Ruben Flores, Apropos “The Collected Works of Norbert Elias”. An Interview with Stephen J. Mennell, in Sociologica 3/2014, doi: 10.2383/79482 (original) (raw)
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Apropos “The Collected Works of Norbert Elias”. An Interview with Stephen J. Mennell
Sociologica
Ruben Flores: What was it like to edit the eighteen volumes of the Collected Works of Norbert Elias in English? Stephen J. Mennell: Well-a lot of work! I think I need to explain a lot about the background to this enormous project. In the 1970s and 1980s, Elias had become good friends with Siegfried Unseld, the famous head of Suhrkamp, the great German publishers. As a result, Suhrkamp published all of Elias's books from then onwards. And, after his death, they agreed to bring out revised scholarly editions of all of Elias's work, including translations of the books and essays that Elias had written in English. The resulting Gesammelte Schriften runs to nineteen volumes-they included a volume of Elias's poetry too, which we decided could not be translated into English. That explains why there is one fewer volume in the English series. 1 x This interview took place in the context of the International Research Seminar Series at the School of Sociology of the Higher School of Economics (HSE) in Moscow. Special thanks to Professor Stephen Mennell, who not only accepted to be interviewed, but also kindly added footnotes to the interview text.
Sociologica, 2011
Licenza d'uso L'articoloè messo a disposizione dell'utente in licenza per uso esclusivamente privato e personale, senza scopo di lucro e senza fini direttamente o indirettamente commerciali. Salvo quanto espressamente previsto dalla licenza d'uso Rivisteweb,è fatto divieto di riprodurre, trasmettere, distribuire o altrimenti utilizzare l'articolo, per qualsiasi scopo o fine. Tutti i diritti sono riservati. 's work has long been overshadowed in its value as sociological theory by readings that focused on the most superficial and methodologically showy aspects of his most important research, The Civilizing Process. To give just one example, Berthelot writes at the conclusion of his The construction of sociology: "What didn't I talk about in this book? [...] I left out Edward Wilson's socio-biology (1929 -) and the historical sociology which has boosted Norbert Elias's work [...] As for historical sociology (in some ways a reaction to the "anti-historicist anathemas" of structuralism and Popper's epistemology) I do not think it harms the dignity of sociology, and even of history, to say that this is history, albeit with broader concepts than usual, but still history " [Berthelot 2005, 117]. It seems that Elias cannot get rid of a constant refrain: too sociologist for historians and too historian for sociologists. Yet if this volume -the sixteenth of the collected works being published by the Norbert Elias Foundation at UCD Press -has a main theme, it is that of sociology's field and its epistemological and methodological status. And (as the subtitle chosen by the editors suggests) its relation to the humanities. The 28 essays contained in the volume (at least half of them published in English for the first time and others practically unknown), cover very different issues. They were mostly written in the most fertile period of the author's publishing activity -that following his retirement -although there are also some older texts, reflecting among other things, the constant threads that accompany questions of his prolific and long-lasting cognitive science. Like previous volumes in the series, this one has been very carefully edited and annotated to improve the readability of the texts.
"Individual" action and its "social" consequences in the work of Norbert Elias
Human Figurations: Essays for/Aufsätze für Norbert Elias, 1977
This article is a contribution to the Festschrift presented to Norbert Elias on his eightieth birthday in 1977. It discusses the problem of the “unintended consequences of purposive social action” which sociologists came to associate particularly with the work of Robert K. Merton. The idea also became associated with what came to be known as the “Thomas theorem” – William Isaac Thomas’s dictum that “situations which men define as real are real in their consequences”, which Merton then unhelpfully entangled with “self-fulfilling prophecies. The article argues that work of Norbert Elias, and in particular the “games models” set out in chapter 3 of What is Sociology?, offers a much more comprehensive understanding of the centrality of unintended consequences to the discipline of sociology. The article concludes “One cannot help speculating how different might be the state of sociology today if his writings had been accorded the attention they deserve, and if indeed they had been published when they were first written. That question, however, pales into insignificance compared with another. How different might be the state of society at large if the nature of the problems with which Elias deals – the sources of opacity in the processes of human interweaving and the compelling figurational trends which make people act as they do – were widely understood, grasped, and resolved?” Full reference: "Individual" action and its "social" consequences in the work of Norbert Elias, in Human Figurations: Essays for / Aufsätze für Norbert Elias, ed. Peter Gleichmann, Johan Goudsblom and Hermann Korte (Amsterdam: Stichting Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift, 1977), pp. 99–109.
Norbert Elias: A proposed intellectual portrait for the 20th anniversary of his passing (1990-2010)
Catalan Social Sciences Review 2012 http://www.raco.cat/index.php/CSSR/article/view/251771, 2012
In the summer of 1990, one of the most eminent sociologists of the 20th century, the German Norbert Elias, died in Amsterdam. His profoundly interwoven life and work are a reflection of the complexity the light and shade of the past century. With this proposed intellectual portrait on the 20th anniversary of his death, we are attempting offer a snapshot a figure and a body of work which, because of its magnitude and originality, undoubtedly deserves to be considered among the most important in sociology. As the thread running through this portrait, we propose a combination of the physical and symbolic places, spaces and people, events and connections that marked a long life and academic career which was little known and largely unrecognised until his later years. It is a career which unquestionably constitutes one of the most outstanding and attractive legacies that the sociology of the past century has passed on to new generations of social science researchers.
The Reception of Norbert Elias's Work within the UK
While Elias has become a more influential sociologist worldwide, his reception in the UK remains patchy. To explore the enigma of his reception, this research seeks for a deeper understanding of the social intellectual and institutional processes that have impacted on his reception in the UK. The research was carried out by qualitative interviews. 11 Eliasians scholars participated in various ways including face-to-face, online and email interview. Results from interview data show the reception of Elias’s work in the UK encompasses three phases. The first is the process of how Eliasian sociologists came to Elias is accidental, which was mainly influenced by personal relationship, teaching, and Elias’s work and research. The second phase is the resistance on uniqueness and outsidership by the first generation of Eliasians has hindered his reception in the UK. The final phase is that adaptations and adjustments made by the new generation of Eliasians have contributed to a new understanding of Elias’s work within British sociology context. It shows the characteristics of British sociology in less influence in intellectual figures, disputed debates on a variety of topics and significance of empirical research. Taking those together, the research gaps the overstatement on the differences between Elias’s sociology and mainstream sociology in literature. The research provides a way of understanding Elias’s reception in the UK by a secondary type of a combination of Elias’s work and British sociology tradition.
Twenty-five years on: Norbert Elias’s intellectual legacy 1990–2015
Human Figurations, 2015
This paper is essentially a study in the sociology of science. In the natural sciences certainly, but also in the social sciences, the work of even very prominent researchers is often forgotten after their death. This has not happened in the case of Norbert Elias, whose influence has tended rather to increase since his death in 1990. For a school of thought to survive, it has often been noted, it is essential that it has a nucleus of advocates, and also an organisational framework. This essay traces in particular the work of the Norbert Elias Foundation, based in Amsterdam, as Elias's executors, in promoting Elias's ideas, and the impact of those ideas on the work of scholars in many parts of the world.
Norbert Elias's post-philosophical sociology: from ‘critique’ to relative detachment
The Sociological Review, 2011
This paper argues that Elias's work presupposes a radical abandonment of philosophy as a vestige of magical–mythical thinking that has been rendered obsolete by the rise of sociology. For Elias, attempts by philosophers to claim a continuing non-empirical area of investigation are spurious and reflect only professional interests. The origins of Elias's position are traced to his rejection of neo-Kantianism and his participation in the Wissenssoziologie of Karl Mannheim in Weimar Germany. Focusing on the traditional ethical or normative questions, the paper shows how Elias's conception of the ‘detour via detachment’ enabled him to transcribe these issues (as well as traditional epistemological and ontological questions) into sociologically manageable terms. His strategy is further clarified through a comparison with the all-pervasive Critical Sociology approach to these matters, which emerges as severely handicapped by its reliance upon quasi-metaphysical, transcendental ...
Eliasian Sociology as a ‘Central Theory’ for the Human Sciences
Current Sociology, 2005
For the last three decades, sociology has been in a permanent state of theoretical and programmatic disarray. Symptoms of the crisis include ambivalence about the possible scientific status of sociological knowledge, theoretical and methodological fragmentation and ambivalence about the appropriate degree of political and ethical 'involvement' in the sociological stance, and deep-seated anxieties about the relationship between sociology and neighbouring disciplines across the human sciences. Through a comprehensive exegesis of his major contributions, it is argued that Norbert Elias provides the foundations for a 'central theory', integrating diverse theoretical traditions within sociology, whilst providing a clear framework for establishing a synthesis across the full range of (social and biological) human sciences. In short, Elias provides us with the rudiments of a comprehensive human science, with sociology well placed to play an orchestrating role in the investigation of phenomena at the highest level of integration.
Norbert Elias and Figurational Sociology: Interview With Stephen Mennell
Sociologia & Antropologia, 2022
This is an interview with Stephen Mennell and a set of texts related to Norbert Elias’s figurational sociology that make up the current volume of Sociologia & Antropologia. Mennell provides readers with a review of figurational sociology, as well as its reception and diffusion. More specifically, he reflects upon Elias’s legacies for sociology and his movement away from philosophy; the publication of the collected works of Norbert Elias; authors who influenced Elias; the importance of the sociology of knowledge and the sciences in the body of Elias’s work; the understanding of the concepts of civilising and decivilising processes, and functional democratisation and de-democratisation; resemblances and differentiations between Elias and Bourdieu; concluding with some reflections on the book The American Civilizing Process, published by Mennell in 2007, and on the use of figurational sociology for the study of current political issues.