Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes On Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Sociological Promise of Norbert Elias
- One Norbert Elias: Genesis of a Determined Thinker
- Two Knowledge, Science and Method: The Sociological Practice of Norbert Elias
- Three Norbert Elias’s Comparative Historical Sociology: Against Process Reduction
- Four Power and Process: Norbert Elias and the Paradox of Inequalities
- Five Norbert Elias and Shifting Gender Relations
- Six Travelling With Elias: Figurations and the Racialising Process in South Africa
- Seven Excitement Processes, Embodiment and Power Relations in Sport and Leisure
- Eight Warfare, Survival Units, National Habitus and Nationalism: Norbert Elias’s Contribution to Political Sociology
- Nine Elias’s Contribution to International Relations Theory: Towards a Global Sociology
- Ten Crime, Government and Civilisation: Rethinking Elias in Criminology
- Eleven Art and the Civilising Process
- Twelve From Social Mobility to Channels of Opportunity: Norbert Elias and Education
- Appendix: Published Works of Norbert Elias in English
- Index
Three - Norbert Elias’s Comparative Historical Sociology: Against Process Reduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes On Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Sociological Promise of Norbert Elias
- One Norbert Elias: Genesis of a Determined Thinker
- Two Knowledge, Science and Method: The Sociological Practice of Norbert Elias
- Three Norbert Elias’s Comparative Historical Sociology: Against Process Reduction
- Four Power and Process: Norbert Elias and the Paradox of Inequalities
- Five Norbert Elias and Shifting Gender Relations
- Six Travelling With Elias: Figurations and the Racialising Process in South Africa
- Seven Excitement Processes, Embodiment and Power Relations in Sport and Leisure
- Eight Warfare, Survival Units, National Habitus and Nationalism: Norbert Elias’s Contribution to Political Sociology
- Nine Elias’s Contribution to International Relations Theory: Towards a Global Sociology
- Ten Crime, Government and Civilisation: Rethinking Elias in Criminology
- Eleven Art and the Civilising Process
- Twelve From Social Mobility to Channels of Opportunity: Norbert Elias and Education
- Appendix: Published Works of Norbert Elias in English
- Index
Summary
Historical imagination and sociological imagination are inseparable: whenever we imagine a society, we are figuring something that has a lifespan reaching far beyond any individual’s existence, both into the past and into the future. The point has long been made in classical sociology: we find it in Émile Durkheim's old argument for understanding society as a sui generis being, not reducible to any sum of individuals, supervening on their relations and extending in time, effectively immortal compared with any human life-span (Durkheim 2014). However, the essentially philosophical insight that a society – any society – always has a historical dimension, does not solve the basic problem of sociology: how can the historicity of the social be accommodated within the framework of empirical science? It is all very well to say that sociological imagination must include history, but how should a sociologist practising the imagination proceed to stay true to the call of history? Specifically, how can she solve the tension between the philosophical concept of history as an (for all practical purposes) infinite process and the limitations of her research methods and techniques? Our research practice, whatever we do, can only address fragments, bits and pieces, it cannot grasp the whole, the continuum, without framing it in some limitative way.
Norbert Elias's theory not only endorses the point about the inherent historicity of the social as self-evident but one that is frequently reduced to a meaningless declaration. It also offers guidance for a corresponding research practice which combines theory and historical evidence. The task of historical sociology has been defined as making ‘theoretical sense of the past’ (Steinmetz 2007). Eliasian sociology carries out this task to perfection. Most importantly, it avoids one trap of thinking about history and society which I would call selective historicity. Let me begin this chapter with a brief discussion of this phenomenon as an introduction to an overview of historical–sociological matter in Elias's work, beginning with On the Process of Civilisation in its historical context, followed by mapping historical–sociological interests in his minor writings. I will conclude with a discussion of Elias's theory as a way to cope with human engagement in mythologised historical imaginaries, including both the happy and the unhappy images of the past, pointing out the benefits of combining historical and sociological imagination with an appropriate quantum of detachment.
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- The Anthem Companion to Norbert Elias , pp. 55 - 70Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2023