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3.0 out of 5 stars
What Sociology is, but Should not Be?, March 16, 2010
This review is from: What Is Sociology (European Perspectives) (Paperback)
Norbert Elias, born in 1987, was a German Jew of middle class background. He is a true political intellectual of his time. He volunteered for the German army in World War I and was employed as a telegrapher. He was an active member of the German Zionist movement, where he met Erich Fromm, Leo Strauss, and other young Zionists. In 1933, Elias left his family for good, fleeing the Nazis, and stopping for two years in Paris. In 1935, he moved to England where he wrote his most famous work, The Civilizing Process. In 1940 Elias, like other German citizens, was detained by the British at internment camps (talk of bureaucratic stupidity). In 1941, the year his mother died in Auschwitz, Elias taught classes in Cambridge, Leicester and elsewhere, and trained as psychoanalyst. He then taught in the Sociology Department in Leicester until he retired in 1962. He travelled and taught in Africa and in universities throughout Europe, and died in 1990.
What is Sociology was written in 1970, but published in English only in 1978. This book is upbeat and optimistic, not reflecting in any obsessive way with fascism or communism, and quite devoid of any sense of Zionist spirit. Elias is here the public intellectual of the late twentieth century. His basic message is (a) sociology is a science; (b) sociology is relatively autonomous from natural science and biology; and (c) sociology deals with the emergent properties of human society (we would now say "as a complex system"). Like Simmel, Weber, Durkheim, Parsons, and other major sociological theorists, Elias is concerned with the long-term social dynamics that make modern society possible and determine its character.
I found the first seventy pages of this 175 page book a rather tedious argument outlining the above three points---all this stuff is well-worn argumentation. Of course, this argument does not distinguish sociology from the other behavioral disciplines, such as economics and anthropology, but Elias nowhere goes into this issue. In chapter 3, "Game Models," Elias makes the strikingly fruitful argument that society requires its own theorizing because humans engage in strategic interaction, something missing from natural science, human biology, and even psychology. "This is the reason why sociology cannot be reduced to psychology, biology, or physics: its field of study---the figurations of interdependent human beings cannot be explained if one studies beings singly." (p. 72)
The term "figuration" is key here. In the place of the overarching view of a totalizing social system, characteristic of Durkheim and Parsons, Elias sees society as a mosaic of overlapping and interrelated "figurations" that individuals come to understand and learn to operate within. It is interesting that Elias never defines the term "figuration," but rather shows pictures with complex arrays of lines and arrows with almost no labeling, leaving the reader to piece together what the term means. Elias here reminds me of Bourdieu's treatment of his pet idea, that of the habitus, which is equally central to Bourdieu's thought yet treated systematically in a nebulous and impressionistic manner. The reason, I believe, is that we cannot analytical define a "social frame" outside the rational actor model, epistemic game theory, and the social-psychological theory of norms (see my argument in my book, The Bounds of Reason). Elias gets so close to game theory, placing it front and center in his delineation of the specificity of sociological theory, but never getting to the point of actually using game theory as more than an allusional device. Of course, Elias is merely following standard sociological tradition in this respect: the decrepit state of sociological theory can be attributed precisely to the unwillingness of its practitioners to bite the bullet and go to full game-theoretic, rational actor route.
Elias' treatment of "figuration" is by hand waving. "Examples," he asserts, "may help to convey the meaning of the concept of figuration as it is used here. It can be applied to relatively small groups just as well as to societies made up of thousands or millions of interdependent people. Teachers and pupils in a class, doctor and patient in a therapeutic group, regular customers at a pub, children at a nursery school---they all make up relatively comprehensible figurations with each other." (p. 151) I teach my students to use examples, but never define by example. Elias doesn't have the analytical capacity to follow this advice.
Elias perpetrates another weakness of standard sociology, that of severely downplaying the importance of studying the behavior of non-human organisms towards explaining human society. He makes the standard argument that outside of humans, social arrangements are purely genetically determined, whereas the differences among human societies are due virtually completely to cultural differences. Therefore, he concludes, the organization of social life in non-human species is of no interest for us. Of course, modern sociobiology denies all of this. Elias makes the reasonable distinction among brute physical matter, the lowest level of organization, biological multicellular species, the next higher level of organization, and human society, the highest level. However, sociobiology has shown us that complex social organization occurs in many species, and the prime question in understanding human society is how our social organization differs from that of other species. This question is of the same order of importance as why different human societies display distinct forms of social structure, culture, and human dynamics.
I won't go through Elias long defense of the standard sociological notion that sociology can do without biology. It is as well done as it is incorrect. We can forgive him for not having read E. O. Wilson's great 1975 book Sociobiology, Elias' book having been published in 1970, and the ideological battles over sociobiology not abating until recently. This forgiveness does not, of course, extend to contemporary sociologists, whose ignorance of sociobiology is as deep and as fatal as their ignorance of game theory and the rational actor model.
This book is worth reading if you want a historical vignette of the incredible contrast between the insightfulness and intellectual vigor of a great sociologist and the deplorable absence of theoretical content to which this insightfulness might be fruitfully attached.
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