The dawn of detachment

Introduction: Elias’s perspective as a world-view

A new generation of sociologists is discovering the work of Elias. His concepts are being applied in research of many different kinds, often to good effect. Inevitably, in the course of these applications the wider purposes and convictions that underpinned Elias’s entire undertaking, as well as his place in the development of sociology, are forgotten. However, to be fully understood his work needs to be grasped in its totality as a synthesis and as a vocation. It is this broader framework that breathes life and significance into Elias’s concepts. Without this understanding, the way in which he combined perspectives on social events with apparently incompatible intellectual traditions, all intertwined with empirical evidence, is lost. Researchers thus miss out on opportunities to incorporate current social and intellectual developments into the synthesis where appropriate, thereby carrying them forward in a new form. ¹

The wider purposes of Elias’s sociological outlook can be summarized under three headings.

Elias and ‘the peculiar enigma of society’

The role of the two revolutions – the French and the Industrial – in the shaping of sociology in the 19^th century has been much discussed (for example, Kumar, 1988; Brown, 1992; Swingewood, 1970, 2000). The same is true of the question of how far the main concepts of the sociological tradition have their origins in the conservative reaction to those revolutions (Nisbet, 2002[1966]). A common and plausible suggestion in much of this literature is that the discipline arose as a reaction to the dissolution of traditional societies and the development of modern ones. On this view, however, sociology was never a generic discipline to do with the study of all human societies, but has as its object only modern, advanced industrial societies. This restricted model of the scope of sociology remains the governing conception in contemporary sociology stated explicitly by leading writers, including Giddens and Habermas (see Kilminster, 2007: 4–7). Elias’s work, on the other hand, has the contrasting aim for sociology of building up a picture of the social nature of humankind as a whole. The way in which he approaches the history of sociology eschews the tradition/modernity dualism completely.

The pioneers of sociology in the first half of the 19^th century were both participating in the tensions and conflicts of the rapidly emerging industrial society and at the same time observing them from different angles and perspectives. Elias stresses that the early pioneers had political and moral convictions that derived from each of the three great ideologies of the period: conservatism, liberalism and socialism. Traces of all three are woven into sociology (Elias, 2009b[1984]: 65–6; Goudsblom, 1977: 166–8; Kilminster, 2013a: 51–2) not only conservatism. Also, the pioneering social scientists of all political persuasions in the 1840s shared a common vocabulary, including: ‘capital’, ‘labour’, ‘the state’, ‘socialism’,‘communism’, ‘capitalism’, ‘class struggle’, ‘bourgeoisie’, ‘proletariat’, ‘industrial society’, ‘industrial system’ and ‘industrial revolution’. Some of these concepts had come into currency slightly earlier, but together they formed the dominant vocabulary of social critics, politicians and the early social scientists of that time (Williams, 1976; Manuel, 1965: 310 ff.).

For Elias, central to the understanding of the origins of sociology is that the depth and intensity of the intertwined military, political and economic events across Europe in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries – compressed into the short period of one generation – were unprecedented and bewildering. People were ‘drawn into a whirlpool of social changes’ (Elias, 2009b[1984]: 62). What is not always stressed in histories of sociology is what must have been the crushing emotional effects of these experiences on people’s sense of security and well-being. Revolutionary doctrines such as communism were being proclaimed while traditional customs, institutions, beliefs, attitudes and ways of life that went back centuries were being dismantled, particularly in France. Contemporary reactions are revealing. François Chateaubriand probably captured widely felt forebodings when he wrote in 1834:

What the new society will be I know not … How fortunes will be levelled, how wages will be equalized with labour, how womanhood will attain complete emancipation, I do not know … but it is to be feared that the individual man may decline, certain eminent faculties of genius be lost, and imagination, poetry and the arts will perish in the cells of a hive-society in which each individual will be nothing more than a bee, a cog in the machine, an atom in organized matter. (Quoted in Evans, 1951: 9)

Elias insists that in trying to understand the origins of sociology it is not enough simply to look at those individual writers who called themselves ‘sociologists’. Political economy was also important in the clear recognition from experience of a unique ‘object’ or field of regularities – ‘society’, ‘sociation’, or the ‘social’ in one form or another – emerging and changing on a sufficiently large scale for the new scientific specialists to be able to lay claim to its investigation. Elias continues that the emerging fields were ‘symptomatic of the transition from a pre-scientific to a more scientific approach to these problems’ (2009b[1984]: 43). He argues that the reality of the ‘social’ on a large scale was first systematically – scientifically – investigated in its economic form simultaneously by political economists such as Adam Smith in Scotland and the Physiocrats in France in the 1770s. Smith had in fact visited François Quesnay, one of the Physiocrats, and was influenced by his work on sectors of the economy (Brown, 1992: 162). That this theory readily transferred into the economic realities that Smith was dealing with, indicates that the two writers were both responding to comparable economic developments.

The question of what advances they may have made in terms of purely economic conceptualizations in the broader context of the history of economics, is not the issue here. The work of the political economists was an important breakthrough for another reason, according to Elias. They employed empirical evidence to demonstrate that there existed self-regulating, social ‘laws’ of an economic kind, operating independently of kings and ministers. ‘Society’ in its economic mode was an anonymous and independent force in its own right, the acknowledgement of which diminished the reach and extent of kingly power in the realm. The work of the early political economists revolved around: (1) the circulation of income between the three main classes of pre-industrial society: landowners, agricultural labourers and merchants/artisans; (2) sources of wealth; and (3) variations in the distribution of the national income. These were relatively static economic regularities operating at the level of the society as a whole. A synchronic picture of the nation (albeit including some internal dynamism) was what was needed for the work of these writers to perform the function of political economy for kings and ministers governing in the immediate present. Hence, the political economists paid less attention to the origins of the nation as a whole and ways in which its development over time might evince evidence of movement in a discernible direction. Nevertheless, this work involved a leap of the imagination, taking ‘economic’ questions out of the household, to which the term formerly applied, and on to the higher level of the nation. In their recognition of a field of social regularities to be investigated empirically, based on a central theory of society, the political economists were, so to speak, ‘sociologists avant la lettre’ (Elias, 2009b[1984]: 69).

After the French Revolutionary wars, learned and educated people from various walks of life and political persuasions – statisticians, philosophers, diplomats, lawyers, journalists and others – began to write about sociological matters of much wider scope, to do with the motor of change and overall direction of society as a whole. As Lorenz von Stein declared: ‘It is the great path of development itself that we seek’ (quoted by Weiss, 1963: 80). These pioneers included Henri Saint-Simon, August Comte, Louis de Bonald and Joseph de Maistre in France; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, as well as Stein, in Germany; and Herbert Spencer in England. Of these, only Comte and Spencer would have accepted the label ‘sociologist’. But all of them understood the ‘social’ as a distinct level of reality in its own right, an insight that each of them had reached while pursuing often very different purposes. ² They were also able to draw on the scientific credibility already established in the social field by the political economists.

Elias shows how this second wave of writers after the French Revolutionary wars introduced overtly processual concepts such as development, stages or phases, progress, evolution, tendency and other similar ones, in order to describe structured social processes across time, using empirical data. A qualification is in order here to avoid a misunderstanding. Philosophers in the Scottish Enlightenment, in particular David Hume, James Millar and especially Adam Ferguson, had also reached broadly sociological insights (Kettler, 1965). They were well aware of the nature of ‘society’, institutions, development and change over time and had seen in outline ‘the break-up of the organic community and the rise of industrial society’ (Swingewood, 1970: 176) and even the burning issue of integrating the emerging working class into society. However, they were writing before socialism developed as an ideology, before the French Revolutionary wars and before the struggle of capitalists and workers had become particularly intense in the 1840s. Their perceptions – seminal to be sure – were mainly at the level of principles or inspired by compassionate concern and not made in connection with the working application of processual concepts in the empirical study of society as a whole and its direction of development.

That area of inquiry – sociogenesis and structured change – made the contribution of the emerging sociologists distinctive. In their writings the seemingly grand speculative issues about the movement of whole societies over time were made the subject of empirical investigation, a novel idea at the time. As Rudolf Heberle said of two of the most important pioneers, ‘The original meaning of sociology as a scientific philosophy of history was conceived by Stein and Comte’ (quoted by Mengelberg, 1961: 268). On the question of what is the driving force of historical change, Marx’s answer was essentially the same as that of Lorenz von Stein and many others: conflicts arising from ‘class interest’ (Stein’s phrase, quoted by Mengelberg: ibid.). Another was what is its direction? For Marx, the social antagonism of capital and labour would inevitably lead to socialism and communism through revolution. For Stein, revolution was not predestined and could be forestalled by social reforms. What is the impact of modern society on the nature of knowledge? Comte’s theories of scientific differentiation and knowledge development and Marx’s theory of ideology are cases in point. Amid all the social disintegration are there signs of a reintegration? Comte saw that ‘[T]wo movements, differing in their nature, agitate society – one movement of disorganization, the other of reorganization’ (in Lenzer, 1983: 9).

Elias explains that the dramatic experience was that changes were occurring which could no longer be explained entirely by the plans and intentions of people anyone could actually name or point to – specific monarchs or ministers or the powerful courtly aristocrats and landowners of former days. It was a symptom of ‘the peculiar enigma of society’ (Elias, 2009b[1984]: 61). Stein had also sensed the undertow of human social relations lying beneath overt political and military action. Human existence, he said, was ‘unalterably embedded in society’ (Mengelberg, 1961: 269; original emphasis). Not only was this insight politically sensitive in the world of absolutist kings, but it was also very unsettling as social experience confirmed people’s widespread bewilderment. Goudsblom (1977: 19) succinctly described the immense achievement of the early pioneers: ‘The major feat of the first great sociologists was their design of a perspective from which these various changes no longer appeared random and inexplicable.’

Elias’s stress on the subject matter of the developing social sciences as an emerging level of social reality with regularities of its own (sui generis as Durkheim later put it) epitomizes Elias’s world-view and consequently his attitude towards the major paradigms of contemporary social thought. First, it is a decisive riposte to social constructivists, discourse analysts, economic liberals, Simmelians, Weberians, Parsonians and other nominalists influenced by neo-Kantianism. They tend to regard individuals as sovereign and autonomous and society as possessing no structure of its own outside of the autonomous actions of individuals, who comprise structureless aggregates. Any patterns that are conceded are seen as arising only from those that our concepts or discourses allow us to see. Elias’s farewell to Weberian ideal-types in favour of ‘real types’ in On the Process of Civilisation (quoted in Kilminster, 2007: 165) is consistent with his affinity with ‘sociological realism’, broadly conceived as approaches that are centrally committed to the existence of a structured, autonomous reality of patterned social relations.

Second, Elias places sociology alongside other sciences that investigate different levels of integration, including the chemical, physical and biological. This focus on society as an integrative level among others provides an autonomous and secure platform for sociology in academia. It functions for sociologists as what could be referred to as a Kampfbegriff, decisively separating the discipline from the purely discursive and avowedly non-empirical subject of philosophy, its progenitor and intellectual and professional rival. It underlines that philosophers cannot make a legitimate claim to the exclusive, systematic scientific analysis of any real ‘object’ of inquiry in this sense.

As sociology developed in the 19^th century, it became clear to many sociologists, notably those in the Durkheimian school, that their arrival had significant repercussions for the intellectual authority of philosophers (Kilminster, 2011: 91–3). Philosophers were clearly no longer qualified to analyse empirically the complexities of social developments and they knew it. Furthermore, the promise of sociology was to take over much of what had been other customary competences of philosophers, in particular in the traditional area of epistemology. After various disputes between philosophers and sociologists in the 20^th century a kind of settlement appears to have been reached between the two groups. Today, most sociologists would concede to philosophers a range of transcendental issues to do with truth-claims, validity and ‘normative’ issues, while suppressing the contentious question of disciplinary autonomy and authority (Kilminster, 2004[1998]: ch. 1). The fact that the parameters of the division of labour between the two subjects have been stipulated by the philosophers has not yet fully registered in sociological circles. Elias, however, refused to enter into arguments in philosophical terms or to defer to philosophers’ guidance on sociological matters or to their intellectual authority (Elias, 2009a[1971].

The birth of the two tracks

In the 1840s, based on a difference of sensibility and scientific attitude, two tracks of sociological science begin to emerge, epitomized by the work of Marx and Lorenz von Stein. ³ The emerging social scientists in this ‘pre-disciplinary’ (Heilbron, 1995) phase in the development of sociology, for all they had in common, differed in their capacity or willingness to stand back from their moral and political convictions in order to investigate dispassionately the interdependence of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat and the impersonal and autonomous order of society. The writers associated with the two tracks also differed in the extent to which they were able to distance themselves from the fantasy of an inevitable future of social equality and human freedom, a utopia associated with the communists of the time.

We can see the birth of track I clearly in the blend of burning political passion and systematic economic science that focused the writings and political activities of Marx and his close collaborator, the businessman Friedrich Engels. Paradoxically, the intensity of their moral and political commitments provided the spur to drive them to make discoveries in the social field, notably in their observations on economic power and the social character of sciences. However, these commitments blinded them to recognizing the untenable teleological flaw at the heart of their theory of social development. Joseph Schumpeter pointed out a long time ago that Marx had a prior and unshakeable ideological commitment to an extra-scientific ‘vision’ of the economic process and its social consequences, which then shaped all of his subsequent social scientific observations in the field of political economy:

[Marx] was a bourgeois radical who had broken away from bourgeois radicalism. He was formed by German philosophy and did not feel himself to be a professional economist until the end of the 1840’s. But by that time, that is to say, before his serious analytic work had begun, his vision of the capitalist process had become set and his scientific work was to implement, not to correct it. It was not original with him. It pervaded the radical circles of Paris and may be traced back to a number of eighteenth-century writers, such as Linguet. History conceived as the struggle between classes that are defined as haves and have-nots, with exploitation of the one by the other, ever increasing wealth among ever fewer haves and ever increasing misery and degradation among the have-nots, moving with inexorable necessity toward spectacular explosion, this was the vision then conceived with passionate energy and to be worked up, like a raw material is being worked up, by means of the scientific tools of his time. (Schumpeter, 1949: 354)

Track II, on the other hand, developed by Lorenz von Stein, Henri Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, Victor Considerant and others, also acknowledged the emerging reality of society. As we saw in the previous section, Stein in particular analysed social developments with a form of economic materialism and class analysis comparable with that of Marx (in the case of Stein, anticipating Marx by several years). The track II writers were the first non-partisan, relatively more ‘detached’ sociologists, although they could not have put it that way. This loose and diverse grouping shared a common focus on the interdependence of capitalists and workers, locked together in what Saint-Simon called the ‘industrial system’ and Stein termed the ‘industrial society’. This track consisted of social scientists who were committed in various ways to incremental social change through various modes of class cooperation and compromise, something abhorrent to exponents of track I. For the track II grouping, it went hand in hand with their perception that the relationship between workers and capitalists constituted an interlocking of interests, which Stein referred to as ‘the reality of the human order’ (quoted in Mengelberg, 1961: 270). It was not an utterly irreconcilable conflict that would inevitably resolve itself in a revolution. The ‘contradictions’ (Stein) of society – manifested as class conflicts – could be managed through reform for the benefit of all, avoiding the destructive upheaval of revolution with its uncertain consequences.

The sociogenesis of intransigent opposition

The origins of track I in the work of Marx can be further illuminated by delving more deeply into his social location in the national character and politics of Germany at the beginning of the 19^th century. This constellation can usefully be contrasted with the situation in France, where many of the sociological and socialist seeds were sown. Insights about the French reform movement in the 18^th century in the early chapters of Elias’s On the Process of Civilisation (2012a[1939]) are relevant here. In France, Elias argues, it was possible for a moderate opposition to exist, as a middle-class clique, within the court system, because courtly and bourgeois intellectual circles had become sufficiently interpenetrated. The concept of Zivilisation has its origins in this reform movement. The concept of Kultur originated in the same middle-class intelligentsia but in Germany, where its structural position is a group without political power or courtly contact. It is a middle-class intelligentsia that operates outside the courts. Dülmen (1992: chs 4, 5) has shown in detail how it was located largely in universities and secret societies, clubs and associations such as the Illuminati and the Freemasons.

Civilisé and cultivé as terms existed in court circles to designate the specific qualities of their own behaviour, which they contrasted to that of simpler or ‘primitive’ people. In the writings of the Comte de Mirabeau, civilisation connotes the softening of manners, urbanity, politeness and the dissemination of ideals of propriety. Mirabeau does note, however, that it is only a ‘mask of virtue’, only the surface appearance of behaviour. Interestingly, the moderate Mirabeau shared this interpretation of courtly behaviour with the more radical Rousseau. Elias comments that Rousseau was less important for the French reform movement than might otherwise appear to be the case from received interpretations. But he was very important in Germany. The French bourgeois radicals were inside the court society and had ideas for reform and adapted behaviour models derived from within that order. They wanted to replace a false civilisation with a genuine one, whereas in Germany there was a politically neutral middle-class intelligentsia, very learned and bookish, wanting to diverge totally from the aristocracy. The politically excluded German intelligentsia was repelled by the superficialities of the behaviour of the court and the integrated upper bourgeoisie. Their ideal is of the educated man. Rousseau was an outsider (Swiss) to the French courtly networks and so could be more radical in his criticisms, which is probably partly why he appealed so much to Marx, who adopted Rousseau’s theory of a benign human nature entirely.

The fateful result was that (unlike Mirabeau) Rousseau and Marx had no counter- concept to the court society, but simply a comprehensive rejection of it. Marx exemplified the habitus of the German intelligentsia, isolated as they were from aristocratic life and from public politics. He absorbed the Kultur of bookishness, and was angry about the intellectual excesses of the Hegelian philosophers of pure consciousness who could not properly deal with either the economic realities of the proletariat in the new factories or the politics of class struggle. Unlike the French communists and socialists who spoke from the standpoint of practical social relations and circumstances, the German philosophers spoke from what Marx called the ‘standpoint of eternity’ (Marx and Engels, 1968[1845]: 521; Kilminster, 1983) and so devalued real concrete social problems. Mirabeau wanted to develop and extend courtly models of behaviour and their attendant sensibilities from which the reform movement sprang. Lacking a counter-concept and being contemptuous both of social reform and of courtly ‘civilisation’, Marx had little alternative but to identify totally with the lower classes, the ‘primitives’, as an overreaction against the attitudes and falsity of the aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie. He wrote to Ludwig Feuerbach from Paris on 11 August 1844:

You would only have to attend one of the meetings of the French workers to appreciate the pure freshness, the nobility which bursts forth from these toil-worn men … [I]t is among these ‘barbarians’ of our civilised society that history is preparing the practical element for the emancipation of mankind. (Marx, 1975[1844]: 354)

Against the model of the imperative of proletarian rule to solve all social problems there could be no politics of compromise in the present, only wholly negative, intransigent opposition, which eschewed working for immediate gains for the organized proletariat. To visualize constructive class cooperation and political participation in an interdependent society à la Saint-Simon, Victor Considerant, or Lorenz von Stein, would have been asking of Marx a higher level of detachment than he and Engels were capable of achieving, given their prior political commitment to working-class revolution (Benthem van den Bergh, 1977: 171). As Davidson (1977: 81) shows, some years before Marx arrived in Paris in 1843, in various publications Considerant had outlined the basic components of a critique of laissez-faire capitalism almost identical to the one we find in Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto (1967[1848]). Considerant analysed in depth the monopolies, the concentration of wealth, big business, exploitation of the proletariat, class antagonism, overproduction, imperialism and much more. But when it came to what should be done to reorganize society in the light of the unfairness generated by these processes, he and they parted company. Marx and Engels looked for revolution to overturn the entire system as the only thoroughgoing alternative, something that was for them inevitable anyway as the economic ‘contradictions’ of capitalism resolved themselves. Considerant, on the other hand, (like Stein) disavowed revolution as counter-productive and also rejected Marx’s appeal to only one class because it would increase class antagonism. Considerant showed remarkable detachment to take a broader view and saw the inequities of the 19th century ‘as a threat to all classes’ (emphasis added). Democracy must be based not on force but on ‘intellectual combat’ (quoted by Davidson, 1977: 82).

Karl Marx or Lorenz von Stein?

As we have seen, another important innovator and pioneer of track II was Lorenz von Stein, who, like Marx, was a pupil of Hegel (see Weiss, 1963; Mengelberg, 1961). Stein’s The History of the Social Movement in France, 1789–1850 (Stein, 1964[1842]) was an economic analysis of private property, social classes, the state, capital and labour which focused on the proletariat as struggling for power in the pursuit of its ‘class interest’. To reiterate, this work arrived at a very similar picture of the nature of early bourgeois industrial capitalism, its development and its problems, to that of Considerant and Marx. ⁵ But Stein came to very different conclusions from Marx about the consequences of his analysis. Mark R. Rutgers summarizes the difference:

Marx prophesizes the end of the state because it is an instrument of the ruling class and calls for revolution. Von Stein does not regard class struggle as an antagonism of the proletariat and bourgeoisie; instead he stresses the interconnectedness of their interests. He considers the state a necessary institution in social life. A stateless society – if conceivable at all – can only result in (more) inequality, social conflict, and loss of freedom. The state specifically has to guarantee freedom of the individual against the arbitrariness of socio-economic developments. The monopolization and misuse of state power by a ruling class does not imply that we should abolish the state altogether. Von Stein strongly emphasizes the importance of the pacification of class struggle: he explicitly rejects revolution as the end of human liberty. (Rutgers, 1994: 400; emphases added)

Stein also anticipated objections levelled much later at Marxism in general about its extravagant one-sidedness and misleading treatment of individual responsibility. In an article from 1849, Stein praised Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England 1844 (2010[1845]) for drawing public attention in Germany to the wretched plight of the English working classes, but complained that it was ‘grandiose in its one-sidedness’. It was based on the proposition that ‘society itself is at fault when the individual has to suffer and even in whatever misfortune the individual may bring about’. Stein provocatively added that ‘This interpretation approaches the ridiculous, if, for instance, the bourgeoisie is held responsible for the fact that the dirty Irish are unwilling to mend their clothes and live on potatoes in order to get drunk on Sundays’ (quoted by Mengelberg, 1964: 31). The 1848 revolutions confirmed for Stein that he had been right that reform would cure the conflicts that had brought about social unrest (Strasser, 1976: 88). Progress towards greater equality and a more democratic society could be achieved only through legislation, administration and the participation of the proletariat in the political process. His sociological prescience was further evident: ‘Socialism and communism in the hitherto existing meaning of the word have become mere individual symptoms of an infinitely more comprehensive problem’ (quoted in Mengelberg, 1964: 23).

Marx, on the other hand, consistent with his ‘vision’, stubbornly exhorted revolutionary socialists to resist as far as they could any participation in conventional bourgeois politics because this was seen, in Schumpeter’s words, as ‘a betrayal of the true aims, an insidious attempt to patch up what should be destroyed’ (Schumpeter, 2011[1942]: 316). Unfortunately, it reinforced a mistrustful ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’ outlook because any concessions by the capitalists or other social improvements were regarded with suspicion as attempts to deceive the working classes or otherwise divert them from their historical mission. The subsequent Marxian dualism of revolution versus reform captured an inflexible orientation towards reducing inequalities that came out of Marx and Engels’s blanket oppositional stance. This was a peculiarly obdurate posture conditioned both by their German habitus and by a specific phase of the developing conflict between the capitalist factory owners and the workers.

Following the liberal principle of laissez-faire, entrepreneurs wanted not only independence but also the active promotion of their own interests by the state. From this, Marx concluded that the state was solely an instrument of the capitalist class, which would disappear when the class interests it served also disappeared in the coming revolution. As Elias put it, ‘Marx simply took over the basic conceptual scheme of the liberal ideology, but infused it with negative values’ (Elias, 2009a[1971]: 8). Stein, on the other hand, like Considerant, was more circumspect. Stein stood back from the conflicts and saw that the main classes of society were interdependent and that in practice the state agencies, which were developing apace, did not serve the interests of only one class. From a practical point of view the communist doctrine of the abolition of the state was therefore incoherent. It was also undesirable because without it there would be no power to protect people against the inequities and extremes of ‘unregulated’ capitalism, as it would be expressed today.

As the 19^th century proceeded into the 20^th, the process that Elias calls functional democratization, that is, ‘the narrowing of power differentials and the development towards less uneven distribution of power chances’ (Elias, 2012b[1978]: 64) was far-reaching. ⁶ It had the effect of pulling the rug out from under the class-war model of extra-parliamentary revolutionary politics, which was predicated on the polarization of the main classes deepening towards a final explosion. The relative social levelling process corresponded to the greater integration of interdependent strata and institutions within the figuration of modern society.

Conclusion

After Marx and Engels, track I developed into the partisan Marxian tradition, from Lenin, Lukács and Gramsci, to the early Frankfurt School, later variants of which have been carried forward in recent years by Marcuse, Habermas, Bauman, Žižek and others (Kilminster, 2014[1979]). This track also includes ‘critical’ partisanship on behalf of various groups and factions which is to the fore today in feminist research and theorizing, disability studies and much of the work in gender, sexuality studies and post-colonialism, to mention only a few areas (Kilminster, 2011, 2013b). Track II, on the other hand, covers essentially the broad tradition of non-partisan theoretical and empirical sociology, from Saint-Simon, Comte and Stein to Spencer, Durkheim, Simmel, Weber, Mannheim, Elias, Parsons, Bourdieu (although some of his later work is closer to track I) and many others. It is clear that Elias’s work falls organically into the later developments of track II, which he further strengthened and radicalized as part of the longer-run, and continuing, ‘sociological revolution’ (Kilminster, 2004[1998]).

Track I is the inheritor of a particular style of thinking which had at its core a hoped-for revolution which would emancipate all of humankind once and for all. This revolution did not occur and the masses opted for National Socialism and fascism in the 1930s. Adorno later commented on these events that ‘Philosophy … lives on because the moment to realize it was missed’ (Adorno, 1973: 3). My point is that it was the internal logic of the theoretical framework that led him and others inexorably to the idea that theory would ‘preserve the truth’ of the communist utopia of freedom as a metaphysical absolute inherent in the world, seen in Hegelian terms as a ‘negative totality’ (Marcuse, 1968[1941]: 376). However, even as these ideas were being propounded, social strata had already become considerably more differentiated and integrated. This is a process that has continued, through many conflictual episodes of varying intensity to the present day, resulting in a relatively stable societal tension-balance. Hence, the traditional ‘standpoint of the proletariat’ became difficult credibly to justify in the older bipolar ‘class-struggle’ format. It therefore had to be reworked as diffuse identification with the underprivileged more generally, a position found widely in contemporary ‘critical’ sociology.

This principle tacitly underpins the emancipatory factional sociologies in the present period, representing a seamless connection back to the origins of track I. In this framework, whatever concepts are needed to sharpen or dramatize social critique in the name of emancipation are borrowed from track II writers and grafted on to a basic theoretical framework of production and consumption, seen as the basis of society (Kilminster, 2013b). Lacking a differentiated conception of shifting power balances on the Elias model, inequalities of all kinds are prejudged as subjugation or oppression, echoing the steep power gradient between capitalists and the proletariat in the early 19^th century. This flaw inevitably leads to the misdiagnosis of social problems and less than optimal policy solutions. Furthermore, track I suppresses the difficult questions about the sociological feasibility of the utopia; the cognitive value of the complex transcendental arguments elaborated to justify it as an abstract possibility; and the nihilism of pursuing the inherently unachievable.

Research in track I, notably in the Critical Theory tradition, is a predictable blend of some fairly simple ideas about the institutional and cultural blockages to the achievement of class-consciousness and a preoccupation with depersonalization and alienation. Track II, on the other hand, is arguably a more innovative and empirically rich tradition (Shils, 1982[1970]). Sociologists in track II have also taken seriously the possibility and the challenge of a non-partisan sociology, something regarded with suspicion by the practitioners of track I, even to the point of ridicule. The traditional Weberian principle of ‘value-freedom’ was given a distinctive twist by Elias. He distinguished between different types of evaluation: ‘autonomous’ evaluations being the professional, institutionalized scientific standards which have to be safeguarded through detachment against the intrusion of ‘heteronomous’ evaluations coming from non-scientific interests and ideologies outside the institutional practice of science itself (Elias, 2007[1987]: 72–3). This model does not imply denial or avoidance of value issues such as discrimination and inequality, let alone complicity in them. Rather, it involves their initial suspension in favour of a ‘detour via detachment’ in order to investigate their plausibility and to try to build up a reliable factual basis for value-judgements. Evaluating becomes possible in a new key as the researcher returns to the value issues better armed to grasp the partiality of their philosophical or political formulations (Kilminster, 2007, 2011).

Adopting Elias’s framework as a preliminary workable central theory, to be corrected and adapted through research, could also function for sociologists as an alternative to the dominant practice of theoretical eclecticism. Employing multi-theoretical approaches in principle fits hand in glove with the day-to-day operation of liberal academic institutions for which it functions as a modus vivendi. It also possesses impeccable democratic credentials reinforced by a strong moral undertone. In addition to the drawbacks I spelled out in the Introduction, eclecticism in practice is also wasteful of human effort. The absence of a unifying framework means that knowledge in the autonomous sub-fields multiplies blindly, self-driven mainly by professional ambition and status competition. It reproduces on a huge scale a fragmented and uneven sociology with little or no knowledge accumulation across the specialisms. ⁷ This condition affects the reputation of sociology and contributes to a lowering of its public credibility. In the light of these pressures and constraints, Elias’s unifying approach constitutes a promising, but challenging, way forward for sociology in the 21^st century.