Norbert Elias's Post-Philosophical Sociology: From ‘Critique’ to Relative Detachment

Introduction

Norbert Elias's work constitutes a radical rejection of many of the common assumptions of twentieth-century sociology, particularly the trends dominant since 1945. For example, contrary to the widely held view of the discipline, he did not conceive of sociology as the study solely of advanced societies within the foreshortened timescale of ‘modernity’. Rather, he saw it as including the study of long-term processes over the whole course of the development of human society. In opposition to the orthodox sociology of ‘modernity’, Elias's work represented a sociology of the human condition (Kilminster, 2007a: 5). This conception of sociology went back a long way in Elias's intellectual development. In a conference response in 1928 on primitive art (Elias, 2006a [1929]: 75) he said that ‘if one wishes to understand man, if one wishes to understand oneself – every period of history is equally relevant to us’. Later in his life he also explicitly opposed several of the major paradigms of sociology, including structural functionalism, Marxism, phenomenology and systems theory. He typically found them to be, in various combinations: individualistic, rationalistic, ideological, economistic, abstract, static, over-analytic at the expense of synthesis, or lacking a developed sociological psychology.

Elias also censured other disciplines, notably history and psychology, for their individualism and narrowness of scope. But it was on the question of the relationship between sociology and philosophy that he was at his most trenchant, uncompromising and controversial. The strident and total rejection of philosophy that we find in Elias is rare in sociology. In the twentieth century, sociologists gradually established themselves institutionally in various countries. Central to this was their perception of the autonomy of a range of regularities sui generis (‘society’, ‘sociation’, ‘the social’, ‘sociality’, or whatever word it was given) and their scientific and professional claim to the investigation of this field. It became clear to many sociologists ¹ that the arrival of the social sciences, including sociology, was of great significance for the intellectual authority of philosophy. Not only was philosophy no longer competent to investigate – theoretically or empirically – complex social processes, but also the sociological perspective promised to take over much of what had been traditionally the competence of philosophers, particularly in the time-honoured areas of epistemology, ontology and ethics. Naturally the philosophers responded, asserting their claim to competence and expertise in conceptual work, logic, clarification or other non-empirical, ‘second-order’ matters in order to legitimate their changing professional existence (Kilminster, 1998, chapter 1).

Subsequently, many sociologists have conceded to philosophers this range of non-empirical or ‘transcendental’ problems, usually to do with ‘truth claims’, a priori suppositions or the question of validity. This is part of an intellectual modus vivendi in the context of professional disciplinary relations in academic institutions. However, in this ethos, the longer-term cognitive issues raised by Elias about the subject matter and fate of philosophy are for the most part suppressed. Even Karl Mannheim – whose work in the 1920s on the sociology of knowledge was widely regarded as a challenge to philosophy – conceded ‘the structural autonomy of the philosophical level of problems’ (quoted by Meja and Stehr, 1990: 295). Elias refused to make even this concession. He was utterly opposed to the hegemony of philosophy and the subtle intrusion of philosophical modes of thought into sociology. He advised his fellow sociologists, whose discipline is of lower status than philosophy, not to defer automatically to philosophers' guidance in the task of building up a sociological research programme. Elias's own sociological work is grounded in a sociological theory of knowledge and the sciences, rather than in the traditional assumptions of conventional philosophical epistemology and philosophy of science. This is one of the main ways in which he differs from contemporary sociologists and from ‘social theorists’ in particular, who are generally far more deferential towards philosophy. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, ‘social theory’, as it is practised today, is effectively philosophizing by another name (Kilminster, 1998: 127–9; 176–8).

At the core of Elias's ‘figurational’ or ‘process’ sociology, then, is a rejection of philosophy as a superseded, pre-modern form of transcendental thinking. In view of the high prestige and virtually unquestioned intellectual authority of philosophy in academic circles and beyond, Elias's position on this subject will seem to stretch his credibility to the limit. In my view, though, taking Elias's argument seriously and following it through is part and parcel of the challenge that his work as a whole represents. This paper first traces the origins of Elias's rationale for the historical supersession of philosophy. Secondly, it explores its implications in relation to the place of sociologists' moral and political values (or what are commonly referred to as ‘normative’ questions) in the framing of their research. The focus will be on the shortcomings of the dominant ‘critical’ perspective on this issue. Let us now turn to the origins of Elias's thinking on this subject.

The sociological mission

Elias wrote his doctoral thesis at Breslau under the neo-Kantian philosopher Richard Hönigswald, from whom he acknowledged that he learned a great deal, even though the relationship ended in their estrangement. The thesis was entitled ‘Idea and Individual: a critical investigation of the concept of history’ (Elias, 2006b [1922]: 23–53) and was eventually accepted in January 1924, after a delay of more than a year occasioned by a dispute between student and supervisor. Their dispute concerned an issue fundamental for the whole neo-Kantian movement: whether there are any grounds for postulating a notion of truth that is transcendental, a priori to and independent of, human experience and human history. At stake here was the whole problematic of Geltung (validity) as a realm of valid knowledge held by some philosophers to be timeless and effectively absolute. Elias could not accept that in a time-bound world there could be anything timeless. The philosophers' insistence on this alerted him to its role as part of a professional ideology (Elias, 1994: 153).

In arguing against the vaunted principle of Geltung, Elias was part of an intellectual and generational movement which challenged the relevance of the neo-Kantianism of the older generation of philosophers that dominated philosophy departments in German universities. This challenge was predicated upon the charge that neo-Kantianism was incapable of dealing with the real and serious problems of society thrown into relief by the carnage of the First World War and the economic crises and political violence of the post-War years. That philosophy was an idealistic, individualistic, philosophy of consciousness, which, in its preoccupation with epistemology, Geltung and methodology, ignored or implicitly devalued the real world. As Michael Zank (2002: 17) has put it, this younger generation (which included Elias) was ‘nauseated by the sanctimonious cultivation of vast theoretical solutions to concrete practical problems’. They emphatically turned away from the philosophical systems and values that they saw as having led to the war and contributed to sustaining it. At the time, the philosopher Margarete Sussman spoke of an ‘exodus out of philosophy’ (quoted in Zank, 2002: 17).

The movement that challenged these priorities has been called the ‘onto-hermeneutic turn’ (Crowell, 1999: 186) in twentieth-century German academic philosophy. This consisted of a widespread incredulity towards the Kantian notions of the thing-in-itself, the knowing subject, fixed a priori categories and the idea of ‘pure knowing’ in general, as well as an acute awareness of the cul-de-sac of solipsism. Many of these objections and problems appeared in various combinations in Elias's doctoral dissertation (Elias, 2006b [1922]). They resurfaced in the context of sociological polemics in Elias's later programmatic writings and lectures on the sociology of knowledge (for example, Elias, 2009a [1971]; 2009b [1982]; 1984). In these later writings and lectures, in the course of a robust sociological re-evaluation of them, Elias showed a fluent familiarity with the philosophical controversies of his youth.

After his dispute with Hönigswald, Elias transferred into sociology under Alfred Weber in Heidelberg and from 1929 to 1933 became Karl Mannheim's first assistant (Hans Gerth was the second) in Frankfurt. Over time Elias developed a broader thesis: that the whole central tradition of modern Western epistemology, from Descartes through Kant to twentieth-century phenomenology, was misconceived. It was based on asking how a single, adult, human mind can know what it knows. Elias called this the model of homo clausus, the ‘closed person’, and found it lurking in much of modern sociology as well (Elias, 2000 [1969]: 470–9; 1978 [1970]: 119 ff.; Mennell, 1998: 188–93; Kilminster, 1998: 57–92). He argued that we must instead think in terms of homines aperti, ‘open people’, and in particular of ‘long lines of generations of people’ building up the stock of human knowledge. This should be our working assumption, not how an individual can come to know something or make moral judgements through the application of Reason. The crucial point, however, which he developed in The Civilizing Process and other later works, was that the image of homo clausus corresponded to a mode of self-experience that was not a human universal but was a social product, particularly associated with developments within and between European societies from the Renaissance onwards. ²

For an adequate understanding of Elias, then, it is essential to appreciate how his sociology developed out of the desire to transcribe philosophical discussions of knowledge, society, culture and the human condition into a form amenable to empirical sociological investigation. These questions included those traditionally grouped under epistemology, ontology and ethics (that is, ‘evaluative’ or ‘normative’ questions), which reappear in Elias's works transcribed into a sociological idiom. One cannot overemphasize the robustly sociological character of Elias's world-view. He considered that his work presupposed the supersession of philosophy and he persistently questioned the authority of philosophers, refusing to enter into discussions conducted in philosophical categories (Elias, 2009b [1982]; 2009c [1985]; Kilminster, 1998: 3–26). In the reception of his work in recent years, the significance of its ‘post-philosophical’ character has not always been fully understood (Kilminster, 2007a).

On the subject of epistemology, from as early in his career as when he was a doctoral student under Hönigswald, there were indications in Elias's doctoral dissertation that he was moving in the direction of developing a sociological epistemology to replace the traditional philosophical one (Kilminster and Wouters, 1995). He could not have put it that way at the time, but this interpretation can be plausibly applied with hindsight. This transformed epistemology would relate ways of knowing to the patterned ways in which human beings live together, and remodel the traditional issue of Geltung. This realization gathers momentum in his work to a point where he makes a complete break with philosophy, decisively turning his back on the tradition. The failure to grasp this feature of his thinking has sometimes led some commentators to try to pull Elias back into the philosophy from which his life's work was a sustained attempt at emancipation (for example Maso, 1995); or to criticize him from philosophical positions that he regarded himself as already having moved beyond (Sathaye, 1973). As far as Elias was concerned, ‘Traditional philosophical epistemology, in its transcendental form … [had] come to the end of its road’ (Elias, 2009b [1982]: 135).

The neo-Kantian philosophy in which Elias was initially schooled did, however, alert him to key areas of enquiry, including the problems of the historical adequacy of knowledge, the origins and status of ‘universal’ categories of thought, and the prevalence of the model of the individual knowing subject in epistemology. The classical German philosophical tradition generally, and neo-Kantianism in particular, thus constituted a point of departure for Elias's transfer of his intellectual energies into a dynamic and historical sociology, which he believed could provide a more inclusive and adequate framework for the solution of those problems. Once Elias had made this break, I would argue, his sociological enquiries became structurally different from philosophy. In his work, the philosophical residues form at best trace elements or transformed distant presuppositions (see Kilminster, 1998: chapter 1, 2007a: 34–35).

What philosophers have discussed under the heading of ontology, for example Heidegger's abstract notion of the historicity of human beings and the bond between present and past involved in historical research, reappears in a transformed guise in Elias and is given an empirical inflection (Kilminster, 2007a: 93 ff). They are reflected very clearly in the complex structure of The Civilizing Process, in which ‘present events illuminate the understanding of the past, and immersion in the past illuminates the present’ as he puts it (Elias, 2000 [1939]: 436). Metaphysical speculations by various philosophical realists about the ‘objects’ of the different sciences, or the so-called ‘modes of being’ postulated by fundamental ontologists such as Heidegger, provided the stimulus for Elias to develop a testable theory of the levels of integration (physical, chemical, biological, social, and so on) of the social and natural worlds investigated by the different sciences (Elias, 2007a [1956], 2009d [1974]). By so doing, Elias subverted the fundamental ontologists' distinction between the ontic and the ontological. He had implicitly rejected the whole transcendental–theological underpinning of a distinction that had been framed by the ontologists and which justified their professional status as the guardians of the abstract question of Being itself (Goldmann, 1977: 105; Steiner, 1978: 86–7; Kilminster, 1979: 226–9; Kilminster, 1998: chapter 1).

Similarly, discussions of values, value-relevance and value-freedom in Rickert and Max Weber are recast by Elias as the theory of involvement and detachment, in which the conceptions of ‘autonomous’ and ‘heteronomous’ evaluations play a central role (Elias, 2007a [1956]; Kilminster, 2007a: chapter 5; more on this below). One finds in Elias, therefore, a principled avoidance of philosophical concepts and the consistent substitution of sociological alternatives that are more amenable to empirical reference. More examples include: ‘truth’ is recast as ‘reality congruence’; ‘part/whole’ becomes ‘unit and part-unit’; ‘modes of being’ are reframed as levels of integration; and ‘abstractions’ are transformed into ‘symbols at a high level of synthesis’.

On the subject of ‘evaluative’ or ‘normative’ matters, or ‘ought’ questions, as philosophers call them, Elias commented very early in his career that ‘ethical questions are always, and quite wrongly, separated from other scientific questions’ (Elias, 2006c [1921]: 15). Furthermore, Elias's total commitment to sociology as a ‘mission’, which comes out clearly in his autobiographical Reflections on a Life (Elias, 1994) embraced an intense human commitment. He saw sociology as potentially able to assist human beings to orientate themselves in the figurations they form together and to help them to control the unintended social entanglements that threaten to escalate into destructive sequences such as mass killings and wars. The figurational view of society, and Elias's theories of civilizing processes and established–outsiders relations, are implicitly underpinned by the imperative of generating knowledge to help groups to achieve greater ‘mutual identification’ and thus to live in controlled antagonism with each other (de Swaan, 1995; 1997; Mennell, 1994). By implication, the level and type of abstraction of the transcendental inquiries of philosophers cannot generate the vivid, multi-faceted, concrete and relational knowledge required for this vital human task. Writers who have failed to grasp this aspect of Elias's work have tended, in their criticisms of him, to confuse the technical and normative dimensions of some of his concepts, for example, ‘civilization’ and ‘civilizing processes’ (for instance Leach, 1986; Bauman, 1989: 107). Elias was, however, aware of the ‘normative’ issue right from the start and had already, to his own satisfaction anyway, transformed the question and the relevant concepts into a sociological form amenable to empirical investigation (Fletcher, 1997: chapter 8).

The strong commitment of Elias (and the later sociologists working on extending his research programme) to empirical research can all too easily lead to a misunderstanding of the ‘moral’ dimension of his work, and to its being wrongly assimilated into the mode of ‘value-free’ sociological empiricism or even positivism (for example, Pels, 2003: 94–5). This matter can be clarified through briefly examining the links between Elias's thinking and Karl Mannheim's sociological programme from the 1920s and 1930s, in the development of which Elias participated (Kettler et al., 2008). He shared the spirit, if not the last letter, of this intellectual venture. In addition to advocating a ‘relational’ or ‘perspectival’ view of society (echoes of which we find in Elias – see Kilminster, 1998: 47–51), Mannheim's programme was at the same time intended to deal with questions normally gathered together under the umbrella of ‘ethics’, ‘politics’ or ‘evaluative’ and ‘existential’ questions. These pertained to the ways in which humankind might achieve greater happiness and fulfilment individually and socially within what Mannheim called ‘the forms of living together of man’ (Mannheim, 1957 [1935]: 43).

In Mannheim's scheme of things, when considering evaluative matters the investigator makes a theoretical move sideways, the intention of this method being to redefine the scope and limits of assertions by politicians, philosophers and others about the possibilities of human freedom, democracy and happiness, by showing them to be coming inevitably from differing ideological perspectives. It was only through these one-sided perspectives (‘involvements’ as Elias later called them) that access was even possible to knowledge of society, all knowledge being existentially bounded and perspectival. For Mannheim, objectivity is sought by ‘the translation of perspectives into the terms of another’ (1936: 270–1). Having made these moves, the investigator is then potentially better able to evaluate the feasibility or soundness of ‘ethical’ or ‘political’ issues in the form in which they were originally raised by the particular politician, party, or ideology. Mannheim refers to this theoretical journey as attaining a new form of ‘objectivity … in a roundabout fashion’ (1936: 270). These analytic steps then reach a point where the process ‘becomes a critique’ (1936: 256). (Mannheim probably meant critique (Kritik) here in a broadly Kantian epistemological sense, but with a possible simultaneous evaluative inflection – see later.)

Elias's version of the journey specifies that it is only by a ‘detour via detachment’ that sociologists can hope to gain more adequate knowledge of the structure of social events in which they themselves are also emotionally caught up (Elias, 2007b [1987]: 169–70). He shared Mannheim's ambition to transcribe so-called ethical and evaluative matters into sociologically manageable terms and thus to put the questions raised philosophically or ideologically on to another level. This position constitutes the pith and marrow of Elias's whole sociological programme.

This ‘evaluative’ intention also pervades the empirical–theoretical presentations that are laid out in The Civilizing Process. Elias opens the first volume with a sociogenetic inquiry, typical of the sociology of knowledge, into the origins of the concepts of Kultur and Zivilization, which were both redolent of the covert ideological dimension of Alfred Weber's sociology and other highly charged ideological conflicts at the time over whether civilized behaviour was the acme or the nadir of human social achievement. Amongst other things, the tacit task of The Civilizing Process is to reframe the range, applicability and realistic usefulness of these two key terms via sociological enquiry into their genesis in the European civilizing process in general. Significantly, Elias returns to the concepts in the final part of his book (2000 [1939]: 363–447) at a new level and re-poses the questions about human satisfaction, fulfilment and constraint embodied more ideologically in the antithesis which partly provided the starting point (Kilminster, 2007a: chapter 4).

Finally, it is important to point out that Elias had made a decision very early on in his career not to transform the discredited neo-Kantian philosophy by restructuring it in a new philosophical direction, say towards fundamental ontology or existentialism, or a new form of Kantian apriorism on the lines of Ernst Cassirer. But rather, his decision was to abandon ³ it altogether. Elias had been profoundly touched by another thorny debate in Weimar Germany. In an era of fundamental questioning, many philosophers and others even questioned the autonomy of philosophy itself or declared the ‘end’ of philosophy (Crowell, 1999: 186; Kilminster, 1998: 25–6). Agonised debates went on about the subject in Weimar Germany and many feared that sociology – and the sociology of knowledge in particular – represented a dangerous threat to philosophy (Arendt, 1990 [1930]; see also Kilminster, 2007a: 24). The autonomy of philosophy was usually justified in the final analysis by transcendental arguments of one kind or another. Out of these conflicts a division of labour emerged. Philosophers conceded that socio-historical study was the task of the empirical social sciences, including sociology. The province of philosophy, however, was reclaimed by the philosophers as ‘systematics’, that is, non-empirical, ‘second-order’, transcendental reflection arising out of the empirical sciences. This dualism appeared in different guises, according to the school of philosophy concerned, and continues to shape the perception of the two subject areas to the present day (for a detailed tabulation see Kilminster, 1998: 16–17). The Heideggerian distinction between the ontic (the objects of the sciences) and the ontological (the Being of the world) referred to earlier, follows the same pattern. Elias did not accept this division of labour between the two disciplines, instead turning his back on the various arguments from ‘transcendence’ involved in its construction (Kilminster, 2010).

Furthermore, this rejection cannot be reduced to an idiosyncratic whim on Elias's part. My point is that it is in fact an organic and principled part of his perspective as a whole. It was based on a scientific conviction that the entire tradition of philosophy is historically defunct and cognitively deficient. For him, it would be scientifically and intellectually dishonest to argue otherwise. Philosophy is revealed as a superseded and potentially disorienting form of human orientation related to theology and magical mythical thought (van Benthem van den Bergh, 1986: 110). ⁴ Its demise was part of a social transformation in which the questions posed by the philosophers were continually being transposed on to another level as sociology, as part of a longer-term process that I have called elsewhere the ‘Sociological Revolution’ (Kilminster, 1998). This process had left the practitioners of philosophy historically defunctionalized, so driving them as a defence of their profession into creating their own fields of inquiry and expertise and laying claim to them (Elias, 2009b [1982]; Kilminster, 1998: chapter 1). From their superior position in the academic pecking order, philosophers have arrogated to themselves the authority to dictate to other fields what their methods and forms of explanation should be. But this authority is purely a product of the institutional power advantage and prestige of the philosophy establishment. That is no guarantee in itself of the cognitive weight or value of the justifications that underpin it. Elias's stance is the strong and final one that philosophy is based on an archaic form of non-empirical (transcendental) speculation that produces abstract reflections of little cognitive value. Hence, to continue with it is self-evidently pointless. Put in these terms, Elias's position – taken to its furthest conclusions – clearly poses a challenge for sociologists and philosophers, most of whom partake in the mythical aura surrounding philosophy. As he remarked, with some understatement, ‘It is not easy to abandon work of such intellectual grandeur and prestige’ (Elias, 2009a [1971]: 35).

On being ‘critical’ in sociology

Judging by the frequency with which sociologists today remind us of their ‘critical’ credentials, the issue of how political and moral commitments should or should not play themselves out in the everyday professional life of social scientists, is clearly one of the abiding concerns of the discipline. The distinctiveness of Elias's ‘post-philosophical’ sociology can be conveyed most compellingly in relation to these questions. (Rather, that is, than in relation to the more rarefied areas of philosophical epistemology and ontology, even though Elias's work has much to contribute also to the sociological transformation of these traditional subject areas; see Kilminster, 1998: chapter 1, 2007a: chapters 2 & 3, and 2010). As we have seen, these matters have traditionally been gathered together under the umbrella of ‘ethics’, ‘politics’ or ‘evaluative’, ‘normative’ and ‘political’ questions. At the present time, the ‘critical theory’ perspective is probably the most adopted (but by no means the most cogent) solution to the perceived problem of what should be the relationship between sociological research and political and moral convictions as to how society ‘ought’ to be organised.

The ‘critical’ viewpoint is one side of a polarization of opinion on the issue of the role of ‘values’ in sociological research. (a) One view accepts that research can be ‘value-free’ in Max Weber's sense, in which matters of moral values, political ideology or ‘ought’ questions generally are suspended for the sake of dispassionate inquiry. On this viewpoint, sociology works towards value-freedom, as an ideal, or this is employed as a regulative principle, in Kantian language. (b) Another view is the probably more dominant ‘critical’ perspective, based on contemporary variants of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. ⁵ Proponents of this perspective argue that the pursuit of ‘value-freedom’ in sociology is undesirable because it does not put eliminating social inequality and domination at the centre of research. It should be substituted by social scientists placing values and normative concerns (typically referred to by high-level abstractions such as freedom, emancipation, equality, social justice, social transformation, self-determination, and so on) at the centre of research, shaping its focus and priorities.

This kind of ‘critical’ thinking is very pervasive in sociology and books about it are legion. Sociologists embracing it often describe what they are doing as ‘critical’ sociology or ‘critical’ social theory, always contrasted with and in opposition to, the ‘value-free’, mainstream orthodoxy. It is a position derived ultimately from Marxism and is presented as the fusion of social science and politics or theory and practice. As we will shortly see, Elias's theory of involvement and detachment goes beyond both of these two typical positions.

The word ‘critical’, as one of a family of words including critique, critiquing, and criticism, is ubiquitous at the present time in sociological writings and in the milieus of teaching, research, publishing and abstracts of conference papers. The word appears in the titles of countless books as well as journals, for example, Critical Discourse Studies; Critical Social Work; Critical Psychology in Action, Critical Sociology, Journal of Critical Social Policy and Theory, Culture and Society: Explorations in Critical Social Science, to name but a few. The obligatory adjective ‘critical’ has developed an almost magical aura, although it is often used carelessly. Sometimes it is used indiscriminately in the same piece of writing with different meanings, such as ‘crucial’ or ‘fault-finding’, without explanation, causing confusion. Important Kantian, Hegelian and Marxian meanings are often conflated, elided, or not mentioned at all.

In the traditional subject of literary criticism, ‘critical’ means involving careful, skilful, accurate, judgement, as part of the art of estimating the qualities of works of literature. Critical in that sense has been imperceptibly transferred into sociology to describe evaluations of theories or theorists. This might involve, say, showing in relation to sociological texts any inconsistencies, ideological inflections, hidden values, omissions or explanatory limits. Sociologists commonly provide a ‘critical’ review of the literature in a given specialism or topic area, or criticize this or that theory on various grounds. In doing so, they will be providing a ‘critique’ or will be ‘critiquing’ various theories or authors. It will also involve, as in literary criticism, judgements of the status or quality of a work or the intellectual standing of an author. Hence, very many sociological writings will be ‘critical’ in this legitimate but ultimately unexceptionable, sense. In the sociological usage, judgements are being made about cognitive or explanatory value rather than aesthetic quality in the literary version.

As all these meanings are separated and clarified, it becomes clear that the word critical has become almost desperately equivocal in contemporary usage in the social sciences and humanities. In one sense or another, particularly bearing in mind that in the humanities virtually any kind of theorizing is described as critical (Buchanan, 2010, in note 5 above) all sociologists and analysts in adjacent areas of study such as gender, film or literature are, without exception, ‘critical’ inquirers. Yet sociologists and others in the social sciences continue self-consciously to commit themselves to a sociology that is avowedly ‘critical’. This conclusion only serves to underscore another implicit meaning of ‘critical’ in sociology that is the most widespread and significant – that is, its use as a code word. It is aimed at initiates who know what meaning is intended. It is difficult for the uninitiated to guess what is meant, the more so in view of the plethora of meanings of the word.

The meaning of ‘critical’ as a code word I would summarize as ‘left-wing, actively committed to reducing inequality, oppression and injustice in unspecified and generalized ways’. Within these broad parameters, the code word encompasses a wide range of political positions and moral viewpoints, largely on the Left of the political spectrum. It functions for many sociologists and others as a talisman, conveying broad moral or political leanings. It satisfies the writer's conscience as well as signalling to others a broad commitment or allegiance. They will, in turn, recognise that the author is ‘one of us’. As a code word, ‘critical’ signifies a potential, imagined or wished-for We-identity, in Elias's language. It bespeaks an imagined grouping that shares the same convictions as to what is wrong with society and how it can be remedied. It is part and parcel of what van Benthem van den Bergh (1986: 110) described as the tendency to look for individuals or groups to blame for unplanned social developments that thwart our pursuit of happiness; or for ‘guilt-causes’ in ever more abstract and personified categories. Writing about the sometimes threatening international and intra-societal conflicts in our time he continues:

Writers who self-consciously describe their inquiries as ‘critical’, frequently also refer to ‘capitalism’, ‘communism’ or ‘consumerism’ in the terms described above. At the time of writing, the personified concept of ‘modernity’ appears to be performing a similar function of ‘guilt-cause’ for many sociologists struggling to come to terms with conflicting political allegiances after the collapse of Soviet communism in 1989. In political discussions in the present period what has been superseded since that time has been the view that in assessing social ills, capitalism is the problem and socialism the solution. Many contemporary sociologists assume either that (a) there is now effectively only one global, capitalist ‘modernity’ associated with the bloc of wealthy nations led by the USA; or (b) the so-called ‘socialist’ societies of the former Soviet Union, as well as the capitalist ones outside the former Eastern bloc, are both part of the wider phenomenon of ‘modernity’ and that this is the source of their common problems (Bauman, 1992: 222). The new geo-political figuration has created a situation in which the previously time-honoured, clear-cut targets for blame have become confused and ambiguous. ‘Modernity’ steps into the vacuum. Modernity, in other words, is now to blame.

Examples of the personification of ‘modernity’ in contemporary social criticism abound. Scott Lash writes: ‘What happens, analysts like Beck and Giddens ask, when modernity begins to reflect on itself? What happens when modernization, understanding its own excesses and vicious spiral of destructive subjugation (of inner, outer and social nature) begins to take itself as object of reflection?’ (Lash, 1994: 112; my emphases). Austin Harrington writes: ‘Only modernity could have thought of applying a scientific conception to the making and shaping of its own world’ (Harrington, 2005: 315; my emphases). In the influential writings of Zygmunt Bauman we find that modernity ‘is coming of age’ and is now ‘consciously abandoning what … it was unconsciously doing’ (Bauman, 1990: 23). In another place he writes: ‘Postmodernity may be conceived of as modernity conscious of its true nature – modernity for itself’ (Bauman, 1992: 187; emphasis in original).

Let us now turn to some of the technical meanings of the term ‘critical’ in philosophy and sociology, which are tacitly implicated when it is being used as a code word. Here the origins of ‘critical’ inquiries in the German philosophical traditions of Kant and Hegel and their legacy in sociology and in Marxism will come to the fore. The intention behind this discussion will be to show not only the Hegelian–Marxian assumptions of the style of thinking hidden behind the code word, but also the Kantian ‘critical’ themes underlying much of classical and mainstream sociology, even though that sociological tradition would never be routinely referred to as ‘critical’. This will pave the way for clarifying how Elias's theory of involvement and detachment can help us to move beyond the negative consequences of the legacy of both Kantianism and Hegelian–Marxism in sociology.

‘Critical’ inquiries in Kant and Hegel

1. In the Kantian tradition, ‘critical’ means showing presuppositions, that which ‘makes possible X or Y’, in knowledge and culture. The focus is on the limits of what can be known or envisaged. Kant's philosophy was known as The Critical Philosophy. His Categories of the Understanding were the a priori universals (for instance time, space, number) presupposed in knowledge and the process of knowing. He was trying to shed light on the true nature of reality and what could and could not be known by establishing the conditions of possibility of experience. Later, in the work of Habermas (1970) and Apel (1980) the approach was extended into the transcendental importance of language and language communities. Here the ‘ideal speech situation’ has been posited as a regulative principle and yardstick for social criticism. Against the ideal speech situation, it is possible to point to ‘distorted communication’ as the result of the intrusion of hierarchy and inequality and power differentials into communications between groups of people.

The Kantian tradition has been very influential in classical sociology and beyond. Kantianism in various forms has probably been the single most influential philosophy in shaping the contours of sociology. This much is very well known, and it is hardly a striking observation. The work of Durkheim, Simmel, Weber, Parsons, Giddens, Lévi-Strauss and Foucault (not an exhaustive list by any means) was founded on Kantian philosophy or transcendental principles inspired by it. Parsons, for example, was interested mainly in the conditions that make social action possible, not in people acting, as such (Kilminster, 1998: chapters 2, 4 & 5, 2010). A Kantian approach to social science tends to be analytic, breaking up social reality into analytically conceived, abstract aspects – say Parsons's cybernetic hierarchy, Weber's ideal types, Simmel's forms of sociation or the social categories in Giddens's structuration theory (Kilminster 1998: chapter 7). ⁶ Despite the fact of Kantianism pervading much of twentieth-century sociology, no one would ever think of calling this tradition ‘critical’ sociology – which, in a certain sense, it is.

2. In the Hegelian philosophical tradition ‘critical’ refers to comparing a particular institution or other object with its universal ideal form. So, for the Hegelian, that which is finite is a particular determination of its embeddedness in what the nineteenth-century British Hegelians (Bradley, Bosanquet et al.) glossed as the concrete universal (Stern, 2007). ‘Critique’ here means relating the finite appearance of the object with its Universal quality or essence, which it also is. (Marx's ‘critique’ of political economy, in trying to demonstrate the reality or essence of exploited labour lying beneath the surface appearance of prices and profits, reproduces this basic metaphysical distinction.) So, in this scheme of things, what is perfect and universal has already been partially realized in the imperfect, finite, concrete world. For example, if one compared a given particular judicial system with the pure concept of Justice then it will always be found empirically to be falling short of what it could ideally be. This method gave the Left Hegelians of the 1840s the means to become merciless critics of society. Society in every aspect never matches the perfection of the idealizations; it could always ‘do better’. Herein lies the origins of the contemporary attitude of Critical Theorists who criticize society relentlessly as not matching up to an idealized utopia of equality, democracy and solidarity (Kilminster, 1998: 53–4).

The writings of Marx and later Marxists are essentially secularized, politicized, social-scientific versions of this kind of thinking. Here we find the deeper significance of the code word. In Hegel, to repeat, universals such as pure freedom or the ‘Absolute ethical life’, are seen as actually embedded in the finite and imperfect world, or ‘relative ethical life’. In the Theses on Feuerbach Marx advocates ‘practical-critical’ activity – that is, making society become what it could ideally be in practice, not just criticizing it purely verbally in the name of the idealized utopia. The whole structure of this way of thinking leads to the characteristic contrast in later Marxist work between society as it is and society as it ought to be (freedom, community, communism, etc.). The latter stage of human society was said to be embedded in the present society as its telos, or potential, yet to be realized by the victory of the proletariat (Kilminster, 1998: chapter 3). ⁷

Once the possibility of proletarian revolution faded in the 1930s with National Socialism and fascism, the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and others) sought with its Critical Theory to preserve as a possibility the transcendental truth of communism and freedom in theory (Kilminster, 1979). This effectively meant a return to Hegelian dialectics, since the practical agent for the realization of the Ought, the proletariat, had apparently deserted its historical mission and the chance to realize the new world in practice had been missed. Adorno and others talked of the ‘utopian moment of the object’ or ‘utopian horizon’. Later, theorists such as Habermas, Apel and Bauman have looked for new models of the as yet unrealized utopia to provide a defensible yardstick for social criticism of inequality and injustice in the present. These analyses have mixed together transcendental arguments from both Kant and Hegel in the service of remaining loyal to the ‘idea of a future society as the community of free men … and to it there must be fidelity amid all change’, as Horkheimer put it (Horkheimer, 1972 [1937]: 217). They have taken the form of Habermas's and Apel's ideas about distorted communication and the presupposed ‘ideal speech situation’ or ‘speech community’ (Habermas, 1970; Apel, 1980), which are argued in a Kantian fashion in the service of a Hegelian–Marxian critique.

In addition to the archaic philosophical and metaphysical hangovers pervading this kind of ultimately needless argumentation, there is another drawback. It is by no means the case that ‘critique’ in this sense always has a positive outcome. It is a common but erroneous assumption that Critical Theory is life-affirming. It has been pointed out by Michael Zank (2002: 197) that Kritik in German can be translated as either critique or criticism, so contains either the intention to establish the true nature of reality (‘critique’) or to achieve a condemnation of it (‘criticism’). In other words, it can take either or both of two connotations: positive or negative, constructive or destructive. In the contemporary code word ‘critical’, the second meaning (which coincides with the dictionary meaning in English of fault-finding ⁸ or censorious, carping, passing judgement) comes to the forefront, the ‘critical’ theorist finding only what is wrong with society – what must be morally condemned. This is usually conceptualized as various combinations of stark inequality, control, oppression, exploitation or domination, all of which prejudge as subjugation the complex, uneven balances of power between interdependent groups. The theorist has passed judgement on them, as Horkheimer had insisted, in the name of fidelity to an unrealized, but ultimately unattainable, idealized state of perfect freedom, democracy, equality and authentic community. One serious problem with the relentless pursuit of idealized goals or the comparison of society with a pure or ideal yardstick, is that we are fated to experience unending frustration. We can never fully give ourselves credit for our achievements, because we know that against the perfect, but forever unattainable goal, our efforts will always fall short. Durkheim warned of this outcome a long time ago: ‘To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness’ (Durkheim, 1951 [1897]: 248).

Furthermore, Arpad Szakolczai (2008) has drawn attention to the broader negative consequences of this kind of ‘critical’ or utopian orientation in sociology (see also Kilminster, 1979: part 4). He sees its essential destructiveness, in theory and in practice, citing communist Eastern Europe under the Soviet Union and China. This relentless, fault-finding orientation towards society results not only in a ‘politics of suffering’ but can also serve to reinforce or even to bring about exactly the frustrations it is purporting to highlight through ‘critique’.

Notice that the dictionary definition of the word ‘uncritical’ means the opposite of the kind of critique referred to above – that is, lacking in judgement, complacently accepting. For the ‘critical’ sociologist, any inquiry that is not self-described or vaunted as critical must be indifferent to or complicit in, the inequalities and injustices of the society being criticized. But, as Boland (2007: 123) has rightly said, ‘it is hubristic and naive to imagine that one's own position has a monopoly on critique and that the discourse of all others is “uncritical”.’ The essentially political character of the commitment to a self-consciously ‘critical’ approach in sociology, and its function for relatively privileged intellectuals, is evident. Complacent acceptance runs counter to the self-image of the ‘critical’ sociologists and drives them to pursue the ‘guilt-causes’ of today's social ills in such personified entities as ‘capitalism’ and ‘modernity’. Reinhart Koselleck has remarked on how the state of absolute freedom implied in utopian thought functions for the critic: ‘A truth that will not appear until tomorrow absolves the critic of all guilt today’ (Koselleck, 1988 [1959]: 110).

Zygmunt Bauman's conception of the contemporary globalized society as a condition of ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman, 2001) presented in a series of books with titles employing the same metaphor of liquidity, is widely accepted by sociologists at the time of writing. Whatever the durability of this work proves to be in the future, it illustrates for present purposes the pitfalls of the metaphysical and transcendental hangovers still persisting in sociology. As a direct result of these presuppositions, Bauman one-sidedly undervalues the present society as producing and reproducing nothing but unremitting anxiety and uncertainty. This gloomy diagnosis is made by comparison with an ideal state of democracy, freedom, equality and solidarity, which exists as a persistent possibility, ‘nagging’ the theorist, as he sometimes tellingly puts it. In his influential book, Postmodern Ethics (Bauman, 1993, reprinted four times), Bauman develops a transcendental argument (Bauman, 1993: 69–81) inspired by the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas, to the effect that a person's moral responsibility for another person is ‘unconditional and infinite’ (Bauman, 1993: 250) but is channelled in various ways in concrete societies and often obscured. The depth and extent of his unquestioned philosophical–theological commitments is clear: ‘Morality is a transcendence of being; morality is, more precisely, the chance of such transcendence’ (1993: 72; emphasis in original). This idea constitutes, he argues in a Kantian vein echoing Simmel, a new sociological a priori. Empirically, people can choose whether to exercise that responsibility and hence the moral self is ‘always haunted by the suspicion that it is not moral enough’ (1993: 80; italics in original). Moral responsibility is thus ambivalent because it contains the sense of a standard that can never be reached. A person knows when they are in the realm of moral choice, says Bauman, when they feel ‘moral anxiety’ (1993: 80), ‘constant anguish’, ‘conscience’ (1993: 250) and ‘guilt’ (1993: 81).

From this guilt-driven view of the world, it is very difficult to conceptualize a notion of progress. Hence it is difficult to assemble a balance sheet of the longer-term social and scientific achievements accumulated unintendedly by humankind which must praised and preserved. Elsewhere I have referred to this tendency as ‘overcritique’ (Kilminster, 1979: 240 ff). To the critical mind, social praise is dangerous because to laud what is good in society blinds us to what is wrong, so playing into the hands of the advantaged power holders who can then claim that we live in the Leibnizian ‘best of all possible worlds’ as satirized by Voltaire in Candide.

Let us draw together the threads of the argument so far. Having its origins in the ‘exodus from philosophy’ in Weimar Germany at the end of the First World War, there is at the core of Elias's ‘process sociology’ a bald and uncompromising rejection of all forms of philosophy, including the utility of all arguments from ‘transcendence’. Philosophy is regarded as a hangover of a pre-modern form of human orientation related to theology and magical–mythical thought that is unfettered by the continuous interplay with empirical evidence. Not only is philosophy no longer proficient to investigate empirically complex social processes, but also the emerging sociological perspective promised to take over much of what had been traditionally the competence of philosophers. Elias's work is thus founded in a sociological theory of knowledge in which he transformed ontological speculations about ‘modes of being’ into a theory of sciences based on the levels of integration in the natural and social realms they investigated. The evaluative and normative discussions dealt with as ‘ethics’, including the relation between sociological research and the political views of its practitioners, were reframed as part of a theory of involvement and detachment and rendered amenable to empirical inquiry. ‘Critical’ theorists in sociology have taken a different road, creating hybrids of social science and philosophy. They have used transcendental arguments as a matter of course in order to justify the legitimacy of a ‘critical’ kind of inquiry that can be used to condemn disparities of power and control in the name of unattainable idealized states of collective social life.

Because of the pervasiveness of traces of the Kantian critical philosophy in the classical tradition of sociology (Kilminster, 1998) most of this tradition could in fact accurately be described as ‘critical’ sociology. But no one would do so, because the term ‘critical’ in the Hegelian and Marxian usages has already been appropriated by a tradition of theory that runs counter to the ‘value-freedom’ principle and its variants that underpins the mainstream sociology tradition. From the ‘critical’ Marxian–Hegelian point of view, the mainstream of sociology (which is critical in a Kantian sense) emerges as ‘uncritical’. So the only significant sense in which the word ‘critical’ is operative to describe an orientation or moral and political commitment in sociology is when it is being used as a code word. In this sense it means left-wing, actively committed to reducing inequality, oppression and injustice. In present usage its implicit but unexplained meaning endows it with the magical ring of an incantation. It functions as a talisman for many sociologists, who feel compelled by their conscience to reveal their ‘critical’ credentials or to justify those credentials with ever more elaborate, quasi-metaphysical constructions. All the other everyday meanings of the word ‘critical’ are either irrelevant or commonplace descriptions of various activities of all reputable sociologists.

There is also a problem with the high level of abstraction, and hence vagueness, of the principles to which the code word is said to commit the initiates – such as freedom, emancipation, liberation and social transformation. Because of its Marxian provenance, the code word is thus subject to many of the well-known shortcomings of that tradition. ‘Critical’ sociology or a ‘critical’ attitude towards research (however vaguely formulated) is underpinned mainly by Hegel, not Kant, although Habermas sometimes uses Kantian argumentation, as does Bauman. In the code-word sense, the ‘critical’ attitude is subject to the objection that it is trying to keep alive and work towards the abstract possibility of a utopian society that is, to repeat the point, sociologically infeasible and unattainable. Like all critique and criticism of this kind, critical sociology is destructive in a double sense. On the one hand, the knowing pursuit of the inherently unattainable generates nihilism and persistent discontent in the habitus of its adherents. On the other, the cataloguing of all that is wrong in society, at the expense of a more balanced picture involving achievements and benign compulsions, not only contributes to gloom and pessimism but also reproduces, through a kind of contagion, exactly the bad things it relentlessly denounces. Without careful specification of what can, cannot, and should not be changed, the statement that society could always ‘be other than it is’, becomes a vacuous slogan.

Furthermore, as we will see in the next section, the whole enterprise of critique and the elaborate philosophical trappings that go along with it, are unnecessary if one wants to ensure that sociology has a practical and beneficial impact on human social relations. One could say that getting lost in the abstractions of ‘critique’, and ‘critical’ metatheory generally, are part of the problem of modern society, not part of the solution. As we will see in the concluding section, Elias's resolute work on involvement and detachment suggests that sociology, properly done, can be ‘evaluative’ or ‘critical’ in a more inclusive and more constructive, sense.

Concluding remarks: critical theory or ‘detour via detachment’?

Elias's ‘post-philosophical’ sociology gives us another perspective on transcendental hangovers in sociology, and a keen awareness of the role of guilt and blaming in our orientation towards the interdependencies in which, as sociologists, we find ourselves. It suggests that we do not need all the transcendental paraphernalia and the enchanted self-description ‘critical’, to affirm that sociology can potentially ‘make a difference’ in the world, as it is often expressed. The apparently positive overtones of the unremitting practice of systematic ‘critique’ are illusory; on the contrary, it emerges as socially iatrogenic, destructive, disorientating and unnecessary. My point is that Elias has provided the most constructive, useful, but challenging, alternative to deal with the issues of human bonding and orientation that are hidden beneath the sweeping ‘critical’ calls for emancipation, freedom and liberation.

Elias does not use the word critical to describe his sociology. Nor does he use transcendental arguments to try to build from philosophical components a moral or epistemological basis for a special kind of inquiry or activity devoted solely to condemning aspects of society. It is consistent with his approach that the issue of how to calibrate what is ‘wrong’ with society, so as to pass judgement on how society could be made ‘better’, is bound up with a continuous struggle in sociology to achieve relative detachment from social values and political ideologies which would help to provide a reliable factual basis for value judgements of that kind. For Elias, social forces continually combine to thwart or divert sociology from being able consistently to produce reliable knowledge of this kind (Kilminster, 2007a: chapter 5). Political ideologies (involvements in Elias's language) in particular colour the ways in which ‘better’ and ‘progress’ are evaluated. The whole problem of evaluation can be taken on to a different level to avoid the excesses and overstatements of ‘critique’. Involvement and detachment are descriptive of relations between people (social forces), with objects (non-human nature, as studied by the natural sciences) and with the self (self-control). These three levels develop unevenly in societies. For Elias, sociology awaits the breakthrough to greater detachment, to help people control their interdependent relations (social forces) with others, which are often experienced as opaque or as an external force. It is in this arena, in particular, that the struggle for detachment manifests itself in modern societies.

In Quest for Excitement (2008 [1971]), Elias says that many people in the twentieth century took for granted that they had become ‘morally better’ and took pride in being less savage than their forebears. Hence the mass slaughter carried out by the Nazis came as a terrible shock. People had never faced the problem of how their feeling of moral superiority came about, thus this episode was a kind of warning. The civilizing process that had made this possible – a specific type of social development and a corresponding conscience-formation which resulted in a more differentiated and stable social control of the means of violence – had long been forgotten. The genocide perpetrated by the Nazis showed graphically that that process could clearly be reversed.

The point Elias is making is, I think, that the shock of those events should not deter us from trying to explain how the social processes that enabled more ‘civilizing’ forms of social conduct came about and how and why they went into reverse. The episodes of mass killing in themselves do not necessarily mean that twentieth century people could not be shown sociologically to have achieved a less savage level of social behaviour than their forebears. His remarks are essentially a plea, even in the face of such horrors, not to leap to value-judgements, for example about human nature (say that humans are basically savage because of their animal heritage) but to continue to pursue further sociological understanding of these matters through the ‘detour via detachment’. In this spirit, Elias argues that it was the long forgotten internal pacification of states that partly provided the social conditions enabling ‘less savage’ social conduct. Hence, when the monopolization of violence by the state began to unravel in Germany in the twentieth century, this provided the insecure social conditions that made a ‘decivilizing process’ more likely, resulting in the rise of violence in the public sphere and culminating in war and genocides. On the question of whether modern behaviour may or may not be considered to be ‘morally better’, Elias broadens the issue:

The tenor of this passage points to (a) the importance of the ‘wider understanding of the nexus of facts’ for providing a basis for value judgements. Elias is taking the whole problem of ‘evaluation’ on to another level through the ‘detour via detachment’. A more vivid, all-round, broader and realistic empirical–theoretical picture of human societies needs to be developed. This would enable researchers to correct for the evaluative overstatements about social relations and interdependencies that arise from one-sided ‘involvements’, including systematic blaming, intruding into the research process. Developing social scientific knowledge of this specific and broader kind requires an institutionalized research programme committed to research principles of fact orientation and detachment (autonomous evaluations in Elias's language) and insulated from the intrusion of ideological evaluations coming from the wider society which would skew the inquiries more towards magical–mythical and wishful thinking (heteronomous evaluations).

The passage quoted above also points to (b) the importance of facing up to the fact that some social developments which we ideologically interpret as ‘progress’ (for example, the longer-term lessening of power differentials between groups that Elias (1978 [1970]: 69) calls ‘functional democratization’) were the result of unplanned development. In other words, these changes do not represent the inevitable march of freedom, nor are they the result of the application of liberal or socialist principles, as the ideologists would claim. To try to change these relatively more levelled power balances between interdependent groups whilst evaluatively exaggerating the power balances as subjugation or harsh oppression – or to work unrealistically towards the elimination of power itself in a utopian society – are to court disaster. The application of an inadequate theory of power relations will inevitably end in the failure of practice, resulting in disillusionment. And the fantasy expectations of a utopia of free citizens living harmoniously in communities will inevitably be dashed by the reality. As Elias warned: ‘The whole of history has so far amounted to no more than a graveyard of human dreams’ (Elias, 1978 [1970]: 28).

It is necessary to forestall the temptation to categorize Elias's ‘detour via detachment’ as another form of cold and passionless positivism. To describe the pleasure viewers derive from the aesthetic qualities of perspective paintings created through the painter's detachment, Elias developed the concept of secondary involvement (Elias, 2007c [1987]: 40–1). It can profitably be transferred on to the process of deriving pleasure from detached scientific research. In contrast to Romantic notions of science as always being cold and rational, Elias's argument is that for sciences to become established and institutionally self-perpetuating, many preconditions have to be fulfilled, one of which is the sustained transfer of controlled affect into ‘autonomous evaluations’ through a process of institutionalization. The practitioners of an emerging science (in this case a renewed sociology) in the developing institutional practices in which they participate, gradually begin to be emotionally moved by specifically scientific activities and values. They come to experience excitement and pleasure in relation to activities in which they are habitually applying a standard of detachment and an orientation to factual research and to discovery, thereby developing a very strong, emotionally reinforced, commitment to the science concerned.

It is compatible with Elias's conception of sociology (as I have argued elsewhere [Kilminster, 1998: 178]) that at the present stage in the development of societies and of the discipline itself, sociologists committed to autonomous evaluations should conduct themselves in the following way: they should apply in their practice of sociology the criteria of cognitive evaluation and the standard of detachment which would be widely taken for granted if the discipline, as a special science, had achieved a higher degree of self-perpetuating, institutional autonomy, and a corresponding intellectual authority, than at present. In applying these criteria and the standard of detachment, we anticipate their future embodiment in a stronger institutionalization of the discipline and, hopefully, help to bring it about.

This orientation constitutes the anticipatory motif in Elias's work. This motif is of a different character from other conceptions, coming from transcendental assumptions, of the regulative character of idealized states of affairs (for example, the ideal speech situation of Apel and Habermas, or the ‘utopian moment of the object’ in Adorno (Kilminster, 1998: 50–4)). Elias does not lapse into the teleological assumption that the renewed sociology will be consolidated in the future, nor does he endow the controlling principle of greater detachment with either an absolute metaphysical status or with a logical necessity. The implication of Elias's model is that although the battles for sociology are well worth fighting, the war could in the end be lost. There are no guarantees because of the vicious circle mechanism. Conflicts and tensions fuel fears that make people feel insecure; which in turn generates involvements (who is to blame?) and fear images. Hence, detachment in relation to social events is more difficult because people cannot control their strong feelings when their ability to control those events is small.

The promise of an institutionalized and self-perpetuating sociology of the human condition is that, with greater detachment and accumulating research data, evaluating becomes possible. The researchers execute a ‘detour via detachment’, whereby they suspend moral and political convictions but return to them in a new form after theoretical–empirical inquiry. Or, to put it another way, one puts Ought questions, hopes, desires, utopian fantasies, ideological convictions, wishful and egocentric thinking, and so forth on to the back burner. The philosophically or politically-posed questions (for example, free will–determinism, freedom–dependency) are broken down into specific relationships amenable to empirical work. After a sociological reframing of the problem through comparative research, one returns to the issue better armed for seeing the partiality of the philosophical or political formulation as it is absorbed into a wider explanatory framework. (I explained in an earlier section the way in which in The Civilizing Process Elias does this with the ideas of culture and civilization, returning to them at the end of the study and re-posing the questions from which he started out.) The exclusively philosophical mode of elaboration then falls away as simply untenable in its own terms. This way of working is present in Elias even in what seem to be largely empirical studies. Consider, for example, the following statement in The Court Society on the historians' fear that sociological research threatens to extinguish human freedom and individuality:

It is consistent with the tenor of Elias's theory of involvement and detachment that people can be expected to have strongly held views about politics, religion and morals, but these views are not to be regarded as shabby or of low calibre. It is only that these convictions should not one-sidedly be allowed to shape research. If you do this you may be contributing to the problems you are trying to solve, because the balance of involvement and detachment embodied in your inquiries is tilted more towards involvements. This is likely to strengthen ‘we-images’ as well as fear images and contribute to the intensification of conflicts between groups rather than their mitigation. Furthermore, in the course of research during the ‘detour via detachment’ you might find evidence that runs counter to your values or utopian vision and have to be prepared to face its implications. Clearly, working this way is emotionally very challenging. As researchers return to the original moral, value-related questions that may have prompted their inquiries they may find that the problem as originally posed, now looks different. And this, then, may affect our conception of the value issues that prompted the original investigation. This possibility of questioning often cherished values and hopes can be painful and frightening, and for many people more than they can bear.

Finally, carrying out more detached inquiries in the sense argued here can also affect our relations with other sociologists, philosophers, colleagues in other disciplines, political associates and friends. Writing about group we-images, Elias pointed out that it is asking a great deal of people in interdependent groups (including disciplinary and political groups) competing with each other to see in perspective the structure and functioning of their relationships with each other. Such a multi-perspectival grasp of their mutual interrelatedness could weaken the cohesion and solidarity of the group and its capacity to survive. He summarized the challenge: