The Disfigured Ontology of Figurational Sociology: Norbert Elias and the Question of Violence

Abstract

This article scrutinizes Norbert Elias’s figurational sociology by focusing on its ontological foundations. The analytical spotlight is on the inherent tension between Elias’s stance of normative neutrality and detachment, his naturalistic ontology, and an unyielding commitment to directional development. We show how Elias’s social theory does not stand apart, as an external observer, from the figurations it seeks to explain. On the contrary, it constitutes its own outside, and this has consequences when it comes to explaining the ‘dark sides’ of the present, and in particular the social sources of organized violence in modernity. It is our contention that Elias’s ontology incorrectly posits violence as the absolute Other of civilization, so that his theory of the ‘Civilising Process’ fails to adequately account for the persistence and proliferation of warfare in the modern age.