A blog within a blog
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With this entry, I am deviating from my original blog, which has long lain dormant. I intend to write a few posts on the Norbert Elias. Norbert Elias (1897-1990) was an influential Anglo-German sociologist of Jewish background who studied the development of Western civilization and the relationship between individual behavior and social processes over centuries. If this blog within a blog goes well, I will start a second blog devoted solely to Norbert Elias and how I have found his writings help me to understand the social world.
I do not intend to abandon the subject of the earlier blog. I will continue to use my family’s story, or stories, to discuss European history in the years before I was born. The Elias entries will be interspersed with my parent’s history
For whom am I writing about Norbert Elias? First, for myself. I have been working on Elias for many years; he has helped me to clarify my thinking about society. I want to put together what I have learned from him in a more systematic way. I also want my audience to be people who might be interested, though they don't know much about Elias. I believe if anyone ever reads this blog, they will find some concepts that will help them understand the social world better. I also hope that people who know Elias’ works may respond to me. When I separate this blog, I will call it “ReadingNorbertElias” In it, I would like to explain to myself and others how reading Norbert Elias has improved my thinking and could improve theirs.
I intend to examine Elias’s thought by discussing what he says, one book at a time. I will start by examining his book Involvement and Detachment. In this book he discusses why and how the natural sciences have become successful and have progressed steadily since Seventeenth Century, while the social sciences remain relatively weak
The title Involvement and Detachment illustrates one of the characteristics of Elias way of working. He invents new terms because he believes the old ones are defective. In this case the terms he is rejecting are “objective” and “subjective”. Involvement corresponds to subjective, while detachment corresponds to objective. “Involvement” implies that a person has some degree of personal investment in what they believe, “detachment” means they are to some degree objective. There is no such thing being completely objective or completely subjective; there is always a balance. Sometimes involvement predominates, at other times detachment does. What Elias has done is replace absolute opposites (subjective and objective) with relative terms, which he believes yield a more realistic picture of human knowledge. What we know is always partly involved and partly detached. Some knowledge is relatively detached and therefore more realistic, other knowledge is more involved and less likely to be realistic. Elias uses these terms to clarify not only the development of the natural sciences, but the barriers to the development of the social sciences.
Elias begins Involvement and Detachment contrasting the way we react to natural disasters and human-made disasters. If there is a natural disaster we call on scientists to help us understand it and possibly to mitigate or even eliminate the harm. Cholera, small pox, measles and many other diseases have been largely eliminated. Hurricanes can be predicted and loss of life minimized. Famine has been eliminated except in the presence of war or civil war.
The social sciences have not done a similar job mitigating dangers humans pose for each other. The greatest threat humans pose for each other is mass violence: war, revolution, civil war. No one expects social scientists to prevent, or even mitigate, such violent episodes. Norbert Elias believed that in the long run, social science could develop in ways that could help people to understand and even control the social world in the way humans can now control the natural world. His mission was to move sociology towards a place where it could help humans to avoid mass violence. He did not believe this could be achieved in the near future.
