Abstract
The long-term development of humanity or human societies was a central interest for the emerging discipline of sociology. It was a major preoccupation for Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, and of lesser figures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such as L. T. Hobhouse in Britain, W. G. Sumner in the USA and Ferdinand Tönnies, Ernst Troeltsch and Franz Oppenheimer among others in Germany. After World War II, however, sociology underwent what Norbert Elias called a ‘retreat of sociologists into the present’. Most sociologists became more concerned with studying the societies in which they themselves lived, especially ‘social problems’ that they hoped their research could serve to ameliorate. Elias’s dissatisfaction with this trend stemmed not from any lack of interest in present-day society and social welfare, still less from a simple interest in history, but from his belief that time was an essential axis in any adequate sociological explanation whether of the present or the past. Knowing the past was also essential to any insight into what the future might hold. And he wanted to get away from the use of static concepts and the search for static structures and to foster a more thoroughly processual way of thinking.
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Notes
- 1.
Norbert Elias, ‘The retreat of sociologists into the present’, Essays III: On Sociology and the Humanities (Dublin: UCD Press 2009 [Collected Works, vol. 16]), pp. 107–26; the first version of this essay was published in German in 1983.
- 2.
Elias developed a whole sociological theory of knowledge and the sciences although, apart from passing references to ‘involvement’ and ‘detachment’, this did not arise prominently at the Bielefeld conference. See Involvement and Detachment (Dublin: UCD Press, 2007 [Collected Works, vol. 8]), and Essays I: On the Sociology of Knowledge and the Sciences (Dublin: UCD Press, 2009 [Collected Works, vol. 14]).
- 3.
The list of those who had been invited but did not participate included Pierre Bourdieu, Wolfram Eberhard, Michel Foucault, Clifford Geertz, Jürgen Kocka, Barrington Moore, Darcy Ribeiro, Marshall D. Sahlins, Theda Skocpol and Fei Xiao-tung.
- 4.
Tape recordings rarely capture every word of such a discussion. Not only are there gaps, but of course speakers habitually make many ‘false starts’ and other errors that they would not make in writing. We have therefore gently edited and ‘tidied up’ the transcript, originally made by Ms J. Gorney while always remaining true to the spirit of what was said. Nor was everyone speaking their native language. We have broadly followed the principles set out in the ‘Note on editorial policy’ in the final volume of the Collected Works of Norbert Elias, Supplements and Index (Dublin: UCD Press, 2014), pp. ix–xiv. The original transcript can be examined in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar. As editors, we have provided all the notes to the transcript.
- 5.
Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, 12 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934–1961).
- 6.
Karl R. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957), p. iii; see also The Open Society and Its Enemies (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1945).
- 7.
Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958).
- 8.
See amongst others Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The Six Killer Apps of Western Power (London: Penguin, 2012), pp. 60–9.
- 9.
This was not at all sudden: for example the published reports of missionaries about their adventures and feats overseas as well as biographies of them or the local converts were among the most widely read products of the printing press, for example in the German-speaking countries in the nineteenth century. See Artur Bogner, Bernd Holtwick and Hartmann Tyrell (eds), Weltmission und religiöse Organisationen (Würzburg: Ergon, 2004). On the momentous and fateful intertwining and synergy of overseas discoveries, socio-institutional changes, modern science, political expansion, and economic growth see the forceful argumentation and concise summary by Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (London: Vintage, 2014 [2011]), Chaps. 15 and 16. On this synergy, see also the partly similar but less coherent or systematic arguments in Ferguson, Civilization.
- 10.
See Norbert Elias, On the Process of Civilisation: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Dublin: UCD Press, 2012 [Collected Works, vol. 3]), pp. 13–67; Bruce Mazlish, Civilization and its Contents (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).
- 11.
Right at the end of his life, Elias acknowledged that this question had led to endless misunderstanding of his work, but said that in the 1930s he had tried and failed to find an alternative word that would capture the full range of meanings he wanted to explore; see Elias, ‘What I mean by civilisation: reply to Hans Peter Duerr’, Essays II: On Civilising Processes, State Formation and National Identity (Dublin: UCD Press, 2008 [Collected Works, vol. 15]), pp. 8–13. Stephen Mennell has suggested that the familiar concept of deferred gratification, broadly interpreted to encompass social and cultural as well as psychological aspects, might have captured most though not all of the senses that Elias wanted to capture. Another facet or aspect of his concept is what Sigmund Freud had earlier, for the individual, called ‘sublimation’; see Mennell, ‘Childhood and society: civilisation as deferred gratification’, Sozialwissenschaftliche Literatur Rundschau (SLR), Heft 77, 2018, pp. 92–9.
- 12.
For an excellent survey, see Volker Kruse, ‘Von der historischen Nationalökonomie zur historischen Soziologie: Ein Paradigmenwechsel in den deutschen Sozialwissenschaften um 1900’, Zeitschrift für Soziologie 19: 3 (1990), pp. 149–65.
- 13.
Reinhard Bendix, Work and Authority in Industry: Managerial Ideologies in the Course of Industrialization (New York, Wiley, 1956), and Nation-Building & Citizenship: Studies of Our Changing Social Order (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1964); Kings or People: Power and the Mandate to Rule (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978). Edward Shils, The Constitution of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).
- 14.
See Talcott Parsons, ‘Evolutionary universals in society’; Robert N. Bellah, ‘Religious evolution’; S. N. Eisenstadt, ‘Social change, differentiation and evolution’, American Sociological Review 29: 3 (1964), pp. 375–86, 358–74 and pp. 339–57 respectively.
- 15.
Talcott Parsons, Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives and The System of Modern Societies (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966 and 1971). It should be noted that Elias explicitly preferred to reserve the term ‘evolution’ for biological processes, always using ‘development’ for social processes, because the differences between the two are very marked—notably that social processes are generally reversible, while biological ones are not. This distinction is not, however, consistently observed among sociologists; and in the United States, some writers have used the terms the other way round.
- 16.
W. G. Runciman, A Treatise on Social Theory, vol. 1, The Methodology of Social Theory; vol. 2, Substantive Social Theory; vol. 3, Applied Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, 1989, 1997 respectively); The Theory of Cultural and Social Selection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
- 17.
For a notable early work, see S. N. Eisenstadt, The Political Systems of Empires (New York: Free Press, 1963).
- 18.
Johann Arnason, participant of the ZiF conference and author of a chapter in this book, is a former doctorand of Habermas.
- 19.
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vol. 1, Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974) and subsequent volumes; Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books, 1974); Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966); Charles Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974). During the 1970s, Dieter Senghaas, a pioneer and for about two decades the doyen of development research in political science and sociology in Germany, did much to promote the reception of theoretical works from the Global South. His publications are typical of the friendly reception, in Germany, of such analyses of long-term changes of societal structures—see Dieter Senghaas (ed.), Kapitalistische Weltökonomie: Kontroversen über ihren Ursprung und ihre Entwicklungsdynamik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979), Imperialismus und strukturelle Gewalt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972) and Peripherer Kapitalismus: Analysen über Abhängigkeit und Unterentwicklung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974).
- 20.
Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d.), p. 135. This observation may perhaps be seen as anticipating Francis Fukuyama’s explicitly Hegelian conception of an ‘end of history’, after the collapse of communism: see The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992). His hotly debated essay, ‘The End of History’ first appeared, in the journal The National Interest, as early as the summer of 1989.
- 21.
William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1963). Equally ambitious books of global history include: A World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1976), The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force and Society since AD 1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) and, with John R. McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird’s Eye View of World History (New York, W. W. Norton, 2003).
- 22.
Burke, Peter, Sociology and History (London: Allen & Unwin, 1980); rev. edn. History and Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 1992); 3rd edn, same publisher 2005.
- 23.
He was the only such Fellow to be resident for such a long period. The ZiF, situated right in the Teutoburg Forest, and close to, but not actually on the main campus, is one of Europe’s distinguished ‘institutes of advanced study’, at which Resident Fellows are usually appointed for only one year. It suited him well, when already in his 80s, to have a flat next to the ZiF’s indoor swimming pool and adjacent to the forest. His private home was by then in Amsterdam. In the years 1982–1984 Elias spent about half his time in his apartment at Bielefeld and half at his home in Amsterdam.
- 24.
See Elias’s contributions in two edited volumes edited by Wehler, Geschichte und Soziologie (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1972); Soziologie und Psychoanalyse (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1972); Wehler, already prominent then, soon became one of the most celebrated German historians.
- 25.
Letter, in French, dated 9 July 1982 from the Collège de France (our translation—eds).
- 26.
Foucault would have been referring to his History of Sexuality, and perhaps to volumes 2 and 3 especially: The Use of Pleasure (London: Penguin, 1984) and The Care of the Self (London: Allen Lane, 1988). Both were first published in French in 1984.
- 27.
Darcy Ribeiro, O processo civilizatório: etapas da evolução sócio-cultural (Rio de Janeiro: Civilizacão Brasileira, 1968); English translation by Betty J. Meggers: The Civilizational Process (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1968).
- 28.
Revised versions of Elwert’s and Mennell’s papers were published afterwards: see Georg Elwert, ‘Ausdehnung der Käuflichkeit und Einbettung der Wirtschaft: Markt und Moralökonomie’, in Klaus Heinemann (ed.), Soziologie wirtschaftlichen Handelns (Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, Sonderheft 28, 1987), pp. 300–21; and Stephen Mennell, ‘On the civilising of appetite’, Theory, Culture and Society 4: 2–3 (1987, pp. 373–403.
- 29.
To list only the books: Quest for Excitement (with Eric Dunning, in English, 1986), The Society of Individuals (in German 1987), Studies on the Germans (in German, 1989), Mozart: The Sociology of a Genius (in German 1991), and The Symbol Theory (in English, 1991). These can be found in volumes 10, 11, 12 and 13 respectively of his Collected Works in English.
- 30.
Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. I, From the Beginning to AD 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
- 31.
David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004).
- 32.
Diamond, Jared, Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997). See also Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive (London: Viking, 2005).
- 33.
Harari, Sapiens.
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Bogner, A., Mennell, S. (2022). Introduction. In: Bogner, A., Mennell, S. (eds) Civilisations, Civilising Processes and Modernity – A Debate. Palgrave Studies on Norbert Elias. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80379-7_1
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