Norbert Elias and Figurational Sociology: The Comeback of the Century

Abstract

Norbert Elias (1897-1990) has been recog nized belatedly in American sociology, even though the prefaces to his collected works claim he was one of the great sociologists of our time. This more British and European judgment-Elias won the first versions of both the Theodor Adorno Award (1977) and the European Amali Prize for social science (1987)-would generally as a surprise for American sociologists. Indeed, if sociol ogy were a sport, Elias would win the come back of the century award (Gordon 2002: 68). Yet as Edward Shils once pointed out, the success and visibility of sociological ideas have only a weak relationship to their enduring validity. Shils' case in point, writ ing in 1970, was that whereas Frankfurt School Critical Theory had become popular primarily because of its politics and strategic location, Karl Mannheim's soci ology had been unjustly marginalized despite its greater sociological depth (Shils 1980). Despite the tendentiousness of his comparative judgments, Shils' sociological argument about the marginalizing effects of ecological locations could be applied even more tellingly to Elias, Mannheim's onetime assistant. Ironically, however, from the per spective of critical social theory all three of these cases can now be viewed in a very dif ferent political context as more complemen tary than competing, sharing a historicist, post-empiricist conception of social theory whose post-Kantian interpretive structural ism could not be comprehended within the categories of logical empiricism and posi tivism. Following a doctorate on Kant in philoso phy, Elias became a sociology student of Alfred Weber (Max's younger brother) in Heidelberg in 1925 for his Habilitation research (necessary for a teaching position). There he also met and befriended Mannheim, becoming his assistant when he left in 1930 for a chair in Frankfurt. Though only 4 years younger than Mannheim, he had lost considerable career time because of trau matic World War I military duty and post war family economic problems. In contrast to Mannheim, however, Elias lived a long-as Early Writings, by Norbert Elias. The Collected Works of Norbert Elias, Volume 1, edited by Richard Kilminster. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Dublin, IE: University College Dublin Press/Dufour Editions, 2006. 136pp. $74.95 cloth. ISBN: 9781904558392.