Watching something truly brilliant be overlooked year after year in favor of the tried-and-true is a particular kind of frustration. Marx on the whiteboard, Weber in the syllabus, and Durkheim dog-eared in someone’s backpack are the usual suspects that dominate the conversation when you walk into any social theory seminar. Norbert Elias was then discreetly tucked away in a corner of the reading list—perhaps a footnote, perhaps nothing at all. Without exaggeration, the most overlooked card in any sociological collection is the theory card that highlights his work. That has been the situation for many years. And it’s really perplexing.
Born in 1897, Elias was a German-Jewish sociologist whose career developed in situations that would have completely silenced a lesser thinker. One of the worst years for a Jewish scholar to publish in Europe was 1939, when his seminal work, The Civilizing Process, was released. The book received little attention. An English-language edition would not find a readership for almost thirty years, and even then, mainstream sociology advanced slowly. In a way unrelated to the caliber of the ideas, the timing was cruel. It’s difficult to ignore how the institutional amnesia surrounding him was shaped by the delay in recognition, which sociologists are still trying to reverse.
The idea at the heart of the Elias theory card, the figuration, is what makes it so valuable and frequently undervalued. At first, it sounds almost abstract. However, if you give it some thought, you’ll see that it’s among the most accurate depictions of how social life really operates. Figurations are the dynamic, fluid, and power-laden webs of interdependence that bind people together over time. Elias described it using the metaphor of a dance. The dancers shift. The tune shifts. However, the dance goes on. The idea that society is constantly in motion, constantly incomplete, and constantly in the middle of a sentence is captured by that image in a way that words like “social structure” or “system” never quite manage to.
Many aspects of modern social theory seem to have yet to fully take this into account. When messy, dynamic frameworks are actually more accurate, analysts tend to favor static ones. Elias contended that when thousands of interdependent actors are moving at once, no single player, no matter how strong, can control the outcome of a social game. That concept seems remarkably up to date. It also seems to be something that is discreetly rediscovered every few years without due credit.
Norbert Elias’ concept of sociogenesis, which holds that society is constantly in media res and in the process of changing, is also included on the theory card. Clean starting points don’t exist. No neat conclusions. simply continuous processes of transformation arising from previous configurations. Some academic traditions that favor cleaner causal chains may find his work unsettling for precisely this reason. Elias maintained that concepts like “cause and effect” were inadequate to convey the intricacy he was discussing.
Elias has long been regarded as one of the greatest in Germany and the Netherlands. Recognition arrived more slowly and sparingly in North America and Britain. He was referred to as “the most important thinker you’ve never heard of” by Steven Pinker, which is simultaneously praising and disparaging. There appears to be momentum as the English edition of The Collected Works of Norbert Elias now consists of eighteen volumes. It’s still unclear if that momentum will result in a true mainstream presence.
One thing that seems certain is that any sociological collection that does not include the Elias theory card is lacking something essential. Not because it’s difficult to understand. since it’s correct.
