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.