Abstract
Stephen Dunne’s (2014) article is an indignant and rather verbose philosopher’s attack on Norbert Elias, ‘figurational sociologists’, anonymous ‘followers’ and ‘supporters’ generally, and on me in particular. We play fast and loose with the age-old tradition of philosophy in the name of an over-estimated and much-vaunted figurational sociology. These dupes are said to have swallowed hook, line and sinker Elias’s fallacious and arrogant claim definitively to have ‘overcome’ philosophy as well as his belief that that is a good thing for sociology. Dunne says that ‘rhetorical motifs buttress the belief that figurational sociology has done away with philosophy, without its actually having done so’ (2014: 78; original emphasis). I think Dunne’s understanding of Elias is very deficient. He has also misrepresented my work and to make his case has descended into unprincipled vilification of his opponents as well as exegetical obfuscation and trickery.
My term ‘post-philosophical’, which I have used to describe Elias’s approach, seems to have provoked much of Dunne’s ire. He stubbornly persists with a formalistic interpretation of this idea throughout the article. I innocently assumed that informed social scientists would recognize that Elias was, over a long period, developing a sociological theory of the growth of human knowledge, a processual theory that was simultaneously theoretical and empirical. Elias saw Auguste Comte as the first sociologist of the growth of scientific knowledge. In effect Comte had begun to see how, from a medieval world in which ‘philosophy’ embraced pretty well all branches of knowledge, over the centuries the various empirical sciences had become differentiated out of the philosophical protoplasm as it were – first the physical, then the biological, and most recently the social sciences.
In its modern form, ‘philosophy’ has been left as an empty husk. Scholars will of course continue to study philosophy as an important aspect of intellectual history. But the failure of philosophers fully to embrace the theoretical-empirical knowledge generated by their historic discipline’s intellectual progeny and their pretence of still being able to legislate from on high, guaranteed the increasing peripheralization of philosophy. Figurational sociology has not ‘done away’ with philosophy, rather the culprit is the historical process through which philosophers have become defunctionalized. In his essay on ‘Scientific Establishments’, Elias drew attention to how antique disciplines still attract great deference and carry great prestige within the academy, which philosophers actively cultivate. Dunne’s taking for granted the superiority and precedence of philosophizing over the pursuit of sociological knowledge demonstrates how difficult it is for even younger scholars to emancipate themselves from ancient patterns of thought.
So thorough has been Dunne’s absorption of philosophy that he fails to grasp the sociological significance of the human self-image of homo clausus developed by Elias. Dunne wildly reduces it to a ‘false idol’ underpinning a ‘rhetorical caricature of a straw-man [sic] called philosophy’ (2014: 90). For him, it is an ideological construct used by figurational sociologists, something he asserts under the careless and ambiguous sub-heading of ‘The arrogance of homo clausus’, which could easily be read as corroborating Elias’s concept as its opposite. Any competent sociologist can see that it is part of Elias’s sociological theory of knowledge. It refers to an empirically demonstrable, specific human self-experience associated with modern societies which underpins western individualism in all its modes, including the Cartesian-Kantian philosophers’ conception of the knowing ‘subject’.
There is an animus running through Dunne’s pretentious prose which drives him towards the dubious tactic of discrediting writers’ ideas by impugning their integrity, particularly when the status of philosophy is at stake. He takes Elias to task for his ‘arrogance’, ‘hubristic posturing’ and intellectual ‘one-upmanship’. I am guilty of ‘dogmatic rhetoric’; my arguments are ‘spurious’; I ‘hedge my bets’; and my apparent reliance on ‘subtextual hearsay’ is ‘obviously self-serving’. At one point Dunne tellingly states that ‘Eliasian scholars’ make ‘a claim towards post-philosophical sanctuary’ (2014: 78). Sanctuary from what? From the incapacitating doubts generated by Cartesian scepticism? Is this Dunne’s problem? That he is resentful of Elias’s certainty, something he wishes he could also achieve to lift the terrible burden of philosophical doubt from his own shoulders?
Dunne’s approach consists of the mechanical application of a style of arguing taken slavishly from the analytical philosophers’ handbook. The professional patois of ‘engagement’, ‘accounts’, ‘grounds’ and ‘logic’ is on display along with the familiar manoeuvre of creating fetishized ‘claims’ and ‘positions’. Dunne’s arguments against me are organized under three convoluted ‘isms’ of his own creation: ‘A Selective Subtextualism’, ‘Premature Rejectionism’ and ‘Disingenuous Pragmatism’ which are not an aid but a needless impediment to comprehension. Everything he ponderously explains under these contrived headings boils down to the following. I supposedly reduce the content of Elias’s doctoral dissertation entirely to Elias conforming with what his powerful professorial supervisor wanted, imposing on to the text what Elias ‘really’ meant. Hence, I disregard the text itself, which is independent of such ‘subtextual’ influence. As a text, it supports the possibility of founding sociology on an augmented neo-Kantian epistemology rather than abandoning it.
In order to establish my ‘subtextual determinism’, Dunne goes in for a piece of exegetical trickery (2014: 84). He cites a long quotation from me (Kilminster, 1998: 4) recommending two prescriptions for the development of sociology, which are that it should develop its own epistemology and distance itself from philosophers’ instructions. But alas, the quotation has been manufactured. Dunne has adapted it to fit his argument against me. The last sentence after the ellipsis, saying that I treat the establishment of philosophers as a ‘structured group’, has been taken from the paragraph following and substituted for the actual one which follows the prescriptions. The result of this substitution is that the crucial point about power that I was making in the original sentence and which was behind my prescriptions – that is, the tendency of higher-ranking disciplines (such as philosophy) to impose their categories and patterns of thought on lower ones (such as sociology) – has been airbrushed out. The substituted sentence is from a different discussion and while it mentions the higher rank of philosophy in relation to sociology, it was not relevant there to mention the issue of its power to impose its categories on other disciplines. Presumably Dunne hoped that the doctored quotation would definitively ‘prove’ my prescriptive commitment to a blanket ‘subtextual determinism’ and no one would notice. But it has rebounded upon him. Creating a phony quotation is an inexcusable piece of unprofessional chicanery and undermines Dunne’s credibility.
Of course I know that Elias’s doctoral thesis, far from rejecting Kant in every respect, shows sympathy with certain of his formulations and concerns. This is hardly surprising in the light of Elias’s philosophical education. In many places Elias describes Kant as a ‘great’ thinker. I have said many times that neo-Kantianism posed the problems about the nature of science that Elias went on to try to solve. But a point of departure is not the same thing as providing a ‘foundation’ (2014: 82) for Elias’s subsequent sociology. What Dunne does not see is that Elias’s dissertation contains Kantian commitments and is tentatively pointing in another direction, towards a sociological theory of knowledge. Once he had consolidated this break, his inquiries gradually became structurally different from philosophy, not founded upon it. I argue that case using circumstantial evidence about the wider revolt against neo-Kantianism and by combining that with a close analysis of Elias’s texts: with what Elias himself says in his Reflections on a Life and in his piece ‘On Re-reading My Doctoral Dissertation’ from 1984, a document which Dunne did not consult. There is no institutionalist determinism on my part at all. In relation to my analysis this accusation is a chimera.
Dunne made a big mistake when he went to press in March 2014 confessing in a footnote not to have been able to locate the latter document, so crucial for our understanding of Elias’s dissertation. In fact, Elias’s piece on rereading his dissertation has been available for 20 years (in Elias, 1994: 152–3) and was also reproduced in Elias (2013), a year ago. Dunne’s sloppiness and lack of initiative are glaring. In this text Elias speaks of the ‘frightening philosophical idiom’ (ibid.: 302) of his dissertation and mentions how he had to compromise with Hönigswald by conceding in the summary that the principle of Geltung (the central problematic of the dissertation not mentioned by Dunne) was not subject to the movement of the historical process, thus contradicting what he suggested in the dissertation. Elias remarks: ‘I made my bow to the philosophical fetish of the concept of validity (Geltung).’ He adds that nevertheless the concept plays a part in the ‘sequential order’ of the development of human knowledge. ‘But for philosophers, as the secularized heirs of theological ways of thinking, it often acts as a symbol of their own aspirations to float in a dimension of eternity above the ceaseless flow of evolution’ (ibid.: 303). This statement is highly significant for our understanding of the nature of philosophy and Elias’s attitude towards the tradition, but is apparently beyond the ken of Dunne.