Abstract
One of the questions that Norbert Elias tries to resolve in his work – either explicitly or implicitly – is the issue of the relationship between the individual and society. Elias critically assesses two approaches to this issue that sociology offered in his time, namely the Weberian conception of individualism that postulates the human individual as the starting point of sociological thought, and the Durkheimian conception of holism, which considered society as a whole as the starting point, giving regard to holistic, supra-individual social facts. Elias considers both of these solutions one-sided and unsatisfactory, and in his conception tries to supercede them. His strategy is close to that of Georg Simmel before him. It consists in highlighting the “third” that lies between the individual and society, which connects them. Simmel calls this “third” “Wechselwirkung”. Elias speaks about “figuration”. In this article, we consider how successful Elias’ strategy is, its merits and its shortcomings. At the end of the text, the author attempts to formulate his own solution of the discussed problem, which is different from Elias’s approach and based on the concept of “homo duplex”.
Highlights
Individualism versus holismThe individualistic (atomistic) interpretation presumes that in all social action the individual is the starting point, often referred to as the (individual) actor and his action, which carries a certain sense of meaning
One of the questions that Norbert Elias tries to resolve in his work – either explicitly or implicitly – is the issue of the relationship between the individual and society
Even if within his sociology of figurations Elias constantly emphasizes the participation of individuals in the creation of social reality, he tends to capture these individuals in the position of typical representatives of certain social groups, classes or masses of human beings, whose main characteristic is that they carry a certain, historically formed type of collective human psyche, and so habitus
Summary
The individualistic (atomistic) interpretation presumes that in all social action the individual is the starting point, often referred to as the (individual) actor and his action, which carries a certain sense of meaning. Individualistic opinion assumes that all social phenomena consist of the many different, interrelated and interconnected actions of individuals, and that these – often complex – phenomena can be retrospectively attributed to the actions of individual actors. For Weber, Sociology is the science of social action. In his 1913 essay Über einige Kategorien der verstehenden Soziologie he notes that the subject of sociology is the social action of individuals and its aim is to understand and explain the course of this action through the meaning that the acting individuals themselves attributed to it [Weber 1988: 432–438]
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