forthcoming in Key Contemporary Social Theorists, edited by Anthony Elliott & Larry Ray, Oxford: Blackwell

Ideas unplanned order; habitus; figuration; interdependence; social process; involvement/detachment; Civilizing process; decivilization

Major Books The Civilizing Process The Court Society The Germans What is Sociology? The Society of Individuals

Influences Comte Marx Freud Weber

Biographical Details
The work of Norbert Elias (1897-1990) is central to the development of contemporary social theory, a powerful example of the possibilities contained within a synthesis of the most dynamic elements of classical sociological thought with an intellectually independent engagement with a wide range of empirical evidence. His conceptual vocabulary destabilizes the orthodoxies of social science in a way which enables the reader to look over and beyond the usual unresolvable debates centred on dualities such as individual/society or state/society. Born in the then-German (now Polish) town of Breslau, after studying philosophy he went on to work with Karl Mannheim at the University of Frankfurt, at the same time that Marx Horheimer and Theodor Adorno were establishing the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, where he completed The Court Society (1983) in 1933. Driven from Germany by the National Socialists, he moved to London via Paris, where he wrote Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation (The Civilizing Process) in the British Museum between 1934 and 1939. As a historical analysis of the development of human personality structure, he saw it as a critique of the academic psychology dominant at the time. The distinctiveness of his ideas kept him out of academic posts in England until the age of 57, when he was appointed to a lectureship in 1954 at the University of Leicester, and where he influenced many of today's leading sociologists. His productivity and real intellectual influence on social theory took off in the 1970s, after his retirement, particularly in the Netherlands and Germany, where students read pirated copies of The Civilizing Process (2000) alongside Foucault's Discipline and Punish. The influence of Elias's distinctive ideas on social theory continues to grow, particularly on those interested in the history of subjectivity, power, knowledge, violence, state formation, emotions, attitudes towards the body and sexuality. His analysis of the historical development of emotions and psychological life is particularly important in relation to the connections he established with larger-scale processes such as state formation, civilization, urbanization, globalization and economic development.

Key theoretical contributions
Elias developed his social theory in a relatively modest way, without explicitly presenting himself as `theorist'. He placed more emphasis on the empirical investigation of particular historical and sociological questions, in works such as The Court Society (1983) and The Civilizing Process (2000), because he was concerned to transcend the division between social theory and social research. The approach to social theory which was embedded within his practice as a social researcher, rather than being self-consciously presented as such, was one of drawing on the work of Marx, Weber and Freud, inter alia, in order to elaborate `a comprehensive theory of human society, or, more exactly, a theory of the development of humanity, which could provide an integrating framework of reference for the various specialist social sciences' (1994, p. 131).
Elias's social theory (1978; 1991; 1997) can usefully be seen as being organized around five interconnected conceptual principles. First, although societies are composed of human beings who engage in intentional action, the outcome of the combination of human actions is generally unplanned and unintended. For Elias, what we call `society' consists of the structured interweaving of the diverse activities of a various human agents pursuing their own particular goals, resulting in social forms such as `Christianity', `capitalism', `modernity' and particular forms of culture and group identity, without those social forms having been planned or intended by any specific individual or group. The task for sociologists is, then, to analyse and explain the mechanics of this transformation of intentional human action into unintended patterns of social life, which necessarily takes place over longer or shorter periods of time. For Elias the goal of such analysis was improved human control over social change, so that `people can only hope to master and make sense of these purposeless, meaningless functional interconnections if they can recognize them as relatively autonomous, distinctive functional interconnections, and investigate them systematically' (1978, p. 58).
Second, human individuals can only be understood in their interdependencies with each other, as part of networks of social relations, or what Elias often referred to as `figurations'. Rather than seeing individuals as possessing an `autonomous' identity with which they then interact with each other and relate to something we call a `society', Elias argued that we are social to our very core, and only exist in and through our relations with others, developing a socially-constructed habitus or `second-nature'. Central to Elias's articulation of this point was an oft-repeated argument against what he called the homo clausus or `closed personality' image of human beings running through much of modern Western philosophy and social and political thought, with its emphasis on autonomy, freedom and independent agency. He suggested that this picture should be replaced by one of human beings as `open personalities' characterized more by interdependence on than autonomy from each other, bound together in social `figurations'. Elias introduced the concept of `figuration' in order to place `the problem of human interdependencies into the very heart of sociological theory' (1978, p. 134) and to transcend an essentially mistaken opposition between `individual' and `society'.
Third, human social life should be understood in terms of relations rather than states or things. For example, instead of power being a `thing' which persons, groups or institutions possess to a greater or lesser degree, Elias argued we should think in terms of power relations, with ever-changing `balances' or `ratios' of power between individuals and social units. This also made it possible to acknowledge that questions of power are different from questions of `freedom' and `domination', and that all human relationships are essentially relations of power.
Fourth, human societies can only be understood as consisting of long-term processes of development and change, rather than as timeless states or conditions. Elias was convinced that sociologists cannot logically avoid concerning themselves with the diachrony of long-term social processes in order to understand current social relations and structures, and he spoke of the `transformational impetus' (Wandlungsimpetus) of all social life, which he saw as `an integral moment of every social structure and their temporary stability as the expression of an impediment to social change' (1997, p. 371). An important implication of this is that instead of speaking of rationality, the market modernity, or postmodernity, Elias would prefer to think in terms of their processual character, of rationalization, marketization, modernization, or even postmodernization.
Fifth, sociological thought moves constantly between a position of social and emotional involvement in the topics of study, and one of detachment from them. The fact that sociologists study other interdependent human beings means that they are part of their object of scientific study, and thus cannot avoid a measure of involvement in their own research and theorizing. Social-scientific knowledge develops within the society it is part of, and not independently of it. At the same time, this involvement is often a barrier to an adequate understanding of social life, especially one which can resolve or transcend any of the persistent problems characterizing human beings' relationships with each other. Elias felt it was important for social scientists to try to transcend the emotion-laden, everyday conceptualization of the human world and develop a `way of seeing' that went beyond current ideologies and mythologies. Indeed, he often referred to sociologists as engaged in the `destruction of myths'.
None of these ideas are entirely unique to Elias, but what makes his approach powerful is his synthesis of what is currently spread across a variety of perspectives in social theory. Elias offers a set of sensitizing concepts, an orientation to how one understands and practises social theory, with the promise of drawing many of its various threads together.
It is in The Civilizing Process (2000), written in 1939, that one finds the most extensive articulation of Elias's social theory in relation to the history of Western social and psychic life. Elias organized his analysis of this history around Europeans' perception of themselves as particularly `civilized', at the very time that they were descending into horrific barbarism (although he did not yet know its extent), because he felt that the idea and experience of `civilization' lay at the heart of the constitution of the psychic structure and dynamics characteristic of contemporary Western societies.
The argument was that what we experience as `civilization' is constituted by a particular habitus or psychic structure which has changed over time and which can only be understood as linked to changes in the forms taken by broader social relationships. His study of European etiquette manuals revealed that from the early Middle Ages onwards, the standards applied to violence, sexual behaviour, bodily functions, eating habits, table manners and forms of speech became gradually more sophisticated, with an increasing threshold of shame, embarrassment and repugnance. He saw medieval society as characterized by `a lesser degree of social control and constraint of the life of drives' (2000, p. 164), and in particular by a greater degree of violence, so that the development of processes of civilization can most usefully be analysed through an assessment of the regulation and management of violence and aggression in everyday social life. Elias argued that the restraint imposed by increasingly differentiated and complex networks of social relations became increasingly internalized and less dependent on its maintenance by external social institutions, a shift from external, social compulsion to internal compulsion. This gradual `rationalization' of human conduct, its placement at the service of long-term goals and the increasing internalization of social constraint was, suggested Elias, closely tied to the processes of state-formation and the development of monopolies of physical force.
A central problem left unaddressed by this analysis, however, was the persistence of violence and aggression even when processes of civilization could be seen as relatively advanced, the obvious key example being German Fascism. Elias addressed this question in his later work, much of which is collected in The Germans (1996), where he raised the possibility that civilization and decivilization can occur simultaneously, with monopolies of force being capable of as extreme violence as situations where the `means of violence' is more diffusely controlled. He also placed more emphasis in his later work on the essential precariousness of the forms of habitus generated by processes of civilization, drawing attention to the speed with which established forms of restrained, civilized conduct can crumble when the surrounding social conditions become unstable, threatening and fearful. None the less, for Elias barbaric human conduct can still only be understood in relation to the social processes by which forms of conduct and feeling we would wish to defend as civilized have emerged, however tenuously, in human society.

Major criticisms
The first of the critical responses to Elias's work derives from a fundamental opposition running through much of Western social, cultural and political thought, between those who lean towards seeing all human beings as more or less similar to each other, and those who emphasis the differences between distinct groups. The latter orientation is divided in turn between a synchronic approach focusing on differences at a particular point in time, and a diachronic perspective concentrating on developments over time, sometimes referred to as `developmentalism'.
Elias generally prefers the latter position, studying differences in human habitus, conduct and social structure over time, but of course this brings him into disagreement with those who are more sensitive to the similarities between human beings at different points in time and in different cultural contexts. For example, one of Elias's strongest critics, the German anthropologist Hans-Peter Duerr (1988; 1990), argues that if we agree that human sexual relations are always socially regulated and subjected to some patterned set of rules and norms, then this will universally produce some sort of division between public and private bodily domains, with the private domain constituting the focus of social regulation. For Duerr the kind of lack of restraint of sexual impulses which Elias seems to observe in the Middle Ages is simply impossible, because the patterned family relations which existed at the time required at least some set of rules governing what one could or could not do in the sexual realm. Since there are no undisputed criteria which might lead us to prefer one approach to the other, the debate is essentially irresolvable and best understood as itself a product of the indeterminacy of the relationship between the universal and the particular, between continuity and change.
Second, Elias's concentration on the connections between state-formation and civilizing processes suggests two alternative modes of analysis, the first of which reflects on different aspects of social organization - other than state formation - which might also support processes of civilization. These can include the form taken by family life and religious belief systems, and broaden our view of the `changes in social structure' to include features of social life beyond the formation of particular types of political regimes. The second alternative is to include an examination of the often barbaric or decivilizing dimensions of state formation, indeed the brutality lying at the heart of almost every nation-state. Questions concerning colonialism and imperialism, the ways in which Western nation-states have imposed a relationship between their own civilization and the supposedly `barbaric' cultures of subjected peoples which is itself a brutal and violent one.
Third, Elias's emphasis on the unplanned nature of social change can have the effect of neglecting the organized interventions of powerful social groups into the form and direction of civilizing processes. Most social historians, for example, paint a picture of European history in which diverse groups of lawyers, inquisitors, clergy, judges, entrepreneurs, military leaders, and so one, played an active and constitutive role on shaping history, in addition to being driven in particular directions by abstract social forces. A central concern for those drawing on Elias's social theory is thus an understanding of how to engage with the distinction between civilizing processes and civilizing offensives (van Krieken 1990).


Bibliography
Duerr, Hans-Peter (1988) Nacktheit und Scham, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp.
Duerr, Hans-Peter (1990) Intimität, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp.
Elias, N. (1978) What is Sociology? London, Hutchinson.
Elias, N. (1983) The Court Society, New York, Pantheon.
Elias, N. (1991) The Society of Individuals, Oxford, Blackwell.
Elias, N. (1994) Reflections on a Life, Cambridge, Polity Press.
Elias, N. (1996) The Germans, Oxford, Blackwell.
Elias, N. (1997) `Towards a theory of social processes', British Journal of Sociology 48(3): 355-83.
Elias, N. (2000) The Civilizing Process (Revised edition), Oxford, Blackwell.
van Krieken (1990) `The organisation of the soul: Elias and Foucault on discipline and the self', Archives Europeénes de Sociologie 31(2): 353-71.