The Anthem Companion to Norbert Elias

By Stephen Mennell and Alex Law

The book presents an authoritative assessment of Norbert Elias (1897–1990). It recognizes Elias as one of the major contributors to the development of sociological tradition in the past century and charts the continuing relevance of his conception of sociology for contemporary society. Only toward the end of his career as an academic did Elias’s work begin to attract the attention of English-speaking sociologists, historians, and scholars of cultural studies.

The book provides an authoritative and broad representation of Elias’s oeuvre and work inspired by it. While Elias is best known for his major study of The Civilizing Process, the reach and subtle depths of Elias’s conception of process sociology has been cemented more recently by the English-language publication of Elias’s collected work of 18 volumes. The baton of process sociology is being passed on to further generations of sociologists.

Chapters from leading contributors outline the nature of the sociological practice of Elias and address fundamental questions of historical sociology, democratization, gender, racialization processes, and embodiment. Later chapters highlight the contribution of process sociology for understanding developments in nation, state and global sociology, criminology, art, and education. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Aug 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9781839986666

Book preview

INTRODUCTION: THE SOCIOLOGICAL PROMISE OF NORBERT ELIAS

Alex Law

Abertay University

Stephen Mennell

University College Dublin

Norbert Elias (1897–1990) has often been acclaimed as the ‘last great classical sociologist’. Zygmunt Bauman (1979, 117) recognised Elias as ‘the great sociologist of our time, who long ago anticipated solution to problems with which all sociologists all over the world keep trying (in vain) to come to grips’. While a great deal has changed, Bauman’s assertion retains its currency. Elias broached apparently intractable problems that continue to haunt twenty-first century sociology. Across a long scientific life, Elias attempted to integrate empirically founded sociological knowledge with insights afforded by psychology and history. Yet for a long time, Elias was consigned to the margins of sociology. When broader recognition for his achievement arrived in the last three decades of the twentieth century, it was subject to misrepresentation, sometimes naive and sometimes gratuitous, as peddling a superannuated evolutionary or Eurocentric tradition. Against the activist temper of post-68 sociology, Elias’s historical sense of sociological prudence smacked for some as the quietist apologetics of an aloof mandarin.

Despite Elias’s legendary outsider status, the past four decades have witnessed an ascending curve of recognition by English-speaking scholars. This trajectory has been consolidated by the authoritative scholarly English edition of The Collected Works of Norbert Elias (UCD Press, 2006–14). Running to eighteen volumes, including three volumes of collected essays, fourteen books and a volume of interviews, the Collected Works amply demonstrates the scope and consistency of Elias’s determination to reorientate sociology that he sustained, refined and distilled over more than six decades (see Appendix for a list of publications available in English). Elias’s published output increased significantly after he retired from full-time teaching duties. Alongside the Collected Works as a fundamental resource for scholars, previously unpublished work, lectures and drafts have more recently been made available that allow us to look over Elias’s shoulder as he engaged in the creative process of further developing his model of sociology. Work that has now been rescued from obscurity includes a historical sociology of eighteenth-century processes of class fusion in the professional seamanship of the British Royal Navy (Elias 2007a); changing balances of spontaneity and control in embodied excitement processes in sport, music, dancing and art (Haut et al. 2017); ‘the riddle of laughter’ as a bio-social human universal (Elias 2017); a conference of international scholars that Elias convened in 1984 on large-scale historical sociology, including Elias’s own paper and debate with leading scholars of the long term, including Immanuel Wallerstein and William H. McNeill; and Elias’s essays on African processes of civilisation while employed as a Professor of Sociology in Ghana in the early 1960s (Reicher et al. 2022).

With a lifelong commitment to large-scale historical questions, it is understandable that Elias is considered by some as the legatee of classical sociology. Yet instead of standing as an epitaph for an obsolete canon, the classical inheritance of Comte, Marx, Durkheim, Weber and Simmel was revitalised by Elias in the shape of a central theoretical model that could be passed on, tested and revised in the light of subsequent empirical developments (Quilley and Loyal 2004). Classical sociologists such as Comte and Marx in their different ways adopted long-term perspectives on the sequential process of change in social relations, an ambition that fell out of favour as sociology became a profession that increasingly framed present-day problems within a narrowly restricted time span (Elias 2009a). By bringing his central model into close contact with empirical evidence, Elias resisted the temptation in sociology to reduce the immanent dynamic of unplanned processes to static concepts or immutable essences.

The aim of the Anthem Companion to Norbert Elias is to quarry Elias’s central model for its ongoing possibilities as a leavening agent for sociology. The very idea of an integrated theoretical model is anathema for a hyper-specialised field where a thousand flowers may bloom – but rarely cross-pollinate. The contributors to the Anthem Companion demonstrate the critical vigour of Elias’s reconstruction of classical sociology as an empirically controlled orientation to the dilemmas, tensions, fears and possibilities of the changing power ratios of interdependent people. The fecundity of Elias’s legacy is rooted in his model-setting study of the civilising process. By developing and refining his central model of civilising processes, Elias made significant contributions to a broad range of sociological problems including, inter alia, community studies, sport and leisure, art and artists, time, science, ageing and death, decivilising processes, ideological partisanship, nationalism and language.

Elias’s Life

Elias was raised as an assimilated Jewish child in Breslau, then in Germany, now Wrocław in Poland, and was educated in the cultural traditions of the German middle class. As a precocious thirteen-year-old, he devoured the classical humanist literature of Kant, Goethe, Heine and Schiller. For Elias’s generation, this idyll was shattered by the experience of the 1914–18 war. Elias (2013, 92) found himself exposed to indescribable horror of the physical destruction of soldiers and horses on the front line and amputations performed on wounded soldiers. Following the war, Elias studied philosophy and medicine at Breslau University, where he acquired an anatomical understanding of the human body, leading to a lasting conviction that humans need to be conceived as attuned to the world at three levels that always presuppose each other: the social, the biological and the psychological. Through the practice of dissecting the complex structure of the human brain, Elias became dissatisfied with the idealist philosophical dogma that counterposed a static dualism between an external ‘outer’ world and an isolated ‘inner’ mind.

The discrepancy between the philosophical, idealist image of the human being and the anatomical, physiological one unsettled me for many years. I became totally absorbed in this problem, ruminated on it endlessly, and only found a clear answer long after I had turned my attention to sociology. (Elias 2013, 10)

Following the award of his doctorate, Elias worked as an assistant manager at an iron foundry to help support his parents whose wealth had been devalued by the Weimar hyperinflation of 1922–23. Personal trauma may help explain the relative self-distancing in Elias’s early work from the scale and depravity of mass violence in the twentieth century that he would later confront head-on in studies of the decivilising reversals of fascism in Germany and the ‘late barbarism’ of the nuclear arms race (Audoin-Rouzeau 2010).

His experience of war, commercial insecurity, the anguish of exile, the murder of his mother in a concentration camp, internment and academic marginalisation could have driven Elias in the direction of the intellectual pessimism of many of his generation, most notably those associated with the Frankfurt School. Instead, at least according to his own later account, these experiences only served to strengthen the reality-oriented thinking of his early medical training and further inoculated him against magical–mythical ideologies like nationalism and speculative philosophising (Elias 2013, 99). Elias (2012a) relished his role as a ‘hunter of myths’ and set out to remedy the dangers of rigidly cleaving to complacent fallacies and non-empirical theories. He later recalled, for example, how in 1932 he failed to persuade social democratic trade unionists in Frankfurt to abandon their illusions in the stability of the Weimar constitution in the face of spiralling extra-parliamentary violence of Nazi street-fighting units and to recognise that any protections afforded by formal legal rights depended on the balance of physical force (Elias 2013, 108).

As the currency crisis subsided in 1924, Elias left the factory for the University of Heidelberg in an attempt to secure his academic calling. He hoped to qualify as a Professor by writing a Habilitationsschrift on the relationship between science and art in the Italian Renaissance under Alfred Weber, brother of Max Weber. Starting from a rudimentary knowledge of sociology, Elias undertook an intensive independent study of the subject, especially the writings of Karl Marx and Max Weber, and became a close associate of Karl Mannheim, whose growing reputation as one of the leading sociologists of his generation was cemented with the critical reception of Ideology and Utopia. In 1930, Elias followed Mannheim to Frankfurt as his assistant and Mannheim replaced Alfred Weber as supervisor of a completely different Habilitationsschrift on ‘Die höfische Mensch’, which, revised many years later, became the book Die höfische Gesellschaft (The Court Society, Elias 2006a). Browsing materials on nineteenth-century French liberalism, he gradually alighted upon the relatively neglected problem of court society, a subject marginalised not least because of lingering bourgeois antipathy towards the absolutist regime. Elias completed the new thesis in 1933 just as the Nazi regime came to power. His preoccupation with French court society as a model-setting example for European ruling groups sensitised him to the related set of sociological problems that came to fruition in his celebrated study of the civilising process that he published in 1939 as Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation (On the Process of Civilization, Elias 2012b).

When the Hitler regime came to power, Elias was forced into exile, first to France for two years and then to England in 1935. In Paris, Elias published his first sociological articles, one on the kitsch style (2006b, 85–96) and another on the expulsion of the Huguenots from France (2006b, 97–104). Elias (2013, 114), failing to obtain an academic position, again worked in a commercial capacity, selling the products of a small toy factory that he established with a couple of German friends; the enterprise failed and he lost what remained of his capital. In London, Elias was supported by a modest allowance from a Jewish refugee committee that allowed him to work undistracted for three years in the British Library on the materials that would gradually take shape as On the Process of Civilisation. After its publication, he did obtain a post, neither senior nor permanent, at the London School of Economics, working under the social historian H. L. Beales on a project on the history of the naval profession. But in Britain, Elias experienced life as a triple outsider: as a Jew, as a foreign national (compounded by an unfortunate period of internment as an ‘enemy alien’ in 1940) and as one of the most innovative sociologists of his generation. At a time when only two departments of sociology existed in Britain, Elias subsisted by teaching adult education classes until he was appointed as a sociology lecturer in 1954 at the University of Leicester. From 1962, he spent two years as Professor of Sociology at the University of Ghana in Legon, Accra (Reicher et al. 2022). On his return to Europe, Elias gradually began to win wider recognition for his resourceful approach to sociology, particularly in the Netherlands and Germany, where he was the first winner of the prestigious Adorno Prize in 1977.

Elias’s Magnum Opus

It is well known that Elias wrote his two-volume opus On the Process of Civilisation as midnight in the century approached, the worst possible moment to conceive a study of the civilising process in Europe. One indication of this is the difficulties he had getting the German language book published by the late 1930s. Elias’s book shared the same fate as Hume (1777, xxxiv), somewhat ostentatiously, said of his own first book: ‘It fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction, as even to excite a murmur among the zealots’. Very few reviews of the book appeared. Walter Benjamin simply refused Elias’s invitation to review it (Korte 2017). Notable exceptions included reviews by the sociologist Franz Borkenau and the psychiatrist S. H. Foulkes. Little wonder that the study mouldered in obscurity for three decades until its reputation gradually grew, first in the Netherlands and Germany, and later still, following an English translation, in Britain. Since then, it has been translated into numerous languages and has attracted the attention of scholars worldwide. Although recognition for the significance of the book took three decades to arrive, Elias would eventually recover from the blow.

The first volume is replete with examples drawn from manners books, most famously that written by Erasmus in the sixteenth century, to chart the long-term development of decorous affect controls, a more reflexive self-consciousness, repugnance over bodily functions and a lowering of the threshold for shame and embarrassment. The eight-centuries-long passage from medieval ‘courtesy’, through Renaissance ‘civility’ to bourgeois ‘civilisation’, represented a specific transformation in the social conduct of the European upper classes that demarcated, at least in their own self-image, people of superior human value from all other people of lesser value. By the end of the eighteenth century, ‘civilisation’ came to exemplify the new sense of nationalism being diffused beyond the ranks of the educated middle class:

from now on nations came to consider the process of civilisation as completed within their own societies; they came to see themselves as bearers of an existing or finished civilisation to others, as standard-bearers of expanding civilisation […]. Its outcome was taken simply as an expression of their own higher gifts; the fact that, and the question of how, in the course of many centuries, civilised behaviour had been attained was of no interest. And the consciousness of their own superiority, the consciousness of this ‘civilisation’ from now on served at least those nations which became colonial conquerors, and therefore a kind of upper class to large sections of the non-European world, as a justification of their rule […]. (2012b, 57).

Although clearly interrelated, an analytic distinction is needed that avoids conflating state-formation processes and nation-building processes. Such an egregious conceptual slippage has been mobilised to justify catastrophic interventions by the Western imperium as nation-building exercises to rescue the ‘failing states’ of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, as well as to exculpate the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Elias pointedly refused to attribute any positive connotations to ‘civilisation’. Although he recognised that the term was ideologically loaded, he may have regretted the fact that ‘civilised’ had by the 1930s already begun to be transformed from a praise word to a disgrace word, helping to obscure the central purpose of the study. In the late 1980s, an exasperated Elias still struggled to separate for his readers the ideological ballast from the sociological conception of civilisation and to rebut the facile charge of Eurocentrism as the righteous wrath of later generations:

The possibility of denouncing as a potential colonialist a person who works on further developing the concept of civilisation, in a country and an age in which the old ideology of the earlier colonial masters has few remaining adherents, is a simple example of how the failings of the fathers make themselves felt, by reaction, as an irritable open wound in the conscience of the children and grandchildren. Through the ever-repeated burial of an idea long since consigned to the grave, people can continue to rely on having public opinion on their side in any dispute. (Elias 2008, 10)

The whole work is bookended by an epigram from Baron d’Holbach’s Système social (1773) to the effect that civilisation is and will remain contested and unfinished business (2012b: 1, 490). Elias’s central contention is that civilisation can only be understood as a process of advancing self-restraint under external constraints, producing more even, more universal and more stable patterns of self-control, and should not in any sense be conceived as a normative goal or a final condition. Elias (2012b, 8) came not to praise Caesar but to confront ‘a number of specific civilisational perils’, what he would later call ‘decivilising spurts’ – he had already diagnosed the germs of impending fascist barbarism – about which ‘it cannot be said that we already understand why we actually torment ourselves in such ways’. In the context of an insecure but assertive German ruling class, the ‘civilisational peril’ of a superior authentic national culture, Kultur, functioned an ossified ideal in opposition to the supposed superficiality of ‘civilisation’, Zivilisation, of the French and British nations.

Elias turned his attention to how unplanned long-term processes occurred in a particular direction that enabled the self-images of later generations to erase the process by which they became ‘civilised’. In short, changes in the structure of social relations acquired an unplanned dynamic that compelled the psychological habitus to change in a ‘civilising’ direction of more even affect controls (Elias 2012b, 405). More even affect controls make possible certain kinds of social relations and limit other possibilities. As the subtitle of the book put it, understanding habitus and structure as a single overarching process required both ‘Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations’. As the differentiation of functions grew increasingly more specialised and complex with the advancing division of labour and commodity exchange under the state monopoly of the means of violence and taxation, people’s habitus developed a more flexible capacity for self-constraint, conscience and foresight. As Elias well understood from his own experience of commercial life, the middle-class world of trade and money that was the source of their social power also placed more stringent demands on their emotional life. ‘For many aspects of the emotional economy, bourgeois functions – above all, business life – demand and produce greater self-restraint than courtly functions’ (Elias 2012b, 181).

Functional specialisation was intimately bound up with changes in the structure of domination. Elias’s focus on the state formation process in Part 3 of On the Process of Civilisation charts the process of pacification in the changing but unplanned power dynamics of ruling figurations in Europe, focusing especially on the centralisation of the territory that became France. A centralised monopoly of the means of organised violence and taxation gradually emerged. In the early stages, the two monopolies of violence and taxation are inseparable: there may be little to distinguish the activities of an early warrior lord within his territory from what today we would call a protection racket: people are forced to live in peace with each other and to pay their taxes (at first most likely not in cash but in kind, or in labour). The process of the ‘internal pacification’ of territory, however, typically brings with it a grudging acceptance of its advantages and its gradual legitimation, circumscribed also by the formation of a legal monopoly and eventually – perhaps very much later – feelings of regional or national pride among the people within territories. Internal pacification, however, went along with violence between territories steadily increasing over the centuries, so that larger territorial units gradually emerged through a protracted ‘elimination process’ between power units. Increasingly, warrior elites were compelled to adapt to the sensibilities demanded by the political choreography of court society (Elias 2006a). As fewer and fewer power units controlled more and more opportunities for power, more and more units become increasingly dependent on the centralised state for power chances and resources (Elias 2012b, 303).

States are Janus-faced. Elias characterised states as attack-and-defence units, or later more succinctly as survival units. On the one side, states engage in an internal pacification process by eliminating, by force where necessary, all local rival forms of organised violence. As people begin to feel more secure, the chains of interdependencies lengthen and interpersonal disputes are resolved without recourse to violence, at least in public, or even impulsive displays of aggression. On the other hand, the armed force of states continued to pose a danger to each other. While killing was forbidden within state jurisdictions, it was allowed or demanded as a national duty in conflicts with other states. Adding to the fragile balance of power between and within states is the increased dependency of rulers on the ruled not only for tax revenues but also to comply with or actively endorse their legitimate right to rule, including the right to inflict violence on others. Functional democratisation processes deepened as more or less peaceful competition for capital and administrative, professional and political positions imposed from below constraints on the autonomy of the upper classes. A high degree of affect control became relatively uniform among western ruling classes despite being tempered by national variations in class-formation processes in France, Germany, Britain and the United States. Power balances between and within classes often takes on an ambivalent character across two main phases in the shaping of a national habitus:

a phase of colonisation or assimilation in which the lower and larger stratum is still clearly inferior and governed by the example of the established upper group which, intentionally or unintentionally, permeates it with its own pattern of conduct; and a second phase of repulsion, differentiation or emancipation, in which the rising group gains perceptibly in social power and self-confidence, in which the upper group is forced into increased restraint and isolation, and in which the contrasts and tensions in society are increased. (Elias 2012b, 472)

Individuals that occupy intermediate class positions feel the ambivalence between an ideal upper-class self-image of innate superiority and their vain struggle to mould the habitus according to the ideal model. Lower classes, lacking realistic chances of upward social mobility or aspiring to middle-class prestige, Elias asserted, continue to live more vigorously within the more relaxed codes of their social world.

Goudsblom (1989, 722) provided as pithy an overall summary of the theory of civilising process as you will ever find: ‘more people are forced more often to pay more attention to more other people’.

Elias’s Synthesis

Elias (2012a, ch. 1) adopted Comte’s unfashionable model of a hierarchy of sciences as a starting point for establishing sociology as a science separate from theology–philosophy and the natural sciences, while relinquishing Comte’s rigid ‘law of three stages’ in the evolution of thought as a self-contained activity. Instead, Elias stressed the part played by social learning across the generations in the development of a more reality-adequate stock of knowledge (Gabriel and Mennell 2011). Understanding the development of sociology as a discipline requires a theoretical model of the sequence of change by plotting the position and function of modes of knowledge in the field struggles of earlier pioneers. Unlike the ‘normal science’ that Kuhn attributed to routine research activities within a well-founded paradigm, sociology lacks sufficient autonomy from the demands of pressing social problems and short-lived theoretical fashions deflecting it from the cumulative development of an empirically grounded core theoretical model.

While Elias (2012a) insisted on the inseparability of the triad of biology, sociology and psychology, they must be studied as different levels of integration. As the most ‘highly organized nexus’, human societies develop more autonomously than ‘less organised nexuses’ like physiology that functions at lower levels of integration. Biology is a necessary but insufficient precondition for all historically formed human societies. For higher levels of integration, ‘stage-specific concepts’ and ‘context models’ are required that combine the uneven but interlocking hierarchical levels of integration. Here as elsewhere, Elias stressed the importance of ‘relative autonomy’ as a guiding scientific concept. An ‘ontogenetic continuity’ of various levels of integration does not imply that they are reducible to each other. A higher level of integration cannot be explained on the basis of a lower one, even if the combined levels of integration cannot be separated in any fixed, absolute sense. Reified concepts merely add a mystifying term for higher levels of integration such as a ‘mind’ or ‘consciousness’ to the supposed foundation of the lower level of an essentialist animal body in order to arrive at labouring, learning and loving human animals (Elias 2007b, 190).

Humans are by their nature highly changeable, adaptable and malleable creatures. There is no fixed, static human condition, only historically constituted figurations of people. Human societies can change radically – ‘from hunters and gatherers to crop-growers and herdsmen or from pre-state tribal grouping to the formation of state societies’ – and be restructured in fairly short order without any corresponding change in biological structure (Elias 2012a, 103). Non-human animals possess innate instinctive capacities. Beyond relatively minor variations adapted to local conditions, the societies that they form change only over the course of biological evolution, not over the course of a lifetime. Human survival depends on a biological capacity for social learning and reflexivity transmitted by interdependent people through languages of complex symbol making. Socially learned forms of human control and communication predominate over spontaneously given dispositions. Learning is only made possible by both a biological capacity and the stocks of knowledge secured by more or less stable forms of symbolic communication across intergenerational figurations of people.

For Elias (2014, 38), Sigmund Freud presented ‘probably the greatest single advance towards an overall model of the functioning of a person that has been made so far [1990]’. Indeed, just as Marx had sent Darwin, the preeminent scientist of the nineteenth century, an inscribed copy of Capital, Elias presented Freud with a courteously received copy of his own monumental book (Lahire 2013). On the Process of Civilisation is marked throughout by the shadow cast by Freud, most explicitly in the theoretical overview of Part 4. Yet Elias refrained from a critical discussion of Freud at that stage since the lengthy qualifications that this would have entailed would have led Elias to stray too far from the overarching architecture of the narrative (2012b, 570). Despite Freud’s innovations, he remained a prisoner of the de-historicised inner–outer, individual–society, mind–body, nature–culture dualisms that Elias aimed to circumvent. Elias was also dissatisfied with Freud’s reduction of ‘the unconscious’ to a container-like object locked up in a ‘mind’ where the ‘ego’ and ‘superego’ battle for supremacy to regulate the instinctual desires of the ‘id’. While Freud’s conflict model gave a more dynamic perspective to psychological processes than static concepts of ‘reason’ or ‘consciousness’, it took little account of the social learning process that continually restructures a person’s habitus and conscience formation across a lifetime. Society is conceived by Freud as an external repressive force, represented by the archetypal form of the tyrannical patriarch, constraining individual desires and dispositions rather than the precondition of individual learning in their development with other people. It may be that the contemporary increase in mental health illnesses confirms one of Elias’s (2014, 37) last hypotheses that ‘increasing self-repression is the price one has to pay, at least temporarily, for decreasing repression by others’. However, self-repression or, in less value-laden terms, self-regulation or self-distancing not only produces pathologies in individuals but also possesses a vital survival value in the greater capacity that it affords for the self-steering conduct of flourishing interdependent people.

Similarly, Elias drew critically on the contribution of Marx’s underdeveloped model of sociology. During the Cold War, Marx needed to be examined at a distance from the fiercely contested ideological positions that enveloped his theoretical model. Elias (2012a, 187) credits Marx with being among the first to theorise struggles over the social distribution of power chances between unequally endowed groups in the social relations of production and to identify the transitional processes involving the changing power ratio of rising and declining classes. For Elias (2012a, 193), however, Marx tended to telescope long-term processes into the short-term but decisive event of revolutionary seizure of power by a rising class, taking France as the classic example, and gave less attention to the longer-term war of attrition fought by increasingly defunctionalised privileged elite groups that made the revolutionary transition possible in the first place. The extreme class cleavages and unequal relations of power described by Marx and Engels in the nineteenth century shifted in the direction of more equal, constantly shifting power balances between functionally interdependent groups. This is not to say that the power ratio between classes could in any sense ever arrive at a final point of equipoise. Indeed, unequal power imbalances between classes have greatly increased over the course of the past four decades of neoliberal capitalism (Bourdieu et al. 1999).

Elias deployed the concept of ‘figurations’ to capture the largely unplanned but compelling dynamic of interdependent people. Figuration as a concept refers to the changing overall patterns that people form in the complex and often serious games that they play with each other, including highly differentiated interdependencies that are often opaque to people deeply involved in the game. Figurations are composed of but are not reducible to individual people. Individuals may exit the figuration, yet the overall dynamic structure persists over time. Figurations are never static but always in motion propelled by processes of shifting power balances. In some ways, Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of fields is analogous to figurations (Hughes et al. 2022). Bourdieu is primarily concerned with the deep structural logic of reproduction struggles within largely discrete institutional domains such as education, science, politics, art and media. For Elias, the concept of figurations more flexibly addresses the processual patterning at varying levels in terms of criss-crossing nexuses of functional interdependencies, what Simmel (2009, 363–407) in his own register described as ‘the intersection of circles’. As the chain of interdependencies lengthens, more and more people have an effect on the power chances of more and more other people in terms of the needs they serve and the resources that they control.

Sociologists often approach the complex nexuses of figurational integration by deriving concepts and methods from natural sciences concerned with lower levels of integration, importing self-evident idioms of everyday usage or allowing the waning prestige of philosophical concepts to authorise the construction of sociological problems. Elias attempted to overcome the problem of ‘process-reduction’ (2012a, 106–10), a pernicious substantialism that takes as its point of departure self-contained things at rest as real and significant, while constant movement and change are relegated as transitory, contingent and ephemeral. Instead, Elias recommended starting from relationships and interdependencies as already in motion without appealing to some illusory zero point of ultimate origins, fundamental essence or first causes. Process sociology is oriented to the order of change not an immutable order of the ever-same. Elias used to say in conversation that he did not think he had a methodology, but he thought that he possibly had a method. Among his papers was found a little slip of paper containing this note to himself:

‘Die Eliassche Methode: Makrostrukturen durch die Untersuchung von Mikrostructuren sichtbar zu machen’ [to make macro-structures visible by investigating micro-structures].

It makes no sense, for example, to counterpose the individual and society and to make one the prime mover that determines the other one (Elias 2010a). Max Weber resolved the conundrum in favour of the self-contained individual as the real unit of social action. Only by imposing artificially constructed ideal types can sociology bring order to a ‘disorderly mass of actions’ for figurations such as bureaucracy, class, nation or religion (Elias 2012a, 112). On the other hand, Emile Durkheim resolved it in the direction of ‘social facts’ as a sui generis reality imposed on isolated individuals. Of course, the reduction to either the individual or society carries with it an ideological commitment that clouds the relational processes that people form with each other and which form them. Sociology needs to begin with people in the plural, multitudes, groups or, as Elias prefers, figurations. Elias (2012a,117) argues that the dichotomy that pictures the individual and society as independent objects is a well-founded illusion for people compelled to exercise high levels of self-restraint: ‘the reification of the socially instilled acts of detachment that form part of their own self-experience’.

To break down illusory images of reified I-images of individuals over-adjusted to demanding levels of affect control, more, not less, self-distancing is needed. Elias (2011, 86–89) gives the example of personal pronouns. A universal feature of human society, personal pronouns help to perform the social function of increased self-distancing as a means of orientation. For a competent speaker of English, the personal pronouns ‘you’ and ‘I’ represent a high level of ‘object-centredness’ from the addressee and self-distancing for the speaker (Elias 2011, 126–27). All personal pronouns – I, he, she, we, us, you and they – relationally presuppose each other in their function as a means of orientation within figurations (2012a, 117–23). Pronoun models plot the shifting coordinates of figurations as aids to greater scientific detachment. Elias (2011, 65) identified the function of personal pronouns as a ‘fifth dimension’ of social positioning of four-dimensional people in time and space. Working from personal pronouns as a model begins to clarify in a less ideologically loaded way that ‘the individual’ refers not to a closed-off inner mind, homo clausus, but rather to an openness towards interdependent people in the singular, homines aperti, while ‘society’ refers less to an external independent power than to interdependent people in the plural.

A pronoun model enables sociology to understand the perspectival nature of communicative figurations from both first- and third-person perspectives: ‘To begin with, it makes us aware that all the people of whom we speak in the third person speak of themselves in the first, and of us in the third person’ (Elias 2011, 121). Elias’s perspectivism also allowed him to break with the reified concepts such as ‘function’ as an external thing that acts exclusively in the service of impersonal ‘structures’ or ‘systems’ and to reorient such concepts as attributes of relationships and matters of multiple perspectives that include the social relations and positions of the people who form communicative figurations. For example, nations take the form of a specific type of communicative figuration at different levels indexed by I, we, us, she and them, among other unnoticed little words that point to and anchor people within a world of nations (Billig 1995).

All human figurations are patterned by the multiple perspectives and functions of the people that form them. In such ways, Elias’s figurational model draws close to the perspectival thinking of Marx (1844) and Georg Simmel (2009). Contrary to received wisdom, Marx rejected the critical theory of his time (and ours) that reduced individuals to self-contained egoistic atoms of civil society. As with Elias, Marx recognised that individuals constitute figurations in ‘seeking for other things and human beings outside him’ and, in the process, become ‘the intermediary between the need of another and the objects of this need’ (Marx 1844, 120). Running through his more sociological writings, Simmel invites comparison with Elias’s figurational model. For example, Simmel’s famous excursus on what he called the ‘two-fold configuration’ of the nobility is redolent of the figuration tensions of court society detailed by Elias:

The nobility is on the one hand a supra-personal social form of a unity of individuals that is inserted between these elements as individual beings and a large circle encompassing the nobility itself, like the guild and sect, the family and the political party; on the other hand it is a concrete conglomerate of people that forms a middle member between the ruling power and the broad mass of the body politic. (Simmel 2009, 642)

Elias not only stands in the venerable tradition of classical sociology as Bauman observed – he thoroughly renovated it as an empirically productive theoretical synthesis that could be passed to new generations of sociologists confronting the problems of the twenty-first century.

Passing on the Torch

Entry-level access to the sociology of Elias has been greatly helped by several fine critical introductions to his life and work, most recently Eric Dunning and Jason Hughes’s (2013) Norbert Elias and Modern Sociology, which builds on Stephen Mennell’s pioneering Norbert Elias: An Introduction (1998). Robert van Krieken’s Norbert Elias (1998) and Jonathan Fletcher’s Violence and Civilization (1997) provide stimulating contextual introductions. Hermann Korte’s (2017) brief intellectual biography of Elias’s early life, On Norbert Elias: Becoming a Human Scientist, has thankfully now been translated from German into English. More advanced scholarship includes Richard Kilminster’s (2007) Norbert Elias: Post-Philosophical Sociology, Dennis Smith’s (2000) Norbert Elias and Modern Social Theory and Cas Wouters’s three-part investigation of the relaxation of social controls, dubbed ‘informalisation processes’, Sex and Manners: Female Emancipation in the West 1890–2000 (2004), Informalization: Manners and Emotions Since 1890 (2007) and, edited with Michael Dunning, Civilisation and Informalisation: Connecting Long-Term Social and Psychic Processes (2017). Significant English language studies working with Elias’s model appear in the book series Palgrave Studies on Norbert Elias edited by Tatiana Savoia Landini. Scholarship is further supported by the work of the Norbert Elias Foundation. Founded to promote critical engagement with Elias’s legacy, it hosts a website and publishes a regular newsletter, Figurations, and a peer-reviewed journal Human Figurations: Long-term Perspectives on the Human Condition (http://norbert-elias.com/about-elias-foundation/).

Elias put into comparative perspective the specific processes of state formation and national habitus in individual countries, mainly France, Germany and Britain. The central model continues to be tested comparatively across very different national historical contexts by a number of country-specific studies. These range from the 1967 study of Dutch Society by Johan Goudsblom, an early adopter of Elias’s process sociology, whose Fire and Civilization (1992) is a landmark of environmental historical sociology, to Stephen Mennell’s The American Civilizing Process (2007), Roderick Broadhurst, Thierry Bouhours and Brigitte Bouhours’s (2015) Violence and the Civilising Process in Cambodia, Wai Lau’s On the Process of Civilisation in Japan (2022) and Behrouz Alikhani’s (2012) comparative study of democratisation processes in Iran, France and Germany.

The chapters assembled for the Anthem Companion are not merely exegetical exercises but rather seek to convey the most recent scholarship and suggest some of the paths that might be taken to further develop process sociology. Based on original research for an intellectual biography of Norbert Elias (2021), Adrian Jitschin in his chapter sheds new light on some of the formative influences on the younger Elias. The next two chapters, first by Jason Hughes and Stephen Mennell followed by Marta Bucholc, examine Elias’s theory of historical sociological knowledge and practice. Taken together, they provide a point of departure for extending process sociology into relatively newer territory. Drawing on the advances made by Cas Wouters among others, Michael Dunning and Jason Hughes interrogate the paradoxical process of what Elias called ‘diminishing contrasts and increasing varieties’ in conditions of deteriorating material inequalities. As Bucholc shows, Elias aimed to historicise myths in order to improve the chances for people to exercise better control over the harms that they inflict on each other. Long-term processes are implicated in shifting power ratios between interdependent people, not least in the cases of gender as discussed by