for others. It is difficult to imagine how social scientists can gain a clear understanding of the fact that nature prepares human beings for life in society without including aspects of the evolutionary process and of the social development of humankind in their field of vision. (Elias 1991a: 145) Furthermore, the converse is also true: that evolutionary biologists have a vested interest in minimizing the importance of levels of social integration other than the biological one in explaining biological changes (Elias 1991a: 33) (although, as we will see shortly, this may be changing). It is Elias’s sociological realization of this two-sided relation that makes his approach to building bridges towards evolutionary biology distinctive. In various places in this cluster of his writings, Elias draws attention to the ideological-emotional dimension, i.e. the involvements, embedded in controversies in the natural sciences which get in the way of a dispassionate investigation of realities. For example, he comments: ‘The petrified clinch in which physicalist biologists perceive as the only alternative to their position that of the metaphysicians and vitalists, and vice versa, obstructs the view of the evidence’ (Elias 1987a: 149). For Elias, people have to change the cosmic picture they have of themselves. He writes of ‘humankind as a whole’, human ‘mutual identification’ and even about the ‘human condition’ (Elias 1985c; Mennell 1998: ch. 9), the latter phrase being associated, of course, with existentialism and fundamental ontology (see Chapter 2). In view of the fact that it has been those philosophies and their close neighbour, theology, which have traditionally addressed these questions, it would be tempting to read Elias – particularly in The Symbol Theory – as really doing philosophy or theology by another name. It would not be at all surprising if someone suggested that in his discussions of these themes Elias reveals, against

The Symbol Theory: secular humanism 135 his declared intentions, that he is basically a religious thinker. I can imagine the kind of sophisticated argument that could be produced apparently to prove this. However, such a view would fail to grasp the way in which Elias’s work in this field carries philosophical and theological ruminations on the place of man in nature on to another level. Those formulations play a part, but only as traces, vestiges or presuppositions which shaped the concerns of Elias’s work in this field. In a word: to argue that Elias was basically a religious thinker would also be to misunderstand the sociological way in which Elias handles the issue of humankind as a whole in The Symbol Theory and elsewhere. He has something in common with Charles Raven and Teilhard de Chardin (see note 4 to this chapter), but departs from their essentially spiritual grasp of the evolutionary process. Philosophy provided Elias with a point of departure. Once he had broken with the tradition, his enquiries – despite some similarities of terminology here and there, as I explained in Chapter 2 – became structurally different from philosophy or theology. He genuinely tried to translate the so-called ‘philosophical’ or theological questions into a form amenable to empirical enquiries, carrying the issues forward in another key (see Chapters 2 and 3; Kilminster and Wouters 1995: 82–4). In my view, this feature of Elias’s work cannot be emphasized too much. It has been a major source of misunderstandings. The ‘Great Evolution’ (Elias 1987a: 119ff.) provides the synthetic framework for all the sciences, including sociology. It is obvious from The Symbol Theory that for Elias evolutionary theory is not to be identified solely with Darwin’s version. He clearly regards this as incomplete and representing an early stage of elaboration. Anticipating the accusations of evolutionary determinism or teleology, he draws the crucial distinction here, as in several other places in this group of writings, between largely irreversible biological evolution and potentially reversible social development. The life cycle of stars and the development of societies are not of the same kind: unlike a star, it is possible for social development to go into reverse and revert back to an earlier stage, say, to feudal social relations or to a stage where mutual identification is less. With this point in mind, Elias thought of civilizing and decivilizing processes, for example, as going hand in hand (Elias 1991a: 82; Fletcher 1997: 82–7; Mennell 1998: ch. 10). Within this great framework of socio-natural development, Elias sees the human technical capacity for communication via symbols to be a unique achievement of the blind inventiveness of nature. The capacity of humans to steer their conduct by means of learned knowledge gave them a great evolutionary advantage over other species which were unable to accomplish this at all or only to a very limited extent. He calls this humankind’s ‘symbol emancipation’ (Elias 1991a: 205). Hence, the survival of human groups has been to an important degree dependent upon objectcongruent knowledge (Elias 1991a: 63). For Elias, there are vital lessons to be learned from this realization for the future of humankind in the next stages of its development. Our orientation and survival in the emerging higher levels of social integration on the continental and global planes will, if history is anything to go by, be vastly aided by reality-congruent knowledge of those levels (Elias 1987a).

136 The Symbol Theory: secular humanism The aim of the research programme opened up in The Symbol Theory is, then, partly to provide a more adequate socio-biological picture of the human capacity for symbol formation than is possible with theories which employ or imply the standard but static polarities tabulated earlier, which contain dualistic, metaphysical undertones. The point is that working with such polarities would blind us to grasping symbol formation as a process of advancing synthesis, a process that is an accomplishment of the history of the whole of humankind. Advancing synthesis is a key term in Elias which covers the empirically demonstrable fact that concepts have embedded within them traces of previous stages of social and scientific development. He therefore prefers this concept to the more customary and static term ‘abstraction’ (see Kilminster 1998: 168–9). In his Time: An Essay (Elias 1992: 66–7) Elias gives the simple but telling example of the concept of ‘the moon’ to illustrate the idea of advancing synthesis. We take for granted that it is the same object that produces the different shapes it assumes in the night sky – its phases. Hence, we have a concept of ‘the moon’ in the singular, which we then teach to our children, for whom it then assumes the status of the obvious. But this fact was by no means evident to our distant ancestors, who saw the world differently. A stock of accumulated experience of a sequence of recurring shapes in the night sky was needed for the concept of ‘the moon’ to be possible. It took the learning process of a long line of generations to achieve it. To put these matters in another way, in The Symbol Theory Elias is interested in establishing the mode of existence of symbols, as learned means of communication, in a diachronic manner in an evolutionary framework which includes social development as its continuation on a higher level. The Symbol Theory consists of theoretical reflections towards the development of a symbolic synthesis of the subject matter of all the sciences that have arisen in the history of the human species to explain the relationships between the different emergent, relatively autonomous levels of integration. This whole enterprise would hopefully also contribute towards human beings developing a more realistic, if uncomfortable, image of themselves as part of nature. Elias’s aim is also to steer between either of the two extreme ideological positions which commonly permeate research on the animalistic dimension of human beings: (1) The reductionist view of the ethologists and sociobiologists such as E.O. Wilson and others (Segerstrale 1986), which effectively says that we humans are basically apes, and (2) The philosophical-religious view that human beings constitute a complete break with the animal world, forming a level of soul or spirit (Elias 1991a: 30–1, 69, 79–80). As I read him, Elias is trying theoretically to clear the decks for developing a new model of humankind to deal with these and other related questions, which usually tend to be posed only in such one-sided and evaluative ways. The use of the traditional dualisms reinforces these two ways of looking at the human socio-biological condition. In The Symbol Theory, Elias perhaps comes the closest he ever came in his major writings to elucidating his work as a world-view.

The Symbol Theory: secular humanism 137

Anthropological and philosophical approaches In this section I will make some comparisons between Elias and selected authors in anthropology and philosophy who have also dealt with symbol formation. This brief discussion will hopefully clarify the distinctiveness and specificity of Elias’s approach. By the mid-twentieth century, a number of social scientists and philosophers had come to appreciate the importance of symbolization in human evolution and history (Cassirer 1923, 1929; Langer 1949, 1953; Bertalanffy 1956, 1965, 1967). As Bertalanffy (1967: 21) commented: ‘the basic fact in anthropogenesis is the evolution of symbolism.’ Some writers have focused on the function of symbols in social cohesion and rituals, or in social boundary maintenance (e.g. Douglas 1966). Many anthropologists have followed Durkheim’s classic injunction: ‘social life, in all its aspects and in every period of its history, is made possible only by a vast symbolism’ (Durkheim 1915: 231; Turner 1967, 1969; Auge 1982). Durkheim’s work on the symbolizing function of material emblems and figurative representations has been extended into the symbolism of flags, food, hair, greetings and partings, giving and receiving, and much more (Firth 1975). As Firth says, as well as being interested in the more abstract significance of symbols in, for example, literature and religion, anthropologists are also concerned with the ways in which ordinary people think about symbols and behave symbolically in their daily life. He continues: The essence of symbolism lies in the recognition of one thing as standing for (re-presenting) another, the relation between them normally being that of concrete to abstract, particular to general. The relation is such that the symbol by itself appears capable of generating and receiving effects otherwise reserved for the object to which it refers – and such effects are often of high emotional charge. (Firth 1975: 15–16) Suitably dynamized and placed in a long-term perspective, cleansed of metaphysical dualisms and linked with social power, this work could be rendered compatible with Elias’s approach to symbolization. Philosophers have been concerned with the criteria by which a symbol can be recognized, definitional issues and the role of the human mind in the process of symbolization (Cassirer 1923; Langer 1949, 1953). Structuralists have also been concerned with the role of the mind in the creation of classification systems (Lévi-Strauss 1976) and semiologists with the grammar of sign systems in various fields, including dance, fashion, architecture and paintings (Eco 1984). Elias’s interest could be seen as being closer to that of the philosophers, structuralists and semiologists, in that he shares, as a perceived problem, their parallel discovery of the links between language, knowing and thinking, a theme central to The Symbol Theory. But Elias had already long ago decisively distanced himself from the implicit and sometimes explicit Kantianism which pervades much of the work

138 The Symbol Theory: secular humanism mentioned immediately above. In section III of The Symbol Theory (Elias 1991a: 49–54) he re-evaluates the philosophical concept of ‘meaning’ which is implied in these approaches. Elias has a dynamic, developmental orientation in contrast to the synchronic cast of the structuralist approach. Ernst Cassirer’s work does have a diachronic view of a sequence of symbol formation from simple beginnings as myth up to modern science, but has no sociological theory to explain the sequence. In addition, there is a tension in Cassirer’s work between his diachronic (historical) ambition and his synchronic (Kantian) reasoning. Benjo Maso (1995) has claimed, among other things, that Elias’s sociology is founded on a relational epistemology derived from neoKantianism, particularly from the early work of Cassirer. Cas Wouters and myself have counterposed an alternative view (Kilminster and Wouters 1995; see also Goudsblom (1995) on Cassirer and Elias). What is relevant about this exchange for our present purposes is that in the course of his polemic Maso went so far as to say the following about Elias’s The Symbol Theory: ‘in many respects seems only a rehash of Cassirer’s “philosophy of symbolic forms”’ (Maso 1995: 58). In our view, this judgement had not been thought through properly and is misleading. It is worth rehearsing again the basics of our case against Maso on this point because it will serve to bring out clearly the specificity of Elias’s sociological approach. Ernst Cassirer and other neo-Kantians did, as Maso correctly says, locate various issues in the study of knowledge and science which we also find in Elias. As problem areas, they all, including Elias, had these in common. These areas include studying science as a long-term process; science as historical and not eternal; the importance of pre-science for the development of science; the inadequacy of the model of the individual knowing subject; the fallacy of regarding mathematical physics as the paradigm model of a science; the link between language and thinking; and the importance for humans of symbols. However, Maso disregards the fact that Cassirer still dealt with these areas in a Kantian fashion, albeit a modified one, while Elias appropriated them as part of his developing sociological direction. This is the crucial difference. Maso accentuates the similarities in the works of Elias and Cassirer, while neglecting the differences. It is an obvious point to make, but Cassirer was a philosopher. Hence, nowhere in his copious works does he develop an original theory of social development, social power or the struggles of real groups of people in societies to account for the cognitive changes that he so brilliantly describes. That is not what philosophers do. Like the other members of the Marburg School, Cassirer was, however, prepared to study the actual findings of science and the history of culture and genuinely tried to blend empirical, historical evidence with the discussion of principles. As Cassirer himself put it in the Preface to the third volume of his The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: ‘As in my earlier works, I have tried to avoid any cleavage between systematic and historical considerations and have striven for a close fusion between the two’ (Cassirer 1929: xvi). In his programmatic statements at any rate, Cassirer claimed, against traditional Kantianism, that fundamental categories (inferred from what Kantians call ‘systematic’ enquiries) are not permanent but are open to constant development.

The Symbol Theory: secular humanism 139 But beyond this and superficial similarities of terminology, the similarity between Elias and Cassirer ends. In attending closely to empirical historical materials, Cassirer probably went about as far as it is possible to go in the philosophy of science without ceasing to be a philosopher altogether. His work may be seen as a way-station between a philosophical and a sociological approach to the origin and function of symbols. The use of empirical materials and an apparently processual viewpoint were features of Cassirer’s work that probably attracted the young Elias. This partly accounts for why he quoted Cassirer at length in his doctoral dissertation (see Elias 1922; Chapter 2, this volume). But Cassirer’s work – breathtakingly erudite to be sure – still remained ‘the philosophy of’ this or that subject, the status and warrant of that philosophy being taken for granted. Far from departing from the a priori and the transcendental method in the direction of a developmental sociology, as Elias did, Cassirer extended them to a study of the ideal forms and categories of language, myth, religion, folklore, magic and astrology. He was interested in demonstrating the forms and categories of the human mind from its early beginnings. In a classical Kantian manoeuvre, Cassirer invoked the energy of the ‘human spirit’ which ‘gives form to reality’, which reality is otherwise chaotic (1923: 78–9 and passim). The fundamental structure of his studies of human culture (including that of science) was transcendentalphilosophical and prefigures later developments in philosophical anthropology. This is very clear from his own description of how his programme was intended to ‘amplify’ and to ‘extend’ Kant: Thus the critique of reason becomes the critique of culture. It seeks to understand and to show how every content of culture, in so far as it is more than a mere isolated content, in so far as it is grounded in a universal principle of form, presupposes an original act of the human spirit. Herein the basic thesis of idealism finds its true and complete confirmation. (Cassirer 1923: 80) It is difficult to imagine a statement of intent further from the sociology of Norbert Elias than this. For the whole of his career, Cassirer never resolved the tension in his work between the evidence of long-term cognitive change he found in the history of sciences and human culture and the ‘timeless’, invariant principles he sought to extract from them. The absurdity of claiming that such principles had remained the same throughout history and would presumably remain so even in any possible future society, despite changes in dominant interests and social purposes, was a criticism levelled at Cassirer’s work long ago (see Stephens 1949: 174). It is also an objection that was made by Elias himself against Kantian thinking in his own doctoral dissertation (see Elias 1922; Chapter 2, this volume). Cassirer’s attempt to ground the different fields of culture conspicuously fell back into a reductive, philosophical idealism. As William H. Werkmeister put it, all of the fields are, for Cassirer, ‘only functions of the same integrating mind, and in and through its diversified products this mind reveals itself and reveals the world of experience as an expression or manifestation of mind’ (1949: 796).

140 The Symbol Theory: secular humanism Significant, too, is the fact that Cassirer believed that the origins of the recurring pattern he had apparently found in the categories of human culture lay in the ‘logical demand’ of thinking itself (Stephens 1949: 175ff.) (there are shades of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism here, which shares the same transcendentalphilosophical inspiration: see Kilminster 1998: ch. 5). Like many other rationalistic philosophers before him, Cassirer regarded humans primarily as thinking beings and elevated this faculty to extraordinary heights. He thus played down the fact that any relative invariance found in human consciousness and culture may also perform a practical function for human groups. Elias’s observations on symbol formation in The Symbol Theory and other writings, on the other hand, approach the problem from just such a practical-social point of view, in an evolutionary perspective. Symbols are partly sound patterns of human communication, made possible by the biological precondition of the human vocal apparatus. At the same time, symbol formation is bound up with practical social communication, orientation and group survival. Elias is interested in the sequential order of the stages in a long-term inter-generational knowledge process through which symbols become socially standardized and form, for later generations, reality-congruent knowledge. To reiterate: the ascent to that level of synthesis is, for Elias, a product of the whole development of humankind, a process which exceeds the compass of any one individual cognitive act of ‘abstraction’ (Elias 1992: 174ff., 184ff.). Elias is not trying to uncover logical invariants, on the lines of Cassirer, nor for him are symbols the product of the ‘human spirit’. Their two approaches are on very different tracks. Each has a completely different theory of the character of ‘abstraction’ (see Kilminster 1998: 23–4, 168). Another significant difference between all this work – Durkheimian, structuralist, Kantian-philosophical – and The Symbol Theory is Elias’s insistence that symbols are also tangible sound patterns of human communication. Humans can make a wide variety of sounds and hence produce many group-specific languages. These propositions bring Elias’s theory close to forms of materialism, although his work is not exactly assimilable to philosophical versions of that doctrine (see the epigraph to this chapter). It is the situating of the problem within an evolutionary framework in a particular sociological and non-reductive fashion which makes Elias’s efforts distinctive. Let us develop this point. To repeat: In The Symbol Theory Elias is trying to build a general framework for talking about human reality in terms of physical, chemical, biological, socialpsychological and cultural processes all at the same time, as shifting, dynamic related levels of existence. What distinguishes this synthesizing impulse from that of certain philosophers, who have also tried to unify the compartmentalized corpus of human knowledge, is that Elias – in a staunchly sociological fashion – wants to leave room for controlling for the intrusion of ideology and the politics of academic establishments into concept formation. This impetus is clear particularly in Elias’s Introduction to, and the first section of, The Symbol Theory (Elias 1991a: 1–36). It is a prominent feature of his sociological approach to knowledge generally (Elias 1971, 1972, 1982). This control should apply to all the sciences, natural and social, which deal with one or other level of this developing socio-natural

The Symbol Theory: secular humanism 141 complex. All scientific establishments have a vested interest in defending their monopoly on understanding and explaining the subject matter of the particular level of integration (or sub-level within a level) with which they are concerned. This is noticeably the case with the sociologists’ strict exclusion of biological processes. Bearing that in mind, it is therefore hard to describe the aims of The Symbol Theory in normal sociological language. Conventional sociological language automatically excludes, for professional reasons, all levels of integration other than a fairly narrowly conceived ‘social’ or ‘cultural’ realm, despite their unity in a comprehensive and developing reality. For Elias, the drive towards synthesis in human knowledge represents both a cognitive challenge to think ourselves out of dualisms such as ideas versus materiality, and a considerable professional challenge to stray beyond conventional disciplinary boundaries. Elias reminds us that symbols are also tangible sound patterns, but sociologists rarely notice the significance of this obvious fact due to their professional blinkers. Because of his theory of levels of integration, however, Elias is able to make this point about the tangible character of symbols without assuming a physicalistic reduction of symbols to the lower level of matter. This move also provides a corrective to the opposite, rationalistic temptation of assuming that symbol systems are part of an independent realm of culture with a reality of its own, unanchored to tangible realities. In The Symbol Theory, Elias addresses a question which is often either fudged in the current extensive work on culture (Arnason 1987; Archer 1988; Alexander 1990; Robertson 1990) or not dealt with because it has been deemed to be methodologically bracketed. The epigraph to this chapter focuses the issue. Elias the ontologist asks: what is the ontological status of knowledge? He addresses this question head-on in section V of The Symbol Theory (1991a: 65–82) in a long discussion of cerebral memory images. There he tries to move beyond the traditional alternatives of idealism or materialism (even though his work still possesses an affinity with materialism generally). Elias overcomes the traditional nature/culture and structure/culture dualisms usually involved in dealing with this issue by dipping them into the stream of continuity from the evolution of the human species through to the development of human societies as a level of integration sui generis. Knowledge must not, he insists, be treated as ‘an ingredient of culture and as wholly immaterial’ (Elias 1991a: 114).

The modern synthesis in evolutionary biology For Elias, then, what philosophers have called the human condition is embedded within social developments which continue the blind evolutionary process on to another level. Symbol formation is bound up with human survival in this process. This vision shares a great deal, in general terms, with that of an earlier generation of evolutionists who, in the 1930s and 1940s, established what is usually called ‘the modern synthesis’ in the theory of evolution (Futuyma 1986: ch. 1; Borchert and Zihlman 1990: 16–17), upon which Elias has clearly drawn. It had been forged

142 The Symbol Theory: secular humanism from the contributions of genetics, systematics and palaeontology to form a new version of Darwin’s theory. Elias already knew the biological sciences quite well from his early training in medicine in Germany in the 1920s. This familiarity is very apparent, for example, in his early essay ‘On Seeing in Nature’ (Elias 1921). But there is a special affinity between the conception of biological evolution found in The Symbol Theory and the modern synthesis as embodied in the work of writers such as Julian Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane, C.H. Waddington, Ernst Mayr, George Gaylord Simpson and Sewall Wright. Other philosophers and theologians, including Teilhard de Chardin and Charles Raven, also assumed a version of the modern synthesis as starting points for their own reflections and purposes. Elias would have encountered all of this work during its heyday, i.e. during the early part of the forty-year period when he lived, taught and researched in Britain (approximately 1935 to 1975).2 It is no accident that a book by Julian Huxley (1941) about the evolutionary uniqueness of man is the only one cited by Elias in The Symbol Theory. Although not a unified school as such, all these writers shared the view that society is an emergent3 phenomenon, a level irreducible to the previous physical, chemical and biological levels (see Blitz 1992: ch. 13). These earlier evolutionists, and others inspired by them, described society variously as the social ‘level of organization’ (Needham 1944); the ‘field of psychosocial integration’ (Reiser 1958); and the phase of ‘psycho-social evolution’ (Huxley 1942, 1953).4 Needham even called his theory of sciences a theory of ‘integrative levels’, as did Novikoff (1945). Elias’s term ‘levels of integration’ was also used in a similar sense by R.W. Gerard (1942: 67ff.) and by Robert Redfield of the Chicago School to describe the way in which, in social and biological systems, smaller entities undergo modifications of function and adjustment to each other as part of ‘the development and persistence of larger entities inclusive of the smaller’ (Redfield 1942: 5).5 There is a great deal of common ground between these writers and Elias’s conception of evolution found in The Symbol Theory. They share with Elias at least the following broad aims and principles: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Establishing human beings as an evolutionary breakthrough, a progression from a lower to a higher form.6 Society is an emergent, extra-somatic phenomenon, not reducible to the physical, chemical and biological levels. The idea that higher levels of integration tend to canalize the lower ones. The importance of knowledge transmission and learning in human development. The uniqueness of the human capacity for symbolization. The issue of how humans might now come to guide the evolutionary process from their position as its highest level. The importance of looking for global trends which might be leading towards the self-integration of humankind into a world civilization.

The Symbol Theory: secular humanism 143 But it is clear that while Elias seems to draw much from these writers and to share a number of assumptions, he also departs from them due to the robustly sociological way in which he handles the issues. He has a highly developed sociologist’s sense of the way in which people’s ideological or disciplinary biases can significantly shape their observations of biological realities. And he puts much more emphasis on explaining the role of power in the successive integrative/disintegrative stages of social development, within the overall social level of integration, than did any of the evolutionary biologists. His terminology for dealing with this level is noticeably tighter, more differentiated and adequate to its contours than is that of the evolutionary biologists. Human societies, as they are constituted today, have several interwoven levels of integration. The kin group level, the tribal level, the state level, the continental level, and finally the level of humanity, they all are steps on the ladder. Observers of the contemporary scene may notice a very pronounced difference in the power chances available to representatives of different levels of integration at different stages of humanity’s development. (Elias 1991a: 139)7 As we move up the developmental scale, into the social level of integration and its sub-levels, Elias specifies that smaller entities also undergo modifications of function and adjustment as part of the development and persistence of larger entities inclusive of them, with accompanying social conflicts. In another place, he makes clear the nature of the differentiation and integration processes that continue at the social levels of ‘The Great Evolution’, though without the assumption of teleology: As societies become more differentiated and the hierarchy of levels of integration grows in size and complexity, communities develop into one of the lower levels of integration. The range of decisions which can and must be taken at the community level decreases with the upward development of societies towards greater differentiation and complexity, just as it increases whenever an upward development goes into reverse and changes into a downward development. (Elias 1991a: xxv, emphasis added)8 This differentiated terminology of levels is in marked contrast to the explanatory looseness, for example, of Huxley’s term ‘phase of psycho-social evolution’, which is performing a different function. This kind of phrase was appropriate to what Huxley and some of the others were trying to do, i.e. simply to establish the irreducibility of the highest human social level to the lower ones, as part of an ethical-humanistic world-view based on an evolutionary picture of humankind (Huxley 1941, 1961). Elias shares a great deal with this particular type of secular humanism. For him, however, the secular vision has been transformed into a different idiom

144 The Symbol Theory: secular humanism through the integration of a sociological perspective in which controlling for ‘involvements’ plays a central part. The evolutionists of the modern synthesis saw the emerging human issue of how people might be able to guide or shape the evolutionary process from their position as its highest level. They also saw, at least in outline, the need to look towards global trends which might be leading towards the self-integration of humankind into a world civilization, something that Elias shared too (Elias 1987a). But for Elias, as one can see clearly in The Symbol Theory, integral to our work on those weighty matters has to be a great deal of sociological effort to control for the intrusion of emotionally charged ideological and religious evaluations into our observations of the biological and social levels of human beings. Compared with the tenor of Elias’s approach, however, the evolutionary humanism of people like Huxley or de Chardin appears somewhat triumphalist and overly optimistic. They tended to gloss over the obstacles that lie in the way of achieving a global secular society living in peace. Taking a very long-term perspective, Elias is neither optimistic nor pessimistic (Elias 1994: 76) about the potential for human beings to live together without killing each other, but is, rather, realistic. He points out that cosmologists have predicted that the sun will remain a life-supporting star probably for several million years. He continues: If humankind does not destroy itself, if it is not destroyed by a meteor or another cosmic collision – which are certainly very real possibilities – the natural conditions of its existence will give humans the opportunity to tackle the problems of their life together on earth, or wherever, for a very long time to come. A future of 4000 million years should give humans the opportunity to muddle their way out of several blind alleys and to learn how to make their life together more pleasant, more meaningful and worthwhile. (Elias 1991a: 146) In his later writings, Elias drew attention to the emerging integration of social groups on a global level, which process necessitates extending the scope of sociology beyond the level of integration of the nation-state to that of humankind as a whole, as a bulwark against the intrusion of national self-images into concept formation (Elias 1987b; Mennell 1998: ch. 9). The Symbol Theory contributes to this vital extension of scope by situating the investigation of human symbol formation in the very long evolutionary timescale of the human species and showing how it is bound up with communication, orientation and, above all, group survival. It thus helps to set a sociological programme for generating social scientific knowledge appropriate in scope and level of detachment needed for understanding – and thus potentially aiding survival in – the next phase of humankind’s development on that global level, which is emerging all around us. My reading of The Symbol Theory is that it is partly intended to provide sociologists with a more realistic and reliable image of humankind as a whole with which to work. Putting it baldly: humans are neither simply apes nor are they divine. A more detached and realistic appraisal suggests that we are the product of

The Symbol Theory: secular humanism 145 a haphazard, unplanned evolutionary process: ‘human beings owe their existence to a unique sequence of coincidences’ (Elias 1991a: 146). We are probably alone in an indifferent universe, having reached our present condition through aimless biological evolution and unintended processes of ever-widening social integration, the outcomes of which are far from certain. The conceptual ground-clearing exercises and polemics that go on in The Symbol Theory are partly designed to contribute to this practical goal by trying to eliminate some of the concepts, dualisms and outdated presuppositions. Elias rarely engaged in methodological polemics for their own sake. If used exclusively, these defective abstractions would not provide an adequate understanding for our orientation as the next emerging, global, integrative level comes increasingly to determine the functioning of the levels below, i.e. the continental, nation-state and kinship levels. In the hands of entrenched academic establishments and often tinged with implicit ideological and other evaluations, these abstractions may also represent a higher degree of involvement. As such, they could also contribute more to disorientation and possibly even to the dangerous raising of social tensions during the reintegration transitions towards larger survival units, through which humankind is probably, though by no means inevitably, about to pass (Elias 1991a: 141). These observations bring out clearly the multi-levelled quality of Elias’s research framework – its character as a ‘world-view’.

Recent evolutionary theory and anthropology As I mentioned at the beginning of this book, Elias rarely situated his work in relation to the writings of others in any systematic way. He was much more interested in developing and extending his own theories. Inevitably, he left behind the problem of ascertaining the compatibility of his legacy with the work of others and with recent findings in the fields he entered. In the case of The Symbol Theory how, if at all, is Elias’s exploratory theoretical work affected by recent developments in the theory of biological evolution and evolutionary psychology? Or by studies of the human symbolizing capacity found in the work of anthropologists working on prehistoric societies within an evolutionary framework? (See Foster and Botscharow (1990) for an overview.) Elias was working towards a synthesis of all the sciences, for which, if it is to be achieved by those who follow him, it will be necessary to sift the recent findings of various disciplines to an extent that will be beyond the research capacity of a single individual. Testing the strength of Elias’s theoretical reflections presents a real problem of expertise. I am not an evolutionary biologist nor well-read in archaeology and anthropology, so I have to rely on others to summarize recent findings. I can only offer here a limited discussion of some main trends in order to start off the process of appraisal. Since the modern synthesis, entire fields such as behaviour and ecology have become incorporated into evolutionary biology. It has become increasingly clear in that discipline that genetic variations and selection pressures are not the whole story in explaining the present features of species. What biologists call

146 The Symbol Theory: secular humanism developmental processes ‘that translate genotypes into phenotypes’ [the genotype is the genetic make-up of an organism and the phenotype refers to the physical and behavioural characteristics displayed by the organism] are now seen more as the products of evolutionary history and developmental biology (Futuyma 1986: 13). Borchert and Zihlman (1990)9 confirm that the modern synthesis placed a great deal of explanatory emphasis on natural selection and gene mutation which lead to morphological change, or a new phenotype. The theory did not, however, incorporate later findings about DNA from molecular biology. It is now realized that there is no necessary relationship between change at the level of genes and changes in morphology, i.e. behaviour. The adaptations that species make which allow them to survive in various environments may occur rapidly, accompanied by little genetic change. The adaptations may not be the result of accumulated mutations, but rather what is usually called ‘natural selection’ may occur as the result of ‘changes in regulatory genes without changes in structural genes’ (Borchert and Zihlman 1990: 16). To explain the origin of such new adaptations, the recent tendency in evolutionary theory and in anthropology is to look to the development of the organism in response to its external environment in the broadest sense. The move is away from the reductionist reasoning that focuses entirely on genes, towards an approach which stresses that genes are regulated by processes and levels above the genotype. It is these levels which provide the sources of new variation from which nature ‘selects’. That is to say, developmental mechanisms determine the range of potential phenotypes available for selection. The recent work by Pigliucci on ‘phenotypic plasticity’ (cited by Quilley 2004: 49) would seem to converge here. In a nutshell, the new dispensation stipulates that phenotypic change generally precedes genotypic change. As Borchert and Zihlman explain: The biochemical environment of the cell, the extracellular tissue environment, the physiological status of the organ system, etc. – all these are aspects of the genome’s environment. Through the interlocking of biochemical, physiological, hormonal and behavioral subsystems, the genes are regulated to some extent by social behavior and the social environment as well. Because these multiple ‘layers’ of environment regulate gene expression, they also then ‘create’ selection pressures to which the gene pool responds. … In its widest sense, the environment – which includes the sociobehavioral milieu of the developing animal – has a tremendous impact on the future actions of natural selection. (1990: 18) Assuming that the previous exposition is a reasonably accurate, if rather basic, indication of the direction of current evolutionary thinking, then what are the implications for our reception of The Symbol Theory? It is interesting that Elias shows an awareness of more recent developments, although it is difficult to ascertain how far his knowledge went in this direction. In his ‘Reflections on the Great Evolution’, Elias (1987a: 119ff.) discusses the import of the discovery

The Symbol Theory: secular humanism 147 of the DNA structure by Crick and Watson, regarded as a watershed for the new correctives to the modern synthesis. He also sees its significance for answering the question of how genetic information is transmitted by chromosomes (Elias 1987a: 163–4). He says that the evolutionary process of hominization was partly dependent upon changes in genetic structure (Elias 1987a: 167) in a balance with cerebral dominance, adding in a footnote: ‘the dominance of gene structures, their power to command as the highest centre regulating all organic processes, does not perhaps possess the absolute character ascribed to it today’ (Elias 1987a: 178). He is talking here about the functional ‘balance of power’, as he puts it, between different parts in an organism and arguing for a structural view of their configuration or organization as providing the key to understanding organic integration. In The Symbol Theory, to repeat an important point, Elias distinguishes between biological evolution and social development, which provide him with the basis for understanding two agencies for the transmission of the ‘means of survival’ from one generation to the next: In the case of evolution, the chief instrument of transmission and change is an organic structure called the ‘gene’. In the case of development, the chief instrument of transmission and change are symbols in the widest sense of the word, including not only knowledge, but, for example, also standards of conduct and sentiment. Initially, language transmission from person to person was its principal form. (Elias 1991a: 23) The important idea here is that in the longer term the biological disposition to be able to learn and to pass on information is interlocked with social developments in a continuous sequence. However, the blunt and static dualism of nature/society will not capture this movement or its synthetic character. Elias speaks about gene mutation in a way very similar to that of the more recent writers. He is aware that survival mechanisms, both biological and social, can affect genetic structures. He mentions the general levers of change in evolutionary theory – the struggle for survival and the survival of the fittest – and refers to ‘the selective operation of such conditions on haphazard mutations’ (Elias 1991a: 46). His basic point is that although very little is known of the conditions which transformed ape-like prehuman creatures, communicating via signals, into human beings communicating with language, it is likely that it was a very long-drawn-out process and ‘hardly the result of a single mutative spurt’ (Elias 1991a: 54). The recent modifications of the modern synthesis reported above, on my understanding at any rate, provide a compatible accompaniment at the biological level for Elias’s conception of evolutionary-social development in The Symbol Theory. The later ideas provide what evolutionary biologists call a ‘developmental’ view of how a range of phenotypes were made available for selection in the origin of the primate we call the human being, rather than its being entirely the result of random gene mutation. Elias seems to have been working on similar, or at

148 The Symbol Theory: secular humanism least compatible, lines. The newer ideas have, if anything, drawn a more broadly conceived evolutionary biology nearer to the synthetic viewpoint of Elias.10 On the Elias model, hominids with the requisite vocal apparatus and cortical connection, hence possessing the biological potential for extensive learning, are a presupposition for the development of group-specific languages and the transmission of knowledge. The recent ‘environmental’ explanation is particularly effective for understanding the stages preceding the evolution of hominids (provided that one complements the analysis with the idea that the survival of humans was also the result of their elimination struggles with other groups). The developmental-sociological conclusions Elias draws after that stage remain essentially unaffected, including the key role of the transmission of knowledge in the survival of human groups. The modern view would add simply that the imperative of communicating for the sake of group survival created selection pressures for regulatory genes best suited to ensure that later generations developed the same responses. This conception is particularly well suited, then, to explaining the transitional phase between our more ape-like animalistic ancestors and hominids as such, upon which Elias places great stress in The Symbol Theory, as an important area of research where much speculation reigns. As we have seen, Elias emphasizes that social and natural processes are interlocked. In the transitional phase, evolutionary processes and social pressures could run in parallel for a period. The early phases of social development, Elias says, ‘may have run side by side and may have intermingled with the evolutionary metamorphosis of ape-like animals into hominids of the present type’ (Elias 1991a: 144). After a certain point, Elias suggests, the developmental-social imperative becomes ascendant, leading to a domination of learned symbols over unlearned signals in hominid development. This is the significance of symbol emancipation. The contemporary ‘neo-Darwinist’ emphasis on genes being controlled by processes and levels above the genotype also fits well into Elias’s model of change in The Symbol Theory because it stresses levels and is moving away from atomism. The higher levels (environment/social behaviour) shape the configuration of partunits (regulatory genes) in the lower level, channelling new ranges of variation from which nature ‘selects’. This seems compatible with Elias’s view that ‘in the course of evolutionary change the autonomy of systems becomes greater and more variable, so all physical-chemical processes are increasingly governed by the order of the higher systems’ (Elias 1987a: 138–9). This observation is consistent with the general lesson that Elias draws from his theory of levels of integration (in Elias 1987a); that is, that higher levels of integration tend to canalize the lower levels, both within natural processes and as a result of social and cultural developments shaping and steering the physical, chemical and biological levels out of which society and culture developed as the next higher, inclusive, level.11 The term ‘anthroposphere’ has been used by Goudsblom (1992b, 2002) to refer to the long-term, expanding range of the ecological impacts of human culture. This conception develops Elias’s insight in The Symbol Theory and elsewhere that this expansion was partly due to the fact that humans are a symbolizing species

The Symbol Theory: secular humanism 149 and have been able to pass down across many generations an accumulating stock of social knowledge that enables the transformation, manipulation, domestication and control of non-human nature (including fire: see Goudsblom 1992a). This symbolizing capacity had important consequences for the survival of humans in particular, as probably one competing hominid group among several. As Quilley puts it: ‘symbol emancipation launched our species on a Promethean trajectory of ecological expansion and domination’ (Quilley 2004: 54). It is important to add, however, Elias’s firm reminder that it is highly likely that the so advantaged emerging human group of hominids probably achieved their dominance ultimately through killing their rivals, who thus became extinct (Elias 1987c: 341–2 and note 9 to this chapter; see also Dunning 1996: 142). In conclusion, a preliminary investigation suggests that Elias’s unifying framework elaborated in The Symbol Theory stands up reasonably well to comparison with contemporary research and trends in evolutionary biology and anthropology. Elias’s theory of knowledge and his attempt at a great synthesis in The Symbol Theory dovetail closely with the growing recognition by biologists of a ‘new evolutionary paradigm based upon a human-centred web of symbiosis – the “age of interdependent forms” ’ (Quilley 2004: 54, quoting Coppinger and Smith 1983). Reviewing a great deal of contemporary work in those fields, Quilley concludes that Elias’s concept of ‘second nature’ developed in The Civilizing Process, together with the concept of ‘symbol emancipation’, provide the basis for an ‘accommodation of sociological perspectives with both evolutionary biology and developmental biology’ (2004: 51). Even this brief survey of selected developments in recent evolutionary biology is sufficient to reveal both the prescience and promise of Elias’s work on the long-term socio-biological condition of humans. The testing of Elias’s ambitious synthetic framework set out in The Symbol Theory will in the future require a major inter-disciplinary research effort.

7

Concluding remarks The fourth blow to man’s narcissism?

When Freud described psychoanalysis as the third blow to man’s narcissism (the other two being delivered by Galileo [Copernicus] and Darwin) in that it showed him he was not master within his own house, there was left the hope … that if he knew himself better he would attain that mastery of the forces within. But suppose a study of group dynamics shows us how we are more than children of our time and generation, are indeed its slaves, that we are in fact ruled from without by group forces of which we are unaware, then our narcissism would get another nasty knock and flinching before the scattering of another illusion we would pull round us the consoling blanket of incomprehension and keep our minds engaged within the cosy circle of the family and its simple social derivatives. (John Rickman 1951: 152–3)

1 Norbert Elias lived through most of the twentieth century. His attitudes towards life and sociology were greatly affected by the reality shock of the First World War and by his experiences as a Jew living in Germany. He was also part of the renaissance of Jewish culture in the Weimar Republic and experienced the political violence which aided the rise of the National Socialists. Elias’s intellectual journey from philosophy to sociology was intertwined with these developments and profoundly shaped by his absorption and subsequent rejection of neo-Kantian philosophy. Elias chose not to try to renew philosophy as the way forward out of the perceived spiritual crisis of the West at the end of the First World War. Instead, his uncompromising strategy was to abandon it totally, on the grounds that it had been historically superseded by sociology. Philosophy was part of the problem, not part of the solution. As we saw in Chapter 2, Elias’s Jewish origins played a significant part in his obdurate rejection of the philosophy of the older, assimilationist generation of Jewish professors. Philosophy did, however, provide problem areas that he sought to transform into a sociological idiom. This would render them amenable to empirical reference and help to solve the problems posed in a more comprehensive and realistic way.

Conclusion: the fourth blow

151

2 Other sociologists, including Marx, Durkheim (and others in his circle, such as Simiand) as well as Mannheim and Bourdieu, have perceived the dwindling area of competence of philosophy in the age of social science and have also distanced themselves from the subject with varying degrees of finality. Few, however, have taken this perception as far as Elias did. Unlike Elias, most sociologists have conceded the autonomy of philosophical questions and have generally deferred to philosophers. Elias’s emphatic abandonment of philosophy in any shape or form included the rejection of the intellectual value of any conception of ‘transcendence’ whatsoever. In proclaiming this, he thereby decisively alienated himself from much of the academic world. Neither the products of Kantian a priori arguments on the ‘preconditions’ of knowledge or culture, nor the belief in the divine groundedness of existence, nor any of their variants, were to play any part in his work. For Elias, transcendental thinking produces empty generalizations buttressed by nothing more than the authority of the philosophers’ establishment. The high level of abstraction means that these enquiries cannot provide the vivid, useful and realitycongruent knowledge that can help humans to understand their relations with each other. Indeed, it would obfuscate and impede that aim. Not for Elias, therefore, the appeals to the ‘utopian moment’, the ‘ideal speech situation’, ‘regulative principles’, the ‘pre-social moral awareness’, ‘transcendental foundations beyond reason’ and the other ‘new prioris’ of contemporary philosophy and social theory. These transcendental tropes represented the last vestiges of philosophy and theology still lingering in academic discourse. Elias returned again and again in his later years to taunt transcendental philosophers with the ominous emptiness and forbidding abstraction of their life’s work. It was a challenge that begged the uncomfortable question of the basis of philosophical authority itself.

3 The immediacy of Elias’s confrontation with the neo-Kantians is several generations behind us. There are now thousands of sociology graduates produced per year, a developed profession in many countries and burgeoning graduate schools. The subject is also taught in schools. Much of the huge output of published books and research in sociology is couched in a methodological idiom of a degree of sophistication unimaginable in the sociological circles of Elias’s youth. (This professional patois is not, of course, a guarantee of cognitive value.) Elias now competes with many other writers and schools in the complex world of institutionalized sociology and its satellites, most of whom accept the basic sociological proposition that Elias and others had to fight to establish in the first half of the twentieth century. That is, that there are social patterns, sui generis, that surpass the scope of individual action and which form the object of the revolutionary new science of sociology. Indeed, in the most general terms this insight is now a commonplace. In such a situation, Elias’s work today tends to be assimilated into sociology as a fruitful approach or as providing some useful

152

Conclusion: the fourth blow

explanatory tools. Because it seems to share so much with the work of sociologists generally and because there are so many others to read, it can easily be passed over. Elias will seem indistinguishable from the many ‘social theorists’ one can choose to read, or whose concepts can be applied in research. Elias often remains unread, even by prominent members of the profession who, for that reason, do not experience that ignorance in any way as a significant gap in their sociological education.

4 In addition to the fate of Elias within the massive institutionalization of sociology in Western countries in recent decades, there is another level to be invoked when considering his reputation. Elias’s career, as Goudsblom (2002) has argued, spanned two stages in the long-term formation of sociology as an academic discipline, the first being when national traditions were established (1890–1930) and the second (1930–1970) when sociology became more firmly institutionalized with an international network and hierarchy. The geo-political domination of Europe by the USA led to the diffusion of the static American functionalist and social system paradigms during the 1940s and 1950s (see also Kilminster 1998: ch. 8). Elias’s developmental approach did not fit this dominant paradigm. This is an accurate account of the delayed (and still patchy) acceptance of Elias, but we can add the effect upon that reception of the whole world-view which accompanied the kind of sociology he was inviting sociologists to adopt. It is not simply his developmental orientation that has impeded his widespread acceptance, important though that dimension is. Elias’s perspective as a whole also makes considerable professional, personal and existential demands upon his readers, which are experienced as disproportionate. What Freud said of psychoanalysis is equally applicable to Elias: ‘powerful feelings are hurt by the subject-matter of the theory’ (Freud 1925: 272).

5 Professionally, a thorough immersion in Elias’s sociology brings about the realization that there are many issues involved in doing sociology that most sociologists do not even perceive as issues and many conventional issues that emerge on reflection to be non-issues. We have to unlearn much of our sociological education. Just consider what Elias is asking of us. We have to move beyond conventional sociological dualisms; abandon philosophy, Marxism, the leading concept of ‘modernity’, critical theory and the fashionable ‘social theory’; suspend political ideologies as guides to our research; and develop a healthy distance from the content and status of the disciplines of economics, history and psychology. These disciplines emerge as dominated by individualism, damaging kinds of abstraction, narrow scope, involvements, lack of process and heteronomous evaluations. What makes Elias’s work demanding lies not in its difficulty or obscurity (quite the contrary) but in what he asks us to give up, or at least to

Conclusion: the fourth blow

153

distance ourselves from. Elias effectively asks us not only to read, study and understand him but also, in the course of that process, to be prepared to rebuild our professional image of ourselves in ways that are far from comfortable. And this revision of our self-image has repercussions for our relations with others, inside and outside of sociology. This is the greatest challenge that his sociological outlook as a whole represents.

6 Whole disciplines are to be abandoned, or at least placed at arm’s length. Political and moral values are to be suspended in favour of a significant transfer (through secondary involvement) of a person’s affective motivation and life meaning into the mission of developing, against enormous odds, highly detached sociological knowledge of the social dynamics that thwart people’s plans like forces of nature. The odds are long because social tensions and conflicts are continually generating forces favouring involvements that deflect sociological efforts from greater detachment. This is because the institutional boundaries around sociology remain relatively porous and open to such external influences. Furthermore, a comprehensive commitment to sociology on Elias’s model could lead to excommunication from friendship networks and professional groups. The possible effects of this on reputation, credibility and career chances are obvious. Elias comments that there is always a point beyond which members of competing and struggling groups can go in a level of detachment that would allow them to see the interrelatedness of their group with others ‘without appearing and, so far as their group is concerned, without becoming, a dangerous heretic’ (Elias 1987a: 15).

7 Let me briefly illustrate the profundity of the problems of self-image and academic identity arising out of Elias’s work by relating a personal experience. Two or three years ago I attended a seminar by a prominent historian of science on what was unique about the scientific revolution in the West in the seventeenth century. How did a cognitive priority come to be attached to science in this period and then become consolidated? He opposed at the outset all sociologically reductive or ’triumphalist’ accounts of the process, in particular the Enlightenment view of science as the triumph of reason. In the course of his talk he confessed that he could not explain how this particular episode, in the many other examples of the irregular growth of science at various times and in various places in history, led to the consolidation of the cumulative model of scientific enquiry in the West. A mood of intellectual dejection hung over the seminar room. The science that we know, he argued, did not emerge as the result of breaking with religion, or as the triumph of reason, but rather its establishment was a ‘contingent’ response to various local events. In other words, it was an accidental occurrence.

154

Conclusion: the fourth blow

8 As I listened to this learned man confessing his inability to solve the question that he had set himself, an image used by Elias (1982: 15) came into my mind. He mentioned the well-known fact that the classical European rationalist philosophers were unable to solve the problem of knowledge based on the ego or knowing subject and ended up in the cul-de-sac of solipsism. He said that these philosophers were trying to get out of a room. They try to unlock the windows, but cannot. They try to climb up the chimney, but it is blocked. But all the time the door is not locked. To go through the door and solve the problem of knowledge would mean to disagree with the rules of the game that philosophers have set themselves. They would cease to be philosophers, which they cannot do.

9 I saw the same kind of failure of nerve in the lecture by the historian of science. His factual knowledge of the period was impressive and even intimidating. But as regards the problem he had set himself, namely of why science became consolidated in the West, he looked this way and that, into this and that detail, citing fact after fact about individual scientists and their circles. But the solution to the problem eluded him, when all the time the road to that solution lay clearly before him. His entire paper remained within the activities of individual scientists and he steadfastly refused to make moves sideways into other social, psychic, political, economic and artistic developments going on in the wider society in which science was developing. (As early as the mid-1920s in his first Habilitation research under Alfred Weber, Elias was working along these lines in relation to the links between science and art in Renaissance Florence. See Elias 2005: appendix.) For this historian of science, though, such an essentially sociological approach was not what he and his fellow historians of science should be doing. For them it would smack of holism, determinism and anti-individualism. His inhibitions in this regard were very strong indeed. To make these moves would have been to cease to be a historian. He would risk excommunication from the community of historians. His entire social existence was at stake. He had unconsciously reached the zenith of what he could face as a professional and as a person. So the problem he raised remained unsolved.

10 In his seminal essay, ‘The Resistances to Psychoanalysis’ (Freud 1925: 273), Freud referred to the cosmological blow to human self-love delivered by Copernicus; the biological blow delivered by Darwin; and the psychological blow aimed by psychoanalysis. Norbert Elias may be seen to have delivered the fourth blow to human narcissism, beyond Copernicus, Darwin and Freud – that is, the sociological blow. It may be that the resistances to his work that have surfaced over the years have arisen, at least in part, from the character of the present stage

Conclusion: the fourth blow

155

of social and psychic development. Most sociologists (and others) may simply not possess the all-round psychic strength and detachment, reinforced by networks of like-minded researchers, necessary to cope with the realistic image of an interdependent human society and of themselves that Elias insists we have to face. Elias points out (1987a: 39) that people’s capacity to ‘face themselves’, to see themselves as they are ‘without the shining armour of fantasies shielding them from suffering, past, present and future’, is dependent on the degree of security which they enjoy in society. He significantly adds, ‘But it probably has its limits’ (ibid.: 39).

11 There are telling parallels between the resistances to the reception of psychoanalysis described by Freud (Freud 1925: 263–72) and the emotionally charged controversies that were bound up with the reception of Elias’s ideas in the late 1960s and into the 1970s (Mennell 1998: ch. 10). People were infuriated by Elias lifting the veil of self-delusion from their professional pretensions and individual fantasies, and they responded by minimizing the novelty of his work or trying to undermine his scholarly credentials, often very stridently. Elias’s work forces one to remove oneself from the centre of the world and to contemplate one’s place in the succession of generations and in a largely opaque society indifferent to our aims and goals which are thwarted through endemic unintended consequences. It also invites people who think they know a great deal about society to reflect on how little the categories they routinely employ actually permit them to know or on how, as a result, their comprehension of society is blurred and uncertain. Only sociology properly done (institutionally freed from individualistic, mythical, political, religious and metaphysical thinking and distanced from the disciplines where they surreptitiously thrive) can provide us with the understanding humans need to help them live together. Elias’s perspective anticipates a more highly secular society than any we have so far seen and a far-reaching process of the institutionalization and scientification of sociology. All of this presupposes degrees of control of nature, self and society across whole stretches of world society envisageable only at present in the imagination.

12 As I argued in Chapter 5, the ‘anticipatory motif’ in Elias’s programme, that is, working towards the standard of detachment that would be embedded in sociology if it had achieved a higher degree of self-sustaining institutionalization, represents a further challenge. There is no guarantee. In the short term, the immediate pay-off in terms of furthering a career is likely to be small. In the longer term, the whole collective effort in this direction could come to nothing anyway if the achieved level of detachment were reversed by unanticipated national or global social conflicts which significantly raised the level of fears, producing a wave of involved, magical-mythical thinking. For most people, to ask them to

156

Conclusion: the fourth blow

work towards something of such long-term uncertainty and so little short-term recompense, compared with embracing conventional sociological research practices, is asking too much. Many sociologists will prefer the security of the wide umbrella of the professionalized mode of sociology. Here, under the wing of methodological rigour, research topics of narrow scope, policy relevance, interdisciplinary forbearance and the blurring of the dubiety of philosophy in the catch-all enterprise of ‘social theory’, it is possible to shelter from the demands and difficult choices being presented by Elias. These strategies and choices provide the ‘consoling blanket’ of which Rickman (see epigraph to this chapter) spoke. The widespread institutionalization of Elias’s paradigm lies very far in the future, if it ever occurs. Until then, his work, where known at all, is likely to be assimilated mainly as another source of concepts and research questions for the eclectic sociologists of the academy. But another function that it may perform for the unfinished process of the development of sociology is to act as the conscience of the discipline.

Notes

1 Understanding Elias 1 In his Involvement and Detachment (1987a: 117–18) Elias argued that simply because a book is old does not mean that it may not still be the best treatment of a problem. Conversely, new books did not necessarily represent an advance simply because they were new. It was the intrinsic cognitive worth of the book that counted, considered in the long-term perspective of the development of knowledge in the field of sociology, not whether it was currently à la mode. Elsewhere I have discussed the implications of these insights for distinguishing from among the huge publishing output of sociological books in the contemporary period those that contain genuine theoretical innnovations from those that are rehashes of earlier dead-ends, reworkings of ground already gained or philosophical regressions (Kilminster 1992, 1998: chs 8 and 9). 2 In The Court Society (1983) Elias added a further gloss that made this intention explicit: ‘A theory of civilizing processes is necessary to gain enough distance in relation to one’s own personality structure to recognize its connection with the structure of the society where one grew up, and to perceive both, not simply as something which exists, but as something which, in the course of a lengthy development, has become what it is’ (Elias 1983: 18, emphasis added). 3 Another way of putting the same point is that contemporary sociologies of ‘modernity’ also fail to take account of the fact that how we understand the Middle Ages today is already conditioned by the experience of ‘modernity’ as well as by the fact that modern societies developed out of the Middle Ages. As Elias writes: ‘[T]he so-called “modern age” did not simply emerge from an earlier period we call the Middle Ages; the way in which we experience the Middle Ages is also influenced by the fact that the modern age has emerged from it, and by the way we understand this modern age. That period only became the “Middle Ages” when seen from the modern age, and to understand the modern age it is necessary to see the Middle Ages as they were before the modern age existed. Similarly, it is useful to imagine this modern age as seen through the eyes of those for whom it has become a “Middle Ages”, and perhaps not even a very civilized one – a useful exercise for people living today, whether or not that other modern age ever comes about’ (Elias 1994: 152–3). This passage should be read alongside my comments in Chapters 2 and 4 about the traces (transformed, to be sure) of hermeneutics and fundamental ontology in Elias’s historiography. 4 Another drawback of contemporary sociological writings that employ the concept of modernity as a major diagnostic concept is the tendency towards reification. Modernity is often seen as an entity with plans and intentions. For example, in the influential writings of Zygmunt Bauman we find that modernity ‘is coming of age’ and is now ‘consciously abandoning what … it was unconsciously doing’ (Bauman 1990: 23). In another place he writes: ‘Postmodernity may be conceived of as modernity conscious

158

Notes

of its true nature – modernity for itself’ (Bauman 1992: 187, emphasis in original). A further example is to be found in an obscure passage in Scott Lash: ‘What happens, analysts like Beck and Giddens ask, when modernity begins to reflect on itself? What happens when modernization, understanding its own excesses and vicious spiral of destructive subjugation (of inner, outer and social nature) begins to take itself as object of reflection?’ (Beck et al. 1994: 112, emphases added). 5 Ulrich Beck (1994: 24) writes that ‘Optimistic and pessimistic fatalism agree in one respect: that there is only one shape of modernity, that of industrial society. … Many modernities are possible; that is the reply of reflexive modernization.’ 6 In the ‘world-system’ theory of Immanuel Wallerstein (1979, 1991) the interdependencies between nations have, of course, been made central. It was a theory of a global system of nations which was explicitly conceived partly in opposition to the lack in modernization theory of direct acknowledgement of the relationship between the development of the Western nations and the underdevelopment of countries in what was formerly known as the Third World. In recognizing the emergence of structured global regularities of an economic kind integrated at a level above but including that of the nation-state, Wallerstein’s work was a pioneering effort in detachment from natio-centric thinking. But the lack of a civilizational-socialization component (and hence the Eliasian dimension of self-confrontation) in the theory of a ‘worldsystem’ compounds the other widely recognized flaws of this approach: economism, externalism, teleology, political overstatements and the lack of a concept of culture (see Kilminster 1998: ch. 6).

2 Origins of Elias’s synthesis 1 My treatment in this chapter of the intellectual influences that fed into Elias’s thinking is necessarily selective. Elias complicated the issue of intellectual debts by challenging the conventional assumption, typical of the history of ideas, that an ‘influence’ always has to come from a book. (See the epigraph to this chapter.) In that spirit, Dunning and Mennell (2003a: xv) have made one of the first systematic attempts to show how events and experiences such as the First World War, the rise of the Nazis, German hyperinflation and Elias’s study of medicine sensitized him, respectively, to the problem of violence, the relationship between the public and the private and the importance of human corporeality and emotions. But we should note that Elias has conceded in the quotation that while not all influences on a social scientist come from books, some clearly do. He said that he was conscious of having learned from others, ‘though not only from books’ (emphasis added). Elias also stated this more explicitly in the Heilbron (1984) interview when he listed books that had impressed him in his youth. Thus, I would argue, it is a complementary exercise to trace which ones and how many, as well as – more importantly perhaps – which intellectual movements an author participated in. This research will hopefully augment the understanding of the character of Elias’s synthetic achievement as well as its genesis. While acknowledging the importance of all the events and experiences identified by Dunning and Mennell above (and perhaps others, including Elias’s twelve-year involvement with the elite of the Blau-Weiss Zionist organization, which they do not mention) in shaping Elias’s ideas, all I have attempted to do in this chapter is to illustrate merely one strand in a complex development that has been paid little or no attention up until now. That is, the way in which Elias’s critique of neo-Kantianism was probably affected by the devastating broadside against neo-Kantianism by the fundamental ontologists and existentialists, which brought philosophy firmly down to earth and – albeit dryly and abstractly – invoked concrete reality and human social relatedness. Elias is strangely silent about the fundamental ontologists, given the affinities of focus and concern, the proto-sociological character of their reflections and his proximity at certain points to,

Notes

159

or friendship with, the main thinkers and his participation in their circles. One obvious possibility is that Elias did indeed learn from the fundamental ontology movement and even from Heidegger himself and/or his early writings, particularly Being and Time, but did not mention this in his later autobiographical reflections because he did not want to be in any way associated with him. Elias must have known of Heidegger’s conservative inclinations and his active endorsement of Nazism after 1933 and the considerable controversy surrounding Heidegger’s later refusal to disown his Nazi past. 2 In Elias’s sociological theory of knowledge, concepts are not simply abstract in relation to the concrete. For him, such a dualistic conception would be symptomatic of the classical metaphysics from which he took his distance. Rather, Elias regards concepts as consisting of differing levels of synthesis, as having embedded in them traces of earlier stages of social and scientific development (Elias 1982: 18ff.; 1987a: 26–34; 1992: 133; Burkitt 1993; Kilminster 1998: 168ff.). 3 For Elias’s remarks on the part played in the genesis of the Civilizing Process by his Jewish identity, see in particular his Reflections on a Life (Elias 1994: 10ff. and 121–30). In the text I focused on how Elias’s attitude towards philosophy may well have been affected by his involvement with the Zionist youth movement Blau-Weiss in the 1920s and its effect. One implication of this is the provisional judgement that his Jewish identity and political involvement in one strand of Zionism for some years played a more significant part generally in shaping his sociological outlook than has hitherto been recognized, partly because this dimension of Elias’s biography remained sketchy until fairly recently. Elias wrote an article on ‘The Sociology of Anti-Semitism’ in 1929 and returned to the issue in an extended book review of Eva G. Reichmann’s Hostages of Civilization: A Study of the Social Causes of Anti-Semitism, later on. In this review Elias says that ‘the naive aim of assimilation has certainly proved a failure’ (Elias 1950b: 5). He also says that bewildered Jews in Germany in the 1930s, faced with rising anti-Semitism, refused to leave what they had come to regard as their homeland, saying: ‘I personally have done no wrong; what can they do to me?’ Thirty-five years later those very words reappeared in Elias’s Reflections on a Life (Elias 1994: 52) where we learned that they were in fact the words of Elias’s father Hermann Elias in London in 1938, just prior to returning to Breslau with his wife Sophie, who subsequently perished in Auschwitz. Gerd Freudenthal, who was a friend of Elias’s in the 1930s, reports in her memoirs that it was with Elias that she first discussed the consequences of being a Jew amidst the rising Nazi tide. Elias, she says, possessed an intense political awareness and ‘did not simply stick his head in the sand and let everything take its course’ (cited in Kettler and Meja 1993: 25). As Kettler and Meja have rightly said, the knowledge of Elias’s Zionism provides the solution to the puzzle of Elias always having been reported as being the least overtly ‘political’ of the Frankfurt circle around Mannheim. Elias was only apolitical in terms of the politics of the bourgeoisie and proletariat, which defined ‘the political’ for the rest of the circle (Kettler and Meja 1993: 25–6). Another difference between Elias and Mannheim (see Chapter 3) is that despite the fact that he, too, was Jewish, Mannheim wrote nothing about anti-Semitism and expressed nothing in public about the terrible fate of Jews in Europe in the 1940s. It is possible that this abstention may have been because he did not want to be accused of special pleading on behalf of Jews. 4 It is worth noting that unlike many of his contemporaries in the early 1920s, Elias did not fully share the common sentiment of the time of the ‘painting of materialism as an evil’ (Mosse 1987: 81; see also Cuddihy 1974). This, according to Mosse, was the dominant sensibility among young Germans and Jews alike in the early 1920s, as an expression of their disenchantment with bourgeois society and industrialism. In his autobiographical interview in Reflections on a Life Elias describes very positively his experiences of having to work in a metal goods factory for two years when his parents’ fortune had dwindled due to inflation (Elias 1994: 31–2). He describes his

160

5

6

7

8

Notes varied work as a specialist in metal pipes as a ‘magnificent experience’. He adds: ‘I learned a lot about economics’ and ‘for a future sociologist those were immensely valuable experiences’. In 1934 to 1935 in Paris Elias was involved with two partners in a failed business venture making children’s toys, in which he bought machines, opened a small factory and tried to sell the toys to stores (Elias 1994: 49–50). Elias seems to have assumed that people reading The Civilizing Process would see that the explanatory power of the ‘workable synthesis’ was everything and would seek to test it further in their own research. Working directly from the sociological model to empirical areas in this way was not without its dangers. It exposed Elias to the risk that readers would find in his books some apparent similarities with the ideas and concepts of other sociologists and philosophers but, failing to appreciate the synthetic character of his work, accuse him of unacknowledged derivation or lack of originality. Much of the controversy surrounding the belated recognition of his work in the 1970s and 1980s (see e.g. Bauman 1979 and the reply by Mennell and Dunning 1979; also Smith 1984; Rojek 1986; Jary 1987) arose from this feature of his approach. In thinking through the issue of homo clausus assumptions in Elias himself, I have been greatly indebted to correspondence with Peter Gleichmann and Michael Schröter. See also Schröter (1993). As anyone who knew Elias can attest, he was a very serene and self-possessed man. In Reflections on a Life the interviewer remarked upon Elias’s remarkable self-confidence, to which Elias replied: ‘I have never doubted what I was doing’ (Elias 1994: 76). Elias enjoyed an extraordinary inner security and an unshakeable certitude about the importance of sociology and his life’s work in its pursuit. In the Festschrift for Elias (Gleichmann et al. 1977) the psychoanalyst Ilse Seglow recalled her impression of him in Frankfurt in the early 1930s: ‘He seemed quite sure about what he wanted to do – too sure for some people’s liking’ (Seglow 1977: 17). Johan Goudsblom (1990a: 172–3) has commented that Elias ‘was not the sort of man to launch an organization. In this respect he differed greatly from Freud. Partly by temperament perhaps, and partly because of his career he was somehow too much of an individualist. He hated this label. When I once suggested it to him, he became very angry, and I can see why. Yet, there is no denying it: he went his own way.’ This statement is from What Is Sociology? (1978a) which was first published in German in 1970. The passage was thus probably composed some time in the late 1960s when Elias was still teaching part-time and researching at the University of Leicester, even though he had officially retired. It is important to note that it was written under the considerable pressure of tensions between sociological factions, including the one centring on Elias, in the Leicester Sociology Department at the time (Dunning and Rojek 2004). My title borrows the formula from Kenneth Megill’s article ‘Georg Lukács as an ontologist’ (Megill 1969). Megill argues that through all the different phases of Lukács’s development, from his early aesthetic work, through History and Class Consciousness, up to his last work, the three-volume study on The Ontology of Social Being, Lukács was basically an ontologist. Not in the sense of seeking the eternal categories of Being on the lines of Heidegger, but through his focus on the real concrete human social condition as it manifests itself in ‘everyday existence’ (Alltagsdasein) as Lukács put it. He added that ‘precisely that Being which we like to call every-day Being (Alltagssein) is a certain highly relative determination of complexes within an historical process’ (cited by Megill 1969: 337). This viewpoint is similar to that of Horkheimer, who wrote that there was no ‘being as such’ but rather a ‘manifold of beings in the world’ (cited in Kilminster 1979: 227). Both formulations have distant affinities with Elias since they are examples of one of the social-scientific (as opposed to philosophical) paths that led from Heidegger’s and the existentialists’ bringing back of concrete social existence, debased by the neo-Kantians – that is, the Marxian path. Elias may be seen, like Mannheim, as having taken another, post-

Notes

161

Marxian, social-scientific track that gave him a more differentiated and nuanced, but no less concrete, sense of social and psychic processes than that of the Marxists. But all three, in the context of the 1920s and 1930s, had in common the desire to explain the ‘historical source’ of the given concrete world of ‘being’, as Goldmann put it (Goldmann 1977: 45). For Elias’s observations on the ‘sociology of everyday life’ as popularized in the 1970s through phenomenology and ethnomethodology, see Elias 1978b. 9 Writers in the tradition of French structuralism also took as their starting point a dissatisfaction with the subject–object dualism and the knowing subject, as well as other pairings associated with Western philosophy generally, such as being/ consciousness and form/content, which were also targets for Elias’s sociology of knowledge (Kilminster 1998: 74). Both traditions, structuralism and the sociology of knowledge (particularly Elias’s version) may be seen as in their different ways contributing to the critical movement away from the dualisms of metaphysics and their surreptitious presence in social science. Jean-Marie Bénoist (1978: 222ff.) pointed out that while the concept of structure in structuralism is not synonymous with ontology, the philosophy of Heidegger is its distant ancestor. It is instructive to note the close parallel between Elias’s critique (Elias 1971: 366) of the Marxian basesuperstructure model of society as essentially dualistic, fallaciously postulating being and consciousness as two separate entities, and Axelos’s (1976: 154–6) Heideggerian critique of the same model on similar grounds. 10 Both Heidegger and Elias probably had in mind the more extravagant claims of some of the neo-Kantians as to the exalted status of logic. Lewis White Beck describes Hermann Cohen’s work, for example, as ‘extravagant panlogism’ (Beck 1967: 471). Paul Natorp, the other famous Marburg neo-Kantian, talked of ‘general logic’, meaning the idea that the logic of thought itself was independent of the process of cognition (Beck 1967: 471; Rose 1981: 10). In Elias’s case, his questioning of the absolute status of logic was also consistent with his emerging viewpoint, which would see the elevation of logic to such a status as a product of dualistic homo clausus reasoning. Logic would be placed in the same category as logos, mind and Geist. The championing of the elevated and autonomous status of logic in Western philosophy (although it did not entirely originate there) reflected and was reinforced by the individualistic state societies in which that tradition was embedded, thus indicating that logic was by no means a universal feature of human reason as the Kantians claimed. Heidegger did not, however, state that logic was worthless and had to be discarded, thereby driving him into the arms of irrationalism. As Fay (1977: 47) points out, for Heidegger it ‘is not that all logic is to be discarded as valueless, but he is attempting to show that it is not the only approach to thought’. He questioned the assumption that it is ‘the last court of appeal in philosophy’ (Fay 1977: 47). For a thoroughgoing critique of Heidegger’s position and a defence of the importance of symbolic logic as the central structure of thinking that helps us to shape the world, see Borgmann (1978). The socio-psychological origins and underpinnings of the laws of logic is a worthy topic of research and may open up interesting links with Elias’s perspective. In his essay ‘On Negation’ Freud associated the law of contradiction in formal logic with the condition of basic repression which, although repressive, nevertheless liberates the mind to contemplate various objects. It is consistent with Elias’s theory of civilizing processes to regard the degree and patterning of that repression as historically specific, which opens up the issue to comparative enquiry. See the interesting discussion in Brown (1959: 278–81) of dialectics as the struggle of the mind to overcome ‘the split and conflict within itself’. 11 Elias’s view of the fate of sociology and philosophy, which had its origins in a specifically German experience, did not transplant very well into British social science institutions, where he attempted to make a career after 1935. Unlike much continental sociology, British sociology, which at that time was institutionally very

162

12

13

14

15

Notes small indeed compared to today, was not born of social crises of the same order as those experienced in other parts of Europe. Britain was a relatively stable society with an indigenous tradition of social administration geared to gathering data about the condition of the underprivileged to be used to promote social reform through the conduit of receptive political institutions (Kilminster and Varcoe 1996b: 8–10). In the British social sciences, the wider questions that were so important for continental sociologists – such as: What is society? How does it hold together? How is civilized behaviour possible? How can we see through ideological illusions? – were not posed in such a way that sociological categories were required to be developed to answer them. T.H. Marshall’s retrospective comment in 1959 in a reference for Elias was telling: ‘[Elias] is … learned and has a subtle and distinguished mind. In many ways perhaps it is a little too subtle, as was that of Karl Mannheim’ (quoted by Korte 1996: 82–3). In these circumstances, Elias’s conception of sociology as committed to unmasking ideologies and myths and investigating the fragile veneer of civilized behaviour was somewhat out of step with British concerns. Adding to this Elias’s idea of having to fight in the name of sociology against the philosophical establishment (something held in particularly high esteem in Britain, notably in Oxford and Cambridge) meant that the deeper import of Elias’s perspective as a whole would have been for many British people very difficult to grasp. There is a parallel between the appeal of Kant to German-Jewish intellectuals because it enabled them to fit their own religion into a universal scheme and the way in which Polish Jewish intellectuals in the post-Second World War period enthusiastically embraced Marxist internationalism as an egalitarian, ‘universal’ doctrine that promised equal rights, freedom and opportunities for all, including the much persecuted Jews (see Morawski 1998). The stark and powerful realism of Elias’s depiction in What Is Sociology? (Elias 1978a: 28) of history as the ‘graveyard of human dreams’, invokes in particular the fate of the National Socialist myth. But it is possible that this view of history may also have its roots further back in Elias’s knowledge and experience of the tragic dashing of the hopes and dreams of many German Jews in the nineteenth-century experiment with assimilation (Elias 1950b: 5). As Richard Wolin (2003: 15) writes: ‘Whereas by 1900, postrevolutionary promises of universal equality had gone far toward alleviating the plight of Western European Jewry, the assimilationist dreams of their Central European counterparts seemed all but dashed amid recurrent waves of virulent antiSemitism.’ Elias incurred the wrath of Popperians in the 1980s by denouncing Karl Popper’s work based on a detailed discussion of one of Popper’s books dating from 1935, but ignoring the convergence of later work by Popper on the development of knowledge with some of his own ideas (Mennell 1998: 190–1). Misjudgements such as this, coupled with the other trenchant statements mentioned in the text, did not win Elias many friends and may also have impeded his reception. Although he discussed and dismissed Kantian philosophy most frequently, he also questioned the content of philosophy generally and the intellectual authority of all philosophers. In an attempt to test Elias’s reflections I have elsewhere (Kilminster 1998: ch. 1) addressed the issue of philosophical authority in relation to a number of other philosophical schools, in addition to Kant and Kantianism, not discussed in detail by Elias. These include logical empiricism, analytical philosophy, phenomenology, existentialism, fundamental ontology and Hegelianism. I also attempt there to assess the credibility of the different claims for an autonomous subject matter for their area of enquiry given by various philosophers from different traditions. In an interesting study by Susan Hekman (1986) an attempt is made to fuse ontological enquiries on the lines of Heidegger and Gadamer with Mannheim’s approach to the study of beliefs and real social groups in competition, in order to provide what Hekman calls an ‘ontological sociology of knowledge’ (Hekman 1986: 158). This

Notes

163

is said to promise a deeper kind of enquiry since it would lead to the heart of the ontological condition of humankind. However, this approach is misleading because the static philosophical conception of modes of being provided by Heidegger and Gadamer is incompatible with the dynamic sociological orientation of Mannheim and, by extension, of Elias too. Hekman wants to fuse a kind of speculative, transcendental philosophy that is developed without reference to empirical evidence (fundamental ontology) with one that is conceived entirely in relation to accumulated data (sociology). Fundamental ontology is at best ‘proto-sociology’ (Kilminster 1998: 64, 65, 176) and as such was never intended to be used in empirical investigations. Hekman’s enquiry presupposes as valid the philosophers’ stipulation of a difference between the ontic and the ontological levels, which Elias’s approach would deny (see the section in this chapter on ‘Elias as an ontologist’, pp. 18–32). Hence, the fusion of two types of enquiry advocated by Hekman is basically incoherent. The only effective way to comprehend the real global interconnectedness of the human predicament (which the fundamental ontologists would term ‘the human condition’ or the human ‘being-in-the-world’) in all its complexity at any given stage of social development is on the basis of comparative sociological evidence. It is this sense of the ‘human condition’ that Elias exemplified in his book about the development of humankind in the forty years since the Second World War, which was allusively entitled Humana conditio (Elias 1985c). In this book he stresses, among other things, that people’s lives are profoundly shaped by the way in which inter-state tensions are connected with the balance of forces within states (Mennell 1998: 73). The furthest point it is possible to reach on issues such as these within fundamental ontology as such would be the undifferentiated and abstract statement that the mode of being of humankind is always being-with-others, which formulation simply blurs the fine texture of the social existence of interdependent people, thus rendering it inaccessible. It is a conception that clearly performs some other functions for its advocates than guiding theoretical-empirical enquiry into the human predicament. One could speculate that those functions might be of a religious and/or a professional kind. (On these issues see Kilminster 1979: 226–9;1998: ch. 1. On Mannheim’s attitude towards Heidegger’s work see note 17 below and Woldring 1986: 147–50.) 16 Elias’s early formal education took place in the years immediately before and during the early part of the First World War, at the Johannes-Gymnasium in Breslau, which he describes as a ‘humanistic grammar school’ in his Reflections on a Life (Elias 1994: 84). Elias speaks favourably about his teachers in many subjects, including German literature and classical literature, the latter having been taught by Julius Stenzel, who Elias credits with giving him his understanding of it. This early orientation provided him, he says, with a ‘broad and deep access to human problems’ (Elias 1994: 85). Many of these teachers would have deeply absorbed the romantic heritage of German historicism. Julius Stenzel, who went on to teach at the University of Kiel, later published a book Philosophie der Sprache, Munich and Berlin, Oldenburg Verlag, 1934 (which is summarized briefly in Kuzmics 2001a). Stenzel’s book dealt with, among other things, language as embedded in community (Gemeinschaft) and his ideas may be of some relevance for understanding the development of Elias’s thinking generally. Stenzel is of some interest for locating earlier sources for Elias’s receptivity to departing from the use of the rigid physical science model of law-like explanation in social science towards a looser, but by no means less rigorous, model. Stenzel’s index contains several categories of Bedeutung (meaning) but none of Erklärung (explanation). (For the latter information I am indebted to e-mail contact with Helmut Kuzmics.) See also my further remarks in Chapter 6 about the relevance of Stenzel for understanding Elias’s Symbol Theory. 17 It is instructive to note, too, that in his essay ‘Competition as a Cultural Phenomenon’ (Mannheim 1928: 196) (originally a lecture given to the Sixth Congress of German Sociologists in Zurich, to which Elias responded – see Chapter 3) Karl Mannheim

164

Notes used Heidegger’s term Das Man in a self-consciously sociological sense to develop his key concept of the ‘public interpretation of reality’ or ‘the They’, citing Heidegger’s ‘Sein und Zeit’ that had been published the year before. Mannheim provocatively comments: ‘I do not suggest, of course, that Heidegger, as a philosopher, would agree with the sociological theory I am propounding. … Philosophy, ladies and gentlemen, may look at this matter differently’ (Mannheim 1928: 196). Elias would doubtless have agreed with a subsequent observation by Mannheim in the same lecture: ‘The philosopher looks at this “They” … but he is not interested to find out how it arose; and it is just at this point, where the philosopher stops, that the work of the sociologist begins’ (Mannheim 1928: 198).

3 Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim 1 Some of the ideas expressed in this chapter were presented in a paper I gave at the conference on ‘Norbert Elias: Sociology and Civilization’ at Kings College, Cambridge, on 13 April 1991. This chapter is a much revised and extended version of Kilminster (1993a), incorporating newly available documents and historical materials. My thinking on this topic was considerably clarified through correspondence and conversations with Reinhard Blomert during Blomert’s translation of the earlier version into German (Kilminster 1996). 2 It is worth briefly mentioning the polemical context of the argument presented in this chapter. My interpretation stems from a dissatisfaction with both the systematic minimizing of Elias’s debt to Mannheim by writers sympathetic to Elias (e.g. Goudsblom 1987a: 324; Mennell 1998: 12–13) and the way in which, in the writings of the influential Mannheim commentators Kettler et al. (1984) and Kettler and Meja (1993, 1995), the possible role of Elias in the shaping of some of Mannheim’s ideas and theoretical directions has not been considered. (The same is true of the works on Mannheim by Simonds (1978), Loader (1985), Hekman (1986) and Woldring (1986).) Having said that, however, I am greatly indebted to the insights and impeccable scholarship of Kettler, Meja and Stehr in their various collaborations on the subject of Mannheim, and of Goudsblom and Mennell on Elias. 3 I think that there is enough evidence mustered in this chapter to refute the hasty judgement of one historian that Elias ‘was a follower of Mannheim’ (Burke 1980: 23). 4 The similarity between these two quotations on the fiction of the isolated knowing subject may not be the result of Elias having borrowed from Mannheim, as it appears. It could be that Mannheim’s 1929 statement was itself formulated under the influence of discussions with Elias, who brought this preoccupation with the ego-centredness of Western philosophy, which was to dominate his subsequent thinking, to Heidelberg from the battles with his teacher Richard Hönigswald in Breslau (see Chapter 2). On the other hand, these kinds of criticism were very much the common currency in the philosophical circles of Weimar Germany in which both Mannheim and Elias participated, where neo-Kantianism was widely assailed in those terms. They may have both been drawing on the same culture of arguments. In 1971, Elias was probably therefore spontaneously summoning up an idea and a way of expressing it, that he experienced as entirely his own. 5 The same puzzle arises here as to the source of this similarity of expression that I referred to in the previous Note. On the face of it, it would appear that Elias was following, even paraphrasing, Mannheim simply because the date of Elias’s formulation is later. The explanation may be, however, that the passage from Mannheim comes from those sections of Man and Society in which, arguably, the influence of The Civilizing Process can be detected. Or it could be that the two men thought so similarly on certain matters that they expressed them in similar ways. L. Charles Cooper, the Mannheim researcher

Notes

165

of Champaign, Illinois, has informed me in e-mails that he possesses letters written to Cooper by Hans Gerth, dating from the early 1970s, conveying, among other things, Gerth’s knowledge of Mannheim’s negative feelings towards Elias, partly arising from Mannheim’s reaction to The Civilizing Process. These letters would clearly have a bearing on the understanding of Mannheim’s relationship with Elias in the late 1930s. Cooper has said that he will be discussing these letters in a forthcoming article. Mr Cooper will not release copies of the letters to me. 6 This theme of the need for controlled social outlets for the expression of ‘irrational’ emotions was foreshadowed somewhat philosophically in Ideology and Utopia as the recovery of the ‘ecstatic element in human experience’ (Mannheim 1929: 82). A later formulation was: ‘A complex mass society offers less opportunity for collective ecstasies, but it widens the scope for the institutional transmission of culture’ (Mannheim 1933a: 62). For a discussion of Ernst Kris’s (1936, 1948) analysis of ‘regression in the service of the ego’ see Chapter 5, this volume. 7 Stephen Mennell (1998: 290–1) points out that plannability itself rises and also falls in the course of figurational dynamics, which is a good summary of Elias’s position. Elias said that the scope for planned intervention on the basis of knowledge of unplanned dynamics increases in the course of a civilizing process. But figurations marked by increasingly more equal balances of power become more difficult to steer according to the plans or intentions of individuals. This would also explain why, as the result of a far-reaching process of informalization in Western societies from the 1960s onwards, in which power balances between groups became more even as contending groups became more integrated, the idea of planning (which presupposes clearer social divisions between rulers and ruled) fell out of favour. 8 In a footnote in The Civilizing Process (Elias 1939: 533) when discussing feudal societies, Elias advocates, in opposition to Otto Hintze’s use of Weber’s ideal types, the use of ‘real types’ in historical research. The concept of the real type was originally coined by Carl Menger (Käsler 1988: 186). Elias probably picked up the concept from discussions in the 1930s, possibly from Ralph Bonwit, who is mentioned in the footnote. In addition, Elias may not have known at that time that the use ‘real types’ was actually being advocated by Hintze himself. As Kocka (1987: 284) has pointed out, after 1930 Hintze ‘refined his views on historical type formation – emphasizing the “real type” (Realtypus) – by moving away from Max Weber, whose ideal type seemed too nominalistic for him’. Elias’s argument in the footnote in The Civilizing Process, together with further comments in The Court Society (1983: 13–14, 21–4 (revised edition, ed. Mennell 2006: 16–17, 24–7) is in fact very similar to that and also follows the tenor of the opposition to the ideal-type which was gathering ground at the time (see summary in Lane and Reimersma 1953: 437ff.). Elias suggests that idealtypes, as loosely constructed models put together from many examples elaborated in the mind of the individual investigator, embody an ‘extensive’ approach which tends to lose contact with real structures of power. They are applied in order to provide some sense of structure to a society assumed to be structureless. Elias advocates, rather, an ‘intensive’ approach leading to building detailed sociological models of, for example, single regimes of rule or distributions of power which enable specific people to maintain themselves as autocrats. Elias did not develop the concept of real types in a systematic and conceptual fashion, in relation to the work of others, either in 1939 or later. That was not his style. Rather, he preferred to elaborate concrete, empirically based, examples of real types, for example, the royal mechanism. But it is clear in retrospect that he was working in the spirit of a wider movement (notably in economics) away from the attenuating, idealized abstractions associated with ideal-types towards a different and more focused comprehension of concrete realities. Others were beginning to employ real types in historical research in the 1930s and 1940s, notably the economist Arthur Spiethoff, a former assistant of Gustav Schmoller. Spiethoff developed as a ‘real type’ the concept of an ‘economic style’

166

9

10

11

12

Notes in explicit opposition to Weber’s ideal-types and went some way towards clarifying his position from a methodological point of view (Spiethoff 1953 [originally 1948]: 453–6). He wrote: ‘But the spirit behind the procedure used to construct a real type is distinctly different from that behind the procedure used to construct an ideal type. In the former case there is no one-sided exaggeration, but a painstaking analysis of the concrete reality’ (Spiethoff 1953: 455). For discussions of Spiethoff’s work see Lane and Riemersma (1953); Cahnman (1995: ch. 2). I am grateful to my former student Paul Kim for the references to Arthur Spiethoff. Kettler et al. point out that Mannheim’s exile to Britain diverted him from ‘turning to good use the substantial responses and criticisms he was getting from people of his own generation like Hannah Arendt, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Hans Speier, Paul Tillich and Norbert Elias.’ (1984: 161). Elias’s critical response was, in effect, The Civilizing Process which, although stimulated by problems and research areas opened up by Mannheim in Frankfurt, constituted a departure from the broad direction of Mannheim’s work, even though they retained between them a great deal of common ground. Mannheim was almost certainly instructed by the level to which Elias in The Civilizing Process had taken enquiries into the relationship between social transformations and psychological changes, the rudiments of which Mannheim ploughed into his own political reflections, as we saw in the text. Other priorities, however, deflected him from making a more sustained and reflective response to Elias’s work, both as a theory of social and psychological processes and as suggesting a sociological programme in its own right. The evidence suggests that for most of the 1930s Mannheim was probably out of touch with the detailed content and overall direction of Elias’s researches and theoretical reflections until he looked at The Civilizing Process late in the decade. Mannheim’s chief collaborators and discussants in the 1930s were apparently Adolph Löwe, Hans Gerth and Edward Shils (Mannheim 1940: xxii; Kettler and Meja 1990: 1461), whereas Elias was in close intellectual contact in the 1930s with, among others, Franz Borkenau, Ilse Seglow and S.H. Foulkes (Goudsblom 1977b: 40–2; Mennell 1998: 17–20; Szakolczai 2000). The University of Amsterdam owns a copy of a 1938 preprint of Über den Prozess der Zivilisation, which contains the dedication: Prof.K. Mannheim [,] als Beitrag zu der gemeinsamen Arbeit an einer besseren Bewaltigung der Beziehungen von Mensch zu Mensch. N.E. (quoted in Goudsblom 1987b: 220). There is circumstantial evidence of Mannheim’s preoccupation with these themes at this time in Peter Laslett’s memoir about several meetings he had with him to discuss his doctoral research in London in late 1939. He writes: ‘[Mannheim] referred to social dissolution, to social structures in stress or “decay”. He genuinely believed in some medium which persisted over time, which was divisible into distinct, integrated national societies, and which was capable of profound crisis – both overall and individually. … He seemed to have an instinctive knowledge of how the psyche fitted into the collectivity, and how the collectivity could be, must be, descried in the individual psyche’ (Laslett 1979: 226). The clear difference between the sociologies of Elias and Mannheim after 1933, despite common ground between them, may be seen if one compares the introductory books on sociology which both of them separately wrote, more than forty years apart. The very title of Mannheim’s Systematic Sociology: An Introduction to the Study of Society (Mannheim 1957, originally 1935) has a Kantian or Simmelian ring. The whole text is organized around the idea of the ‘forms of living together of man’, e.g. domination/ subordination, competition and so on, which are dealt with analytically. In contrast, Elias has ‘process universals’ rather than ‘transcendental’ universals. Mannheim’s analytic sociology also informs his lectures on BBC Radio in 1945, which he also called ‘What Is Sociology?’ (Mannheim 1945). Elias’s What Is Sociology? (Elias 1978a), on the other hand, begins with Comte’s dynamic, developmental approach and proceeds to the need to destroy myths as being a prerequisite for sociology.

Notes

167

On both of those points, Elias remained faithful to the sociology of knowledge of the Heidelberg and Frankfurt years. On the subject of the concept of development, after 1933 Mannheim dropped it when the rise of the Nazis undermined his previous Hegelian faith in the progressive march of history. In retaining a conception of development Elias, in contrast to Mannheim, did not overreact to the events of the 1930s. I am grateful to Johan Goudsblom for suggesting to me the telling contrast between the two introductory texts. 13 Wilhelm ‘Gi’ Baldamus (conversations in Leeds with RK,11.9.90) recalled that when he met Elias at an internment camp in the Isle of Man in 1940, he immediately asked where was Mannheim? Elias apparently shrugged and said I’ve no idea, in a tone which Baldamus remembered as implying why should you think I would know? Baldamus also said that Elias told him at the camp that for all the Frankfurt period he had always been distanced from the direction of Mannheim’s work, but had kept his counsel. Elias was apparently no more specific than this. Baldamus, who had regularly attended the Mannheim/Elias sociology seminar at Frankfurt from 1931 to 1932, also recalled that Elias was completely silent during the seminars he attended. The discussions were always dominated by Hans Gerth, Adolph Löwe and Mannheim himself (see also Korte 1988: 112 ff.). For Baldamus’s enthusiastic endorsement of Elias’s later programme (Elias 1971) for ‘new directions’ in the sociology of knowledge, see Baldamus (1976: 49–50).

4 The Civilizing Process: the structure of a classic 1 The first English translations of the two volumes of The Civilizing Process in 1978 and 1982 received, for the most part, very enthusiastic reviews in anglophone periodicals and journals, for example, the extended reviews by Sennett (1978), Thomas (1978), Bauman (1979), Kilminster (1983) and Lasch (1985). (On the reception of Elias generally see Goudsblom (1977b) and Mennell (1998: ch. 1).) Many reviewers were impressed by how Elias had in 1939 anticipated many later theoretical developments in historical psychology and semiotics and, as a consequence, felt that the book had a very contemporary feel. But not all reviewers and commentators were unanimously positive, notably Marxists (Buck-Morss 1978; Robinson 1987 – see response by Dunning 1989) who opposed Elias’s theory of civilizing processes with either transcendental arguments about a possible utopian society or reinterpreted Elias’s data through the categories of historical materialism – or both. Furthermore, the publisher had misleadingly given the first volume of what is a robustly sociological study the subtitle of ‘The History of Manners’. This may have contributed to the book being wrongly perceived as a work of professional history writing. Hence historians, following their professional code, expressed predictable misgivings about what they saw as Elias’s illegitimate attempt to establish historical causal laws out of the facts of history (e.g. Mosse 1978; Adams 1982; Barraclough 1982; Lasch 1985). This argument against Elias oddly came at a time (the late 1970s) when in the British context history and sociology were actually coming closer together, not maintaining their strict disciplinary separation. Dialogue and co-operation between the two were the order of the day. As Anthony Giddens commented at the time: ‘There simply are no logical or even methodological distinctions between the social sciences and history …’ (Giddens 1979: 230, italics in original). This new mood was particularly evident in the work of Bullock, Laslett, Burke, Marwick and Foster, the History Workshop journal and in Marxist historiography generally. (I reviewed these debates in Kilminster 1982b.) This suggests that the emerging (albeit temporary) rapprochement between the two disciplines in the British context at that time was uneven. There were still enough traditionally minded historians available who would follow the old code when reviewing The Civilizing Process. For Elias’s views on the relationship between

168

2

3

4

5 6

Notes sociology and history, see especially Elias 1983: introduction; 1992: 187ff.; 1977: 363–9. Bruno Bettleheim (1985: 82–4) made a similar point about the mistranslation of the title and subtitle of Freud’s Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagsleben: Über Vergessen, Versprechen, Vergreifen, Aberglaube und Irrtum. The standard English version is The Psychopathology of Everyday Life: Forgetting, Slips of the Tongue, Bungled Actions, Superstitions and Errors. In this case, the omission of the contraction Zur and the word Über in the translation lost the clear signals from Freud that the book was only about these topics and ‘by no means an apodictic treatise on the subject’ (Bettleheim 1985: 84). Bruno Bettleheim (1985: 98ff.) pointed out that Civilization and Its Discontents is a misleading translation of Freud’s Das Unbehagen in der Kultur and that Freud himself suggested that Unbehagen be translated as either discomfort or malaise, but never ‘discontent’. According to James Strachey, in his Editor’s Introduction to the original English edition in 1930, Freud himself had suggested the title Man’s Discomfort in Civilization, but that it was the translator Joan Riviere who created the title finally adopted, i.e. Civilization and Its Discontents (Strachey 1930: x). Hence, the English translation of Elias’s allusive play on words ‘Unbehagen an der Barbarei’ as ‘barbarism and its discontents’ quoted in the text has uncritically, but perhaps understandably, repeated the standard translation of part of the title of Freud’s book, thus missing the tenor and nuance of Elias’s original words. Bettleheim further contended that ‘discontent’ is an unsatisfactory translation because it suggests a dissatisfaction of mind resulting from intellectual speculation, whereas for Freud Unbehagen designated a feeling. The English translation of the title does not convey the implication contained in the German one that ‘a certain discomfort is necessarily or unavoidably inherent in culture’ (Bettleheim 1985: 100). Furthermore, by inexplicably subsituting Zivilisation for Kultur the English title also misses the crucial point that by Kultur Freud had in mind those aspects of our world he cherished most highly and these were decidedly not aspects of material and technological ‘civilization’ in the German usage. The English title, Bettleheim continues, might give the cursory reader the impression that Freud was being critical of a civilization that brought about discontentment with life. This could imply the erroneous conclusion that it would be possible to have civilization without discontent. This would be a ‘childish and narcissistic’ (Bettleheim 1985: 101) notion that runs completely counter to what Freud had in mind, i.e. that Unbehagen is the inescapable concomitant of achieving a cultured existence. Bettleheim recommended the alternative title of The Uneasiness Inherent in Culture. Elias has also used Unbehagen to denote a feeling of discomfort or unease that we can feel towards groups of people who conceal or restrain certain natural functions less than we do. Elias’s usage would seem to be close to the spirit of Bettleheim’s reading of Freud on this point. But this affinity has been lost in the translation of Elias’s allusion in The Civilizing Process mentioned above. Later, in The Germans (1996: 13), Elias said that because national unity in Germany was achieved under the Prussians and through war, the German middle class in the nineteenth century assimilated military models of behaviour, even in business. These models were taken from an aristocracy that had a more militaristic character than its French and English counterparts. For a comparison of the civilizing processes in Austria and England see Kuzmics (1997). Later, Elias extended these insights into a much broader analysis of the development of social sciences, including political economy and sociology, from the eighteenth century onwards (Elias 1984a; see also Kilminster 1998: ch. 1). This is not to imply that the process of social relations becoming less rigid was a unilinear one. As Elias (1939: 80) puts it: ‘the movement ought to be seen in its full multilayered polyphony, not as a line but as a kind of fugue with a succession of related movement-motifs on different levels.’ Elias later (1996: 31–5) speaks of spurts in the

Notes

169

formalization and informalization of social behaviour through various phases as the balance of power between groups fluctuates. There will also be different trajectories in this respect in different countries. 7 Elias’s explanation of how socially desirable behaviour in modern times seems to come from people of their own free will, in the interests of their own dignity, could illuminate contemporary sociological debates about morality. These concerns have come to the fore in the wake of the breakup of the Russian empire in 1989 and the resulting prominence of the pluralistic, relativistic, ‘postmodern’ outlook. In his influential book, Postmodern Ethics (Bauman 1993, reprinted four times), Bauman develops a transcendental argument (Bauman 1993: 69–81) inspired by the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas, to the effect that a person’s moral responsibility for another person is ‘unconditional and infinite’ (Bauman 1993: 250) but is channelled in various ways in concrete societies. This idea constitutes a new sociological a priori. Empirically, people can choose whether to exercise that responsibility and hence the moral self is ‘always haunted by the suspicion that it is not moral enough’ (Bauman 1993: 80, italics in original). Moral responsibility is thus ambivalent because it contains the sense of a standard which can never be reached. A person knows when they are in the realm of moral choice, says Bauman, when they feel ‘moral anxiety’ (Bauman 1993: 80), ‘constant anguish’, ‘conscience’ (Bauman 1993: 250) and ‘guilt’ (Bauman 1993: 81), the latter taking a particularly profound form in extreme cases such as those of Holocaust survivors. The problem is, though, that Bauman elevates such moral responsibility to an absolute status: ‘Morality is the absolute beginning.’ (Bauman 1993: 74, italics in original). However, the kind of highly self-controlled, guilt-prone people he presupposes in his analysis, as well as those towards whom the whole exposition is aimed – those who would be capable of experiencing the compelling emotional power of a standard forever not attained – are not humans as such. As Elias shows, they are the product of a specific kind of internally pacified modern society at a far-reaching stage of state formation and civilization (see also Elias 1970). Bauman takes for granted the self-awareness, capacity for reflection and all-round conscience formation of such modern people generally, including his own, the genesis of which has been long forgotten. He does not ask how this self came about or how it is selfsustaining apparently without external coercion, or how universal it is. The pertinent sociological question was asked a long time ago by Louisa Holt: ‘How is it that human impulses become so firmly disciplined that people can have the illusion that man is instinctively an ethical being, or a rational being?’ (Holt 1950: 171). When it is no longer possible to identify the social superiors compelling our behaviour because the compulsion has become automatic and internal, then modern people can feel that their own inner world is indubitable and that they are entirely self-impelled and self-autarkic. It is the complex intellectual reflection and self-doubting of which this specific type of person is capable that has been elevated to the status of an absolute. 8 Christopher Lasch (1985) questioned the direction of psychological change depicted by Elias: ‘By emphasizing the internalization of authority, Elias exaggerates the importance of superego controls and misses the emergence of the modern ego’ (Lasch 1985: 714). It would appear at first glance that Lasch has anticipated here the point later made cogently by Wouters (1998) and Waldhoff (1995) that in The Civilizing Process Elias’s emphasis was on the balance between super-ego restraint and external constraint. This was due to Elias’s cut-off point in the nineteenth century, whereas the balance between super-ego and ego-functions and external constraints in the contemporary psyche has very probably moved more towards the egofunctions. But it is not the case that Lasch had also seen the need to extend Elias past the nineteenth century and into the investigation of the formation of a more egodominated form of self-regulation. Lasch in fact had in mind a different and highly evaluative meaning of the word ‘ego’. In his hands it is a code word for capitalistic economic individualism, a certain form of which, in its contemporary ‘narcissistic’

170

9

10

11

12

Notes incarnation, Lasch thoroughly disapproves because of the irresponsible selfishness and lack of robust self-reliance that it apparently encourages. His interest in making the observation about the direction of psychological change in The Civilizing Process was solely in order to prepare the way for presenting his own moral diagnosis, i.e. that the egotistical modern mind has encouraged a further ‘psychological regression’ into infantile narcissism, with disastrous moral and political consequences (Lasch 1985: 714–15; see also Lasch 1980). In other words, Lasch is not here strictly speaking making a contribution towards the scientific testing of Elias’s theory, but rather is simply using a discussion of Elias’s book as an occasion for making a preconceived moral-political point. In the service of his moral criticism he elides two quite distinct meanings of the word ‘ego’. The status of the concept Angriffslust in Elias’s work formed part of recent exchanges in Theory, Culture and Society between Benjo Maso (1995) and Kilminster and Wouters (1995). Maso claimed that a close reading of The Civilizing Process revealed a latent substantialism or essentialism in Elias’s thinking. This feature of his work was particularly evident, Maso argued, in the chapter ‘On Changes in Aggressiveness [Angriffslust]’. In the exchange, Wouters and I tried to show from extensive quotations from his works that Elias did not believe that human beings were innately aggressive, or that they possessed fixed drives or instincts, i.e. a ‘substance’. Whenever Elias talks about outbursts of cruelty, rapine or joy of attacking among medieval knights, Wouters and I argued, it is always in relation to the changing pattern of social standards of control over such violent impulses, in relation to a previously attained level of control. It is pertinent to add that in The Civilizing Process Elias never spoke of Instinkt but of Trieb (drive) (see Dunning et al. 2000: xvii) and frequently connected that word also with Affekte, thereby indicating that he wanted to separate it from its biological connotations and thus from any hint of ‘substantialism’. Generally, Angriffslust has been translated as ‘aggressiveness’ (occasionally as ‘belligerence’), when perhaps a more appropriate translation might be ‘lust for attacking’ (see Kilminster and Wouters 1995). Laplanche and Pontalis (1988: 17), in their standard international dictionary of psychoanalytic terms, give for aggression the German word Aggressivität. They also point out that psychoanalytically speaking this impulse, or cluster of tendencies, does not always have to have a destructive motor outcome, i.e. physical violence. It can be real or phantasy behaviour through which the person wants to harm, destroy or humiliate someone. Elias would surely have known that; so in the chapter in question, which is all about physical violence, it is reasonable to assume that he consistently used Angriffslust rather than Aggressivität. For an appreciation of Elias’s use in this chapter of pictorial evidence from the Medieval House-book of the late fifteenth century, see Dunning (1987). He also draws attention to Elias’s point about the matter-of-fact and un-nostalgic way in which people of all occupations and strata are represented in the drawings in this book. A qualification needs to be added here. The argument at this point must not be taken to assume that Elias accepted the time-honoured distinction between Naturwissenschaften and Kulturwissenschaften, as enterprises fundamentally different. The latter is usually said to involve the study of human cultural creations, thus requiring a different methodology of understanding from the law-like explanations appropriate in the natural sciences. I think evidence suggests that he did not accept this division in the clear-cut dichotomous way in which it is usually presented. For Elias both types of science, being human products, are bound up with the dialectics of involvement and detachment, but it is just that the cognitive products of the natural sciences have long since become autonomous of their original producers and their multifarious extraneous purposes and interests long forgotten (see Elias 1971; Bogner 1986, 1992; Chapter 4, this volume). A later comment in Elias’s Reflections on a Life (Elias 1994: 152) brings out this point clearly: ‘[I]n human experience it is not only what has gone before that can be

Notes

13

14

15 16

171

posited as the reason for what comes after, for its consequences; in the experience of those who come later even what comes afterwards, the “consequences”, in part determine the way in which something which happened earlier, the “reason”, is experienced and understood.’ This comment shows a sophisticated understanding of the historical embeddedness of social scientists and of sociological knowledge generally and gives the lie to the simple positivistic interpretation of Elias. On the contrary, Elias’s historiography could be said to be broadly ‘hermeneutic’, having been partly developed out of problems posed by the fundamental ontologists, as we saw in Chapter 2. Elias takes these assumptions for granted. In many places in The Civilizing Process he refers to the way in which present events and processes can illuminate our understanding of earlier stages of social development, which can then potentially help us better to understand the present as well as the development as a whole (see especially Elias 1939: 269, 277, 403–4, 436ff.). Also, in addition to the advice about how to read the two volumes, there are in this Introduction passages that anticipate contemporary discussions about the different speeds of social change in the different levels of society (e.g. Archer 1982, 1988; Mouzelis 1991). Elias says there are two main kinds of processes, proceeding in two different directions, towards: (1) ioncreased differentiation and integration; and (2) decreased differentiation and integration. Then, (3) a type of social process in the course of which the ‘structure’ of a society, or its particular aspects, is changed but without a tendency towards either of (1) or (2) being manifest. Finally, there are (4) countless changes in a society which do not involve changes in its structure at all. He also refers to hybrid forms, several types of changes in different directions and so on being observable simultaneously. Prior to Elias’s 1968 Introduction, all of the above points were made in a slightly different form by Eric Dunning in an article on ‘The Concept of Development’ (Dunning 1967). In his The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known, Christopher Bollas (1987: 282) has argued that the practice of clinical psychoanalysis also has deep existential and historical implications: ‘Is it not possible that by eventually developing a limited relation to the unthought known in ourselves, we can then address the mysteries of our existence, such as the curious fact of existence itself, particularly the legacy of our ancestors carried as it is through the generations via the idiom of the inherited disposition? In thinking the unthought known we ponder not simply the kernel of our true self, but elements of our forbears’ (Bollas 1987: 282–3). I am grateful to Graeme Gilloch for translations of the Elias/Benjamin correspondence. The wording of the German original of the letter by Elias quoted in the text may be found in Schöttker (1988). The passage quoted in the text occurs in Hamilton’s (1996) discussion of Benjamin’s conception of redemption. Hamilton (1996: 207–9) shows how Benjamin was well aware of the paradox that orthodox Marxism, an avowedly secular and scientific doctrine, contained at its core denied theological assumptions that were nevertheless vital for satisfying its belief in progress. In order to avoid the emancipatory impulse of Marxism being co-opted or diverted by ideological compromises in the present, Benjamin advocated an ‘embarrassingly apocalyptic’ (Hamilton 1996: 207) assumption; that is, an entirely imagined alternative society of justice and solidarity to be used as a perennial yardstick of social criticism. In her review of The Civilizing Process Susan Buck-Morss (1978: 198) essentially applied such a Marxian argument to Elias’s book, in her case an argument deriving more from Adorno than from Benjamin, but similar in its basic assumption. She complained that Elias’s theory suffered from a surfeit of ‘evolutionary gradualism’. He could not envisage a future utopian society as a complete break with bourgeois competition, repression and domination. But this conception does not see the issue of continuities versus breaks or discontinuities in history as being an empirical question. It simply applies a transcendental argument

172

Notes

in order to make a preconceived political point (See Kilminster (1998: ch. 3) for a critique of this principle in critical theory). 17 There are two different models of progress derivable from the Enlightenment. (1) The version that came to be associated with Marxian socialism, i.e. that the development of human history is known with certainty, and freedom will come inevitably. Each individual has an allotted place. This view is associated with totalitarianism, external discipline and state control of the populace (following Talmon 1952). (2) The other, which most closely approximates to Elias’s view, is the liberal model, through which surveying the ascent of man from apes justifies the view that humans have achieved some liberty through struggle. Through various reversals and mistakes, humankind may be seen as moving slowly towards a better future within an indefinite timescale. It will be possible, eventually, for humans to control nature, society and themselves. This view is associated with the French Enlightenment and in particular with Turgot, who, as Sampson (1956: 165) has pointed out, repudiated a notion of ‘simple mechanical progression’ in favour of a model whereby ‘Evil and error are necessary for the realization of progress, which emerges out of conflict’ (Sampson 1956: 165).

5 Involved detachment: knowledge and self-knowledge in Elias 1 I presented the essentials of the argument contained in this chapter at a seminar in the Department of Sociology at University College, Dublin, in November 2001. The argument was further developed in Kilminster (2004). This chapter is a much expanded and revised version of that article. I have focused on those aspects of Elias’s theory involvement and detachment that bear upon the issues of science, values and suspending political and ideological commitments, and on the part played in the genesis of his theory by problems raised by Weber and others in the context of Weimar sociology and philosophy. Elias’s related theory of levels of integration, which he also first expounded in his original article on involvement and detachment in 1956, I discuss in Chapters 2 and 6. In the Introduction to Elias (1987a) he also explores at length the usefulness of the concepts of involvement and detachment for an understanding of Renaissance perspective paintings, including important works by Masaccio, van Eyck and Velazquez. The connection between this kind of painting and the development of science in Florence was a subject that had interested Elias from early on. It was the subject of his proposed but never completed Habilitationsschrift under Alfred Weber in 1925. (The plan for Elias’s research under Alfred Weber was recently discovered and has been translated as the Appendix to Kilminster 2006b; see also Mennell 1998: 11.) It is instructive to compare the Kantian viewpoint of Bullough (1912) which, while providing insights into the role of the distancing continuum in artistic appreciation, is a somewhat disembodied and abstract theory. Following the philosopher’s code, Bullough would probably have regarded it as ‘unphilosophical’ to raise the issue of the origins of the types of real people who are capable of the controlled finesse of modern aesthetics. Once this is addressed, then it becomes possible, as Elias did, to see connections between artistic perspectivism and aesthetics and scientific detachment. 2 The problem of distanciation is also a major theme in Mannheim’s first lecture series given following his appointment to the Chair of Sociology in Frankfurt in 1930 (Kettler and Loader 2001a). 3 The term ‘outsiders’ (which subsequently Elias was to make his own) occurs a few times in Mannheim’s essays on the intelligentsia and on social democratization from the early 1930s (in Mannheim 1933b, 1933c). It is occasionally contrasted with the term ‘insiders’, in a pairing that Mannheim may have acquired from American sociology books of the time. In these essays by Mannheim, to repeat the point I

Notes

4

5

6 7

173

made at greater length in Chapter 3, one finds a number of adumbrations of research themes and problems later taken further by Elias as he worked towards the specific integration of sociology and psychoanalysis he achieved in The Civilizing Process and the established–outsiders theory. Dennis Smith (1984: 381) wrote: ‘The main weight of Elias’s claim to originality with regard to the understanding of social processes must surely rest upon his generalizations with respect to the relationship between figurational change and transformations within the human psyche.’ This judgement is essentially correct, except that Elias consistently regarded his work on the civilizing processes as a testable theory, not merely as a series of ‘generalizations’, as Smith’s historian’s formulation has it. For Mannheim, another consequence of social democratization has been the development of the aristocratic trait of ‘self-distanciation’ (Mannheim 1933c: 231) arising out of courtly life, which has percolated into the middle classes. This refers to people seeking, through learning, ‘cultivation’ and the pursuit of higher, spiritual ideals, to elevate themselves above contingent circumstances, to create some personal distance between themselves and everyday life. Mannheim (1933c: 239ff.) speculates that the process of social democratization, as it creates greater and greater social dedistanciation, could enable more and more people to establish contact with others in purely ‘existential relationships’, i.e. solely as human beings, not as socially distanced from each other in hierarchical relationships. He talks of developing a ‘new pattern of orientation based upon a deeper and more genuine truth’ (Mannheim 1933c: 246) for which the modern age provides a unique opportunity. Durkheim reached similar conclusions by another route. On the consequences of a very far-reaching division of labour he wrote: ‘One is thus gradually proceeding towards a state of affairs, now almost attained, in which the members of a single social group will no longer have anything in common other than their humanity, that is, the characteristics which constitute the human person in general’ (Durkheim 1898: 26). Cas Wouters (1998: 146), from an Eliasian perspective, has coined the term ‘superiorism’, to capture a common characteristic of racism, sexism, ageism and so on; that is, ‘equating power superiority with superiority as a human being’. He speculates on whether one outcome of social tensions in the contemporary period might be a further ‘emancipation of emotions’ whereby ‘feelings of inferiority and superiority will be further admitted into consciousness’, thereby coming under more stable internal control. Mannheim (1933c: 207) also cites Bullough’s seminal article. In some places Peter Berger and Hansfried Kellner (whose work on sociological method represents an advanced absorption of Weberian, phenomenological and psychoanalytic discussions) have gone some way towards correcting for Schutz’s rationalism – at least in their programmatic statements. Occasionally they achieve more integrated and less one-sided formulations of the structure of scientific activity that acknowledge the internal emotional struggles and the self-steering of those who undertake social science. For example, on the subject of what they regard as the grim consequences for science of allowing one’s values to dominate the enquiry, they write: ‘[O]nce … sociologists embark on their scientific inquiry, they must “bracket” these values as much as possible – not, needless to say, in the sense of giving them up or trying to forget them, but in the sense of controlling the way in which these values might distort the sociological vision. If such bracketing is not done, the scientific enterprise collapses and what the sociologist then believes to perceive is nothing but a mirror image of his own hopes and fears, wishes, resentments or other psychic needs; what he will then not perceive is anything that can reasonably be called social reality’ (Berger and Kellner 1981: 56). In the last two sections of this chapter I try to relate the phenomenologists’ methodological principle of rigorous ‘bracketing’ to the particular balance between ego and super-ego functions associated with the disciplining phase of the civilizing process.

174

Notes

8 Elias had a long-standing interest in the sciences, particularly biology, from his initial but uncompleted medical training (Elias 1994: 86ff.). His first proposal for a Habilitationsschrift with Alfred Weber in 1925 (mentioned in note 1 above) had as its focus the transition from pre-scientific to scientific thinking in the Italian city states (Elias 1994: 41; Mennell 1998: 11). 9 In keeping with the cognitive cast of their approach, phenomenologists have generally preferred the term ‘distance’ (or the variants ‘distancing’ and ‘distanciation’) to the word ‘detachment’. The latter term does occur occasionally in their writings (e.g. Schutz 1970: 259) where it is mostly used, as far as I can ascertain, synonymously with distance. 10 The quotation in the text is taken from the epigraph to Elias (1956). There is a typo in the version reproduced in Elias 1987a: 3. In the third line, ‘tell’ should read ‘tells’. It was correct in the original 1956 article. In the line in which the ‘Author’ says: ‘Madame, neither do I and it may well be that we are talking nonsense’, the original text by Hemingway (1994: 83) (originally 1944) had the word ‘horseshit’ instead of ‘nonsense’. This change had been made in the later editions of Hemingway’s text, which Elias has reproduced. 11 Elias offers another formulation in The Symbol Theory: ‘In short, by acquiring the skill of sending and receiving messages in the codified form of a social language, persons gain access to a dimension of the universe which is specifically human. They continue to be located in the four-dimensions of space-time, like all pre-human events, but are in addition as human beings located in a fifth dimension, that of symbols, which serve humans as means of communication and identification’ (Elias 1991a: 47). On a cursory reading there appears to be a terminological inconsistency between the two passages. In the passage quoted in this note, the fifth dimension refers specifically to symbols. But in the passage from 1987 quoted in the text, it appears that it is the study of symbols that provides the investigator with indirect access to the fifth dimension, described there as the ‘ “experiential”, thinking, feeling, drive aspects’, which are all part of a personality structure conceived of as ‘multi-levelled’ (1987a: 116). On the one hand, symbols are seemingly conceived of as part of a not immediately observable psychic structure, but, on the other hand, apparently in some way separate from it, as a fifth dimension. One needs to be cautious, however, about looking at this issue in too formalistic a fashion and imposing a dualistic structure (symbols and something else, or consciousness/being) on what Elias conceived of as a unified system of functions within humans as biological organisms which are also social beings. On this interpretation, symbols cannot be understood apart from their reality as sound patterns of human communication made possible by the evolutionary biological precondition of the unique and complex vocal apparatus of humans. Elias argues that it is the learned character of the sound patterns in humans (unlike in animals) that endows ‘languages with the character of symbols’ (Elias 1991a: 40). (See also Elias 1991a: 38ff.; Kilminster 1991a: xvii.) Hence, a study of symbols, since they are learned sound patterns used in human communication, can illuminate the inner world of affect control, because upon its typical pattern and character depends the ways in which the symbols are articulated in social relations, which is the external and compelling functional imperative for this kind of symbolic communication. For Elias, the fifth dimension of symbols thus has a unique (but not metaphysical) existence in the universe because this dimension is sustained as part of the interlocked human groups and social interdependencies (the emergent social level of integration) in which those symbols function as vital means of orientation. This social level includes, as lower levels, the physical, chemical and biological processes which make up nature and humans as biological organisms. In all this Elias is plying a course between idealism and materialism and between other dualisms such as structure/culture and nature/culture (see Elias (1991a: section V) on cerebral memory images; Kilminster 1991a: xvii; Chapter 6, this volume; and note 12 below).

Notes

175

12 It is obvious from the text up to this point that Elias’s model of human beings emphasizes two features: (1) their corporeality as whole people, as bodies; and (2) involvement and detachment as ends of a continuum, developed out of other models of continua, and not as a dualism. It is therefore difficult to comprehend how Rojek (1986) could have concluded that Elias’s concepts of involvement and detachment do constitute a dualism after all. And, moreover, that it is a dualism which portrays the world as ‘the mere expression of “involved” consciousness’ (Rojek 1986: 587), thus lapsing into idealism. As I have tried to show, the pith and marrow of Elias’s whole endeavour, both in its origins partly as a sociological transformation of problems raised by philosophical ontology and in its model of humans and theory of levels of integration, embraces precisely the opposite tendency. If anything, there are affinities with forms of materialism in Elias, not idealism (see Chapter 2, this volume). As I have tried to show at length in the text, Elias’s work is a sustained broadside against the rationalism of Kantianism, phenomenology and Weberian action theory, which were for Elias points of departure for his psychoanalytically informed sociology of power. Thus, I find Rojek’s (1986: 592–3) detection of a ‘basically rationalist view of social relations’ and other ‘rationalist overtones’ in Elias, simply baffling. For a contemporary materialist theory of consciousness that places the illusion of a mind–body distinctness and hence the metaphysical dualism itself, at the centre of the enquiry, in a formulation apparently compatible with Elias’s work; see Papineau 2004. More work needs to be done than I have the space to attempt here into the compatibility of Elias’s theory of levels of integration and his evolutionary viewpoint in The Symbol Theory with contemporary materialist theories of consciousness. Perhaps a synthesis would be possible. All I can do here is to suggest the affinity (see note 11 above). 13 In What Is Sociology? Elias (1978a: 156–7) referred to the ‘triad of basic controls’ as a way of calibrating the stage of development of a society: control over non-human forces, social forces (i.e. relations between people) and over the self as an individual. See also Mennell (1998: 169–70), who usefully glosses the three controls as the three interdependent levels of the ‘technological’, the ‘social’ and the ‘psychological’. There is further discussion of the triad in Dunning (1986: 13–14). For a comparison of the differences between Elias’s model of the uneven development between the three controls and the misleading conception of total social, natural and individual domination and control found in the work of the early Frankfurt School, see Bogner (1987: 265ff.). 14 My focus on the problematics of ‘face thyself’ has meant that I have had to leave aside many other interesting and highly topical things Elias says in his essay ‘Involvement and Detachment’ about the struggle for sociology generally. For example, he draws attention to the domination of sociology by a model of scientific explanation derived from physics. Often wrapped up with intense involvements, this model provides for many sociologists a form of ‘pseudo-detachment’ (Elias 1987a: 33). Interestingly, Elias uses the ‘model of models’ – that is, the theory of sciences as defined by the level of integration upon which they focus (ibid.) – as a way of showing that the model of science based on physics is simply inappropriate for the kind of units and their organization that one encounters in the social realm. This way of convincing readers of why they should avoid that model in the pursuit of sociology already presupposes a considerable level of detachment. As an argument it functions in a similar way to Elias’s use of data in The Civilizing Process that I drew attention to in Chapter 4. The argument forestalls discussion of the issues in terms of preferences or ideological biases as reflected in the dogmatic advocacy of polarized alternatives such as humanistic hermeneutics versus a dehumanizing positivism and so on. For Elias those kinds of discussion are beside the point and reflect to a great extent other involvements of their participants, simply because in choosing a model of science the relationship between units and part units in the level of integration corresponding to networks of social relations is the key. Hence, the application of the physics model, where these relations

176

15

16

17

18

Notes are those of atoms and molecules and not people bonded into social relations, should not even be on the agenda. It is significant that although he talks in his exposition of involvement and detachment about ‘positive sciences’, Elias never refers in the article to positivism as such, thus avoiding the value-laden associations with which that term is heavily compromised. One such person was the pioneer Freudian Ernest Jones, who, in a lecture in 1939 entitled ‘Evolution and Revolution’ (Jones 1941), made out a case for the importance of psychoanalysis in providing knowledge of the unconscious dimension of destructive social events such as revolutions and similar conflicts. Like Elias he, too, saw the urgent problem of controlling and directing social forces that were partially unconscious and which were getting out of hand. Of the impending European war Jones wrote (with exquisite English understatement): ‘The prevailing muddle, to use a mild expression, into which the social relations of mankind have obviously landed, both intra-nationally and inter-nationally, is more than anything else due to ignorance of just those unconscious forces on the nature of which psycho-analysis is throwing so much light. To control and manipulate those forces, as we can do with so many other natural agencies, may prove to be difficult enough, but it is evidently altogether impossible so long as we do not even know of their existence’ (Jones 1941: 194). The only place in his published writings where Elias discusses sublimation at length is in his study of Mozart (1993: 52–61, 137–8). In this late work he writes systematically in praise of elementary streams of fantasies in the context of artistic creation. (See also the discussion of Ernst Kris earlier in this chapter.) For Elias, fantasies are very important for people and indispensable in many areas of social life, but harmful in the form of social myths (see Elias 1978a: 23–8, 1994: 40). As regards sociology, however, Elias advocates in the strongest terms the rigorous elimination of certain kinds of fantasies if they inform ideologies, creeds and similar involvements that could tip the balance of the knowledge produced by sociologists more towards involvement than greater detachment. Dennis Smith (1984: 375) argued against Elias by employing a particular kind of transcendental thought experiment that is often invoked in sociology but not often challenged. (I have examined the origins and function of transcendental arguments in philosophy establishments in Kilminster 1998: ch. 1.) Smith confronts Elias’s theory of involvement and detachment with the abstract possibility: what if comprehensive object-adequate knowledge via greater detachment had actually been achieved in society, what would the ‘enlightened’ people in this society actually perceive? His answer is that they would ‘see, very clearly, themselves looking at themselves’. And because subject orientation, and hence all culture, would have been overthrown, people would have, at the highest point of their control over nature and society, lost the motivation to act. This analysis has projected on to Elias’s theory of social development a utopian end-state of the ‘identical subject-object of history’ on the lines of Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (see Kilminster 1979: chs 1 and 2, 1998: chs 2 and 3). One can only surmise from various remarks in Smith’s article the intention behind this strategy. It was probably to suggest that Elias’s sociological mission, in rejecting philosophy and ‘social theory’, has cut him off from discussions of how society ‘ought’ to be changed or reorganized, and that the projection of an imaginary state of total and paralysing enlightenment as the end of history for Elias would somehow place those issues back on the agenda. This point has misunderstood the ‘detour via detachment’ argument of Elias, whereby evaluative questions are returned to on another level and reformulated (see Chapters 2 and 3, this volume). Chris Rojek (1986: 591) effectively wants such guarantees. He comments provocatively that readers of Elias ‘intent upon practising the method of detachment must whistle in the dark. Elias supplies no guidelines, no mechanisms, no drill for attaining detachment.’ Like Smith’s critique in note 17 above, this comment also misses the non-transcendental anticipatory motif in Elias’s observations about the struggle for

Notes

19

20

21

22

177

sociology that I discuss in the text. Rojek also disregards Elias’s warnings about the formidable demands he is making on sociologists themselves and in their relations with colleagues and friends. They have to ‘face themselves’ without the certainty that their sociological commitments will bear fruit and at the risk of appearing to certain groups as a dangerous heretic. Rojek further claims that Elias’s critique of process reduction in sociology ‘simply operates as a pretext for never making any commitment’ (Rojek 1986: 594) but does not specify what type of commitment he has in mind. The context of his remark implies that he means political or ideological commitments. This comment shows a basic misunderstanding of the difference between autonomous and heteronomous evaluations in Elias which specifies that there are different kinds of commitment. Furthermore, Rojek shows no understanding of the idea of a cumulative transfer of affect into autonomous evaluations as part of the developing institutionalization of sociology. His critique implicitly operates with a dualism between science (reason) and passion (ideology) that Elias was trying, in my view successfully, to transcend. In the text at this point and subsequently I have drawn on the work of Hans-Peter Waldhoff and Cas Wouters, which has converged with my own in a number of ways (Kilminster 1998: chs 7 and 8). I have been unable to cite at every point my indebtedness to their research and reflections. In his autobiographical reflections in 1959, Ernest Jones, a distinguished member of Freud’s early circle and later biographer of Freud, reported how he first heard of him. In 1906 an English surgeon, Wilfred Trotter, told him that there was a doctor in Austria ‘who actually listened with attention to every word his patients said to him’ (quoted by Rayner 1991: 5). On the boldness and innovative character of Freud’s much misunderstood method of ‘free association’, Christopher Bollas has noted: ‘Few other intellectual traditions had been as linear and goal-directed as Western consciousness, which … remains highly focused, directed, and … privileges hard science which delivers on the promise of objective cross-verifiability. To ask Western man to discover truth by abandoning the effort to find it and adopting instead the leisurely task of simply stating what crosses the mind moment to moment is to undermine the entire structure of Western epistemology’ (Bollas 1999: 63). R.K. Merton was an important figure in promoting a kind of sociology which methodologically excluded (i.e. suppressed or banished) psychological realities from sociological enquiry. In doing so, he was able to stake out a claim to the independent subject matter of sociology as a human science, something which had obvious professional benefits. His model had a considerable impact in the 1950s and 1960s and continues to do so today. This is despite the fact that the level of behavioural formality, formal self-regulation and social distance associated with that social phase and which made the model plausible in the self-experience of sociologists has long since been superseded by more flexible patterns in society as a whole, as explained in the text (see also Kilminster 1998: 155ff.). As Benjamin Nelson (1962: 151) presciently observed: ‘In Merton’s case there was operative from the outset an effort to provide as precise as possible a purely sociological mode of analysis which was not entangled with psychology and above all with psychoanalysis. In his early paper, “Social Structure and Anomie” [he] … carefully bracketed psychodynamic perspectives. The achievement of Professor Merton and those who have followed his lead since that day have been undeniable. Yet one day the dividends and costs of his decisions will have to be calculated together.’ (On these issues see Devereux 1967 and Hunt 1989.) As Elias put it: ‘Social as distinct from natural sciences are concerned with conjunctions of persons. Here, in one form or the other, people face themselves, the “objects” are also “subjects” ’ (Elias 1987a: 12).

178

Notes

6 The Symbol Theory: secular humanism as a research programme 1 For an account of the composition and editing of the original manuscript and of the various decisions taken by Elias, the present author and the publisher that led to the unusual form of the posthumously published book, see Kilminster (1991a) and further remarks in Kilminster (1994). The Symbol Theory originally appeared in three parts in Theory, Culture and Society in 1989. In this study Elias does not explicitly discuss any of the contemporary literature in the fields of evolutionary biology and archaeology and cites only one source, Huxley (1941). 2 It was during the early part of Elias’s British period, i.e. between about 1940 and 1954 (when he was appointed to a full-time Lectureship in Sociology at the University of Leicester), that he must have absorbed much of the modern synthesis in evolutionary biology and the debates surrounding it on the subject of evolutionary humanism. It was very much ‘in the air’ at the time. Julian Huxley coined the phrase ‘modern synthesis’ in his Romanes Lecture of 1943 (Blitz 1992: 153) which was entitled ‘Evolution and Ethics’ (see also notes 3 and 4 below). During this period Elias lived briefly in Cambridge, but was mainly in London working with S.H. Foulkes in group analysis, undergoing a personal psychoanalysis and teaching part-time in adult education (Mennell 1998: 19–21). In this fourteen-year period he researched, among other things, the history of the British naval profession, some of which appeared in Elias 1950a (see Moelker 2003) and fox-hunting. He also published a review article on anti-Semitism (Elias 1950b) and a short introduction in German to the publication of an excerpt from The Civilizing Process in a monthly magazine distributed in Germany and Austria by the Allied Information Service (Blomert 2001: 5). 3 The concept of emergence, like the related concept of levels of integration, was also being discussed in the philosophy of science in the 1940s (Garnett 1942; Henle 1942; Bergmann 1944; see also Edel 1959; Wassall 1990, 1994; Blitz 1992: ch. 3). One can surmise that Elias would have been aware of these debates, since he kept up with scientific research and controversies and regularly read scientific journals. One important issue was whether a theory of integrative levels in biology could be defended against the accusation that the idea of emergence upon which it depended was, in fact, metaphysical. This question was the subject of a long-running controversy between the ‘emergentists’ and the ‘reductionists’, the latter including Carnap, Russell and Popper (Blitz 1992: 150–1). It was bound up with the related conflict between the ‘vitalists’ and the ‘mechanists’, to which Elias himself refers (Elias 1987c: 28). Elias explicitly distances himself from vitalism (Elias 1987c: 148–9). (For a review of the contemporary revival of new forms of vitalism, see Greco 2005.) The tenor of Elias’s work in the area of levels of integration is broadly compatible with an emergentist position, since he is generally opposed to reductionisms of any kind. As far as I can discern, however, Elias does not actually employ the terms ‘emergence’ or ‘emergent properties’ in his writings on the origins and differentiation of the sciences. He talks instead of the ‘functional properties’ of a higher stage of integration or ‘properties of a composite unit’ or ‘stage-specific properties’ (Elias 1987c: passim). In a way so typical of Elias, side-stepping the conventional terminology of emergence avoids the unwanted metaphysical associations while still addressing the issues in another way. It is a worthy topic of further research to assess the compatibility of Elias’s model of levels of integration with recent philosophical and other work on levels of reality. For comprehensive reviews of the recent literature and some appraisal of the issues, see Blitz 1992; Emmeche et al. 1997. 4 Although not referring specifically to Elias’s writings, C.H. Waddington used Elias’s key term ‘sociogenetic’ to describe the cumulative mechanism of social learning:

Notes

179

‘Psychosocial’ is Huxley’s word. To my mind, it suffers from some redundancy, since the social can hardly avoid being psychological. I prefer to use ‘sociogenetic’, which emphasizes the importance of the mechanism as a means of transmitting information from one generation to the next, which is the crucial point. (Waddington 1961: 74)

5

6

7 8

There is evidence that Waddington was widely read in the 1940s. Viola Klein wrote in 1972 that her interest in the ideological element in knowledge in her celebrated book The Feminine Character: History of an Ideology (Klein 1946) had been aroused by Waddington’s book The Scientific Attitude which was ‘widely discussed at the time’ (quoted in Kettler and Meja 1995: 302). Elias’s later plea for process thinking (e.g. Elias 1978a: 111ff.), which in fact went back to his doctoral dissertation (Elias 1922), would have found confirmation in Waddington. In his book This Changing World (1944b), Waddington described the whole movement of modern scientific thought in almost Eliasian language as ‘a movement away from analysing into things and towards analysing into processes’ (quoted by the psychoanalyst Marjorie Brierley in her article on ‘Metapsychology as Process Theory’ (Brierley 1944: 97)). While in Cambridge in the early 1940s, Elias was also in contact with Canon Charles Raven (1885–1964), Master of Christ’s College, a progressive theologian, naturalist and biographer of Teilhard de Chardin. Raven was associated with an informal group of theologians who regularly met to discuss ‘process-philosophy’, which was a reinterpretation of the Christian faith in terms of ‘emergent evolution’ (see Dillistone 1975). For a discussion of the contemporary revival of process thinking see Fraser et al. 2005: 2–5). It was also part of the title of a volume of papers published during the Second World War as Levels of Integration in Biological and Social Systems edited by Robert Redfield (1942). They had all been presented at an interdisciplinary conference in Chicago in 1941 attended by biologists as well as social scientists, including Robert E. Park, A.L. Kroeber and Robert Redfield, who wrote an Introduction to the volume. The eleven papers in the volume are laid out in an ascending order of levels, the explanation for this ordering being discussed at length by Redfield in his Introduction. The use the conception of an evolutionary movement from ‘lower’ to ‘higher’ forms of life is often criticized as implying a theory of progress in some direction, perhaps towards the emergence of the human species as the goal of evolution. Despite their compromising associations, Elias also uses these terms in relation to levels of integration within the level of social development generally and with reference in particular to ‘post-national’ (Elias 1970: 284), continental and global integrations (e.g. Elias 1970: 284, 1974: xxiii). In so doing he risked being misread as a teleologist, and this despite his frequent disclaimers to the contrary. However, it is a popular misconception of the theory of evolution that it implies the emergence of humans as the goal of evolution. In fact, very like Elias’s conception of social development, the theory of biological evolution implies a purposeless, impersonal direction to the process. So sure was Darwin that it was a misrepresentation of evolution to equate it with progress that he reminded himself in one of his notebooks ‘never to say higher or lower’, although he did not always follow this through (cited by Futuyma 1986: 8). For some further observations on the relationship between Elias’s theory of civilizing processes and modern conceptions of social progress, see Chapters 2 and 4, this volume. Elias also distinguishes ‘territorial or regional integration’ and ‘strata integration’, which he says are ‘structurally connected’ (Elias 1970: 279). A danger lurking in the careless or over-enthusiastic use of evolutionary or developmental models is teleology. Elias is usually very circumspect about the destination of developmental sequences, often remarking that an observable directional process in social development (unlike one in evolutionary biology or the formation of stars)

180

Notes

could go into reverse. The most obvious case in point is that of ‘decivilizing processes’ (see Fletcher 1997: 146). 9 Borchert and Zihlman (1990) have used the modifications to the modern synthesis in building their own speculative theory of the origins of language. Their interest is in what behaviours of early hominids provided the ‘selection pressure’ for language, most research hitherto having concentrated on adult behaviour. They place great emphasis on the dual role of females. (1) In classical Darwinian terms, females would choose to mate with those males capable of using conventional gestures and vocalizations in the most efficacious way, so females ‘took on nature’s job in deciding what to select’ from the gene pool (Borchert and Zihlman 1990: 37). And (2) as mothers, they would have played an important role in creating the context for the passing on of symbols to children and as primary caring siblings they would do the same to younger siblings. Plausible though this analysis seems, care has to be taken in projecting on to the prehistoric past present-day attitudes about the importance of mothering. In contrast, the figurational approach of Elias would specify that one should at the same time speculate on the relations between early male and female hominids in explaining the emergence of humans into dominance, as well as ‘symbol emancipation’ referred to in the text. Important though the role of women may have been, the analysis overlooks the fact that men were important in different ways. While women were, through their caring and nurturing role, ‘helping’ nature in deciding which genes to ‘select’, their mates and other males would have been busy elsewhere hunting so as to ensure a food supply for the survival of the group, which would include both themselves and women and children. Men would also have been involved in fighting, and eventually eliminating, rival hominid groups to the point of extinction. In the long run, in tandem with the part played by women, it would probably have been the total annihilation of rival hominid groups, in particular, that would have been ultimately decisive in the emerging evolutionary hegemony of humans. This is not a comfortable conclusion, but it is a realistic one. 10 The apparent compatibility of Elias’s work in The Symbol Theory with recent work which modifies the modern synthesis could be the result of his having encountered adumbrations of these ideas in some of the earlier work of the 1940s and 1950s, found them congenial and absorbed them into his developing sociological approach to understanding the human socio-biological condition. In the 1940s, Ernst Mayr, Simpson, Wright and others did acknowledge the importance of behavioural changes and developmental processes in initiating changes in organisms and biological adaptations. There is also an even earlier prefiguring of these principles in the work of James Mark Baldwin in the 1890s (cited by Borchert and Zihlman 1990: 17, 38). 11 See Blitz (1992: 160–2) for a discussion of contemporary variants of this principle in the biological ideas of ‘supervenience’ and ‘downward causation’. This important idea is placed in an Eliasian perspective by Quilley (2004: 51–2), who refers to the stage of ‘reflexive evolution’.

Bibliography

Adams, Robert M. (1982) ‘By Process of Elimination: Review of Norbert Elias, State Formation and Civilization’, Times Literary Supplement, 10 September: 983. Adorno, Theodor W. (1973) Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. —— (1974) Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott, London: New Left Books. Alexander, Jeffrey C. (1990) ‘Analytic Debates: Understanding the Relative Autonomy of Culture’, in Jeffrey C. Alexander and Steven Seidman (eds) Culture and Society: Contemporary Debates, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 15–39. Apel, Karl-Otto (1980) Towards a Transformation of Philosophy, trans. Glyn Adey and David Frisby, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Archer, Margaret (1982) ‘Morphogenesis versus Structuration: On Combining Structure and Action’, British Journal of Sociology, 33, 4: 455–83. —— (1988) Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arendt, Hannah (1978) ‘Heidegger at Eighty’, in Michael Murray (ed.) Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, pp. 293–303. Arnason, Johann (1987) ‘Figurational Sociology as a Counter-paradigm’, Theory, Culture and Society, 4, 2–3, June: 429–56. Aron, Raymond (1957) German Sociology, London: Heinemann. Auge, Marc (1982) The Anthropological Circle: Symbol, Function, History, trans. M. Thom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Axelos, Kostas (1976) Alienation, Praxis and Techne in the Thought of Karl Marx, London: University of Texas Press. Baldamus, W. (1976) The Structure of Sociological Inference, London: Martin Robertson. Barraclough, Geoffrey (1982) ‘Clockwork History: Review of Power and Civility, Volume II of The Civilizing Process by Norbert Elias’, The New York Review of Books, 21 October: 36–8. Bauman, Zygmunt (1979) ‘The Phenomenon of Norbert Elias’, Sociology, 13, 1, January: 117–25. —— (1987) ‘The Importance of Being a Marxist’, in William Outhwaite and Mike Mulkay (eds) Social Theory and Social Criticism: Essays for Tom Bottomore, Oxford: Blackwell (reprinted, Aldershot: Gregg Revivals, 1992), pp. 1–9. —— (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust, Cambridge: Polity Press. —— (1990) ‘From Pillars to Post’, Marxism Today, February: 20–5.

182

Bibliography

—— (1992) Intimations of Postmodernity, London: Routledge. —— (1993) Postmodern Ethics, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. —— (2001) (with May, Tim) Thinking Sociologically, 2nd edn, Oxford: Blackwell. Beck, Lewis White (1967) ‘Neo-Kantianism’, in Paul Edwards (ed.) Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, London: Collier Macmillan, pp. 468–73. Beck, Ulrich (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage. —— (1994) ‘The Reinvention of Politics: Towards a Theory of Reflexive Modernization’, in Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash (eds) Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 1–55. Beck, Ulrich, Giddens, Anthony and Lash, Scott (eds) (1994) Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bendix, Reinhard (1966) Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait, London: Methuen, University Paperbacks. Benjamin, Walter (1973) Illuminations, ed. with introduction by Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, London: Fontana Bénoist, Jean-Marie (1978) The Structural Revolution, New York: St Martin’s Press. Benthem van den Bergh, Godfried van (1986) ‘The Improvement of Human Means of Orientation: Towards Synthesis in the Social Sciences’, in Raymond Apthorpe and Andreás Kráhl (eds) Development Studies: Critique and Renewal, Leiden: E.J. Brill, pp. 109–34. Berger, Peter L. and Kellner, Hansfried (1981) Sociology Reinterpreted: An Essay in Method and Vocation, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Bergmann, Gustave (1944) ‘Holism, Historicism and Emergence’, Philosophy of Science, 4: 209–21. Berki, R.N. (1981) On Political Realism, London: J.M. Dent & Sons. Berkowitz, Michael (1996) Western Jewry and the Zionist Project, 1914–1933, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bertalanffy, Ludwig Von (1956) ‘A Biologist Looks at Human Nature’, Scientific Monthly, 82: 33–41. —— (1965) ‘On the Definition of the Symbol’, in J.R. Royce (ed.) Psychology and the Symbol: An Interdisciplinary Symposium, New York, Random House, pp. 28–71. —— (1967) Robots, Men and Minds. Psychology in the Modern World, New York, George Braziller. Bettleheim, Bruno (1985) Freud and Man’s Soul, London: Fontana Paperbacks. Bhaskar, Roy (1978) A Realist Theory of Science, 2nd edn, Hemel Hempstead: The Harvester Press. Bickerstaffe, Timothy (2002) The Significance of the Common Bond in British Credit Unions, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Leeds. Bleicher, Josef (1980) Contemporary Hermeneutics: Hermeneutics as Method, Philosophy and Critique, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Blitz, David (1992) Emergent Evolution: Qualitative Novelty and the Levels of Reality, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. Blomert, Reinhard (1991) Psyche und Zivilisation: Zur theoretischen Konstruktion bei Norbert Elias, Münster and Hamburg: Lit Verlag. —— (2001) ‘1947 publication by Elias’, Figurations: Newsletter of the Norbert Elias Foundation 16, November: 5.

Bibliography 183 Bogner, Artur (1986) ‘The Structure of Social Processes: A Commentary on the Sociology of Norbert Elias’, Sociology, 20, 3: 387–411. —— (1987) ‘Elias and the Frankfurt School’, Theory, Culture and Society, 4, 2–3, June: 249–85. —— (1992) ‘The Theory of the Civilizing Process: An Idiographic Theory of Modernization?’, Theory, Culture and Society, 9, 2 May: 23–53. Bollas, Christopher (1987) The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known, London: Free Association Books. —— (1999) The Mystery of Things, London: Routledge. Borchert, Catherine M. and Zihlman, Adrienne L. (1990) ‘The Ontogeny and Phylogeny of Symbolizing’, in Mary Le Cron Foster and Lucy Jayne Botscharow (eds) The Life of Symbols, Boulder, CO, and Oxford: Westview Press, pp. 15–44. Borgmann, Albert (1978) ‘Heidegger and Symbolic Logic’, in Michael Murray (ed.) Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, pp. 3–22. Bourdieu, Pierre (1996) The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, trans. Peter Collier, Cambridge: Polity Press. Brenner, Michael (1996) The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press. Brierley, Marjorie (1944) ‘Metapsychology as Process Theory’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 25: 97–109. Brown, Norman O. (1959) Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History, London: Sphere Books. Brown, Richard (1987) ‘Norbert Elias in Leicester: Some Recollections’, Theory, Culture and Society, 4, 2–3, June: 533–9. Bubner, Rüdiger (1981) Modern German Philosophy, trans. Eric Matthews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Buck-Morss, Susan (1978) ‘Review of Norbert Elias, The Civilization Process’, Telos, Autumn: 181–98. Bullough, Edward (1912) ‘Psychical Distance as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle’, British Journal of Psychology, V, 1912–13: 87–118. Burke, Peter (1980) Sociology and History, London: George Allen & Unwin. Burkitt, Ian (1993) ‘Overcoming Metaphysics: Elias and Foucault on Power and Freedom’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 23, 1: 50–72. Cahnman, Werner J. (1995) Weber and Tönnies: Comparative Sociology in Historical Perspective, edited with an Introduction by Joseph B. Maier, Judith Marcus and Zoltán Tar, New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers. Caputo, John D. (1999) ‘Heidegger’, in Simon Critchley and William R. Schroeder (eds) A Companion to Continental Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 223–33. Cassirer, Ernst (1910) Substance and Function, and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, trans. William Curtis Swabey and Mary Collins Swabey, Chicago, IL, and London: Open Court. —— (1918) Kant’s Life and Thought, trans. James Haden with Introduction by Stephan Körner, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1981. —— (1923) The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol I: Language (trans. Ralph Manheim), New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953. —— (1929) The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol III: The Phenomenology of Knowledge (trans. Ralph Manheim), New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957.

184

Bibliography

—— (1944) An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Chartier, Roger (1988) ‘Social Figurations and Habitus: Reading Elias’, in his Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations, Oxford: Polity Press, pp. 71–94. Coppinger, R.P and Smith, C.K. (1983) ‘The Domestication of Evolution’, Environmental Conservation, 10, 4, Winter: 283–92. Cremin, Colin (2005) Post-ironic Society: Corporate Modernity and the Appropriations of the Self, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Leeds. Critchley, Simon and Schroeder, William R. (eds) (1999) A Companion to Continental Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell. Crowell, Steven Galt (1999) ‘Neo-Kantianism’, in Simon Critchley and William R. Schroeder (eds) A Companion to Continental Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 185– 97. Cuddihy, John Murray (1974) The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Lévi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Curtius, Ernst Robert (1929) ‘Sociology and its Limits’, in Volker Meja and Nico Stehr (eds) Knowledge and Politics, London: Routledge, 1990, pp. 113–20. Davis, Mark (2006) Freedom in the English Language Writings of Zygmunt Bauman, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Leeds. De Swaan, Abram de (1990) The Management of Normality: Critical Essays in Health and Welfare, London: Routledge. Devereux, George (1967) From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences, The Hague: Mouton. Dillistone, F.W. (1975) Charles Raven: Naturalist, Historian, Theologian, London: Hodder & Stoughton. Douglas, Mary (1966) Purity and Danger, London: Routledge. Dunning, Eric (1967) ‘The Concept of Development: Two Illustrative Case Studies’, in Peter I. Rose (ed.) The Study of Society: An Integrated Anthology, New York: Random House, pp. 879–93. —— (1977) ‘In Defense of Developmental Sociology: A Critique of Popper’s Poverty of Historicism with Special Reference to the Theory of Auguste Comte’, Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift, 4, 3: 327–48. —— (1986) ‘Preface’ to Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 1–18. —— (1987) ‘Comments on Elias’s “Scenes from the Life of a Knight” ’, Theory, Culture and Society, 4, 2–3, June: 366–71. —— (1989) ‘A Response to R.J. Robinson’s “The Civilizing Process”: Some Remarks on Elias’s Social History’, Sociology, 23, 2, May: 299–307. —— (1996) ‘Fire and Civilization’ (review article on Johan Goudsblom, Fire and Civilization, London: Allen Lane, 1992), Theory, Culture and Society, 13, 4, November: 139–46. —— (1999) Sport Matters: Sociological Studies of Sport, Violence and Civilization, London: Routledge. —— (with Goudsblom, Johan and Mennell, Stephen) (2000) ‘Editors’ Note on the Revised Translation’ of Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott, rev. edn, ed. Eric Dunning, Johan Goudsblom and Stephen Mennell (one volume), Oxford: Blackwell. —— (with Mennell, Stephen) (2003a) ‘Editors’ Introduction’ to Eric Dunning and Stephen Mennell (eds) Norbert Elias (4 vols), London: Sage, pp. ix–xxxiv.

Bibliography

185

—— (with Mennell, Stephen) (2003b) (eds) Norbert Elias (4 vols), London: Sage. —— (with Rojek, Chris) (1993) Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process, London: Routledge. —— (with Rojek, Chris) (2004) ‘The Anatomy of the Leicester School of Sociology: Interview with Eric Dunning’, Journal of Classical Sociology, 4, 3, Autumn: 337–59. Durkheim, Émile (1898) Individualism and the Intellectuals’, trans. Steven Lukes, Political Studies, XVII, 1: 14–30 (1969). ——(1915) The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1968 (originally published 1912). Eco, Umberto (1984) Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, London: Macmillan. Edel, Abraham (1959) ‘The Concept of Levels in Social Theory’, in Llewellyn Gross (ed.) Symposium on Sociological Theory, New York: Harper & Row, pp. 167–95. Elias, Norbert (1921) ‘On Seeing in Nature’, in Richard Kilminster (ed.) The Complete Works of Norbert Elias: Volume 1, Early Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2006, pp. 5–21. —— (1922) ‘Idea and Individual: A Critical Investigation of the Concept of History’, D.Phil. thesis, Philosophy Faculty of the Friedrich-Wilhelms University, Breslau, in Richard Kilminster (ed.) The Complete Works of Norbert Elias: Volume 1, Early Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2006, pp. 23–53. [Extract also in Johan Goudsblom and Stephen Mennell (eds) The Norbert Elias Reader: A Biographical Selection, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.] —— (1924) ‘Idea and Individual: A Contribution to the Philosophy of History’ [summary of D.Phil. thesis], in Richard Kilminster (ed.) The Complete Works of Norbert Elias: Volume 1, Early Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2006, pp. 55–7. —— (1929a) ‘Contribution to the Debate on Karl Mannheim: The Importance of Competition in the Intellectual Field’, in Richard Kilminster (ed.) The Complete Works of Norbert Elias: Volume 1, Early Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2006, pp. 67–70. [Also in Volker Meja and Nico Stehr (eds) Knowledge and Politics: The Sociology of Knowledge Dispute, London and New York: Routledge, 1990, pp. 97–9.] —— (1929b) ‘The Sociology of German Anti-Semitism’, in Richard Kilminster (ed.) The Complete Works of Norbert Elias: Volume 1, Early Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2006, pp. 77–83. —— (1929c) ‘Contribution to the Debate on Richard Thurnwald, On Primitive Art’, in Richard Kilminster (ed.) The Complete Works of Norbert Elias: Volume 1, Early Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2006, pp. 71–5. [Also in Johan Goudsblom and Stephen Mennell (eds) The Norbert Elias Reader: A Biographical Selection, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.] —— (1935a) ‘The Expulsion of the Huguenots from France’, in Richard Kilminster (ed.) The Complete Works of Norbert Elias: Volume 1, Early Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2006, pp. 95–104. [Also in Johan Goudsblom and Stephen Mennell (eds) The Norbert Elias Reader: A Biographical Selection, Oxford, Blackwell, 1998.] —— (1935b) ‘The Kitsch Style and the Age of Kitsch’, in Richard Kilminster (ed.) The Complete Works of Norbert Elias: Volume 1, Early Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2006, pp. 85–96. [Also in Johan Goudsblom and Stephen Mennell (eds) The Norbert Elias Reader: A Biographical Selection, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.]

186

Bibliography

—— (1939) The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott (revised edn), ed. Eric Dunning, Johan Goudsblom and Stephen Mennell (one volume), Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. —— (1950a) ‘Studies in the Genesis of the Naval Profession’, British Journal of Sociology, 1, 4: 291–309. —— (1950b) ‘Inquest on German Jewry’ (review article of Eva G. Reichmann’s Hostages of Civilisation. A Study of the Social Causes of Antisemitism), Association of Jewish Refugees Information, April, p. 5. —— (1956) ‘Problems of Involvement and Detachment’, British Journal of Sociology, 7, 3: 226–52. (Also in Norbert Elias, Involvement and Detachment, Oxford: Blackwell, 1987, pp. 3–41.) —— (1964) ‘Group Charisma and Group Disgrace’, in Johan Goudsblom and Stephen Mennell (eds) The Norbert Elias Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998, pp. 104–12. —— (1968) ‘Introduction’ to the second edition of The Civilizing Process, Vol. I: The History of Manners, Oxford: Blackwell, 1978, pp. 221–63. —— (1969a) ‘Sociology and Psychiatry’, in Johan Goudsblom and Stephen Mennell (eds) The Norbert Elias Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. [Also in S.H. Foulkes and G. Stewart Prince (eds) Psychiatry in a Changing Society, London: Tavistock Publications, pp. 117–44.] —— (1969b) ‘An Interview in Amsterdam [with Johan Goudsblom]’, in Johan Goudsblom and Stephen Mennell (eds) The Norbert Elias Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998, pp. 141–51. —— (1970) ‘Processes of State Formation and Nation-Building’, in Transactions of the Seventh World Congress of Sociology, Varna, 1970, Vol III, Sofia: International Sociological Association, 1972: 274–84. —— (1971) ‘The Sociology of Knowledge: New Perspectives’, Sociology, V, 2, 3: 149–68, 355–70. —— (1972) ‘Theory of Science and History of Science: Comments on a Recent Discussion’, Economy and Society, I, 2: 117–33. —— (1973) ‘The Sociologist’s Reply’ [unpublished draft response to Sathaye (1973)]. (Manuscript.) —— (1974) ‘The Sciences: Towards a Theory’, in Richard Whitley (ed.) Social Processes of Scientific Development, London: Routledge, pp. 21–42. —— (1976) ‘A Theoretical Essay on Established and Outsider Relations’, Introduction to Norbert Elias and John L. Scotson The Established and the Outsiders: A Sociological Inquiry into Community Problems (2nd edn), London: Sage, 1994 (originally published 1965), pp. xv–lii. —— (1977) ‘Towards a Theory of Social Processes’, trans. Eric Dunning and Robert van Krieken, British Journal of Sociology, 4, 3, September: 355–83. —— (1978a) What is Sociology?, London: Hutchinson. —— (1978b) ‘On the Concept of Everyday Life’, in Johan Goudsblom and Stephen Mennell (eds) The Norbert Elias Reader: A Biographical Selection, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998, pp. 175–85. —— (1982) ‘Scientific Establishments’, in Norbert Elias, Herminio Martins and Richard Whitley (eds) Scientific Establishments and Hierarchies, Dordrecht and London: Reidel, pp. 3–69. —— (1983) The Court Society, Oxford: Blackwell. [Also in a revised edition: Stephen Mennell (ed.) The Complete Works of Norbert Elias: Volume 2, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2006.]

Bibliography

187

—— (1984a) ‘On the Sociogenesis of Sociology’, Sociologisch Tijdschrift, 11, 1: 14–52. —— (1984b) ‘Knowledge and Power: An Interview by Peter Ludes’, in Nico Stehr and Volker Meja (eds) Society and Knowledge: Contemporary Perspectives on the Sociology of Knowledge, New Brunswick/London: Transaction Books, pp. 251–91. —— (1985a) The Loneliness of the Dying, Oxford: Blackwell. —— (1985b) ‘Theory, Culture and Society Interview with Norbert Elias’, Amsterdam, 9–10 March, 1985, conducted by Mike Featherstone, Artur Bogner, Josef Bleicher and Richard Kilminster (manuscript). —— (1985c) Humana Conditio: Beobachtungen zur Entwicklung der Menscheit am 40. Jahrestag eines Kriegsendes (8. Mai 1985), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. —— (1985d) ‘Einführung in die Zivilisationstheorie: Notizen zu einer Vorlesung’, unpublished manuscript, DLA Marbach A: Elias Misc-D XX=Vorl-Ziv 1. —— (1985e) ‘Norbert Elias: Menschenwissenschaftler’, Ein Film von Ulrich Gembardt und Christian Feyerabend (German TV programme). —— (1987a) Involvement and Detachment, Oxford: Blackwell. —— (1987b) ‘The Retreat of the Sociologists into the Present’, Theory, Culture and Society, 4, 2–3: 223–47. —— (1987c) ‘On Human Beings and Their Emotions’, Theory, Culture and Society, 4, 2–3: 339–63. [Reprinted in Mike Featherstone, Mike Hepworth and Bryan S. Turner (eds) The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory, London: Sage, 1991.] —— (1988) Los der Menschen. Gedichte/Nachdichtungen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. —— (1990) ‘Fear of Death’, in Hans G. Kippenberg, Yme B. Kuiper and Andy F. Sanders (eds) Concepts of Person in Religion and Thought, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 159–70. —— (1991a) The Symbol Theory, ed. and introduction by Richard Kilminster, London: Sage. —— (1991b) The Society of Individuals, Oxford: Blackwell. —— (1992) Time: An Essay, Oxford: Blackwell. —— (1993) Mozart: Portrait of a Genius, ed. Michael Schröter, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Cambridge: Polity Press. —— (1994) Reflections on a Life, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Cambridge: Polity Press. —— (1996) The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Michael Schröter, trans. and Preface by Eric Dunning and Stephen Mennell, Cambridge: Polity Press. —— (2005) The Complete Works of Norbert Elias: Volume 1, Early Writings, ed. Richard Kilminster, Dublin: University College Dublin Press. —— (with Dunning, Eric) (1986) Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process, Oxford: Blackwell. Emmeche, C., Koppe, S. and Stjernfelt, F. (1997) ‘Explaining Emergence: Towards an Ontology of Levels’, Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 28: 83–119. Fay, Thomas A. (1977) Heidegger: The Critique of Logic, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Featherstone, Mike (1987) ‘Norbert Elias and Figurational Sociology: Some Prefatory Remarks’, Theory, Culture and Society, 4, 2–3: 197–211. Firth, Raymond (1975) Symbols: Public and Private (2nd impr.), London: George Allen & Unwin. Fish, Jonathan S. (2005) Defending the Durkheimian Tradition: Religion, Emotion and Morality, Aldershot: Ashgate.

188

Bibliography

Fletcher, Jonathan (1997) Violence and Civilization: An Introduction to the Work of Norbert Elias, Cambridge: Polity Press. Fontaine, Stanislas (1978) ‘The Civilizing Process Revisited: Interview with Norbert Elias’, Theory and Society, 5: 243–53. Foster-Carter, Aidan (1976) ‘From Rostow to Gunder Frank: Conflicting Paradigms in the Analysis of Underdevelopment’, World Development, IV, 3: 167–80. Foster, Mary Le Cron and Botscharow, Lucy Jayne (1990) The Life of Symbols, Boulder, CO, and Oxford: Westview Press. Frank, André Gunder (1971) Sociology of Development and the Underdevelopment of Sociology, London: Pluto Press. Fraser, Mariam, Kember, Sarah and Lury, Celia (2005) ‘Inventive Life: Approaches to the New Vitalism’, Theory, Culture and Society, 22, 1: 1–14. Freud, Sigmund (1925) ‘The Resistances to Psychoanalysis’, in The Pelican Freud Library Volume 15, Historical and Expository Works on Psychoanalysis, ed. Albert Dickson, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986, pp. 262–73. —— (1927) The Future of an Illusion, London: The Hogarth Press, 1978. —— (1933a) New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, London: The Hogarth Press, 1957. —— (1933b) Civilization and Its Discontents, London: The Hogarth Press, 1969. Friedman, Michael (2000) The Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger, Chicago and La Salle: Open Court. Frisby, David (1976) ‘Introduction to the English Translation’ of Theodor Adorno, Hans Albert et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, trans. Glyn Adey and David Frisby, London: Heinemann, pp. ix–xliv. —— (1992) The Alienated Mind: The Sociology of Knowledge in Germany 1918-1933 (2nd edn), London: Routledge. Futuyma, Douglas J. (1986) Evolutionary Biology (2nd edn), Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates. Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1960) Truth and Method, London: Sheed and Ward, 1975. —— (1976a) Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, trans. with introduction by P. Christopher Smith, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press. —— (1976b) Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. and ed. David E. Linge, Berkeley: University of California Press. —— (1985) Philosophical Apprenticeships, trans. Robert R. Sullivan, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. —— (1986) ‘The Unity in Heidegger’s Thinking’, unpublished lecture, Goethe Institute, London, 7 April. Garnett, A. (1942) ‘Scientific Method and The Concept of Emergence’, Journal of Philosophy, 39, August: 477-86. Gay, Peter (1973) The Enlightenment: An Interpretation: Volume Two, The Science of Freedom, London: Wildwood House. —— (1974) Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider, Harmondsworth: Penguin. —— (1978) Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gehlke, Charles E. (1915) Émile Durkheim’s Contributions to Sociological Theory, New York: Columbia University Press. Gellner, Ernest (1964) Thought and Change, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Gerard, R.W. (1942) ‘Higher Levels of Integration’, in Robert Redfield (ed.) Levels of Integration in Biological and Social Systems, Lancaster, PA: The Jaques Cattell Press.

Bibliography 189 Gergen, Kenneth J. and Gergen, Mary M. (eds) (1984) Historical Social Psychology, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Gerth, Hans and Mills, C. Wright (1954) Character and Social Structure: The Psychology of Social Institutions, New York: Harcourt Brace & Co. Giddens, Anthony (1976) New Rules of Sociological Method: A Positive Critique of Interpretative Sociologies, London: Hutchinson. —— (1979) Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis, London: Macmillan. —— (1984) The Constitution of Society, Cambridge: Polity Press. —— (1991) Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Cambridge: Polity Press. Gleichmann, Peter R. (1988) ‘Zur Historisch-Soziologischen Psychologie von Norbert Elias’, in Gerd Jütteman (ed.) Wegbereiter der Historischen Psychologie, München/ Weinheim: Beltz-Psychologie Verlags Union, pp. 451–62. Gleichmann, Peter, Goudsblom, Johan and Korte, Hermann (1977) Human Figurations: Essays for Norbert Elias, Amsterdam: Sociologisch Tijdschrift. Goldmann, Lucien (1977) Lukács and Heidegger: Towards a New Philosophy, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Goudsblom, Johan (1969) ‘An Interview [with Norbert Elias] in Amsterdam’, in Johan Goudsblom and Stephen Mennell (eds) The Norbert Elias Reader: A Biographical Selection, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998, pp. 141–51. —— (1977a) Sociology in the Balance, Oxford: Blackwell. —— (1977b) ‘Responses to Norbert Elias’s Work in England, Germany, the Netherlands and France’, in Peter Gleichmann, Johan Goudsblom and Hermann Korte (eds) Human Figurations: Essays for Norbert Elias, Amsterdam: Sociologisch Tijdschrift, pp. 37–97. —— (1987a) ‘The Sociology of Norbert Elias: Its Resonance and Significance’, Theory, Culture and Society, 4, 2–3: 323–37. —— (1987b) De sociologie van Norbert Elias: Weerklank en kritiek. De civilisatietheorie, Amsterdam: Meulenhoff Informatief. —— (1989) ‘Human History and Long-term Social Processes’, in Johan Goudsblom, E.L. Jones and Stephen Mennell (eds) Human History and Social Process, Exeter: University of Exeter Press, pp. 11–26. —— (1990a) ‘Norbert Elias, 1897–1990’, Theory, Culture and Society, 7, 4: 169–74. —— (1990b) ‘The Humanities and the Social Sciences’, in E. Zürcher and T. Langendorff (eds) The Humanities in the Nineties: A View from the Netherlands, Amsterdam: Swets and Zeitlinger, pp. 23–42. —— (1992a) Fire and Civilization, London: Allen Lane. —— (1992b) ‘Review of The Society of Individuals and The Symbol Theory’, Contemporary Sociology, September. —— (1995) ‘Elias and Cassirer, Sociology and Philosophy’, Theory, Culture and Society, 12, 3: 121–6. —— (2002) ‘Introductory Overview: The Expanding Anthroposphere’, in Johan Goudsblom and B. De Vries (eds) Mappae Mundi: Humans and their Habitats in a Long Term Socio-ecological Perspective. Myths, Maps, and Models, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 21–46. —— and Mennell, Stephen (eds) (1998a) Norbert Elias: On Civilization, Power, and Knowledge: Selected Writings, Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press.

190

Bibliography

—— and Mennell, Stephen (eds) (1998b) The Norbert Elias Reader: A Biographical Selection, Oxford: Blackwell. —— , Jones, E.L. and Mennell, Stephen (1989) Human History and Social Process, Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Greco, Monica (2005) ‘On the Vitality of Vitalism’, Theory, Culture and Society, 22, 1: 15–27. Grünwald, Ernst (1934) ‘The Sociology of Knowledge and Epistemology’, trans. Rainer Koehne, in Volker Meja and Nico Stehr (eds) Knowledge and Politics: The Sociology of Knowledge Dispute, London and New York: Routledge, 1990, pp. 261–6. Habermas, Jürgen (1970) ‘On Systematically Distorted Communication’, Inquiry, 13: 205–18. —— (1984) The Theory of Communicative Competence. Volume 1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy, London: Heinemann. Hackeschmidt, Jörg (1995) ‘Norbert Elias – Zionist and Bündisch Activist’, Figurations Newsletter of the Norbert Elias Foundation, No. 3, June: 4–5. —— (1997) Von Kurt Blumenfeld zu Norbert Elias oder Die Erfindung einer jüdischen Nation, Hamburg: Europäische Verlanganstalt. Hall, Stuart (1992) ‘The Question of Cultural Identity’, in Stuart Hall, David Held and Tony McGrew (eds) Modernity and Its Futures, Cambridge: Polity Press/The Open University, pp. 273–326. Hall, Stuart, Held, David and McGrew, Tony (1992) Modernity and Its Futures, Cambridge: Polity Press/The Open University. Hamilton, Paul (1996) Historicism, London: Routledge. Hammond, Michael, Howarth, Jane and Keat, Russell (1991) Understanding Phenomenology, Oxford: Blackwell. Harries, Karsten (1978) ‘Fundamental Ontology and the Search for Man’s Place’, in Michael Murray (ed.) Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, pp. 65–79. Harrington, Austin (2000) ‘Value-spheres or “Validity Spheres”?: Weber, Habermas and Modernity’, Max Weber Studies, 1, 1: 84–103. —— (2001) Hermeneutic Dialogue and Social Science: A Critique of Gadamer and Habermas, London: Routledge. Heidegger, Martin (1927) Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford: Blackwell, 1973. Heilbron, Johan (1984) ‘Interview with Norbert Elias’ (manuscript). Heinemann, F.H. (1953) Existentialism and the Modern Predicament, London: Adam and Charles Black. Hekman, Susan (1986) Hermeneutics and the Sociology of Knowledge, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Hemingway, Ernest (1994) Death in the Afternoon, London: Arrow Books (originally published 1944). Henle, Paul (1942) ‘The Status of Emergence’, Journal of Philosophy, 39, August: 486– 93. Hennis, Wilhelm (1988) Max Weber: Essays in Reconstruction, trans. Keith Tribe, London: Allen & Unwin. Herzen, Alexander (1846) ‘Letters on the Study of Nature’, in James M. Edie, James P. Scanlan and Mary-Barbara Zeldin (eds) Russian Philosophy, Volume 1, Chicago, IL: Quadrangle, 1965, pp. 338–45.

Bibliography 191 Holt, Louisa P. (1950) ‘Identification: A Crucial Concept for Sociology’, Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 14: 164–73. Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor (1944) The Dialectic of Enlightenment, New York: Herder & Herder, 1972. Hughes, H. Stuart (1975) The Sea Change: The Migration of Social Thought, 1930–1965, New York: Harper & Row. Hunt, Jennifer C. (1989) Psychoanalytic Aspects of Fieldwork, London: Sage. Huxley, Julian (1941) The Uniqueness of Man, London: Chatto & Windus. —— (1942) Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, London: Allen & Unwin. —— (1953) Evolution in Action, London: Chatto & Windus. —— (1961) (ed) The Humanist Frame, London: George Allen & Unwin. Izenberg, Gerald N. (1976) The Existentialist Critique of Freud: The Crisis of Autonomy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jary, David (1987) ‘Sport and Leisure in the “Civilizing Process” ’, Theory, Culture and Society, 4, 2–3: 563–70. Jones, Ernest (1941) ‘Evolution and Revolution’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 22: 193–208. Käsler, Dirk (1988) Max Weber and Contemporary Social Theory, Oxford: Martin Robertson. Kecskemeti, Paul (1953) ‘Introduction’ to Karl Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology and Social Psychology, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 1–11. Kettler, David and Loader, Colin (ed. and trans.) (2001a) Sociology as Political Education: Karl Mannheim, New York: Transaction Books. —— (2001b) Sociology as Political Education: Karl Mannheim in the University, New York: Transaction Books. Kettler, David and Meja, Volker (1990) ‘Rationalizing the Irrational: Karl Mannheim and the Besetting Sin of German Intellectuals’, American Journal of Sociology, 95, 6: 1441–73. —— (1993) ‘Their “Own Peculiar Way”: Karl Mannheim and the Rise of Women’, International Sociology, 8, 1, March: 5–55. —— (1995) Karl Mannheim and the Crisis of Liberalism: The Secret of These New Times, New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers. Kettler, David, Meja, Volker and Stehr, Nico (1984) Karl Mannheim, London: Tavistock Publications. Kilminster, Richard (1979) Praxis and Method: A Sociological Dialogue with Lukács, Gramsci and the Early Frankfurt School, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. —— (1982a) ‘Theory and Practice in Marx and Marxism’, in G.H.R. Parkinson (ed.) Marx and Marxisms, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 157–76. —— (1982b) ‘Zur Utopiediskussion aus soziologischer Sicht’, in Wilhelm Voßkamp (ed.) Utopieforschung: Interdisziplinäre Studien zur neuzeitlichen Utopia, Vol. 1, Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler Verlag, pp. 64–96. —— (1983) Review of Norbert Elias, State Formation and Civilization: The Civilizing Process, volume II, Sociology, 17, 3: 399–402. —— (1987) ‘Introduction to Elias’, Theory, Culture and Society, 4, 2–3: 213–22. —— (1991a) ‘Editor’s Introduction’ to The Symbol Theory by Norbert Elias, London: Sage, pp. vii–xxv. —— (1991b) ‘Evaluating Elias’, Theory, Culture and Society, 8, 2: 165–76. —— (1992) ‘Theory’, in Haralambos, Mike (ed.) Developments in Sociology, Ormskirk: Causeway Press, pp. 136–60.

192

Bibliography

—— (1993a) ‘Norbert Elias and Karl Mannheim: Closeness and Distance’, Theory, Culture and Society, 10, 3: 81–114. —— (1993b) ‘Phenomenology’, in Tom Bottomore and William Outhwaite (eds) The Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth Century Social Thought, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 460–3. —— (1994) ‘The Symbol Theory as a Research Programme’, Paper presented to the Ad hoc Sessions on Figurational Sociology, XIII ISA World Congress of Sociology, Bielefeld, 18–23 July. —— (1996) ‘Norbert Elias und Karl Mannheim: Nähe und Distanz’, in Karl-Siegbert Rehberg (ed.) Norbert Elias und die Menschenwissenschaften: Studien zu Entstehung und Wirkungsgeschichte seines Werkes, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 352–92. —— (1998) The Sociological Revolution: From The Enlightenment to the Global Age, London: Routledge. Reprinted 2000, paperback 2002. —— (2004) ‘From Distance to Detachment: Knowledge and Self-knowledge In Elias’s Theory of Involvement and Detachment’, in Steve Quilley and Steven Loyal (eds) The Sociology of Norbert Elias, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 25–41. —— (2006a) ‘Editor’s Introduction’ to Richard Kilminster (ed.) The Complete Works of Norbert Elias: Volume 1, Early Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Dublin: University College Dublin Press, pp. xi–xx. —— (ed.) (2006b) The Complete Works of Norbert Elias: Volume 1, Early Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Dublin: University College Dublin Press. —— and Mennell, Stephen (2002) ‘Norbert Elias’, in George Ritzer (ed.) The Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 178–206. —— and Varcoe, Ian (1992) ‘Sociology, Postmodernity and Exile: An Interview with Zygmunt Bauman’, in Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity, London: Routledge. —— and Varcoe, Ian (eds) (1996a) Culture, Modernity and Revolution: Essays in Honour of Zygmunt Bauman, London: Routledge. —— (1996b) ‘Introduction: Intellectual Migration and Sociological Insight’, in Richard Kilminster and Ian Varcoe (eds) Culture, Modernity and Revolution: Essays in Honour of Zygmunt Bauman, London: Routledge, pp. 1–21. —— and Wouters, Cas (1995) ‘From Philosophy to Sociology: Elias and the Neo-Kantians: A Response to Benjo Maso’, Theory, Culture and Society, 12, 3: 81–120. Klein, Viola (1946) The Feminine Character: History of an Ideology, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul (2nd edn, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972). Kocka, Jürgen (1987) ‘Otto Hintze and Max Weber: Attempts at a Comparison’, in Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel (eds) Max Weber and his Contemporaries, London: Allen & Unwin, pp. 284–95. Köhnke, Klaus Christian (1991) The Rise of Neo-Kantianism: German Academic Philosophy between Idealism and Positivism, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kolakowski, Leszek (1972) Positivist Philosophy: From Hume to the Vienna Circle, trans. Norbert Guterman, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Korte, Hermann (1988) Über Norbert Elias, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag. —— (1996) ‘Norbert Elias an der Universität Leicester’, in Karl-Siegbert Rehberg (ed.) Norbert Elias und die Menschenwissenschaften: Studien zu Entstehungund Wirkungsgeschichte seines Werkes, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 77–86. Kranendonk, Willem H. (1990) Society as Process: A Bibliography of Figurational Sociology in the Netherlands (up to 1989): Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Studies,

Bibliography 193 with introduction by Johan Goudsblom, Amsterdam: Publikatiereeks Sociologisch Instituut, Universiteit van Amsterdam. Kris, Ernst (1936) ‘Comments on Spontaneous Artistic Creations by Psychotics’, in his Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art, New York: Schocken Books, 1964 (4th printing 1974), pp. 85–117. —— (1945) ‘The Function of Drawings and the Meaning of the “Creative Spell” in a Schizophrenic Artist’ (with Else Papenheim), in his Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art, New York: Schocken Books, 1964 (4th printing 1974), pp. 151–69. —— (1948) ‘Aesthetic Ambiguity’, in his Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art, New York: Schocken Books, 1964 (4th printing 1974), pp. 243–64. Kumar, Krishan (1993) ‘Modernity’, in Tom Bottomore and William Outhwaite (eds) The Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth Century Social Thought, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 391–2. Kuzmics, Helmut (1991) ‘Embarrassment and Civilization: On Some Similarities and Differences in the Work of Goffman and Elias’, Theory, Culture and Society, 8, 2: 1–30. —— (1997) ‘State Formation, Economic Development and Civilization in North-Western and Central Europe: A Comparison of Long-term Civilizing Processes in Austria and England’, Geschichte und Gegenwart, 2: 16 Jahrgang, May. —— (2001a) ‘Bibliographical Retrospect: Julius Stenzel, Philosophie der Sprache, Munich and Berlin, Oldenbourg Verlag, 1934’, Figurations (Newsletter of the Norbert Elias Foundation), No. 15, July: 14. —— (2001b) ‘On the Relationship between Literature and Sociology in the Work of Norbert Elias’, in Thomas Salumets (ed.) Norbert Elias and Human Interdependencies, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, pp. 116–36. Landgrebe, Ludwig (1966) Major Problems in Contemporary European Philosophy: From Dilthey to Heidegger, New York: Ungar. Lane, Frederic and Riemersma, Jelle C. (1953) ‘Introduction to Arthur Spiethoff’, in Frederic Lane and Jelle C. Riemersma (eds) Enterprise and Secular Change: Readings in Economic History, London: George Allen & Unwin, pp. 431–43. Langer, Suzanne K. (1949) Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art, New York: Mentor Books. —— (1953) Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art, New York: Scribner. Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J-B. (1988) The Language of Psychoanalysis, London: Karnac Books. Laqueur, Walter (1974) Weimar: A Cultural History, 1918–1933, New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. —— (1989) A History of Zionism, with a new Preface by the author, New York: Schocken Books (originally published 1972). Lasch, Christopher (1980) The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, London: Sphere Books. —— (1985) ‘Historical Sociology and the Myth of Maturity: Norbert Elias’s “Very Simple Formula” ’, Theory and Society, 14, 5: 705–20. Lash, Scott (1994) ‘Reflexivity and its Doubles: Structure, Aesthetics, Community’, in Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash (eds), Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 110–73. Lassman, Peter, Velody, Irving and Martins, Herminio (eds) (1989) Max Weber’s ‘Science as a Vocation’, London: Unwin Hyman.

194

Bibliography

Laslett, Peter (1979) ‘Karl Mannheim in 1939: A Student’s Recollection’, Revue européenne des sciences sociales, 17, 46: 223–6. Lavsky, Hagit (1996) Before Catastrophe: The Distinctive Path of German Zionism, Detroit: Wayne University Press. Layder, Derek (1986) ‘Social Reality as Figuration: A Critique of Elias’s Conception of Sociological Analysis’, Sociology, 20, 3: 367–86. Leach, Edmund (1986) ‘Violence’, London Review of Books, 23 October: 13–14. Lederer, Emil (1918) ‘On the Socio-psychic Constitution of the Present Time’, trans. Alfons Richter, Department of Social Sciences, Columbia University, 1941. (Originally published as ‘Zum sozialpsychischen Habitus der Gegenwart’, in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 56, 1918–19: 114–39.) Lepenies, Wolf (1978) ‘Norbert Elias: An Outsider Full of Unprejudiced Insight’, New German Critique, 15, Autumn: 57–80. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1976) The Savage Mind, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Lichtheim, George (1974) Europe in the Twentieth Century, London: Sphere Books. Loader, Colin (1985) The Intellectual Development of Karl Mannheim: Culture, Politics and Planning, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Löwith, Karl (1982) Max Weber and Karl Marx, trans. Hans Fantel, ed., with Introduction, Tom Bottomore and William Outhwaite, London: George Allen & Unwin (originally published 1932). Lukács, Georg (1923) History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone, London: Merlin Press, 1971. Lukes, Steven (1975) Émile Durkheim: His Life and Work: A Historical and Critical Study, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mandel, Ross (1978) ‘Heidegger and Wittgenstein: A Second Kantian Revolution’, in Michael Murray (ed.) Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, pp. 259–70. Mannheim, Karl (1922) ‘The Structural Analysis of Epistemology’, in Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology and Social Psychology, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (4th impression), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1969 (originally published 1953), pp. 15–73. —— (1924) ‘Historicism’, in Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (5th impression), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972 (originally published 1952), pp. 84–133. —— (1925a) Structures of Thinking, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro and Shierry Weber Nicholsen, ed., and Introduction, David Kettler, Volker Meja and Nico Stehr, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. —— (1925b) ‘The Problem of a Sociology of Knowledge’, in Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (5th impression), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972 (originally published 1952), pp. 134–90. —— (1927a) ‘Conservative Thought’, in Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology and Social Psychology, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (4th impression), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969 (originally published 1953), pp. 74–164. —— (1927b) ‘The Problem of Generations’, in Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (5th impression), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972 (originally published 1952), pp. 276–320. —— (1928) ‘Competition as a Cultural Phenomenon’, in Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (5th impression), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972 (originally published 1952), pp. 191–229.

Bibliography 195 —— (1929) Ideology and Utopia, trans. Edward A. Shils and Louis Wirth, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960. —— (1933a) ‘Towards a Sociology of the Mind’, in Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Culture, ed. Ernest Manheim in co-operation with Paul Kecskemeti (4th impression), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971 (originally published 1956), pp. 15–89. —— (1933b) ‘The Problem of the Intelligentsia. An Inquiry Into Its Past and Present Role’, in Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Culture, ed. Ernest Manheim in cooperation with Paul Kecskemeti (4th impression), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971 (originally published 1956), pp. 91–170. —— (1933c) ‘The Democratization of Culture’, in Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Culture, ed. Ernest Manheim in co-operation with Paul Kecskemeti (4th impression), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971 (originally published 1956), pp. 171–246. —— (1934) ‘German Sociology (1918–1933)’, in Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology and Social Psychology, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (4th impression), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969 (originally published 1953), pp. 209–30. —— (1938) ‘Planned Society and the Problem of Human Personality: A Sociological Analysis’ [Four lectures at Manchester College, Oxford], in Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology and Social Psychology, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (4th impression), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969 (originally published 1953), pp. 255–310. —— (1939) ‘Mass Education and Group Analysis’, in J.I. Cohen and R.M.W. Travers (eds) Educating for Democracy, London: Macmillan, pp. 329–64. —— (1940) Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, reprinted 1980. —— (1943) ‘Ethics’, Nine Talks for Sixth Forms on BBC Radio (September–November), transcripts, BBC Written Archives Centre, Reading, UK. —— (1945) ‘What Is Sociology?’, Six Talks for Sixth Forms on BBC Radio (January– March), transcripts, BBC Written Archives Centre, Reading, UK. —— (1946a) ‘Foreword’ to Viola Klein, The Feminine Character: History of an Ideology, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co, pp. vii–xiv. —— (1946b) ‘Letter to Kurt Wolff, 15.4.46’, in Kurt Wolff, ‘Sociology of Knowledge and Social Theory’, in Llewellyn Gross (ed.) Symposium on Sociological Theory, New York: Harper Row, 1959, pp. 567–602. —— (1957) Systematic Sociology: An Introduction to the Study of Society, ed. J.S. Erös and W.A.C. Stewart, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, New York: Oxford University Press (originally published 1935). —— (1969) Essays on the Sociology and Social Psychology, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (4th impression), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul (originally published 1953). —— (1971) Essays on the Sociology of Culture, ed. Ernest Manheim in co-operation with Paul Kecskemeti (4th impression), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul (originally published 1956). —— (1972) Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (5th impression), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul (originally published 1952). —— (with W.A.C. Stewart) (1935) An Introduction to the Sociology of Education, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962. Marcuse, Herbert (1941) Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, reprinted London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968. Marx, Karl (1875) ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works In One Volume, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 3rd printing, 1973, pp. 311–31.

196

Bibliography

Maso, Benjo (1995) ‘Elias and the Neo-Kantians: Intellectual Backgrounds of The Civilising Process’, Theory, Culture and Society, 12, 3: 43–79. Mason, John Hope (1982) The Irresistible Diderot, London: Quartet Books. May, Tim (1996) Situating Social Theory, Buckingham: Open University Press. —— (2001) Social Research: Issues, Methods and Process, Cambridge: Polity Press. Megill, Kenneth (1969) ‘Lukács as an Ontologist’, Studies in East European Thought, 9, 4: 334–53. Meja, Volker and Stehr, Nico (eds) (1990) Knowledge and Politics: The Sociology of Knowledge Dispute, London and New York: Routledge. Mennell, Stephen (1976) ‘Ethnomethodology and the new Methodenstreit’, in David C. Thorns (ed.) New Directions in Sociology, Newton Abbot: David and Charles, pp. 139–57. —— (1977) ‘ “Individual” Action and its “Social” Consequences in the Work of Norbert Elias’, in Peter Gleichmann, Johan Goudsblom and Hermann Korte (eds) Human Figurations: Essays for Norbert Elias, Amsterdam: Sociologisch Tijdschrift, pp. 99–109. —— (1990) ‘The Globalization of Human Society as a Very Long-term Social Process: Elias’s Theory’, Theory, Culture and Society, 7, 2–3: 359–71. —— (1995) Civilization and Decivilization, Civil Society and Violence, Inaugural Lecture, University College Dublin. —— (1998) Norbert Elias: An Introduction, Dublin: University College Dublin Press. —— (2003) ‘Another Biographical Footnote: Elias and St Edith Stein’, Figurations, Newsletter of the Norbert Elias Foundation, No. 19: 6. —— (2006) The Complete Works of Norbert Elias: Volume 2, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Dublin: University College Dublin Press. —— (with Dunning, Eric) (1979) ‘ “Figurational Sociology”: Some Critical Comments on Zygmunt Bauman’s “The Phenomenon of Norbert Elias”’, Sociology, 13, 3: 497–501. —— and Goudsblom, Johan (eds) (1998a) The Norbert Elias Reader: A Biographical Selection, Oxford: Blackwell. —— and Goudsblom, Johan (eds) (1998b) On Civilization, Power and Knowledge, London: University of Chicago Press. Merton, Robert K. (1968) Social Theory and Social Structure, London: Collier Macmillan. Mitzman, Arthur (1987) ‘The Civilizing Offensive: Mentalities, High Culture and Individual Psyches’, Journal of Social History, 20, 4: 663–87. Moelker, René (2003) ‘Norbert Elias, Martime Supremacy and the Naval Profession: On Elias’s Unpublished Studies in the Genesis of the Naval Profession’, British Journal of Sociology, 54, 3: 373–90. Mommsen, Hans (1991) From Weimar to Auschwitz: Essays in German History, Cambridge: Polity Press. Mommsen, Wolfgang J. (1970) ‘Max Weber’s Political Sociology and his Philosophy of World History’, in Wrong, Dennis (ed.) Max Weber, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, pp. 183–94. —— (1974) The Age of Bureaucracy: Perspectives on the Political Sociology of Max Weber, Oxford: Blackwell. Morawski, Stefan (1998) ‘Bauman’s Ways of Seeing the World’, Theory, Culture and Society, 15, 1: 29–38.

Bibliography 197 Morgan, Catherine (2001) The Demise of the Nation-state? A Reappraisal of the Statesociety Problem in Sociology and International Relations Theory, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Leeds. Morris, Brian (1991) Western Conceptions of the Individual, New York/Oxford: Berg Publishers. Mosse, George (1978) ‘Review of Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners’, New German Critique, 15, Autumn: 178–83. —— (1987) Germans and Jews: the Right, the Left and the Search for a ‘Third Force’ in Pre-Nazi Germany, Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Mouzelis, Nicos P. (1991) Back to Sociological Theory: The Construction of Social Orders, London: Macmillan. Needham, Joseph (1944) ‘Integrative Levels: A Revaluation of the Idea of Progress’, in his Time: The Refreshing River, London: George Allen & Unwin, pp. 233–72. Nelson, Benjamin (1962) ‘Sociology and Psychoanalysis on Trial: An Epilogue’, Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Review, 49, 2: 144–60. Niestroj, Brigitte (1989) ‘Norbert Elias: A Milestone in Historical Psycho-sociology. The Making of the Social Person’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 2, 2: 136–60. Nothaas, J. (1931) ‘Social Ascent and Descent in Germany’, trans. S. Ellison, Department of Social Science, Columbia University, 1938 (originally in Kölner Vierteljahrshefte für Soziologie). Novikoff, Alex B. (1945) ‘The Concept of Integrative Levels and Biology’, Science, 101, March: 209–15. Papineau, David (2004) Thinking About Consciousness, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parsons, Talcott (1937) The Structure of Social Action, New York: The Free Press of Glencoe. Pels, Dick (2003) The Unhastening Science: Autonomy and Reflexivity in the Social Theory of Knowledge, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Power, Richenda (2000) A Question of Knowledge, London: Pearson Education. Quilley, Stephen (2004) ‘Ecology, “Human Nature” and Civilising Processes: Biology and Sociology in the Work of Norbert Elias’, in Stephen Quilley and Steven Loyal (eds) The Sociology of Norbert Elias, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 42–58. —— with Loyal, Steven (eds) (2004) The Sociology of Norbert Elias, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rabinbach, Anson (1997) In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment, Berkeley: University of California Press. Rayner, Eric (1991) The Independent Mind in British Psychoanalysis, London: Free Association Books. Redfield, Robert (ed.) (1942) Levels of Integration in Biological and Social Systems, Lancaster, PA: The Jaques Cattell Press (Vol. VIII of Biologica Symposia: A Series of Volumes Devoted to Current Symposia in the Field of Biology, ed. Jaques Cattell). Rehberg, Karl-Siegbert (1979) ‘Form und Prozess. Zu den katalysatorischen Wirkungschancen einer Soziologie aus dem Exil: Norbert Elias’, in Peter Gleichmann, Johan Goudsblom and Hermann Korte (eds) Materialen zu Norbert Elias’ Zivilisationstheorie, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, pp. 101–69. Reiser, Oliver L. (1958) The Integration of Human Knowledge, Boston, MA: Extending Horizons Press. Rickman, John (1951) ‘Number and the Human Sciences’, in W. Muensterberger (ed.) Psychoanalysis and Culture, New York: International Universities Press, pp. 150–5.

198

Bibliography

Robertson, Roland (1990) ‘Globality, Global Culture and Images of World Order’, in Hans Haferkamp and Neil Smelser (eds) Social Change and Modernity, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 395–411. Robinson, R.J. (1987) ‘ “The Civilizing Process”: Some Remarks on Elias’s Social History’, Sociology, 21, 2: 1–17. Rojek, C. (1986) ‘Problems of Involvement and Detachment in the Writings of Norbert Elias’, British Journal of Sociology, 37, 4: 584–96. Rose, Gillian (1981) Hegel Contra Sociology, London: Athlone Press. Russell, Conrad (1999) The Ruses of Desire: Space, Time and Utopia in Fourier, the Surrealists and the Situationist International, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Leeds. Russell, Steven (1997) Jewish Identity and Civilizing Processes, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Sampson, R.V. (1956) Progress in the Age of Reason: The Seventeenth Century to the Present Day, London: Heinemann. Sartre, Jean-Paul (1936) The Transcendence of the Ego, trans. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick, New York: Noonday Press, 1957. —— (1968) Search for a Method, New York: Vintage Books. Sathaye, S.G. (1973) ‘On Norbert Elias’s Developmental Paradigm’, Sociology, 7, 1: 117–23. Scaff, Lawrence A. (1989) Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics and Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber, Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Schad, Susanne Petra (1972) Empirical Social Research in Weimar-Germany, The Hague: Mouton. Schelting, Alexander von (1934) ‘The sociology of knowledge and methodology’, trans. Volker Meja and Karl Pillemer, in Volker Meja and Nico Stehr (eds) Knowledge and Politics: The Sociology of Knowledge Dispute, London and New York: Routledge, 1990, pp. 267–84. —— (1936) ‘Review of Ideology and Utopia’, American Sociological Review, 1, 4: 664–74. Schöttker, Detlev (1988) ‘Norbert Elias und Walter Benjamin. Ein unbekannter Briefwechsel und sein Zusammenhang’, Merkur, Autumn. Schröter, Michael (1993) ‘Triebkräfte des Denkens bei Norbert Elias’, Psyche, 47, 7: 684–725. Schutz, Alfred (1932) The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert, London: Heinemann, 1972. —— (1940) ‘Phenomenology and the Social Sciences’, in Marvin Farber (ed.) Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl, London: Greenwood Press, reprinted 1968, pp. 118–39. —— (1970) On Phenomenology and Social Relations: Selected Writings, ed. and introduction by Helmut R. Wagner, Chicago, IL, and London: The University of Chicago Press. Scott, Alan (1995) ‘Value Freedom and Intellectual Autonomy’, History of the Human Sciences, 8, 3: 69-88. Segerstrale, Ullica (1986) ‘Colleagues in Conflict: An In Vivo Analysis of the Sociobiology Controversy’, Biology and Philosophy, I: 53–87. Seglow, Ilse (1977) ‘Work at a Research Programme’, in Peter Gleichmann, Johan Goudsblom and Hermann Korte (eds) Human Figurations: Essays for Norbert Elias, Amsterdam: Sociologisch Tijdschrift, pp. 16–22.

Bibliography 199 Seidman, Steven (1998) Contested Knowledge: Social Theory in the Postmodern Era (2nd edition), Oxford: Blackwell. Sennett, Richard (1978) ‘Review of The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners by Norbert Elias’, The New York Review of Books, March. Shils, Edward A. (1970) ‘Tradition, Ecology and Institution in the History of Sociology’, in his The Constitution of Society, Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982, pp. 275–383. Sica, Alan (1984) ‘Sociogenesis versus Psychogenesis: The Unique Sociology of Norbert Elias’, Mid-American Review of Sociology, 9, 1: 49–78. Simonds, A.P. (1978) Karl Mannheim’s Sociology of Knowledge, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smith, Dennis (1984) ‘Norbert Elias: Established or Outsider?’, Sociological Review, 32, 2: 367–89. Spiethoff, Arthur (1953) ‘Pure Theory and Economic Gestalt Theory: Ideal Types and Real Types’, in Frederic Lane and Jelle C. Riemersma (eds) Enterprise and Secular Change: Readings in Economic History, London: George Allen & Unwin, pp. 444–63. Steiner, George (1978) Heidegger, London: Fontana/Collins. Stephens, I.K. (1949) ‘Cassirer’s Doctrine of the Apriori’, in Paul Schilpp (ed.) The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, Evanston, IL: Open Court, pp. 149–82. Strachey, James (1930) ‘Editor’s Introduction’ to Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, London: Hogarth Press 1969. Szakolczai, Arpad (1999) Reflexive Historical Sociology, London: Routledge. —— (2000) ‘Norbert Elias and Franz Borkenau: Intertwined Life-works’, Theory, Culture and Society, 17, 2: 45–69. Talmon, J.L. (1952) The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, London: Secker and Warburg. Thomas, J.J.R. (1985) ‘Ideology and Elective Affinity’, Sociology, 19, 1: 39–54. Thomas, Keith (1978) ‘Review of Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process’, New York Review of Books, March: 28–30. Thorns, David C. (ed) (1976) New Directions in Sociology, Newton Abbot: David and Charles. Turner, Victor (1967) The Forest of Symbols, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. —— (1969) The Ritual Process, Harmondsworth: Penguin. van Krieken, Robert (1998) Norbert Elias, London: Routledge. Waddington, C.H. (1944a) The Scientific Attitude, Harmondsworth: Penguin. —— (1944b) This Changing World, London: Allen & Unwin. —— (1961) ‘The Human Animal’, in Julian Huxley (ed.) The Humanist Frame, London: George Allen & Unwin, pp. 65–80. Waldhoff, Hans-Peter (1994) ‘On Secondary Involvement and the Perception of Strangers’, paper presented to the Ad hoc Sessions on Figurational Sociology, XIII ISA World Congress of Sociology, Bielefeld, 18–23 July. —— (1995) Fremde und Zivilisierung. Wissensoziologische Studien über das Verarbeiten von Gefühlen der Fremdheit. Probleme der modernen Peripheri-Zentrums-Migration am türkisch-deutschen Beispiel, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Wallerstein, Immanuel (1979) The Capitalist World Economy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (1991) Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World-system, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

200

Bibliography

Wassall, Terence (1990) The Development of Scientific Knowledge in Relation to the Development of Societies: A Problem in the Contemporary Sociology of Science, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Leeds. —— (1994) ‘The Role of Levels of Integration in Elias’s Sociology of Knowledge’, paper presented to the Ad hoc Sessions on Figurational Sociology, XIII ISA World Congress of Sociology, Bielefeld, 18–23 July. Weber, Alfred (1920–1921) ‘Fundamentals of Culture Sociology: Social Process, Civilizational Process and Culture-Movement’, trans. G.H. Weltner and C.F. Hirshman, Department of Social Science, Columbia University, 1939. [Originally in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 47, 1920–1921: 1–49.] Weber, Max (1904) ‘ “Objectivity” in Social Science and Social Policy’, in The Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch, New York: The Free Press, 1949. —— (1918a) ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970, pp. 77–128. —— (1918b) ‘Science as a Vocation’, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970, pp. 129–58. Werkmeister, William H. (1949) ‘Cassirer’s Advance Beyond Neo-Kantianism’, in Paul Schilpp (ed.) The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, Evanston, IL: Open Court, pp. 757–98. Willett, John (1984) The Weimar Years: A Culture Cut Short, London: Thames and Hudson. Willey, Thomas E. (1978) Back to Kant: The Revival of Kantianism in German Social and Historical Thought, 1860–1914, Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Wolandt, Gerd (1977) ‘Norbert Elias und Richard Hönigswald’, in Peter Gleichmann, Johan Goudsblom and Hermann Korte (eds) Human Figurations: Essays for Norbert Elias, Amsterdam: Sociologisch Tijdschrift, pp. 127–34. Woldring, Henk (1986) Karl Mannheim: The Development of his Thought, Assen/ Maastricht: Van Gorcum. Wolff, Kurt (1959) ‘Sociology of Knowledge and Social Theory’, in Llewellyn Gross (ed.) Symposium on Sociological Theory, New York: Harper and Row, pp. 567–602. Wolin, Richard (2003) Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse, Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Wouters, Cas (1977) ‘Informalization and the Civilizing Process’, in Peter Gleichmann, Johan Goudsblom and Hermann Korte (eds) Human Figurations: Essays for Norbert Elias, Amsterdam: Sociologisch Tijdschrift, pp. 437–55. —— (1986) ‘Formalization and Informalization: Changing Tension Balances in Civilizing Processes’, Theory, Culture and Society, 3, 2: 1–19. —— (1987) ‘Developments in Behavioural Codes Between the Sexes: Formalization of Informalization in The Netherlands, 1930–85’, Theory, Culture and Society, 4, 2–3: 405–27. —— (1990) ‘Social Stratification and Informalization in Global Perspective’, Theory, Culture and Society, 7, 4: 69–90. —— (1998) ‘How Strange our Feelings of Superiority and Inferiority to Ourselves?’, Theory, Culture and Society, 15, 1: 131–50. —— (1999a) ‘Changing Patterns of Social Controls and Self-controls: On the Rise of Crime Since the 1950s and the Sociogenesis of a “Third Nature” ’, British Journal of Criminology, 38, 3: 416–32.

Bibliography 201 —— (1999b) ‘Balancing Sex and Love since the 1960s Sexual Revolution’, in Mike Featherstone (ed.) Love and Eroticism, London: Sage, pp. 187–214. —— (2002) ‘The Quest for New Rituals in Dying and Mourning: Changes in the We–I Balance’, Body and Society, 8, 1: 1–27. Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth (1982) Hannah Arendt: For Love of theWorld, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press. Zeitlin, Irving (1968) Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, and London: Prentice-Hall.

Index

absolutism 4, 31, 45, 47, 49–50, 61, 84–5, 124, 147 abstraction 1–2, 9, 24–5, 28–9, 35, 95, 96, 115, 136, 140, 145, 151, 152, 159n action research 125, 128 action theory 8, 118 adaptation (evolutionary) 146, 180n Adorno, Theodor 11, 45, 97–8, 112, 124 aesthetics 107–8, 123, 126 Aggressivität 170n Angriffslust 91, 170n alienation 12, 101 ancien régime 80 anthropogenesis 137 anthropology 4, 137–41, 145–9 anthroposphere 148 anti-Semitism 21, 26–8, 42, 159n anticipatory motif 17–18, 124, 155 Apel, Karl-Otto 124 apriori (Kant) 9, 21–4, 34, 55, 133, 139, 151 (see neo-Kantianism/neo-Kantians) archaeology 145 Arendt, Hannah 11, 20, 24 aristocracy 76–81, 84, 89 assimilation (of Jews) 6, 12, 26–7, 36, 78, 125, 150, 162n atomism 103, 148 Aufweis 39 authoritarianism 62, 70, 128–9 autonomous evaluations 66, 118, 122, 124, 133 (see heteronomous evaluations) balances of power 4, 7, 14, 34, 38, 87, 147 Baldamus, Wilhelm ‘Gi’ 42, 167n Baldwin, James Mark 180n Bandmann, Martin 27 barbarism/barbaric behaviour 75, 81, 83, 89 base-superstructure model 47

Bauman, Zygmunt 97, 157n, 169n Beck, Ulrich 158n becoming 9 behavioural codes 72–3, 75, 79, 83 being 22, 29–30, 32, 95, 132 Being and Time (Heidegger) 20, 30, 37, 163n Benjamin, Walter 23, 97–8, 171n Berger, Peter 110, 173n Berkeley, George 49 Bertalanffy, Ludwig von 137 Beweis 39 bias 14, 57, 143 Bildung 77, 78 biology 116, 131, 133–6, 140–9, 154 blame/blaming 111, 112, 118, 121 Blau-Weiss x, 12, 19, 26–7, 98, 158n, 159n (see youth movements) Blitz, David 142 Bloch, Ernst 98 Bollas, Christopher 171n, 177n bonding 82, 87, 113 Borchert, Catherine M. 146 Bourdieu, Pierre 31, 151 bourgeoisie 76–9, 81, 84, 86, 88, 90, 100 bracketing 109–10, 127–8, 141, 173n Brenner, Michael 26–7 Brierley, Marjorie 179n British Museum 86 Brown, Norman O. 161n Brown, Richard 122 Buber, Martin 98 Bullough, Edward 107–8 bureaucracy 80 Calviac, C. 89 capitalism 6, 21, 100 Cartesianism 19–20, 29–30 Cassirer, Ernst 11, 22, 26, 34, 49, 138–40

Index categories 22, 24, 34, 55, 59, 133, 138–40, 155 celestial eye (Michel de Certeau) 17 cerebral memory images 141 charisma 101 Chicago School 142 children 90–2, 117–18 chivalry 83 Christianity 12 chromosomes 147 citation networks 3 De civilitate morum puerilium (Erasmus) 83–4 Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud) 75, 168n The Civilizing Process (Elias) 2–3, 5, 72–100 civilizing/civilization 57, 62, 81 (see decivilizing processes) civilizing offensives (Mitzman) 81, 125 class conflict 10, 12, 45, 57, 76–81, 86, 88–90 Cohen, Hermann 11, 26, 161n Cold War 58 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 108 collective unconscious 61 Collingwood, R.G. 97 colonialism 81, 99, 125 commerce 78 communication 135–6, 140, 147 communism 101 competition 53–4 Comte, Auguste 8, 25–6 concept formation 2, 11, 14–15 conscience 11, 65, 103, 156 Conservative Thought (Mannheim) 21, 42, 45 conspicuous consumption 14 Cooper, L. Charles 164n Copernicus, Nicolaus 154 cosmology 144, 154 The Court Society (Elias) 2–3, 5, 16, 36, 87, 157n court society 76–8, 80–1, 88–90 Courtin, Antoine de 86 Crick, Francis 147 critical realism 8, 132 critical theory 97, 152 The Critique of the Gotha Programme (Marx) 100 culture 6, 10–13, 18, 21, 23–4, 26, 77, 78, 84, 138–40, 141 (see Kultur) Darwin, Charles 135, 142, 154

203

Dasein 23, 30–1, 82 de-distanciation 106–7 death/dying 3, 19, 56, 65, 120 decentralization 92 decivilizing processes 135 democracy 21, 51, 53, 69–70, 100 denial 7, 37, 62 detachment 7, 14, 16–18, 23, 59, 144 (see involvement) determinism 12, 68, 135, 154 detour via detachment 36, 52, 176n diagnosis 44, 58 dialectics 34, 52, 66, 98, 121 dialogic sociologies 128, 129 Diderot, Denis 78 dilettantism 121 Dilthey, Wilhelm 97 discrimination 27 dissimilation 26 division of labour 45, 100 DNA 146–7 double-binds 63, 120 (see vicious circles) double hermeneutic (Giddens) 110 dualisms 31, 38, 44–5, 47, 59, 102, 105, 132–3, 136, 141, 144, 152 Dunning, Eric 15, 73, 102 Durkheim, Émile 23–4, 26, 137, 140, 151, 173n economics 10–11, 14, 18, 21–2 economism 44 education 70, 77, 80–1 ego/ego-functions 15, 19–20, 29–30, 37, 45, 90, 108–9, 116–17, 126–8, 154, 169n The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Durkheim) 24 Elias, Hermann 159n Elias, Sophie 159n elites 14, 48, 62 emancipation 11, 26, 32, 38, 61, 126, 129, 135, 149 emergent properties 178n emotions 52, 55, 62–3, 66–8, 71, 123, 133–4 empiricism 36, 64–6, 68, 72, 74 Encyclopaedists 78 England 11, 43, 76, 79, 82, 88, 116 English language 41, 68–9, 73–4, 102, 104 Enlightenment 78, 99, 121–2, 153, 172n Epimenides 46 epistemology 12–13, 17, 21, 33–5, 45–6 Erasmus, Desiderius 75, 83–5, 87, 92, 95

204

Index

The Established and the Outsiders (Elias) 3, 16 established/outsider relations 3, 16, 106 (see outsiders) ethic of responsibility 111 ethics 23, 29, 32–3, 35–6, 46, 51–2 ethnicity 6, 125, 128 ethnology 136 ethnomethodologists 22 etiquette 77, 86–7 evaluations/evaluating 32, 36, 51–3, 66, 75, 96, 100, 111–12 evolution/evolutionary theory 8, 116, 131, 133–5, 141–2, 145–9 existentialism 12, 19, 21–2, 27, 29, 95–6 experiential explanation 74 explanatory levels 87–93 Faust (Goethe) 97 fear 110, 123, 130 Featherstone, Mike 3, 8, 19 feedback mechanisms 119 feudalism 92, 135 figurations 48, 58, 63–5, 66, 120 figurational sociology ix, xi–xii, 3, 8, 14, 58–9, 116 First World War 10, 12–13, 18, 21, 26, 150 Firth, Raymond 137 five-dimensional image (Elias) 116 Florence 154 Foulkes, S.H. 11 Frankfurt School 24, 44–5, 112 free trade 80–1 French language 74, 77, 79 French Revolution 81 Freud, Sigmund 8–9, 14, 36, 38, 42–3, 55, 57, 61, 66–7, 70, 75, 90–1, 100, 102, 105, 107–8, 125–6, 150, 152, 154–5, 161n, 168n (see psychoanalysis) Freudenthal, Gerd 43 Fromm, Erich 27 functional democratization (Elias) 14, 44, 48, 106, 125, 129 functionalism 8, 128, 152 fundamental democratization (Mannheim) 48 fundamental ontology 12–13, 18–32, 54, 74, 95, 98, 134, 158n, 162n (see Heidegger, Martin) The Future of an Illusion (Freud) 100 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 23, 95, 97 Gay, Peter 10–11, 26, 122 gebildeter Mensch 80

Gehlke, Charles 24 Geist 18, 161n Gellner, Ernest 4 Geltung 9, 21, 23, 33–4, 38 (see validity) Geltungsproblematik 9 generations/generational conflict 10, 12, 14, 20, 23, 25–7, 38 genetic fallacy 49 genetics 142, 145–7 genomes 146 genotypes 146, 148 Gerard, R.W. 142 German language 7, 69, 73–4, 77, 96, 109, 132 Gerth, Hans 42, 47, 164n, 166n, 167n Giddens, Anthony 4–5, 8, 110, 167n Gleichmann, Peter 2, 160n globalization 6 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 19, 77–8, 82, 97 Goffman, Erving. 110 Golden Twenties 10 Goldmann, Lucien 22, 161n Goudsblom, Johan 2, 8, 14, 32, 63, 75, 131, 148, 152, 160n group charisma/group disgrace 54 Gundolf, Friedrich 82 Habermas, Jürgen 5, 8, 23, 124 habitus 14, 72, 89, 93, 95, 98, 103, 125 Hackeschmidt, Jörg 12 Haldane, J.B.S. 142 Hall, Stuart 6 Hamilton, Paul 99 Harries, Karsten 30, 37 Harrington, Austin 110–11 Hartmann, Nicolai 32 Hegel, G.W.F. 18, 32, 51, 64, 97 Hegelians 31, 52 hegemony 20, 25 Heidegger, Martin 11, 13, 19–21, 23, 28–31, 35, 37, 54 (see Being and Time) Heine, Heinrich 100 Heinemann, F.H. 23, 29 Hekman, Susan 162n Hemingway, Ernest 114–15, 174n heretics 113, 153 hermeneutics x, 8, 21, 27, 74, 95–7, 110 Herzen, Alexander 31 heteronomous evaluations 66, 102, 118, 152 (see autonomous evaluations) high society 78 Hintze, Otto 165n historical materialism 55, 98, 167n

Index historical necessity 101 Historical School 55 historicism 8, 43, 47, 52, 97, 99 historicity 31, 34, 47, 95 historiography 19, 97, 99 History and Class Consciousness (Lukács) 12, 27, 160n, 176n history/historians 4, 7, 9, 11–13, 31, 32, 34, 50–1, 69–70, 74, 82, 93–4, 96, 97, 99, 121–2, 139, 152, 153–4, 167n Hitler, Adolf 11 Hofzucht (Tannhäuser) 84 Holbach, Baron d’ 73, 100 homines aperti x, 30–1, 102, 113 hominids 4, 148–9, 180n hominization 147 homo clausus x, 15, 17, 30–1, 43, 49, 102, 113 Hönigswald, Richard 1, 9, 19, 22–3, 26, 33, 164n Horkheimer, Max 45, 112 Hoselitz, Bert F. 7 human condition 4–7, 30, 31, 54, 118, 134, 141, 163n humanism 63–4, 74, 84, 99, 143–4 Hungary 61, 64 Husserl, Edmund 11, 19–20, 23, 30, 37 Huxley, Julian 2, 22, 142–4 id/id-functions 90, 108, 116–17, 126–7 ideal-types 66, 165n (see real types) idealism 132, 139, 141, 175n ideology 9, 13, 16, 18, 22, 47–9, 51–3, 64–5, 112, 129, 152 Ideology and Utopia (Mannheim) 24, 50, 53, 61, 67, 105 independence 52 individualism 15, 20–1, 23, 29–30, 44, 55, 101, 103, 105, 154 industrial society 7, 61 inflation 10, 18, 21 informalization 10, 106, 109, 125–9 infrastructure of history 32, 97 institutionalization of sociology 115, 118–25, 151–2, 155–6, 161n intelligentsia 77–80, 105–6 interdependence 15, 22, 29–31, 44, 48, 58, 61, 87, 90, 113, 125, 127, 149 internalization 14, 45, 54, 107 internal pacification 73, 87 intervention 58–9, 67, 121 intimacy 109 involved detachment 123 (see secondary involvement)

205

involvement 7, 14, 17–19, 35 involvement/detachment balance 101–30, 126, 129 Involvement and Detachment (Elias) 18, 66, 104, 132 is/ought 7, 29, 36, 102 Jaspers, Karl 11, 19–20, 53 Jaszi, Oscar 64 Jewish youth movement 12 (see BlauWeiss) Jews 11–12, 26–8, 40–1, 98, 125, 150 Johannes-Gymnasium, Breslau 38, 163n Jonas, Hans 30, 54 Jones, Ernest 176n, 177n Judaism 12, 27, 98 Kampflust 92 Kant, Immanuel 20, 26, 77, 107–8 Kantianism/Kantians (see neo-Kantianism/ neo-Kantians) Kant’s Life and Thought (Cassirer) 34 Kaufman, Felix 19 Kecskemeti, Paul 47–8 Kellner, Hansfried 110, 173n Kettler, David 18, 57, 60, 64 Klein, Melanie 14 Klein, Viola 179n knowledge 101–30 Korsch, Karl 12, 21, 25 Krieken, Robert Van 9, 114–15 Kris, Ernst 104–13 Krueger, Felix 14 Kuhn, Thomas 121 Kultur 52–3, 66, 74–83, 96, 168n (see Zivilisation) Kuzmics, Helmut 1, 163n Landgrebe, Ludwig 21 language 1–4, 8, 23, 28, 37, 137, 139, 147–8, 180n Laqueur, Walter 12 Laslett, Peter 107, 166n Lebenswelt 109 Leeds University 30–1 Leicester University xi, 122, 160n, 178n Lepenies, Wolf 1 Letters on the Study of Nature (Alexander Herzen) 31 levels of integration 32, 127, 132–3, 135, 140, 142–3, 179n Lévinas, Emmanuel 169n Lévi-Strauss, Claude 140 liar paradox (Epimenides) 46

206

Index

liberalism 43, 45, 61–2, 64–6, 99, 122 Liebmann, Otto 26 Locke, John 49 logic, status of 9, 23, 31, 36, 49, 124, 133, 140, 161n Logical Positivism 12, 23 Löwe, Adolphe 166n, 167n Löwenthal, Leo 27 Löwith, Karl 29 Ludes, Peter 126 Lukács, Georg 11–13, 21, 25, 27, 29, 51, 98 Lukes, Steven 24 Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (Mannheim) 41, 44, 54, 61, 67–9 Mann, Thomas 53 manners 68, 72, 74–5, 78, 80–1, 85–9, 91, 94–5, 117 Mannheim, K. 3, 7, 9, 11, 13–14, 18, 21, 23–5, 32–3, 35, 38–71, 86–7, 97, 104–13, 120, 132, 151 Mannheim-Lang, Julia 42, 67 Marburg School 22, 138, 161n (see neoKantianism/neo-Kantians) Marcuse, Herbert 24, 70 markets 5, 90 Marx, Karl 26, 32, 45, 51, 54, 64, 100–1, 151 Marxism/Marxists 8, 11–13, 21, 22, 24, 27–8, 42, 54, 55, 68, 97–8, 112, 152 Masaccio, Tommaso 123 Maso, Benjo 138 materialism (economic) 159n materialism (philosophical) 21–2, 132, 140–1, 175n mathematics 138 Mayr, Ernst 142, 180n medicine 22, 142 Megill, Kenneth 160n Meja, Volker 18, 60, 64 Menger, Carl 165n Mennell, Stephen 15, 56, 72, 75 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 29 Merton, R.K. 128, 177n messianism 12, 27, 98 meta-critique 23–4, 27, 33 metaphysics 2, 16, 28, 44, 52, 114–15, 124, 136–7, 155 Methodenstreit 11 methodologism 23 methodology 93, 98, 102, 110, 127–9, 141, 145, 151

Middle Ages 68, 72–3, 78, 83, 85, 87–8, 104, 117 Mirabeau, Comte de 80 Mitwelt 29 Modern Synthesis (evolutionary biology) 142, 146–7, 178n modernity 4–7, 152, 157n modernization 7, 101 molecular biology 146 monopolization 14, 45, 73 Moore, G.E. 23 Morawski, Stefan 162n morphology 146 Mozart, Wolfgang 3, 108 mutual identification 59, 128, 134 mutations 46, 147 myths/myth hunters 13, 57, 64, 162n narcissism 150, 154, 169n National Socialists/Nazis 43, 69, 150, 162n nationalism 26–8 Natorp, Paul 161n natural attitude (Schutz) 109 natural selection 146 nature 115, 118–20, 134–6, 141, 147, 149, 153 Needham, Joseph 142 Nelson, Benjamin 177n neo-Darwinism 148 neo-Heideggerians 95, 161n neo-Kantianism/neo-Kantians xi, 1, 9–10, 13, 19–24, 26–30, 34, 37, 103, 108–9, 112, 133, 137–40, 150–1, 158n neo-Marxists 21 Niebuhr, Reinhold 63 nihilism 30 nominalism 29, 95, 105, 133 normative questions 32, 35–6, 111 Nothaas, J. 14 nothing/negation 23 Oakeshott, Michael 97 objectivity 52, 104, 109, 111–12, 115, 132–3 omnipotence 120 ontic/ontological distinction 32 ontology/ontologists 18–32, 132, 141 outsiders 22, 25–7, 35, 38, 54, 80, 99, 106–9, 66, 68, 172n (see established/ outsider relations) palaeontology 142 panlogism 142, 161n Parsons, Talcott 7–8, 22, 96, 101

Index path-dependency 7 peasants 84, 91 Periclean Age 11 perspectives/perspectivism 18, 47, 49, 50, 52, 59–60, 111–13, 123 (see relationism) persuasion 36–9 Peters, R.S. 23 phenomenology/phenomenologists 8, 20, 22–3, 25, 74, 103, 109–10, 112–13, 118, 127, 133 phenotypes 146–7 philosophes 122 philosophy/philosophers xii, 1, 3, 8–9, 13, 18–29, 30, 31, 32–6, 45, 49, 50, 65, 95, 96, 114, 116, 97–8, 132, 137–40, 150–2 physicalism 133–4, 141 physics 3, 25, 34, 138 Physiocrats 54, 80 Pigliucci, Massimo 146 planning 43, 59, 62–3, 165n pluralism 6 poetry 77, 108, 122 polemics 59, 66, 77, 133, 138, 145, 164n political economists 54 political philosophy 64–5 politics 6–7, 10–14, 17, 19, 21, 31, 33, 43, 48, 49, 51–2, 58, 64, 98, 101, 125, 159n polyvalent social structures 125 Popper, Karl 162n postmodernity 4, 121, 169n power relations (see balances of power) praxis 21, 29 pre-science 138 prehistory 4, 145 prejudice 114–15 principle of increasing facilitation 124 private sphere 11, 90 privatization 11 process thinking 179n process sociology 3, 14, 22 (see figurational sociology) professionalism 17, 25, 33, 153–6 progress/progression 93–100, 172n, 179n proletariat 12 protectionism 80 Protestants 125 pseudo-detachment 17, 175n psychic distancing 40–3, 103, 105–7, 109, 112–13 psychoanalysis x, 11, 36, 38, 40, 43, 52, 57, 60, 66–7, 86, 98, 105, 107, 112, 150, 152, 154, 155 (see Freud, Sigmund)

207

psychogenesis 14, 82, 84, 86 (see sociogenesis) psychologization 104–5 psychology/psychologists 10, 14, 16, 98, 152, 154 public sphere 11, 14, 41, 90 Quilley, Stephen 149 Rabinbach, Anson 97 rational choice theory 8 rationalism 19–23, 29, 31, 37–8, 43, 61, 103, 105, 108, 154, 133, 175n rationality 53, 57, 61, 122, 132 rationalization 14, 66, 82, 101, 112 Raven, Charles (Canon) 135, 142, 179n realism 95, 98, 105, 123, 128, 132 reality congruent knowledge 35, 49, 140 reality shock 21, 63 real types 66, 165n (see ideal types) Reason and Revolution (Marcuse) 24 redemption 93–100, 171n Redfield, Robert 142 reductionism 54, 59, 133, 136, 139, 146, 178n Reflections on a Life (Elias) xi, 8–9, 11, 13, 19, 35, 42, 46–7, 49, 86 reflexivity 127–8, 129 reform cliques 80–1 reframing 32–6, 50, 132 regression 108–9 Reichmann, Eva G. 159n reification 2, 44, 157n relationism 34, 42, 46–51, 58, 112, 121 (see perspectives/perspectivism) relative autonomy 49, 132, 136 relativism 23, 31, 44–7, 49–50, 53 religion 12–13, 23, 25–8, 68, 98, 134–5, 136, 144, 153, 155 Renaissance 2, 68, 83–5, 87, 123, 154 repression 61–2, 70, 75, 126–7, 129 research programmes 131–49 resistances (psychoanalytic) 154–5 revolution 12, 21, 29, 55, 64, 81, 151, 153 Rickert, Heinrich 3, 8, 35 Rickman, John 150, 156 Roaring Twenties 10 Rojek, Chris 175n, 176n role distance 110 Romans 4 romantics 122 Rose, Gillian 23 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 80

208

Index

salons 81 Sartre, Jean-Paul 29, 97 Scheler, Max 14 Schiller, Friedrich von 77 schizophrenics 108 Schmoller, Gustav 165n Scholem, Gershom 98 Schröter, Michael 125, 160n Schutz, Alfred 103–13, 117–18 science-immanent/science transcendent developments 34 science/scientists 3, 9, 22, 25, 29, 37–8, 52, 65–6, 96, 102, 109–10, 117, 121–2, 124, 125, 132–4, 138, 139, 142, 153–4 scientification 22, 155 scientific establishments 141, 145 scientificity 17 Scott, Alan 110 Second Nature 90, 149 Second World War 107, 116 secondary involvement 121–30 (see involved detachment) secularism 12–13, 22, 63, 72, 84, 98–9, 131–49, 155 Seglow, Ilse 160n Seinsverbundenheit 48, 66 self-autarky 15, 103 self-knowledge 101–30 self-organization 127 self-restraint 62, 67, 87, 90, 92 semiology 137 sexuality 11 Sica, Alan 102 sign systems 137 Simiand, François 151 Simmel, Georg 8, 11, 14 Simonds, A.P. 6 Simpson, George Gaylord 42, 180n Smith, Adam 54 Smith, Dennis 173n, 176n social construction 114–15 social equalization (Scheler) 14 socialism 6, 55 socialization 10, 90–1 social sciences 1–3, 7, 10, 14–15, 40, 44–5, 76, 101, 102, 109, 111–12, 118–19, 133–3, 137, 152, 168n social theory ix, 152, 156 The Society of Individuals (Elias) 18 socioanalysis 93–100 sociobiology 136 sociogenesis 14, 24, 53, 82, 84, 86, 178n (see psychogenesis)

The Sociological Revolution (Kilminster) xi–xii, 162n sociologism 24 sociologization 108 sociology/sociologists x, 1–7, 18, 25, 43–7, 64–5, 56–64, 101–2, 122–25, 127–30, 144, 151–53, 154–6 sociology of knowledge 7, 14, 44, 45, 131–2, 161n, 162n (see Wissensoziologie) solipsism 21, 28–30, 154 Sombart, Werner 11, 14 Soviet Union 6 specialists 124, 134 Spengler, Oswald 94 spirituality 135, 139–40 Spiethoff, Arthur 165n sports 62, 109, 126 Stehr, Nico 60, 64 Stein, Edith 19–20 Steiner, George 37 Stenzel, Julius 38, 163n structuration theory 8 structuralism 137, 140, 161n structure (in Mannheim) 48 (see figurations) students 12, 19–20, 27, 30, 33 Sturm und Drang 77 style 1–4, 18 subject-object 23, 29, 45, 51, 95, 104, 115, 129, 132–3, 161n, 177n sublimation 62, 123, 126, 176n Substance and Function (Cassirer) 34 Sumer 4 super-ego/super-ego functions 89–91, 93, 112, 116–17, 125–9, 169n survival units/mechanisms 99, 144, 145, 147–8, 149 symbiosis 149 The Symbol Theory (Elias) xi, 2, 15, 22, 60, 66, 131–49 symbols 3, 22, 132, 136–7, 140, 145, 174n symbol emancipation 135, 149 synthesis 3, 9–11,14–19, 29, 31, 36, 38, 44, 51, 53, 136, 141–2, 145–7, 149, 159n systematics 142 systems theory 8 taboos 11, 38, 68, 109, 126 Tannhäuser 84 taxation 45, 80 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre 135, 142, 144

Index teleology 32, 44, 51, 71, 124, 135, 143 theology/theologians 13, 98–9, 134–5, 142, 151 theory and practice 56–64 Third Nature (Wouters) 126, 128 Thomas, Jeremy J. 82 time/timescale 3, 9, 19, 47, 50–1, 62, 133, 144 Time: An Essay (Elias) 28, 132, 136 top-down sociology 17 totalitarianism 48, 61, 69–70 Toynbee, Arnold 94 trade networks 80 transcendence/transcendental arguments 9, 24–5, 28, 32–4, 95, 109, 132, 139–40, 151, 167n, 169n, 176n triad of basic controls 45, 115–6, 155, 175n two-front strata (Simmel) 14 Unbehagen 75, 90, 168n unconscious 61, 74, 91, 108, 154 underdeveloped countries 7 universals 71, 73, 91, 166n utopias 62–3, 124 validity 9, 21, 23, 33–4, 38, 47, 50–2, 111 (see Geltung) value-freedom 101–3, 110–12, 118 value-judgements 35, 75, 94, 101, 111, 127–8 Van Eyck, Jan Van 123 Veblen, Thorstein 11, 14 Velázquez, Diego de Silva y 123 vertical distance 106 vicious circles 118–19, 121 (see doublebinds) Vienna Circle 12 violence, means of 3, 14, 19, 21, 61–2, 72, 91–2, 150 vitalism 134, 178n Voltaire (pseud. François-Marie Arouet) 78

209

Waddington, C.H. 142, 178n Waldhoff, Hans-Peter 125, 177n Wallerstein, Immanuel 158n wars 35, 56, 58–9, 63–4, 102, 109, 120 Watson, James D. 147 Weber, Alfred 3, 11, 43, 52–3, 55, 83, 134, 154 Weber, Marianne 43 Weber, Max/Weberians 8,11, 13–14, 22, 35, 43, 63, 65–7, 69, 71, 82, 101–5, 107, 108–12, 121–3, 125, 127 Weimar Germany/Republic x–xi, 7, 10–14, 19, 24, 26, 38, 40, 43–6, 63, 66, 75, 112, 150, 164n Werkmeister, William H. 139 Western society 7, 12, 15, 57, 62, 72–6, 85–6, 93–4, 103, 117–18, 125, 127, 130 What is Sociology? (Elias) 18, 49, 51, 56, 64, 166n, 175n Whitehead, Alfred North 32 Willey, Thomas E. 1 Wilson, E.O. 136 Wissensoziologie 44 (see sociology of knowledge) Wittgenstein, Ludwig 12, 37 Wolandt, Gerd 9, 19 Wolin, Richard 20–1, 26 women 4, 57, 60, 91, 99, 180n world-view x, 136, 145, 152 Wouters, Cas 106, 109, 138, 177n Wright, Sewall 142, 180n youth movements xi, 12, 26–7 (see BlauWeiss) Zeitgeist 18 zero-sum relation 120, 122 Zihlman, Adrienne L. 146 Zionism 12, 26–8, 57, 65, 98, 159n Zivilisation 52–3, 74–83, 96, 168n (see Kultur) Zurich Congress (1928) 30, 43, 53–6, 68, 163n