What is Sociology?What is Sociology? presents in concise and provocative form the major ideas of a seminal thinker whose work--spanning more than four decades--is only now gaining the recognition here it has long had in Germany and France. Unlike other post-war sociologists, Norbert Elias has always held the concept of historical development among his central concerns; his dynamic theories of the evolution of modern man have remedied the historical and epistemological shortcomings of structualism and ethno-methodology. What is Sociology? refines the arguments that were first found in Elias' massive work on the civilizing process, in which he formulated his major assertions about the interdependence of the making of modern man and modern society. It is Elias' contention that changes in personality structure--embodied in phenomena ranging from table manners and hygiene habits to rites of punishment and courtly love--inevitably reflect and mould patterns of control generated by new political and social instututions. Elias' rejection of a dichotomy between individual and society, and his use of psychoanalysis, political theory, and social history, help restore a fullness of resource to sociology. |
Contents
Authors acknowledgements | 7 |
Translators acknowledgements | 9 |
Foreword | 11 |
Introduction | 13 |
Sociology the questions asked by Comte | 33 |
From a philosophical to a sociological theory of knowledge | 37 |
From nonscientific to scientific knowledge | 38 |
The scientific investigation of the sciences | 41 |
Universal features of human society | 104 |
The need for new means of speaking and thinking | 111 |
A critique of sociological categories | 113 |
The personal pronouns as a figurational model | 122 |
The concept of figuration | 128 |
Human interdependencies problems of social bonds | 134 |
Political and economic bonds | 138 |
The development of the concept of development | 145 |
Sociology as a relatively autonomous science | 45 |
The problem of scientific specialization | 47 |
The sociologist as a destroyer of myths | 50 |
Game models | 71 |
model of a contest without rules | 76 |
models of interweaving processes with norms | 80 |
Commentary | 91 |