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Development and
Underdevelopment
Definitions & conceptualization:
Development & Underdevelopment
Development notions
Since its inception in the 1950s and
1960s, the notion of development has
been an equivalent term with “progress”
and “modernization.” Nowadays it has
become an analogue of “economic
growth”.
A few catch-words:
Economic growth
Industrialization and modernization
Progress
Update, up-to-date
Technological advance
Modern man, ”capitalist spirit”, forwardlooking
“Development” denotes a movement away from
something that is considered to be underdeveloped.
The US president Truman was among the first who
used the word “underdeveloped” in his speech on
January 22, 1949 when he took office: “We must
embark on a bold new program for making the
benefits of our scientific advances and industrial
progress available for the improvement and growth
of underdeveloped area.…”
Since the word “underdeveloped” was
invented in comparison with the development
level of the West at the end of World War II,
the majority of the world population had
suddenly degraded into a status of
“underdevelopment.”
Development defined
All non-Western countries have been more or
less in a process to “develop” or to “catch up.”
The Petit Robert dictionary contains the
following text under the general heading of
“development”: “Developing country or region,
whose economy has not yet reached the level of
North America, Western Europe, etc.”
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Development measurements
economic growth and expansion (GDP*,
GNP*) , institutionalized by WB and IMF
International trade (export and import)
wealth accumulation (foreign reserve, etc.)
mass production and consumption.
One is considered as being “developed” if it
can meet these measurements.
Problems of these measures
1) The number-based measures fail to give a
real picture when using them for acrosscountry

comparisons due to the wide
differences from country to country in terms
of exchange rate anomalies, differentials in
tariff and tax rates, as well as subsidies to
consumption goods
2) these data put an emphasis on the market value of
economic transaction, that is the rate at which
resources are converted to commodities and
consumptions together with other paid services
and activities. For example, the expansion of
military budgets, expenditures on prisons, wars
and crime including prevention expenditures, as
well as environmental costs (the destroying of
forests and the toxic dumpsites) seem to make
GNP and GDP data impressive;
3) they do not take account of exchange of
goods and services that do not enter the
market, for example, self-sufficiency,
female contribution to households, elders
unpaid tutoring of youth, care for the sick
and elderly, voluntary work of civic
societies, etc, and other social aspects, such
as family and community coherence,
emotional well-being, social stability
New ways of thinking and measure
1) basic well-being (e.g., food, shelter,
clothing, the goods for self-respect)
2) additive well-being (e.g., health, education,
identity expression, culture)
3) freedom from subtractive and divisive
well-being (e.g. environmental degradation,
violence, crime, coercion, deception,
genocide, ethnic-cleansing, lynching,
slavery, psychological torture, forced
displacement and migration, rape and abuse)
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4) multiplicative well-being (e.g., ease of
mobility, degree of comfort, ease and
participation in creative and public life,
spiritual fulfillment, confidence and
growing self-respect and psychic health)
Three Major Development Theories
Modernization Theory
Critical development theories:
Dependency Theory
World System Theory
Critical Development Theories
The latter two (dependency and world system)
developed as critiques of the modernization
school.
Emerged as theory to find answers to
development problems, but ended up more as
an explanation of underdevelopment in the
Third World.
Modernization theory
Historical origin
1. The rise of the US as a superpower and as a
model to follow.

2. The birth to many new nation-states in the
Third World which were in search of
development model.
3. The US identified the threat of communism
in post-war Europe and in the Third World
believing that economic recovery and
modernization and moved them along the
path of the US, and thus they would move
away from communism. (Marshall, East
Asia)
4. The economic recovery of Europe
strengthened the ideology and policy of
deliberate intervention.
5. American political scientists sought to
identity the conditions that gave rise to
development in the First World and
examine why these were lacking in the
Third World.
6. With the US support, an interdisciplinary
modernization school was in making in
the 1950s.
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Modernization Assumptions
Development is a spontaneous, irreversible
process inherent in every single society.
Development is regarded as an evolutionary
perspective. Development and
underdevelopment are differences between
rich and poor nations in terms of observable
economic, political, social and cultural gaps.
Social change is progressive, gradual, and
irreversible.
Development thus implies the bridging of
these gaps by means of an imitative process
in which less developed countries gradually
assumed the qualities of the industrialized
nations. It is a phased process. Society begins
with a primitive stage and move to an
advanced stage.
Modernization policies (a rationalization and
effectivization of economic and social
structures) are not only seen as elements of a
development strategy, but as universal
historical forces. It bears a strong resemblance
to the transition from feudalism to capitalism
in Western economic history.
Development implies structural differentiation
and functional specialization.
The process of development can be divided
into distinct stages showing the level of
development achieved by each society.
Development can be stimulated by external
competition or military threat and by
internal measures that support modern
sectors and modernize traditional sectors.
Development is seen as an universal process
as well as a characteristic of human

societies rather than a concrete historical
process taking place in specific societies
during specific periods.
Some approaches to modernization
Functional-structural approach to society
and modernization
cultural approach to society and
modernization
The economics of development
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Functional-structural approach
to society and modernization
A. Emile Durkheim (19th century). Neil
Smelser, Talcott Parsons
1. Social evolution is a process of social
differentiation as a result of societies
becoming structurally more complex.
2. Social change is seen as a basically
endogenous process (in-built).
Modernization is a universal process
characteristic of human societies rather
than a concrete historical process taking
place in specific societies during specific
periods.
3. Systems are in complex exchange with
their environment, which often requires
internal adjustment. (division of labour
and differentiation)
4. Social differentiation is defined to be the
evolution from a multi-functional role
structure to a specialized role structure.
5. For example, during a society’s transition
from family to factory production, the
division of labour increases and economic
activities based on the family move to the
firm. When a formal education system
emerges, education and training functions
provided by the family and church are now
catered for by a specialized unit - the
school.
6. In political sphere, the political roles in a
pre-modern society are closely bound up
with kinship roles, which provides the main
integrative principle in such a society.
When a society becomes increasingly
complex and more specialized structures
emerge: bureaucracies, parties, assemblies
and the like.
1. Appropriate economic conditions for
development, while necessary, were not of
themselves sufficient. (economic
rationality is not enough)
2. In addition, a capitalist spirit, a set of
orientations and values, was required.

Cultural approach to society
and modernization
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3. Weber argues that there is causal connection existed
between the spiritual and the temporal, namely the
effect of religion on the development of capitalism
religious spirituality was secularized when the
dedication to the task of societal regeneration became
linked to the generalization and multiplication of
capital and when profit-making was turned into an
ethos, a moral crusade. This gave birth to a socioeconomic
evolution which began to function in a
manner independent of religion which was
marginalized by the economic logic.
4. These characteristics are depicted as unique
cultural phenomena of Western civilization and as
the elements behind the emergence of capitalism
in Europe:
1) rationalization and creativity of economic
activities.
2) rational organization of free labour (separation of
productive activity from the household).
3) modern book-keeping system.
4) industrial organization.
5) organization of political and social life.
5. Market economy as an entity that combines
norms, values, markets, money, and laws is an
unanticipated consequence of the Protestant
ethic because “people create social structures
but that those structures soon take on a life of
their own, over which the creators have little
or no control.
6. Besides Weber, Hegel and Marx also took
the culturalist perspectives to explain why
occidental (Western) societies were able to
achieve industrialization earlier than the rest
of the world, and why the oriental (Asian)
societies failed to do so. (Chinese
Confucianism vs Protestant ethics)
7. They argue that traditional religions, cultures
(such as Chinese Confucianism) and social
patterns in oriental societies were structural
barriers and were inimical to the development
of capitalism. This also denotes that
modernization is preconditioned by cultural
capital and ideological attitude receptive to
capitalism.
(the decline of the Chinese empire --- the rise of
East Asia since 1960s --- the financial crisis in
1997 --- the rise of China)
8. Weber’s work has generated a tremendous
impact on and strengthened the culturalist
approaches to the studies of Third World
development.
9. Cultural aspects become one of the most
important elements in development studies.
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Cultural Modern Man

1. “Modern man” is a central concept. Modern
man is adaptable, independent, efficient,
oriented to long-term planning, adaptable to
change. Modern man is confident of the
ability to bring change about and is actively
interested in and eager to participate in
politics.
3. On the contrary, the “traditional man” is
anxious, suspicious, lacking in ambition,
oriented towards immediate needs,
fatalistic, conservative and clings to wellestablished
procedures even when they
are no longer appropriate.
The economics of development
Underdevelopment is a shortage issue:
- Physical conditions
- Capital (saving rate)
- Technology
W.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic
Growth, 1960 (non-communist manifesto)
The best known economic contribution
within the tradition of modernization theory
is that of Walt Rostow, who conceived of
development as a number of stages linking a
state of “tradition” to “maturity”. This
development process was believed to be an
endogenous process.
There were five stages through which all developing
societies had to pass:
1. The traditional society
Limited production, absence of modern science and
technology; agricultural based, clan-based polity, and
fatalistic mentality.
2. The pre-take-off society (many traditional
characteristics removed; agricultural productivity
increased; effective infrastructure created; new
mentality and new class appeared.)
3. Take-off (most crucial, economic
development obstacles removed;
national income raised; certain sectors
developed faster;)
4. The road to maturity (modern
technology disseminated from the
leading sector; the whole economy
moves to mass consumption)
5. The mass consumption society (today)
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Policy implications
Modernization theories are not just
academic theories, they were originally
formulated in response to the new global
leadership role of the United States after
World War II. Therefore they have
important policy implications.
Modernization theories intend to

provide an implicit justification for the
asymmetrical power relationship
between "traditional" and "modern"
societies. Since the US is modern and
advanced, and the Third World is
traditional and backward, the latter
should look to the former for guidance.
Modernization theories attempt to
legitimate the US aid and intervention
policies. If what is needed is more
exposure to modern values and more
productive investment, the US can help
by sending advisers, by encouraging
American business to invest abroad, by
making loans and other kinds of aid.
Structural theories:
Dependency and World System
Structuralist thought (economic structuralism)
It has its origin in Marxism
A historical perspective
Holistic perspective
Economic and political analysis
Focus on the structure of the international capitalist
system / mode of production
Structuralism (background)
Unlike European industrialization, one of the
distinctive features of Third World
industrialization is the fact that such a process
was taking place alongside already
industrialized Western countries and was
therefore tied to them by various economic
relations
Critique to the David Recardo’s Comparative
Advantage: each country is endowed with local
resources, material, cultural and geographical
conditions. A country’s economic development
would benefit from specialization on these
strengths connected with international trade.
If everyone does the same, a system of
specialization and trade will work to its
optimum.
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Structuralist theories: some basic
assumptions
1. It is necessary to understand the global
context within which states and other entities
interact.
2. They stress the importance of historical
analysis in comprehending the international
system.
3. The rise of British (see List’s theory) and
the later-comers (the US, Russia, Germany
and Japan) all favored industrialization
behind protective tariff barriers --
industrialization not under global

specialization, but under protection.
4. The global system is not a uniform
marketplace with actors freely making
mutually beneficial contracts, rather, it is
divided into powerful central and relatively
weak peripheral economies with the former
playing an active role and the latter a
passive/reflexive role.
5. It is assumed that particular mechanisms of
domination exist that keep Third World states
from developing and that contribute to
worldwide uneven development.
6. They also assume that economic factors are
absolutely critical in explaining the evolution
and functioning of the world capitalist system
and the relegation of Third World states to a
subordinate position.
Dependency Theory
Definitions of dependency
In a nutshell
Historical Origin
Intellectual Origin
Explanations of underdevelopment
Suggestions of solution
Definition of Dependency
…a situation in which the economy of a
certain group of countries is conditioned by
the development and expansion of another
economy, to which their own is subjected.
(Dos Santos)
(Theotonio Dos Santos, "The Structure of Dependence," in K.T. Fann
and Donald C. Hodges, eds., Readings in U.S. Imperialism. Boston:
Porter Sargent, 1971, p. 226)
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An explanation of the economic
development of a state in terms of the
external influences - political, economic,
and cultural - on national development
policies. (Osvaldo Sunkel)
(Osvaldo Sunkel, "National Development Policy and External
Dependence in Latin America," The Journal of Development Studies,
Vol. 6, no. 1, October 1969, p. 23).
a historical condition which shapes a certain
structure of the world economy such that it
favors some countries to the detriment of
others and limits the development
possibilities of the subordinate economics...
In a nutshell
“The underdevelopment of the Third World and the
development of the First World are not isolated and
discrete phenomena. Rather, they are organically and
functionally interrelated. Underdevelopment is not a
primal or original condition, to be outgrown by
following the industrialized course pioneered by
Western nations. The latter are overdeveloped today to
the same degree the peripheral lands are
underdeveloped. The states of developedness and
underdevelopedness are but two sides of the same
coin.”
L.R. Stavrianos, Global Rift
Key points:

_Dependency is the source of
underdevelopment
_Dependency is the result of the imposition
of a set of external conditions on Third
World development
Historical and intellectual origin
Dependency Theory developed in the late
1950s under the guidance of the Director of
the United Nations Economic Commission
for Latin America (ECLA).
Economic growth in the advanced
industrialized countries did not necessarily
lead to growth in poorer countries.
A group of Latin American intellectuals
(especially economists and sociologists), in
the early 1960s, began an overall critique to
modernization theory. ECLA's scholars
started a set of theoretical approaches that
was going to be known generically as
Dependency Theory.
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It is argued that most of the foundations of
the theoretical categories and development
policies rooted in the modernization school
have been exclusively based on the historical
experience of European and North American
advanced capitalist countries. Thus, these
western theoretical categories are not suitable
to guide our understanding of the
underdevelopment problem of the Third
World.
Marxist tradition – combination of several
traditions, Marxism, Leninism, Neo-
Marxism - more sociological in outlook
Associated with Marxist thinking and sets
LDCs within wider socio-historical context,
arguing that lesser developed nations are
dominated economically & politically by,
and dependent upon, outside industrial
powers
Fields of investigation
mechanisms and processes of domination through
which existing structures are maintained regarding
both national and international structures.
forms of dependency creating mechanism of selfperpetuation
and the possibilities of change.
antagonistic and non-antagonistic relations between
social classes and groups.
Basic assumptions
1) Historical dimensions of relations of dependence are
rooted in the internationalization of capitalism.
Gunder Frank:
“All serious study of the problems of developed and
underdeveloped and all serious intent to formulate
policy for the elimination of underdevelopment and for
the promotion of development must take in account,
nay must begin with, the fundamental historical and
structural cause of underdevelopment in capitalism”
2) The international system comprises two

sets of states – metropolitan centre vs peripheral
satellites (buffer).
3) External forces are of singular importance
to economic activities of dependent states.
4) Relations between two sets of states are
dynamic because ongoing interactions tend
to reinforce and intensify unequal relations
and patterns.
5) Attempt to explain underdevelopment by
examining patterns of interactions and
argument that inequality and exploitation
are intrinsic parts of those interactions.
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6) Developing countries could not be able to
follow the suit of the Western path because
they have experienced the history that
western countries have not experienced –
colonialism
7) Third World countries are not “primitive” and
“feudal” or “traditional”. It is the colonialism
and foreign domination have handicapped
their development course.
8. Poor countries exported primary commodities to
the rich countries who then manufactured
products out of those commodities and sold them
back to the poorer countries. (even today)
9. The "Value Added" by manufacturing a usable
product always costs more than the primary
products used to create those products. (raw
material vs finished products; agriculture vs
manufacturing)
10. Domestic elite is in an alliance with
international capital because they share the
same interests.
Today, “transnational elite class”
Underdevelopment formula
Foreign capital and surplus penetrating in
the national economy
Loss of economic control, wealth,
distribution to foreign powers
Underdevelopment and economic
stagnation
Samir Amin: dual sector
1. The centre and the periphery play unequal roles
in the system because of unequal exchange.
2. In the periphery the ruling groups are in alliance
with those of the centre create environments in
the former in which peasants lack access to the
quantity and quality of land needed to maintain
their family's livelihood. As a result, the pool of
labour available is large. (labour creation)
3. Due to the surplus of labour, the reduction in
wages makes the reduction of prices of
commodities produced by the periphery
possible.
4. The production processes in the centre are
articulated whereas those in the periphery are
dis-articulated

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5. In the centre, demand and supply linkages
connect the production process throughout the
economy. Thus expansion of one sector has
positive impacts on other sectors via these
linkages.
6. In the periphery, there are few links between
various sectors. The expansion of one sector has
little impact via demand or supply linkages to the
rest of the economy. This rules out autonomous
development in the periphery.
Suggestions of solution
Poorer countries should embark on programs of
import substitution so that they need not purchase
the manufactured products from the richer
countries.
The poorer countries would still sell their primary
products on the world market, but their foreign
exchange reserves would not be used to purchase
their manufactures from abroad.
The only possibility of avoiding dependency
is creating an alternative system of
production, a non-capitalist system of
production. Here, the majority of dependentist
intellectuals were proposing "socialism" as
alternative.
Alternative Dependency thinkings
Cardoso: Associated-dependecy
_It is a critique to the classical dependency school’s
assertion that foreign domination/dependency
makes no room for national development.
_It puts a focus on the new development and
particularity of these activities in order to uncover
the dynamics.
Questions to ask and think:
_The historical origin and uniqueness of a
given dependency situation.
_A particular dependency situation different
from previous.
_Can the existing dependency structures
themselves generate possibilities of
transformation?
_What impact will a change in dependency
have on the historical development of a
developing country?
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Cardoso’s arguments:
1. to some extent, internal prosperity of the
dependent countries becomes compatible with
multinational corporations (they have to sell
products) and they promote development.
2. the basic relationship remains the same
because this relationship between the
developed and underdeveloped country is
based on the extractive exploitation of the
underdeveloped.
3. Cardoso regards the national bourgeoisies of
the dependent societies as potentially powerful
and capable of shaping development.

4. In the case of Brazil, the military regime
(bureaucratic-technocratic) state, the MNCs
and the local bourgeoisie formed a political
alliance to promote associated-development
since 1964.
O’Donnell – bureaucratic-authoritarian
state (vs traditional authoritarianism)
1. Dominance of bureaucrats
High government officials were those who
have successful careers in bureaucratic
organizations such as the arm, the public
bureaucracy and large private firms.
2. Political exclusion
The BA states repressed popular sectors (fx
labour unions) through closing channels of
political access and imposing corporatist
controls.
3. Economic exclusion
The BA states reduced or postpones
aspirations to economic participation by the
popular sectors.
4. Depoliticization
Social issues were reduced to “technical”
ones that can be solved by the rational
planning of state bureaucrats. (China in
the last two decades, economics-in
command. )
5. Capital is oriented towards: stability,
predictability, discipline. (rather than
democracy, human rights)
Post-colonial dependency
It refers to the status of a country that is no
longer colonized and has regained its political
independence (e.g., post-colonial Africa). In this
sense, "post-colonialism" will pertain to the
previous set of features (economic, political,
social, etc)
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Colonial infrastructures
Conceptual definitions (democracy, rights)*
A legal system (legislation, law-enforcement)
A communication system (ports, roads,
railways, telegraphs, etc.)
An economic system (trade, production,
finance, accounting,
A social system (health, police, recreation)
A cultural system (state and societal)
Post-colonial dependency characterizes the
statehood of these countries and the way they
negotiate their colonial heritage – the long
periods of forced dependency have a
profound impact on the social and cultural
fabric of these societies (the post-colonial
condition), fx. Africa and Latin America.
“African state”
Political and cultural dependency
ideological conviction (brain-wash)

culture of governance
culture of management
culture of capitalist spirit (Weber)
culture of understanding society,
economics and politics
Pan-Africanism
common identity (logo)
common history
common problems
historical bloc
leadership
full independence? Revolution?*
World system theory
1. Three major historical social systems:
a) closed local economies
b) World empires ( a core extracts tribute from
peripheries; such as the Chinese empire and the
Roman empire)
c) World economies (a single economy with
division of labour; pattern of specialization and
exchange; multiple cultures; no central political
authority
2. The world systems approach, argues that
the present inequality and poverty is a direct
consequence of the evolution of the
international political economy into a fairly
rigid division of labor which favored the
rich and penalized the poor.
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3. The modern world-system is a capitalist worldeconomy,
which means that it is governed by
the drive for the endless accumulation of
capital, sometimes called the law of value.
4. This world-system came into existence in the
course of the sixteenth century, and its original
division of labor included in its bounds much of
Europe (but not the Russian or Ottoman
Empires) and parts of the Americas.
5. This world-system has been expanding over
the centuries, successively incorporating
other parts of the world into its division of
labor.
6. The capitalist world-system is constituted
by a world economy dominated by coreperipheral
relations and a political structure
consisting of sovereign states within the
framework of an interstate system.
7. The fundamental contradictions of the
capitalist system have been expressed within
the systemic process by a series of cyclical
rhythms, which have served to contain these
contradictions.
8. The cyclical rhythms included hegemonic
cycles consisting of the rise and decline of
successive guarantors of global order, each
one with its particular pattern of control.
9. The cyclical rhythms resulted in regular slowmoving

but significant geographical shifts in
accumulation and power, without changing the
fundamental relations of inequality within the
system.
10. These cycles were never perfectly
symmetrical, but rather each new cycle brought
about small but significant structural shifts in
particular directions that constituted the secular
trends of the system.
11. The modern world-system, like all systems, is
finite in duration, and will come to an end when
its secular trends reach a point* such that the
fluctuations of the system become sufficiently
wide and erratic that they can no longer ensure
the renewed viability of the system's institutions.
When this point is reached, a bifurcation will
occur, and via a period of (chaotic) transition the
system will come to be replaced by one or
several other systems.
World-system in historical perspective
Mini-systems (pre-agricultural era)
Mini homogeneous societies in cultural and
governing structures
World empires (8000 B.C. – 1500 A.D.)
Vast political structure encompassing a wide
range of cultural patterns; the extraction of
tribute or locally self-sufficient.
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Wallerstein: (vis-s-vis culturalist explanations)
- The Chinese empire
The Chinese were accomplished astronomers;
had invented gunpowder, printing, and paper;
and had developed a sophisticated bureaucracy
to manage their imperial state. The Great Wall
of China is the only clear object that can be
seen from the moon. (The long and durable
feudal system)
- Turko-Arabic empire
The Arabs had pioneered much of modern
mathematics including the use of Arabic
numerals, zero, and algebra (the term itself is
derived from Arabic). They were also
accomplished chemists, having developed
distillation (alcohol is another term derived from
Arabic).
World economies (since 1500)
Uneven chains of integrated production
dissected by multiply political structures; the
basic logic was accumulation of surplus;
wealth was unequally distributed in favour of
those able to achieve monopolies; the capitalist
world economies then expanded to the entire
globe.
(European expansion, the fall of other empires)
From British to American Empire
Neil Ferguson (2003)
Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British
World Order and the Lessons for Global Power

British empire
the British Empire was the grand provider of five
institutions for the world:
1. the triumph of capitalism as the optimal system of
economic organization.
2. the Anglicization of North America and Australasia
3. the internationalization of the English language
4. the enduring influence of the Protestant version of
Christianity.
5. "the survival of parliamentary institutions.
Neil: American empire?
that it is the United States, not Britain, that is
"capable of playing an imperial role" in the world
today.
America's own history - freeing itself from the
British Empire - has made it wary of "formal rule
over subject peoples"
America must face up to its imperial duties
because it is "an empire in denial," an empire "that
dare not speak its name."
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other readings
Chalmers Johnson (2000): Blowback: The Cost and
Consequences of American Empire.
Andrew J. Bacevich (2002) American Empire: The
Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy.
Harry Turtledove (2003) American Empire: The
Victorious Opposition.
The rise of European dominance
As the first to develop a national capitalist economy,
then expanded to the globe, then translated the
economic power the into the military and
technological power necessary to dominate and
eventually subjugate its Islamic and Chinese rivals.
The maturation of a capitalistic society gave the
Europeans an edge over other powers and offered
them advantages that resulted in European
dominance. From these beginnings came European
hegemony.
World system, 1800 - World system, 1900 -
World system, 2000 ? (China and East Asia) Country differentiations
Competition in total production output
(GNP, GDP)
Specialization in particular type of
production (technological level)
Timing and conditions of state formation
Relative successes in warfare and internal
population control
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World-system methodology
A Marxist approach
The essence of Marx's analysis of history is that
class divisions emerge as a result of the mode of
production within a society. Slavery, feudalism,,
and capitalism all created class divisions, be they
master/slave, noble/serf, or capitalist/worker.
Human history is a history of class struggles
according to Marx.

Wallerstein expands it to examine the entire
global economy from a Marxian perspective.
Applying the Marxist approach on the global
level.
The globe also could be arranged not on the
basis of geography but on the Marxian basis of
the mode of production and division of labor.
Global divisions
Core, “developed”
Semiperiphery, “semi-developed”
Periphery, “developing” or underdeveloped
The core
The core was the equivalent of the ruling
class in traditional Marxian perspective
while the periphery was the equivalent of
the lower class. The core, or First World,
had an economy based upon the importation
of raw materials and exportation of finished
goods.
The periphery
The periphery, or Third World, in turn
provided the raw materials and a market for
the finished goods made from them.
The semi-periphery
In between lay the semi-periphery, or
Second World. The economy of the semiperiphery
was a mixture of resource
extraction and manufacturing but was
dominated by neither.
More recent formulations of the theory have
expanded the semi-periphery to include the
semi-core
20
World system discourses
A. It rejects the nation-state as the unit of analysis:
- as long as exchange takes place through a
market (sale for profit), even if it is only on an
international level, it is still capitalism;
- wage labor is not the issue here; production for
profit in a market is the issue;
- agricultural capitalism began with the rise of
the Western world (Marx's stages of history)
B. A world division of labor in which
production is exchanged through a market
and in which the political units are not
conterminous with the division of labor is a
capitalist world-economy; if political unit is
conterminous with division of labor, it is a
world-empire.
(The division of economic and political class;
single vs multi-legitimation)
C. In a world market, actors and producers
attempt to avoid the normal operation of the
market whenever it did not maximize their
profit. They turn to non-market devices in
order to ensure this--this means to the nationstate.;
i.e., mercantilism; note that this can

mean protection (usually for those seeking to
catch up) or a more positive hand to capitalists-
-forcing open markets, maintaining a free trade
regime
D. Historically northwest Europe was better situated in
the 16th century to diversify agricultural
specialization and add certain industries (textiles,
shipbuilding, metal wares). It traded these with E.
Europe and W. Hemisphere for grain, bullion,
wood, cotton, sugar. Strong states developed in the
core because there was more surplus to tax and new
producers wanted protection. They did not develop
in the periphery because there were no surpluses to
tax and large agricultural producers did not want
protection (self-sufficient, self-reliance).
E. Once the unequal exchange mechanism is
set up, and the differences between strong
and weak states are established, the
situation is exacerbated. Strong states
defend their markets and force open those
of the periphery.
F. Western liberal values (science, progress,
rationality, liberty, democracy, rights) which are
alleged to have been the basis of imperialism,
domination and exploitation are not considered
as a major cause of exploitation and domination.
Rather, it was the military and economic power
generated by capitalism that made European
colonialism and hegemony possible. (economic
and technological imperatives)
21
Capitalism vs socialism
Christopher Chase-Dunn
The historical development of the communist states can
be explained as part of a long-run spiraling interaction
between expanding capitalism and socialist counterreponses
The history and developmental trajectory of the
communist states can be explained that socialist
movements in the semiperiphery that attempted to
transform the basic logic of capitalism, but ended up
using socialist ideology to mobilize industrialization for
the purpose of catching up with core capitalism
The spiraling interaction between capitalist
development and socialist movements can be seen in
the history of labor movements, socialist parties and
communist states over the last 200 years:
both capitalism and socialism affect one another's
growth and organizational forms. Capitalism spurs
socialist responses by exploiting and dominating
peoples, and socialism spurs capitalism to expand its
scale of production and market integration and to
revolutionize technology (resilience of capitalism).
Socialists were able to gain state power in certain
semiperipheral states and use this power to create
political mechanisms of protection against competition
with core capital. This was not a wholly new
phenomenon because capitalist semiperipheral states
had done and were doing similar things. But, the
communist states claimed a fundamentally oppositional
ideology in which socialism was allegedly a superior
system that would eventually replace capitalism.

Therefore, it is both a economic and ideological
struggle.
In response to socialist movement, capitalism
was driven to further revolutionize technology
or to improve living conditions for workers and
peasants because of the demonstration effect of
propinquity to a communist state.
U.S. support for state-led industrialization of
Japan and Korea (in contrast to U.S. policy in
Latin America) was understood as a
geopolitical response to the Chinese revolution.
Dependency vs World-system
Dependency perspective World-system
perspective
Unit of analysis The nation-state The world system
Methodology Structural-historical: boom
and bust of nation-state
Historical dynamics of the
World-system: cyclical
rhythms and secular trends
Theoretical
structure
Bimodal: core-periphery Trimodal: coresemiperiphery-
periphery
Direction of
development
Deterministic: dependency is
generally harmful
Possible upward and
downward mobility in the
world economy
Research focus On the periphery On the periphery as well as
on the core, the semiphery
and the world economy
World-system key position
Nation’s future is shaped solely by its
historical position in the world system.
Strategies for growth and national policy
have limited impact on development
22
The case of East Asia: yes+no
Modernization
East Asia
Dependency
(linkage –core)
World-system
(geopolitics, upward)
Critical questions
What are the conditions that give rise to
East Asian developmental states?
Why did it emerge in East Asia and not in
Africa and Latin America?
What are other factors and explanations
which form the nature of state-market
relations and state-society relations
East Asian: a special case?
The role of geopolitics
- The Cold War
- The role of the US (political, economic and
military.
The role of the state (political economy)
- Authoritarian capitalism, CDS
- The role of culture?
American security umbrella

South Korea
- $13 billion or $600 per capita in the period of
1945-79
- US aid accounted for five-sixths of Korean
imports
_ Taiwan some $5.6 billion and $425 per capita.
_ Market access, investment and foreign trade
Limits of East Asian model
Historically specific vs culturally specific
A model to be learned, but historically confined
Unique conjunction with the development of
capitalism (after the Second World War)
Globalization vs high-speed export-oriented
After the Cold War with the fall of Soviet Union
communism, US needs “fair competition”
The 1997 Asian financial crisis.
The East Asian case is the interaction of many
mutually-related external and internal factors. It
is the synergy of external factors, such as the
US security umbrella, favorable international
environment, foreign assistance and direct
investment, correlating with internal factors,
such as the role of state, cheap labor, export-led
development policy, the role of education and
cultural aspects. Ignoring one single factor
would put explanations on a fragile and
uncompleted basis.
…………………………………………….
Center for European Studies
Working Paper Series 129
Unbalanced Growth: Why Is Economic Sociology
Stronger in Theory Than in Policies?*
by
Carlo Trigilia
Professor of Economic Sociology
Faculty of Political Sciences
University of Florence
Via Delle Pandette, 21
50127 Firenze, Italy
E-mail: trigilia@unifi.it
Abstract
The aim of this article is to discuss the relationship between economic sociology and economic
policies. In the last decades, economic sociology has made significant achievements in terms of
theory and research, but that its influence on policies has remained weak. While this was inevitable
in earlier decades, when scholars had to concentrate most of their effort on defining the role
and contribution of economic sociology, it has since become a constraint for the institutionalization
and recognition of the discipline. The return to economic sociology, since the 1980s, has
brought about important theoretical achievements, especially in the analysis of economic organization
at the micro level in terms of social and cultural embeddedness. The role of social relations
in contemporary economy has clearly emerged, but its implications for policies to promote economic
development have remained more latent so far. Although a weaker institutionalization

and a poorer connection to policy-making certainly affect the political influence of economic sociology
in comparison to economics, the paper focuses on the research perspective. A shift of the
research focus from the statics to the dynamics of economic organization could be useful. In this
framework, particular attention is drawn to the study of local development and innovation
through a closer relationship of economic sociology with comparative political economy. A separation
between these two approaches does not favor a full exploitation of the potential contribution
of economic sociology to policies.
*Paperprepared for the International Review of Sociology. A first version was presented at the International
Conference on “Economic Sociology: Problems and Prospects,” University of Crete, Rethimno, Crete,
September 8-10 2004.
2
The aim of this article is to discuss the relationship between economic sociology
and economic policies. I would like to show that in the last decades economic sociology
has made significant achievements in terms of theory and research, but that its influence
on policies has remained weak. While this was inevitable in earlier decades, when scholars
had to concentrate most of their effort on defining the role and contribution of economic
sociology, it has since become a constraint for the institutionalization and recognition
of the discipline.
Of course, one could ask why we should care about influencing policy. It could
be argued that the main goal of the discipline should be to improve knowledge of economic
activities and processes from a sociological point of view. My answer is that a social
science should care about its contribution to a reflexive reconstruction of society. As
James Coleman wrote, "social science is not only a search for knowledge for the aesthetic
pleasure of discovery or for the sake of knowing, but a search for knowledge for the reconstruction
of society" (Coleman 1990, 651).
I will begin by recalling that the classics, the founding fathers of economic sociology,
viewed their approach as clearly oriented towards finding solutions for the reconstruction
of a society increasingly destabilized by liberal capitalism. Analytical intentions
and political implications were strictly related. However, after the Second World
War, a process of disciplinary specialization took place. There was a decline of the classical
tradition and a loss of interest in economic policies. The latter were mainly discussed
in the framework provided by mainstream economics. In the ensuing part of the
paper, I will try to show that a revival of economic sociology, since the 1980s, has
brought about important theoretical achievements, especially in the analysis of economic
organization at the micro level in terms of social and cultural embeddedness. The role of
social relations in contemporary economy has clearly emerged, but its implications for
policies to promote economic development have remained more latent so far. In the final
section, I discuss some factors that affected this outcome and point to possible remedies
to strengthen the contribution of economic sociology to policy proposals. I am aware
that a weaker institutionalization and a poorer connection to policy-making certainly
affect the political influence of economic sociology in comparison to economics. However,
this paper concentrates on the role of the research orientation. It suggests that a
shift of the research focus from the statics to the dynamics of economic organization
could strengthen the policy impact of economic sociology. From this perspective, particular
attention is drawn to the study of local development and innovation through a
closer relationship with comparative political economy. The separation between these
two approaches prevents a full exploitation of the potential contribution of economic
sociology to policies.
1. The classics of economic sociology and the political reform of capitalism
The founders of economic sociology did not oppose the market, but were convinced

that it should be properly regulated. It was mainly in Germany, with Max Weber
and Werner Sombart, that economic sociology grew as an autonomous discipline. Both
of them respected neoclassical economics. They took Menger's side in the methodological
debate (Methodenstreit), where he opposed the historicists. They believed that analytical
economic theory had a legitimate right to exist, but did not assume its empirical va 3
lidity. Weber repeatedly stated that economic behavior was actually influenced only
very rarely by the motivations that neo-classical economics attributed to self-interested,
atomistic actors. This is why he wanted to begin a theoretical study of the economy in its
socio-cultural context. He aimed to develop a micro-foundation of economic behavior
able not only to improve the understanding of capitalist development, but also to provide
more sophisticated and effective policy tools than the laissez-faire kit of neo-classical
economics.
The worries about liberal capitalism expressed by Weber and Sombart were
shared by other classics, such as Durkheim and Polanyi. For all of them the market
works better when problems of fairness and trust are successfully dealt with, and this
distinguishes the sociological view from neo-classical economics.
Economic sociology is more interested in the problems of fairness in real markets,
while economics focuses on problems of efficiency, taking it for granted that a fully
competitive market will also resolve any problems of equity. If labor relations are particularly
unbalanced, conflicts may emerge in bargaining relations, which risk endangering
productive activities; or alternatively, workers may become less committed to
their tasks, lowering productivity. In these cases, the institutions representing the collective
interest of workers and introducing political regulation into the labor market, become
important. Moreover, state intervention to regulate working conditions and to reduce
social inequalities brought about by the market are also necessary precisely to have
more efficient markets.
In addition, the real operation of the economy is highly dependent on trust. Individuals
are not normally well-informed or fully capable of rational calculation, and not
everyone can be considered equally trustworthy. The lack of perfect information, together
with the risk of moral hazard, makes market exchanges problematic, even where
they have been legitimized. In addition, markets are not always fully competitive. In real
societies, therefore, the market works better insofar as there are institutions that generate
and reproduce trust through personal interactions (for example, those tied to families,
kinship relations, local communities, etc.) or in an impersonal way, through formal institutions
(such as legal sanctions applied to people who violate contracts). Therefore,
what Durkheim called “non-contractual conditions of the contract” are crucial for the
tradition of economic sociology.
These analytical intentions of economic sociology are well known, but it is worth
noticing that they were strictly related to clear political implications. The classics were
convinced that social and political regulation of the market was necessary; and this conviction
was strengthened by the economic and social turmoil brought about by the Great
Depression and the crisis of liberal capitalism, as is very clear in Polanyi's Great Transformation.
However, after the Second World War, this tradition of economic sociology as
macro-sociology of capitalism, oriented towards its political reform, declined. The legacy
of the classics became fragmented and economic sociology moved towards greater thematic
and disciplinary specialization. New fields emerged, such as industrial and labor
sociology, organizational studies and industrial relations. The original political orientations
towards the reform of liberal capitalism dissolved as well.
4

Many factors contributed to the process of fragmentation and disciplinary specialization,
but there are two reasons particularly worth mentioning. The first concerns
the consequences of intense economic growth and social and political stabilization. In
other words, many of the worries about the difficult relationship between the economy
and society in liberal capitalism – on which the founders of economic sociology had focused
their attention – seemed less important as a consequence of the “great transformation”
of capitalism. This occurred particularly in the more developed countries,
where Keynesian policies and “Fordist” forms of industrial organization became widespread.
The second reason involves the contemporary redefinition of the boundaries
between economics and sociology. On the one hand, with the “Keynesian revolution”,
economics offered new and effective instruments to interpret and guide this new and
intense phase of economic growth. On the other hand, the institutionalization of sociology
pushed scholars towards fields that were less studied by economists, and encouraged
a greater disciplinary specialization. The work of Talcott Parsons played a crucial
role in the redefinition of the boundaries between economics and sociology.
Parsons (1937) criticized the atomistic individualism of neo-classical economics
because of its assumption that individuals define their ends independently of their mutual
interaction. However, he proposed a definition of the boundaries between the two
disciplines based on what he called “the analytical factor view". Economics must be conceived
as the analytical theory of a factor of action based on the rational pursuit of individual
interest, while sociology should be understood as an abstract analytical theory of
another factor of action, one linked to “ultimate values”. While an important effect of
this influential view was to favor the academic institutionalization of sociology in new
fields not presided over by economics, at the same time it also meant that the interests of
the sociological community shifted away from economic sociology and towards other
themes. Policy implications were loose and indirect, but basically they implied interventions
that could favor the social acceptance of market economy, even through redistributive
policies (as is clear in Parsons and Smelser 1956). Economic organization
was seen as essentially shaped by market incentives, and thus left to mainstream economics.
Summing up, we could say that when the era of the classics came to a close, their
commitment to a political reform of capitalism had been taken over by Keynesian economics
and Fordist re-organization, until the late 1960s. Sociology was oriented towards
the problem of social integration, and distanced itself from the analysis of the economy
and from economic policies (Granovetter 1990).
2. The revival of economic sociology: theoretical achievements distant from policies
As is known, since the 1980s there has been a return to economic sociology with
the "new economic sociology", focusing mainly on the micro level. Two main factors
have influenced this trend. First, there was a theoretical reaction to new economic
neoinstitutionalist's
attempts to analyze the growing variety of productive organization. In
addition to market and hierarchy, a number of new hybrid forms were developing,
based on the more or less formalized collaboration between firms (joint ventures, alli
5
ances, co-operation agreements, etc.). Although transaction-costs theory tried to redefine
the traditional economic theory of action by taking into account aspects such as
"bounded rationality" and "opportunism" (Williamson 1975,1985), this approach still explains
organizational choices in terms of the rational search for efficiency. Thus, it has
not been able to provide a satisfactory explanation for economic action under conditions
of insufficient information and uncertainty.

In sociology, the development of neo-institutional economic theories triggered, in
turn, new explanations of organizational variety that underlined the autonomous roles
of social networks, cultural factors and power relations. This led to the second factor
driving new economic sociology. In the 1970s and early 1980s, there was a growing dissatisfaction
in sociology with Talcott Parsons’ theory of action, and the new economic
sociology was particularly influenced by the criticisms developed by ethnomethodology
and phenomenology (DiMaggio 1994). Thus, it shares a theory of action
that is more constructivist, more contingent and more open to direct social interactions.
Different approaches converge in the new economic sociology. It may be worth
mentioning some differences and similarities between the structuralist and the neoinstitutional
approach. In the structuralist approach, the actor’s location in the structure
of social relations is crucial for understanding his actions (Granovetter 1985). It defines a
peculiar “social capital” that can be used in economic transactions to provide information
and trust (Coleman 1990). Important applications of the structural approach can be
found in the study of labor markets, business groups and inter-firm relations, product
differentiation and market competition, new high-tech activities, the stock market.
In contrast, sociological neo-institutionalists take a different position, emphasizing
the autonomous role played by cultural factors in motivating actors and shaping organization
choice. A good example of the analytical consequences resulting from the
neo-institutionalist approach is the work on “isomorphism” by Powell and Di Maggio
(1991). In empirical research, this approach has stimulated numerous contributions, especially
in sectors that are not affected by market competition, such as non-profit and
cultural organizations, as well as financial institutions and large accounting firms. Fligstein’s
work (1990) on the productive diversification of large American firms provided
an interesting application.
Despite these differences, both the structural approach and sociological neoinstitutionalism
provide a view of the market as embedded in social structures, and try
to explain the real action of economic actors in concrete markets. Both also share an explanation
of organizational diversity than cannot be reduced to the mere search for efficiency
by atomistic actors (individuals or firms). Under the same conditions of "asset
specificity" - to use Williamson's language – different actors could rely to different degrees
on the market, hierarchy or relational contracting, thus providing variable organizational
choices. In fact their choice is influenced by their social relations (or social
capital as intended by Coleman) and by their cognitive and normative attitudes. In this
way the new economic sociology reacted to the "imperialism" of economic analysis by
providing alternative explanations for the variety of economic organization. As
Granovetter (1990) pointed out, this is an important difference from the "old" economic
sociology, which did not trespass on the traditional boundaries between economic and
sociology.
6
On the whole, this has been a significant theoretical achievement, which was favored
by interesting research, and is in turn orienting new research on economic organization.
However, there is in an important potential for policy-making in the new economic
sociology that has not been fully exploited so far. While the shortcomings of
mainstream economics, particularly in the micro-foundation of economic behavior, have
been clearly shown, standard economic thought continues to greatly influence policies
to promote economic development. The new economic sociology appears distant from
policy debates. Engaged in reacting to the “economic imperialism” at the analytical
level, it remains extremely weak in challenging the dominance of mainstream economics

and economic neo-institutionalism over policies. Why is it so?
3. How to strengthen the influence of economic sociology on policies
Current economic policies may take the form of either laissez-faire measures or
state-centered intervention. Both orientations, however, share the same attitude towards
economic behavior. Economic action is about self-interested and socially isolated actors.
Laissez-faire policies assume that in order to improve economic development, economic
actors have to be freed from social bonds and political constraints. This is still the same
old worry, since Adam Smith, that social relations and networks among economic actors
would bring about collusion, and could result in the loss of efficiency. In contrast, since
the “Keynesian revolution”, state-centered measures recognize that uncertainty, lack of
information and trust may hinder economic activity. However, they usually provide
policy solutions that are based on two main instruments: financial incentives to compensate
the risks and costs coming from the backwardness of local settings, or public investments
to improve infrastructure or human capital. In any case the role of social relations
and social networks is not considered as a possible target for policies. On the contrary,
it is often perceived as a factor that could hinder the efficient operation of markets.
The reasons for the hegemony of mainstream economics over economic policies
are complex. Certainly, economics provides important tools for the macro-management
of contemporary economies, and this adds to a long-lasting tradition of institutionalization.
and reputation. Economic research centers - both within the university system and
in public or non-governmental structures - are well entrenched and tightly connected to
governmental decision-making. They have a long experience in translating economic
ideas into policy proposals. It is obvious that the degree of institutionalization of economic
sociology and its capacity to influence policy proposals are much weaker.
In addition, one should take into account that the policies shaped by mainstream
economics tend to be more easily understood by politicians and representative of interest
groups, although this does not mean that they are always accepted. As a matter of
fact, they are usually formulated in terms of attempts at influencing the behavior of single
actors, through financial incentives or regulatory measures. Policies inspired by economic
sociology would be more complex because they would try to shape the relational
aspects of economic activities, or the building up of social capital as a way of fostering
economic development. The benefits of such policies tend to be more diffuse, rather than
concentrated on specific groups, and their effective implementation usually requires a
longer time than standard economic measures.
7
Therefore, there are various reasons that hinder a stronger influence of economic
sociology over policies. However, in the following remarks I will concentrate on some
aspects that mainly concern the research topics and the analytical perspective of the discipline.
Although these factors do not directly affect the important issues of institutionalization
and connection to the decision-making, my contention is that a shift of the research
focus to the problem of local development and innovation, and to the relevant
policies, could improve the contribution of economic sociology to more effective policies.
This, in turn, would require a more intense collaboration with comparative political
economy.
So far the “new economic sociology” - especially in the United States - has grown
mainly dealing with static problems. Basically, it has tried to provide an alternative explanation
for the varieties of economic organization at the micro level. Research interests
have been strongly concentrated on the attempt to show that efficiency reasons are not
sufficient and can be misleading. Both the structural approach based on networks and

the study of isomorphism undertaken by sociological neo-institutionalism reacted to
economic explanations of economic organization. While this research focus was able to
show the role of social and cultural factors in the operation of the economy, it was less
favorable to exploiting the analytical potential of economic sociology in terms of policies.
A shift of focus towards dynamic problems – such as local development and innovation
– could foster a more active contribution to policies New research might involve
dynamic cities, backward areas that experience new growth, or local innovation systems
such as new high tech districts. A systematic assessment of comparable cases of success
and failure would allow a better understanding of the influence of social and cultural
embeddedness on economic performance.
What are the policy implications of the social and cultural embeddedness of
economic organization? We could hypothesize that the local availability of a rich network
of social relations would favor economic activity and development. It might help
to tackle the problems of co-operation that are due to lack of information and trust; and
it might also help to develop favorable relations among the leaders of collective actors,
thus improving the provision of collective goods. If these hypotheses were reasonably
confirmed, we would have important elements for new policies that go beyond the old
dichotomy between state and market, by promoting cooperation among individual actors
(firms, workers and firms) and collective actors (local governments and organized
interests) as a way to support economic development and social quality. This could entail
both technical assistance and financial incentives to cooperative projects aimed at
strengthening external economies and collective goods.
To make progress in this direction would require more collaboration with comparative
political economy in focusing on the role of politics and policies. The themes of
local development and innovation have been more extensively investigated within the
comparative political economy tradition, especially in the literature related to industrial
districts and local innovation systems (Trigilia 2002), but also in work on the “varieties
of capitalism” (Hall and Soskice 2002). However, the social dimension is often the missing
link. A closer relationship with the theoretical framework and research tools of economic
sociology could improve the analysis of local development and innovation by focusing
on the specific role of social networks and on their relationship with governance,
and could also help to propose new and more effective policies.
8
From this perspective, I would like to draw attention to two problems. The first
has to do with the specific role of social networks, which is not sufficiently clear in the
political economy literature. They may favor development, or may hinder the growth of
economic activities. They may lead to collusion, or to closure with regard to external
stimuli (new knowledge of technology or market trends). So we must ask under what
conditions social networks favor local economic development and innovation. The second
problem concerns the origins of “good” networks conducive to local development
and innovation. It is important to clarify whether good social capital is just rooted in the
history of a particular region or city, or can be fostered through appropriate political
measures. The possibility of improving policies for local development and innovation
strongly relies on adequate evidence and convincing comparative accounts. But before
dealing with these problems (in the final section), it is worth pointing to the increased
importance of social relations in contemporary economic organization.
4. Why social relations become more important for economic development
Comparative political economy implicitly suggests that social networks are more
important for economic development, in the post-Fordist era: the economy tend to become

more “relational” (Veltz 2000, DiMaggio 2002). Fordist organization made social
networks less important than in liberal capitalism. Large vertically-integrated firms were
more autonomous from their environment. The non-economic factors that most influenced
development were mainly of two types: the organizational capacity of the firm –
the “visible hand” of the organization at the micro-level - and the Keynesian policies at
the macro-level. Policies to attract large external firms by means of incentives and infrastructures
were also important for backward areas. Stability was the key word for the
old model, which guided the “golden age” of post-war development. In the last decades
it has been increasingly substituted by two other catch-words, especially for firms in advanced
countries: flexibility and quality. Flexible specialization changed the landscape
and tended to give social networks a growing role. The search for flexibility and quality
led not only to restructuring to increase the autonomy of the firms’ internal organization,
but even more to a greater need for external co-operation, especially in sectors
where the technological trajectory is uncertain or the demand is very unstable (as in
biotechnologies, or in the media industry or in some parts of ICT).
Networks of firms (or districts) and large networked-firms become the protagonists
of contemporary economy. But they are more dependent than their predecessor of
the past – the vertically-integrated large firm - on the willingness of the workers and
other firms to cooperate effectively to obtain flexibility and quality. This increased the
potential transaction costs and therefore the value of social capital – of the networks of
social relations rooted in a certain territory – in the productive process and for innovation.
However, one could object that increasing globalization of economic activities, and
the improvement in communications, foster a decentralization of manufacturing towards
the newly developing countries with lower costs. Thus, the role of localized social
networks tends to become less important in a global market where contractual relations
are continuously growing.
As a matter of fact, individual firms – above all the multinationals, but also the
smaller firms – can search, more easily now than in the past, for more advantageous
9
conditions by moving from one country to another and by combining in their productive
process inputs from firms and local partners in different areas, through complex organized
structures. The improvement of communications and information technologies help
this process. All this tends to rapidly alter the localized benefits of a particular territory.
Nevertheless, the empirical evidence suggests that the result is not a simple tendency
towards the “de-territorialization” of productive processes, but rather a greater competition
between regions in which the resource of “good” social networks between individual
and collective actors is crucial. Productive growth and localization of external investments
tend in fact to concentrate where the external economies and productive specialization
are stronger. This affects both the newly developing countries as well as the
more advanced ones.
The decentralization of manufacturing to areas with lower costs is not even. It is
much stronger in areas where external economies and collective goods are more widespread.
The availability of “good” social networks among individual firms, and among
employers and workers influence the potential for economic development. No less important
is the role of collective social capital: cooperative and effective relations among
private and public actors which help to increase the production of collective goods (infrastructure,
services, training) for the local economy (Evans 1996). Even within the “developmental
states”, in the Third World, there are strong regional differences in the
ability to attract foreign investments and to sustain local initiatives.

In the developed countries, globalization is fueling an overall reshuffling of economic
organization. While manufacturing tends to shrink, there is a shift toward the
new knowledge economy. These countries are forced to pursue a “high road” based on
innovation in high-tech activities more dependent on scientific advances. But this trend
is producing a new “re-territorialization” of the economy around specialized areas and
cities, both in Europe (Crouch et al. 2001, 2004) and in the US (Florida 2002,2005). Innovation
is now more closely tied to processes of co-operation among firms in different
sectors, which imply the sharing of a language, the development of “conversations”
among different actors (Lester and Piore 2004); some forms of tacit knowledge that allow
the better exploitation of standard technologies and codified knowledge to find out new
solutions and new products. Paradoxically enough, in many innovative sectors such us
bio-technologies, software activities or the media industry, the growth of new information
and communication technologies increases the diffusion of codified information,
but at the same time opens up a greater role for tacit knowledge and understanding,
embedded in social networks, as a competitive resource. Again, it is not only the network
of relations between individuals, but that between organizations, or collective actors,
which is also important. A good network of relations between interest organizations,
financial institutions, universities, and local governments can favor the improvement
of infrastructural facilities and the efficient provision of economic and social services,
as well as the influx of capital and investments of both local and external firms,
and the establishment of effective cooperation among economic actors and research and
training institutions.
Therefore, it can be said that globalization has contradictory consequences for local
development. It may weaken some areas not only as a result of higher costs, but also
because these do not manage to keep up with the provision of external economies and
collective goods that are necessary to increase productivity. It may however favor other
10
areas that exploit their social capital to attract external firms and to take advantage of the
greater opportunities in terms of a growing market for exports that open up, as in the
developing countries; or to exploit the new possibilities dependent on knowledge-based
economy for developing more innovative activities, as in advanced countries.
On the whole, it is to be stressed that the importance of social network seems to
increase, in comparison to the past. This trend enhances the possibilities of local actors to
affect the development of their region. This process does not necessarily depend on
lower costs, although they remain important as competitive resource, especially in the
developing countries. Both in the backward and in the advanced countries, the capacity
to use social capital to develop a certain amount of knowledge and of specialization is a
key resource for development.
5. Social networks, local development and policies
While the political economy literature suggests that social networks may play an
important role in local development, it is not sufficiently clear how they actually work,
under what conditions they may favor economic development, and when they instead
lead to collusion or closure to external knowledge. Another crucial problem concerns the
possibility of promoting cooperative social networks that are conducive to economic development
and innovation through intentional actions. A research investment by economic
sociology in these issues, and a closer cooperation with comparative political
economy, could improve the understanding of these processes and could help develop
new policies more fine-tuned to the relational features of contemporary economy.
Some examples can help to clarify these problems. Let us consider first the problem

of collusion with particular reference to the backward areas. The role of traditional
social structures (e.g. family, kinship, community, religious, ethnic subcultures), as resources
for development in backward countries has been widely discussed, reversing
one of the classic assumptions of the theory of modernization. In fact, however, their relationship
with economic development is more complex. While traditional resources as
source of social networks are widespread, their activation as resources for development
is quite uneven, as is shown, for instance, by a comparison between Latin-American and
Asian countries. What makes the difference seems the combination of networks based
on traditional institutions and a modernized politics, autonomous from civil society. It is
the “embedded autonomy” (Evans 1995) – the autonomy of political action that is at the
same time socially embedded at the local level – which can contribute in an innovative
way to local development. In Latin America politics seems to have hindered the productive
use of social capital linked to traditional structures, because of its lack of autonomy
from social interests and the weakness of state structures. On the contrary, the
Asian experiences show a polity that not only provided more strategic capabilities (developmental
states), but also oriented social networks towards the economic rather than
the political market.
Following this perspective, one can propose the hypothesis that the composition
of social capital (strong ties vs. weak ties) matters. It seems likely that an appropriate
mix of the two types would favor economic growth. But an important condition has to
do with the role of politics. Political settings that are more autonomous from particular
11
istic pressure seem more able to avoid the collusive use of social networks, more oriented
to the political rather then to the economic market. In addition, this kind of polity
seems more equipped to avoid the closure of local networks to external stimuli, and
therefore more able to prevent the emergence of lock-ins. More systematic comparative
studies could throw light on this crucial issue, which is obviously important for policies.
Another example that shows the importance of clarifying the role of social networks
concerns the sites of innovation in the most advanced countries. There is a clear
link between the production of innovation in the knowledge-based economy and the
cities. Richard Florida (2005) pointed out that the process is mainly influenced by some
social groups with high human capital. They choose to live in cities with high degree of
tolerance, and cultural and social amenities. This, in turn, attracts – or contributes to the
creation of – innovative firms. This explanation raises many questions about the causal
direction. However, it is certainly true that not all the large and well-equipped cities are
able to trigger a virtuous circle between people and innovative activities, including the
crucial contribution of university and research institutions. There is a different “absorptive”
capacity of potential for innovation related to universities and research facilities, in
terms of economic, cultural and social infrastructure. The comparison between Silicon
Valley and route 128 in Boston (Saxenian 1994) suggests that there is an important social
factor in the explanation of why certain regions or cities succeed and others do not.
Again, a closer attention in comparative terms to the role of social networks and to their
relations to governance could help to better understand local development, and could
contribute to work out more effective policies beyond the traditional opposition between
market and state-centered policies.
Let us come to a second problem. It is not yet clear whether the role of social
networks is merely dependent on the history of local contexts - on the way history has
shaped culture and social relations of actors - or if it may also be socially and politically
constructed through reflexive action. In the first case, if path-dependency prevails, there

is little space for policies. Local development could be predicted but hardly promoted
through purposive policies in local contexts which lack certain requisites. In the other
case, we could learn important lessons for new policies that work by promoting the appropriate
social capital through financial incentives and technical assistance. These kind
of policies that try to foster economic development by promoting social capital are
growing, especially in Europe, where they are pursued by the EU, and in the developing
countries through programs of international organization such as the World Bank or
UNIDO, and others. Therefore, it would be crucial to select and investigate cases of local
development that are based on planned interventions to improve cooperation among
individual actors, as well as collective actors. These might include cases of strategic
planning for cities, territorial pacts for backward areas, or projects for the growth of high
tech systems. Such an analysis might encourage the creation of a new repertoire of policies
for economic development that build social bridges between state and market, and
take more into account the relational bases of contemporary economic organization.
These examples show that there could be an important role for economic sociology
in the analysis of local development and innovation. This, in turn, could strengthen
the contribution of this approach to more effective policies. But this also requires that
economic sociologists start to pay more attention to political processes and the role of
public policies than the new economic sociology has so far. As Fligstein (2002) has
12
pointed out, this would be important because it would not only contribute to a more integrated
sociology of markets, but would also help to link micro-economic sociology
with macro-comparative political economy (see also Block and Evans 2005).
Actually, in the main accounts of more recent achievements, economic sociology
has been mainly identified with the "new economic sociology" developed in the US. This
trend does not favor a closer relationship with comparative political economy. A wider
conception of economic sociology that includes comparative political economy would be
consistent with the classical tradition of economic sociology, which paid particular attention
to the influence of the state on economic activities (Trigilia 2002). It also would
help to develop the policy implications of theoretical and empirical achievements. In this
way economic sociology could integrate its theoretical framework with the kind of "pluralistic
applied research" that Coleman was demanding, for a richer contribution to the
reflexive reconstruction of society.
13
References
Block, F. and Evans, P. 2005. “The State and the Economy”, Pp.505-526 in The Handbook of Economic
Sociology, edited by N.Smelser and R.Swedberg, 2nd ed.. Princeton: Princeton University
Press
Coleman, J. 1990. Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Crouch, C., Le Galès, P., Trigilia, C., and Voelzkow H., 2001. Local production Systems in Europe:
Rise or demise? Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- 2004. Changing Governance of Local Economies: Responses of European Local production Systems.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
DiMaggio, P.1994. “Culture and the Economy.” Pp. 27-57 in The Handbook of Economic Sociology,
edited by N.Smelser and R.Swedberg. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
- 2001, ed., The Twenty-First-Century Firm: Changing Organization in International Perspective,
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Evans, P. 1995. Embedded Autonomy. States and Industrial Transformation. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.

- 1996. “Government Action, Social Capital and Development : Reviewing the evidence on
Synergy.” World Development 24(6): 1033-37.
Florida, R. 2002, The Rise of the Creative Class, New York: Basic Books
- 2005, Cities and the Creative Class, New York: Routledge.
Fligstein, N. 1990. The Transformation of Corporate Control. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge
University Press.
- 2001. The Architecture of Markets. An Economic Sociology of Twenty-First-Century Capitalist Societies,
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Granovetter, M. 1985. “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness.”
American Journal of Sociology 91: 481-510.
- 1990. "The Old and New Economic Sociology: A History and an Agenda." Pp. 89-112 in Beyond
the Marketplace. Rethinking Economy and Society, edited by R. Friedland and A.F. Robertson.
New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Hall, P. and Soskice, D. 2002. Varieties of Capitalism. The Institutional Foundations of Comparative
Advantage, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lester, R, and Piore, M. 2004. Innovation: The Missing Dimension, Cambridge Mass.. Harvard
University Press.
Parsons, T. [1937] 1968. The Structure of Social Action. 2 vols. New York: Free Press.
Parsons, T. and Smelser, N. 1956. Economy and Society: A Study in the Integration of Economic and
Social Theory. Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press.
Powell, W. 1996. "Interorganizational Collaboration in the Biotechnology Industry." Journal of
Institutional & Theoretical Economics, 12:197-215.
Powell,W. and DiMaggio, P. 1991. ”Introduction.” Pp.1-38 in The New Institutionalism in
Organizational Analysis, edited by W. Powell and P. DiMaggio. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Saxenian, A. 1994. Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128,
Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Trigilia, C. 2002. Economic Sociology: State, Market and Society in Modern Capitalism, Oxford:
Blackwell.
Veltz, P. 2002. Le noveau monde industriel, Paris: Gallimard.

Beyond the 'problem of order': Elias, habit and modern sociology(1)
or
Hobbes was right
ROBERT VAN KRIEKEN
University of Sydney
....social interaction is not simply the substructure of the "crystallisations" which make up Simmel's
society, or an order detached from the social order made up of Goffman's 'solid buildings' in whose
cracks 'the individual self resides'. It is what endows those entities with the only kind of existence
they have. Social interaction turns out to be not only where 'most of the world's work gets done', but
where 'the solid buildings of the social world' are in fact constructed. (Burns 1992: 380)
Norbert Elias is rarely regarded as a significant sociological theorist, partly because he was hardly
ever concerned to comment on, let alone outline or reconstruct other theorists' ideas. When he was
being critical of other sociological approaches, he usually preferred to keep his critique implicit, so
that only a careful 'reading between the lines' reveals the positions he was distancing himself from.
Elias developed and elaborated his theoretical position primarily through his empirical studies,
especially those on the significance of 'court society' (1983) and one particular long-term social
process around which he felt others tended to be organized: the civilizing process (1994). Elias
refrained from making the claim that he was developing a theoretical 'system' because he wanted to
avoid fetishising theory, theorists and theoretical perspectives; his theory was embedded within his
sociological practice rather than being self-consciously presented as such.
This can give the impression that his primary strength as a sociologist lies in his empirical studies in
historical sociology, not his theoretical framework. It may have been Lewis Coser's (1980)
particularly bad-tempered review of the first of Elias's two explicitly theoretical books, What is
Sociology? (1978)(2) which established this assessment of Elias's sociological theory. Coser insisted
on his admiration for The Civilizing Process (1939) and The Court Society (1983), but proclaimed
What is Sociology? a 'failure' (p. 193) , the work of 'an outsider battling what he perceives to be the
establishment of sociology' (p. 192). Elias, we were told, 'tends to ram in open doors', and Coser
dismissed Elias's concept of 'figuration' as adding nothing, because it covers 'a subject matter that
has been the birthright of sociology since the days of Comte or Cooley' (p. 193).
A central purpose of this paper is to correct this cantankerous misunderstanding, both of Elias
himself and of sociological theory more generally. Rather than assume a continuity in sociological
thinking from the days of Comte and Cooley to today, almost every assessment of Talcott Parsons's
The Structure of Social Action (Alexander 1988; Camic 1989; Gould 1991; Levine 1989; Shils
1961: 1406), including by Coser (1977: 562) himself, has indicated Parsons's significance in having
effected a powerful transformation of sociological thought, one which established a clear break with
pre-Structure theory in the very process of claiming to draw out the essential features of (some)
classical social theorists. Edward Shils once remarked that Structure 'precipitated the sociological
outlook' and 'began the slow process of bringing into the open the latent dispositions which had
underlain the growth of sociological curiosity' (1961: 1406), and no later commentator has
formulation a convincing argument against this assessment.
The paper will begin by identifying two persistent obsessions in sociological theory introduced by
Structure - the captivation with dualisms of various types, and the fascination with the so-called
'Hobbesian problem of order' as the fulcrum of all sociology - and establishing the underlying
connection between the two, using Bruno Latour's (1993) conception of the 'Constitution' of modern

scientific thought to explain this connection. Then I will outline Elias's sociological theory and 'way
of seeing', indicating the ways in which it moves around sociology's 'Constitution' in a very
particular and, I will argue, more useful way, concluding with some observations about what we
might do with our theoretical 'Constitution' from this point onwards.
THE DOCTRINE OF 'THE TWO SOCIOLOGIES' AND THE 'PROBLEM OF ORDER'
We can begin with two observations, and then see how they are linked. First, all sociologists are by
now familiar with the mode of reasoning which proceeds as follows: hitherto everyone has divided
both the world itself and the way we think about it into two categories; many have tried to bridge,
link, integrate or synthesise these categories, but all have failed. However, we now have a new way
of thinking which truly achieves the bridging, linking, integration or synthesis, and I, dear reader,
am the bearer of this delightful new theory. This is the doctrine of 'the two sociologies'. It was
probably Talcott Parsons who first developed this rhetorical style in The Structure of Social Action
(1937), the book which Jeffrey Alexander argues established the 'base line vocabulary for modern
sociology', the modern sociologist's 'frame of reference' even as she argues against it (1988: 97).
Before that, sociologists saw both themselves and all previous social and political thought as rather
loose collections of competing perspectives, not as organised around any dualism or polarity in need
of linkage (Shils 1961; Camic 1989).
The bridging exercise never actually abolishes the oppositional dualism, indeed it preserves it. As
Parsons wrote concerning his particular bridging endeavour between positivist and idealist theories
of action, he wanted to 'make the best of both worlds' (Parsons 1937: 486) rather than construct a
third. We need only think of what bridges do - they keep things apart as much as they provide a
means of moving from one to the other. The bridge ceases to exist unless the
polarity/opposition/dualism remains in place, the bridge needs the dualism, if we can use such a
functionalist term. The same applies to 'links', and even integration and synthesis are less interesting
once they have been completed and there is nothing left to integrate or synthesise.
The net result is that every new generation of theorists can repeat the argument, organise their
research, their journal articles, their monographs and their textbooks around the dualism(s) of their
choice, although they may choose to rename the dualism a duality - conflict/consensus,
action/structure, micro/macro, homo economicus/homo sociologicus, individualism/holism, and so
on - and set about busily linking them (Holmwood & Stewart 1991; Sztompka 1994: 269-70). It
gives us all something to do, these two things which need to be integrated, synthesised, bridged or
linked, and something to organise our thoughts around.(3) But apparent attempts to transcend or
bridge the agency/structure dualism merely reproduce it and pose it in a different form because of
the continued conceptual opposition of 'action' to 'structure'. As Richard Kilminster has observed in
relation to structuration theory, 'the ghost of the old dualism haunts the theory because his point of
departure is action theory, which carries the dualism at its core' (1991: 98), and this is why Collins
remarks that 'the result looks curiously like the Parsonian scheme that Giddens criticizes' (Collins
1992: 89).
Parsons may have been the first to practice the argument of 'the two sociologies' in 1937, but it was
Pamela Nixon who appears to have first named it as such sometime in the late 1960s,(4) to be
disseminated in Alan Dawe's (1970) article of that title. As Dawe put it, 'there are...two sociologies:
a sociology of social system and a sociology of social action' (p. 214). The first 'asserts the
paramount necessity, for societal and individual well-being, of external constraint,' whereas the

second revolves around the concept of 'autonomous man, able to realize his full potential and to
create a truly human social order only when freed from external constraint' (p. 214).(5)
At this point you may be protesting that there are many dualisms in sociology - individual-society,
micro-macro, etc. - and that it has become accepted practice to insist that they are not all the same.
Erving Goffman, for instance, is more properly understood as a 'micro structuralist', rather than
seeing him as emphasising the creativity of human action simply because of his micro focus (Burns
1992; Collins 1992: 80). 'Action' is, in principle, not supposed to be bound up with the concept of
'the individual', agency can be attributed to collective actors such as organisations. However, in
practice we usually find this insistence dissolving back into something which looks remarkably like
the same old individual/society dichotomy; we often begin by talking about micro-macro or agency-
structure, but it rarely takes very long before we are actually talking about individuals and their
relationships to social constraints (Alexander et al 1987). We seem to be unable to resist the
temptation, despite all our best intentions, to mobilize our dualisms as if they were concerned with
the opposition between individual and society, between free will and determinism. To the extent,
then, that any dualism tends to revert back to the individual/society opposition, I will treat all of
them as essentially the same, grouping individuals, agency/action and the micro-level on one side,
and society, structure/social system and the macro-level on the other, gathering them together under
the heading of 'the doctrine of the two sociologies'.
The second observation is that sociological thought is organised around an equally persistent
misinterpretation of Hobbes, the 'Hobbesian problem of order', another central feature of Parsons's
The Structure of Social Action. Before explaining why it is a misinterpretation, we need to look
briefly at how the problem and its centrality to sociology has been defined. The standard
sociological interpretation(6) of Hobbes is the attribution to him of the view that 'in the absence of
external constraint, the pursuit of private interests and desires leads inevitably to both social and
individual disintegration' (Dawe 1970). Without any constraint imposed on the random pursuit of
ends, wrote Parsons, 'the relations of individuals then would tend to be resolved into a struggle for
power - for the means of each to realize his own ends. This would, in the absence of constraining
factors, lead to a war of all against all - Hobbes's state of nature' (1982: 87). It is 'clear enough,'
asserted Nisbet, that 'Hobbes is concerned with what he believes to be the natural character of the
individual - his precultural, presocial, and prepolitical character' (Nisbet 1974: 138-9). Since then,
we have been told with consistency and regularity that 'the thesis that sociology is centrally
concerned with the problem of social order has become one of the discipline's few orthodoxies'
(Dawe 1970: 207). The 'Hobbesian problem of order' is seen as central to sociology because the
question of 'how is social order possible' slides over to the quite different one of 'how is society
possible'. Alexander puts it in precisely this way: 'What Parsons called the Hobbesian problem can
be understood in the following way: What holds society together?' (1988: 97). Parsons told us that
Hobbes felt that only the coercive force of sovereign authority could in fact hold society/social order
together, when in fact it was the internalisation of values which achieved this effect - the normative
solution to the problem of order which retained a voluntaristic element to social action.
The standard sociological interpretation of Hobbes is simply wrong, for two reasons, concerning
both the problem of order itself and its solutions. First, this is not how Hobbes understood the 'state
of nature' and it is not his 'problem of order'. Essentially the standard sociological intepretation rests
on a very simplistic, and incorrect, reading of what Hobbes meant by the 'state of nature', revolving
around a projection of its own concern to see 'nature' as opposed to society onto Hobbes's much
more specific concern with explaining and preventing civil war. C.B. Macpherson remarked as early
as 1962 that Hobbes's state of nature concerns the conduct of entirely socialized individuals in the

absence of a central authority. 'To get to the state of nature,' wrote Macpherson, 'Hobbes has set
aside law, but not the socially acquired behaviour and desires of men' (1962: 22). Hobbes's state of
nature 'is a deduction from the appetites and faculties not of man as such but of civilized men' (1962:
29).
Hobbes did not regard human beings as psychological egoists who could only be constrained to act
in a civil manner by some external authority. Like any contemporary sociologist, Hobbes took it for
granted that humans are made - by discipline, education or as we would all it today, socialization -
rather than born (Gert 1967; 1996). The threat to social order - the threat of civil war - came not
from some presocial, egoistic human nature, which Hobbes felt never existed,(7) but from the effects
of passionately held beliefs and opinions with no central authority to decide between them. Rather
than not having a sense of normative order, as Parsons accuses him (1937: [89]), Hobbes's whole
point was that it was precisely unregulated values and beliefs which would drive humans to civil
war (Loyd 1992). We are in a state of nature, argued Hobbes, so long as 'private appetite is the
measure of good and evil' (1962: 167) - in other words, as long as society is not normatively
integrated, something which he felt can only be achieved via a socially-founded (not externally
imposed: Lloyd 1992: 317; Shapin & Schafer 1985: 152-3) sovereign state. In Bernard Gert's words,
'all the premises about human nature....which he uses in arguing for the necessity of an unlimited
sovereign, are in fact statements about the rationally required desires, and not, as most
commentators have taken them, statements about the passions' (1996: 164; c.f. also Ryan 1996:
217-8 and Kraynak 1983: 93-4).
Second, the 'normative' solution to the problem of order which almost everyone from Parsons
onwards has suggested is specific to sociology, having eluded Hobbes, (Levine 1980: x) is actually
present in Hobbes himself. Brian Barry (1970), Charles Camic (1979) and Donald Levine (1980)
have made this point abundantly clear for the utilitarians generally. Barry observes that 'the victory
over the 'utilitarian' schema is an empty one, because Parsons's 'utilitarians' are men of straw' (1970:
77), and Camic comments that,
The ultimate irony of Parsons's discussion of the utilitarians is that they would reject the
egoistic, rationalistic image of humans ...which Parsons suggests was their image for two
centuries. They would in fact reject it in a more general fashion than Parsons himself does in
Structure, where the Hobbesian problem of order remains central (1979: 523).
Levine also remarks that 'none of the writers associated with developing the principle of utility in
moral philosophy held a view of human action as determined solely by the pursuit of selfish
interests through instrumentally rational means. Much of the animus of their work precisely refutes
such a conception' (1980: xiii).
Levine felt that Hobbes and Mandeville might be the only remaining European social philosophers
who did 'reduce the elements of action to narrowly defined gratificational interests', but noted that
even here there were arguments (1980: xix), and in fact all of Barry's and Camic's arguments
concerning the utilitarians apply with equal force to Hobbes. Barry had pointed out that 'Hobbes
held that men might be motivated by a quite refined moral code', but simply felt that this was
insufficient in itself to prevent violence and civil warfare, making the state's monopolization of
violence 'a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of social peace' (1970: 77). Bernard Gert had
pointed out that Hobbes appealed to morality as much as he appealed to self-interest and self-
preservation. Indeed, continued Gert, 'it would be exceedingly odd for Hobbes, holding that
mistaken views about rights and duties were one of the causes of civil war, to come up with a theory

of human nature in which men never act because of their beliefs in the moral rightness or wrongness
of an action (1967: 517-8). This is why, writes Lloyd, Hobbes solution actually has less to do with
'force' and more to do with 'authority' and its moral effects, so that his solution to his 'problem of
order' is 'to reproduce perpetually a proper, stability-reinforcing conception of people's transcendent
religious interests by a process of education that continually generates consensus. It is education,
and not might, that makes for social order in Hobbes's system' (1992: 2).(8)
Occasionally there are leading sociologists who see this difficulty in the interpretation of Hobbes,
and the fate of this perception is instructive. For example, in 1972 Giddens was very clear that the
'Hobbesian problem of order' as Parsons had formulated it was not in fact a problem in Hobbes
himself, nor in Durkheim, nor in any classical theorist. Giddens had read Macpherson, and agreed
that the static dichotomy between 'man in nature' and 'man in society' was 'foreign to Hobbes's own
thinking, which is much more historically oriented' (1972: 359). However, by 1979 this emphatic
rejection of the sense of talking about a problem of order in Parsons's sense had started to weaken,
beginning to be replaced by the different concern that Parsons's 'social actors are not capable,
knowledgeable agents' (1979: 254). By the time we get to the official unveiling of structuration
theory, in The Constitution of Society, Giddens had moved even further along this road; the problem
or order was reinstated as a real one, and when Giddens mentioned it, his only complaint was that
'little, if any, conceptual room is left for what I emphasize as the knowledgeability of social actors,
as constitutive in part of social practices' (1984: xxxvii).
Dennis Wrong also has, at times, a very clear and precise understanding of Hobbes's position,
pointing out very correctly that Hobbes saw the 'war of all against all' as 'a hypothetical construct'
and that 'he fundamentally conceived of both the state of nature and the social contract as theoretical
"models" or Weberian "ideal types"; at most, the war of all against all represented a limiting
condition towards which all societies tended in times of weakened political authority and internal
conflict' (1994: 16-17). Yet, on the very next page, Wrong reverts back to the standard
interpretation: 'Hobbes's state of nature is the negative mirror image of social order. It is intended to
represent disorder as the opposite of order...Hobbes's state of nature is the contrary of social order'
(1994: 18-9), and later speaks of 'the Hobbesian problem of how asocial, self-preserving human
beings manage to create and maintain cooperative and rule-governed social relations at all' (p. 28).
Flying right in the face of all the textual evidence, then, the very best exponents of sociological
thought seem determined to cast Hobbes as a negative reference point for sociology as a particular
mode of perception and analysis.(9)
The connection between my two observations is this: the significance of the misconceptions is not
simply the scholastic one that Hobbes has been maligned, it is that the definitional construction of
our understanding of the specifically sociological imagination as pitted against a fictional
'Hobbesian' individual/society opposition which is 'the exact inverse of the sociological outlook
formed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries' (Wrong 1994: 16) actually has the effect,
perversely, of lodging that very opposition between nature/individual and society, or agency and
structure, at the heart of sociological theory itself. As Giddens put it,
the 'Hobbesian problem of order'...was defined by Parsons as concerned with how society
can exist, with some degree of stability over time, in the face of the struggle of individual
wills, the war of all against all. The effect of adopting this point of departure has been to tie
Parsons's own theories, in a deep-rooted way, to a position in which interests are grasped
primarily in terms of an individual/society opposition. The moral consensus which makes

possible the unity of the social whole incorporates values 'internalised' as need-dispositions
in personality, thus ensuring a fit between individual and society (1979: 101-2).
If we accept that the (false) "Hobbesian problem of order" is a problem at all both attributes
(wrongly) the assumption that social orderliness is external to human individuals to Hobbes (and,
for Parsons, the utilitarians generally) and condemns us to that assumption ourselves, leaving only
an argument about the correct solution to the problem - coercive, exchange, or normative, Hobbes,
Locke or Durkheim (Ellis 1971) -, about how that external constraint should be conceptualized, in
terms of brute force or norms and socialization, which takes us back to the individual/society
dualism (Elias 1969: 141).
Instead of having moved beyond the individual/society opposition ever since Cooley, as Coser
(1980) asserted, Margaret Archer can still see it in 1995 as ontologically founded, announcing that
'the problem of the relationship between individual and society was the central sociological problem
from the beginning. The vexatious task of understanding the linkage between "structure and agency"
will always retain this centrality because it derives from what society intrinsically is' (Archer 1995:
1). Dualisms like individual/society, or agency/structure and the 'Hobbesian problem of order' are
thus integrally linked, bound to each other like Siamese twins. Accept the latter, and we are
condemned to the former.
How can we make sense of this seemingly perverse fascination with dualisms like agency/structure
at the very same time that we think we are moving beyond them? Why is it that astute theorists like
Giddens and Wrong can both reject the individual/society dichotomy and yet remain captured by it?
What exactly is this spider's web we are entangled in? Perhaps Bruno Latour can be of assistance.
LATOUR AND THE MODERN CONSTITUTION.
In We Have Never Been Modern (1993), building on Shapin and Schaffer's (1985) discussion of
Hobbes and Boyle, Latour sets out an argument concerning the way we have conceived the
relationship between the human and non-human worlds, between the world of nature and things, and
the world of human beings and society. It is a complex set of arguments, and I will only be able to
refer to the ones I want to utilize here. He opens the book with observations about how in practice
we actually mix politics, science, culture, human beings, things, religion, economics, society
regularly and routinely, and yet we conceptualize them as distinct entities. In particular, we divide
science and the knowledge of nature and things from politics, society and the realm of human
beings. The first set of practices, Latour calls 'the work of translation' or 'mediation', the creation of
hybrids, networks, and 'collectives', and the second he calls 'the work of purification', the
establishment and maintenance of the dichotomy between non-humans and nature on the one hand,
and humans, culture, society and politics on the other. Each set of practices depends on the other:
without translation, hybridification and mediation, ' the practices of purification would be fruitless or
pointless'. Without purification, 'the work of translation would be slowed down, limited or even
ruled out' (p. 11). He represents his argument diagrammatically as follows:

Figure 1. Source: Latour 1993: 11.
Being 'modern', suggests Latour, consists of seeing the work of purification and the work of
translation as entirely distinct, and never allowing the two to be seen together. So, what he calls the
'Constitution' of modern knowledge consists of three 'guarantees':
1. Even though we construct Nature, Nature is as if we did not construct it.
2. Even though we did not construct society, Society is as if we did construct it.
3. Nature and Society must remain absolutely distinct: the work of purification must remain
absolutely distinct from the work of mediation. (p. 32)
'Nature' and 'Society' can thus alternate at will between being 'hard' or 'soft', one determining the
other, or the reverse, to suit our needs at the time and place. Diagrammatically:
Figure 2. Source: Latour 1993: 52
This Constitution, writes Latour has 'made the moderns invincible' (p. 37), because they can move
from one position to the (contradictory) other to suit the unrestricted proliferation of hybrids,
collectives and networks. By denying the existence of hybrids and collectives and maintaining that
only the upper half of the Constitution exists, the work of translation can proceed unimpeded
without having to take account of its effects. 'Native Americans,' writes Latour, 'were not mistaken
when they accused the Whites of having forked tongues. By separating the relations of political
power from the relations of scientific reasoning while continuing to shore up power with reason amd
reason with power, the moderns have always had two irons in the fire' (p. 38). With this
Constitution, moderns 'hold all the sources of power, all the critical possibilities, but they displace

them from case to case with such rapidity that they can never be caught redhanded' (p. 39). If we
conceptualize purification and hybridization together, 'we immediately stop being wholly modern,
and our future begins to change' (p. 11).
The dualism with which Latour is concerned is nature/society, but the argument actually works for
any dualism, including individual/society and agency/structure.(10) Using Latour's diagram,
sociology's Constitution would look like this:
Figure 3. Source: Adapted
from Latour 1993: 11
The guarantees would be:
1. Even though Structure determines Action, Action is as if Structure did not determine it.
2. Even though we did not construct Structure, Structure is as if we did construct it.
3. Action and Structure must remain absolutely distinct: the work of purification must remain
absolutely distinct from the work of mediation.
And the dual determinisms would look like this:
Figure 4. Source: Adapted from Latour 1993: 52
This concept of sociological theory as bound by this constitution makes sense of why the various
dualisms are so difficult to overcome, because they are crucial to the whole project of modern, post-
Parsonian sociology, and why we constantly alternate between defending the dualisms and trying to
bridge, integrate or synthesise them, between dissolving them in practice and continuing to work

within them in theory. The work of translation and hybridization - sociological analysis which
makes no distinction between structure and agency, individual and society, micro and macro - went
on and goes on all the time, in the work of the classical theorists, the Chicago School, Goffman,
Bourdieu, Bellah, etc., indeed in Parsons himself, perhaps in every sociologist, but operates more
powerfully precisely because it is never observed together with the top half of the Constitution, with
the debates concerning the dualisms and how they are to be bridged, linked, synthesised, and so on,
so that conceptual and empirical sociological hybrids can proliferate unhindered. Look at the two
halves of the constitution together, and you get a different type of sociological theory and practice,
one not organised around the 'problem of order', as we shall in in the work of Elias.
FROM ACTION AND STRUCTURE TO HABITUS AND SOCIAL PROCESSES
Elias moves around this Constitution in a very particular way, one which allows us to perceive its
operation more clearly, for two reasons: his rejection of the centrality of a theory of 'action', and his
insistence on a temporal dimension to sociological theory. When he met Parsons in 1970 at the ISA
conference in Varna, Elias praised his integrity, sincerity and his power of theoretical synthesis, but
added: 'I cannot persuade myself that this gift has been used in the right cause' (Elias 1972: 277).
Elias made essentially two points about Parsons and, through them, sociology more broadly.
The first was the organization of sociological thought around the concept of 'action'. 'Why put
'actions' in the centre of a theory of society,' said Elias, 'and not the people who act? If anything,
societies are networks of human beings in the round, not a medley of disembodied actions' (Elias
1972: 277). The division of sociological thought into'the two sociologies' emerges from interaction
between a continued attachment to individualist, liberal ideals of autonomy and freedom and the
organization of sociology around theories of 'action'. Attempts to oppose the determinism of
structuralist approaches with action theories merely approach the dualism from a different angle,
proposing that social order can emerge from autonomous individuals emancipated from external
constraint. As Elias put it, 'one of the strongest motive forces of people who insist on starting their
theoretical reflections about societies from "individuals per se" or from "individual acts" seems to be
the wish to assert that "basically" an individual is "free"' (Elias & Scotson 1965: 172).(11)
To the extent that Parsons's understanding of human action as organised around the linking of means
and ends has been followed within sociology, with the only argument being about how the ends are
determined, sociologists have forgotten an essential feature of the classical sociologists'
understanding of human behaviour which Elias retained, namely, their emphasis on the importance
of particular psychological formations of individuals in explaining social life. Charles Camic points
out that an important concept which the early sociologists organised much of their work around was
'habit', 'habitus', 'habitude', a concept which Parsons 'wrote out of the whole history of modern social
theory' (Camic 1986: 1074), and which few writers have written back into it.(12) The exceptions have
included Wilhelm Reich, the Frankfurt School theorists - Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and the
early Fromm - and more recently, Elias, Camic, Pierre Bourdieu and, to a lesser extent, Randall
Collins. However, as R.W. Connell points out, 'There have been no effective successors to this
generation of theorists. Historical depth psychology remains a gleam in the theoretical eye rather
than an established branch of knowledge' (Connell 1983: 158).
The concept of habit or habitus refers to 'the durable and generalized disposition that suffuses a
person's action throughout an entire domain of life or, in the extreme instance, throughout all of life
- in which case the term comes to mean the whole manner, turn, cast, or mold of the personality'
(Camic 1986: 1046). Elias called it 'second nature'. As Durkheim wrote, anticipating Freud, 'it is not

enough to direct our attention to the superficial portion of our consciousness; for the sentiments, the
ideas which come to the surface are not, by far, those which have the most influence on our conduct.
What must be reached are the habits....these are the real forces which govern us' (Camic 1986:
1052). Weber's work on the 'spirit of capitalism' showed a similar concern with habit, not just in
relation to traditional action, but also modern instrumentally rational action, which Weber felt also
rested on a foundation of habit. His concept of the 'capitalist spirit' referred to 'the development of
[a] particular habitus', and he saw ascetic Protestantism as producing 'a psychological vehicle that
tended to create a typical conduct' (Weber 1978: 1113). Weber's analysis was of the emergence of a
particular type of Lebensführung or 'conduct of life', and his focus was on 'the aspect most difficult
to grasp and 'prove', relating to the inner habitus' (in Hennis 1983: 146). The concept 'socialization'
has emerged in its place, but it never properly dealt with the problem, because it left the door open
for a continued re-emergence of arguments against the 'determinism' built into the concept of
socialization.
This was why Elias frequently remarked on the continuing individual/society dichotomy, to the
frustration of many of his critics. Sociologists generally agree that individuals do not exist outside
society, and that subjectivity is socially constructed. But the continued adherence to a theory of
action, uninformed by psychology, smuggles the concept of an 'autonomous individual' opposing an
'autonomous society' back in via another route, re-embedding it within sociological thought at the
very same time that a contrary theoretical position is taken up when the question is addressed
overtly. Parsons read and utilized Freud later, but by then the damage had been done. Sociology had
become organized around a dismissal of psychology, producing a schism in its understanding of
human social life which Parsons' appropriation of psychoanalysis could only approach from the
other side. The rejection of the concept of habit, remarks Camic, has 'left permanent effects on the
inner conceptual structure of sociological thought' (Camic 1986: 1077). In other words, sociologists
may explicitly agree that individuals are social beings, and thus become puzzled when Elias suggests
they do not, but the latent structure of sociological theory continues to embody a continuing
opposition between 'the individual' and 'society'. To put it as simply as possible, the huge and vital
difference between Elias and Parsons was that Elias wrote Freud into his theory from the outset,
whereas for Parsons psychoanalysis was a late addition to an already-formulated sociological theory.
Second, Elias argued that the assumption that societies are normally well-integrated systems makes
little sense, and that both social and system integration is emergent and contested. At first this looks
like an echo of the standard criticisms of Parsons from a conflict-theoretical position. But Elias's
critique was aimed equally at Parsons' opponents, to the extent that they also neglected the
historical interweaving of conflict and stability. For Elias it was important precisely to make the
long-term processes of social integration and disintegration themselves the object of sociological
study, rather than assuming a condition of either integration or conflict. It was the neglect of 'long-
term processes of integration and disintegration as a theoretical and empirical topic of sociological
enquiry' (Elias 1972: 278) which, Elias argued, had produced the opposition between conflict and
consensus perspectives which dominated sociological debate in the 1960s and 1970s. Parsons had
essentially rejected history via his rejection of evolutionism.(13) Sociologists generally joined Parsons
in his disdain for evolutionary theory, from a variety of perspectives. Liberals would reject it
because of its determinist implications, Marxists because of the neglect of class struggle and denial
of the possibility of revolutionary transformations. Whatever the merits of a rejection of teleological
evolutionary theory, in the process sociologists also forget about history altogether, and it is only in
the last few decades that the historical dimensions of sociological analysis have become taken more
seriously. This relates back to the question of human action, because it is only over time that one can
trace the workings of habitus, and its re-formation over a number of generations. Elias observes that

habitus and culture are very slow to change, making it impossible to understand social life except
over longer spans of time. A temporal dimension, in other words, is crucial to understanding the
workings of human social life.(14)
The theoretical position which Elias felt avoided these two mistakes - organizing sociology around a
theory of 'action' and rejecting history - included the following basic elements:
1. an understanding of social life as the unplanned and unintended outcome of the interweaving of
intentional human actions;
2. an approach to human beings as interdependent, forming figurations or networks with each other
which connect the psychological with the social, or habitus with social relations;
3. a relational orientation;
4. a related concern with dynamic processes of development and change, rather than static
structures.
UNPLANNED 'ORDER'AND THE QUESTION OF AGENCY
Elias also saw sociology as fundamentally concerned with a 'problem of order' but a very different
one. He did not see the very existence of 'social order' itself as problematic, saying that he
understood the concept 'in the same sense that one talks of a natural order, in which decay and
destruction as structured processes have their place alongside growth and synthesis, death and
disintegration alongside birth and integration' (Elias 1978: 76). He directed his attention to another
question, namely, the apparent independence of social order from intentional human action.
Whereas Parsons puzzled over how human beings formulated their ends and related them to their
means, Elias went on to examine the relationship between the pursuit of those ends and the actual
outcome of that pursuit in social life. For Elias, the question was: 'How does it happen at all that
formations arise in the human world that no single human being has intended, and which yet are
anything but cloud formations without stability or structure?' (Elias 1994a: 443-4). It was the slowly
dawning awareness from about the French Revolution onwards that, just as social life was not
determined by God or supernatural forces, it was also not determined by the intentions of human
beings, which Elias felt contributed to the emergence of sociology as a discipline:
If one does not ask merely for a definition of society, but rather for the experiences which
cradled a science of society, this was one of them: the experience that although people form
societies and keep society moving by their actions and plans, at the same time society seems
often to go its own way and, while being driven by those who form them, at the same time,
seems to drive them (Elias 1984a: 43).
The thinkers who first contributed to this developing awareness included, suggested Elias, Adam
Smith, Hegel, the Physiocrats, Malthus, Marx and Comte. Hegel's concept of the 'cunning of reason'
was one of the first attempts to capture this 'ordered autonomy' of social life from the individuals
who make it up:
Again and again...people stand before the outcome of their own actions like the apprentice
magician before the spirits he has conjured up and which, once at large, are no longer in his

power. They look with astonishment at the convolutions and formations of the historical
flow which they themselves constitute but do not control (Elias 1991: 62).
Elias thus recasts the 'problem of order' as not being about the possibility of social order (Parsons),
which actually needs no explanation, but about the relationship between social order and human
intentionality, the actions of the human beings making it up. More precisely, the most acute problem
for Elias was the apparent lack of relationship, the seemingly alien character of the social world to
the individuals making it up.
Elias saw 'society' as consisting of the structured interweaving of the activity of interdependent
human agents, all pursuing their own interests and goals, producing distinct social forms such as
what we call 'Christianity', 'feudalism', 'patriarchy', 'capitalism', or whatever culture and nation we
happen to be part of, which cannot be said to have been planned or intended by any individual or
group. Weber's analysis of the roots of the spirit of rational capitalist accumulation in ascetic
Protestantism provides a good example of the kind of 'blind' process Elias was talking about.
Although human beings possess and conduct themselves with 'agency', then, this does not mean that
they are the 'agents' or 'creators' of social life, which has a 'hidden order, not directly perceptible to
the senses' (Elias 1991: 13).
It is only in a limited sense, then, that people 'make their own history'. Elias formulated it as follows:
It is simple enough: plans and actions, the emotional and rational impulses of individual
people, constantly interweave in a friendly or hostile way. This basic tissue resulting from
many single plans and actions of men can give rise to changes and patterns that no
individual person has planned or created. From this interdependence of people arises an
order sui generis, an order more compelling and stronger than the will and reason of the
individual people composing it. It is this order of interweaving human impulses and
strivings, this social order, which determines the course of historical change; it underlies the
civilizing process (Elias 1994a: 444).
This conception has much in common with the notion of 'spontaneous order' usually attributed to
Adam Ferguson and the Scottish Enlightenment theorists, although an earlier, theological version
appeared in 1681, in the work of Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1976). There has been some
discussion of the notion of the 'unintended consequences of human action', indeed Robert Merton
published a short paper on the topic at the same time that Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation was
being completed (Merton 1936; see also Boudon 1986). We all know that Friedrich von Hayek
explored the concept of 'spontaneous order' and also argued against the utility of planned
intervention into economic and social processes (von Hayek 1967; 1989). However, Elias worked
through the implications of the concept of 'unplanned order' far more systematically, and in relation
to particular empirical examples. Instead of seeing unintentional outcomes merely as 'perverse' and
mysterious effects of human action, he emphasised that 'unplanned development...is structured and
correspondingly explainable' (Elias 1997a). Rather than engaging in a polemical argument against
communism and socialism, as von Hayek did, he analysed the relationship between intentional
attempts to control and transform the social world and the long-term unplanned processes of
development within which they take place.
Elias wrote in The Civilizing Process that the 'more general problem' which he was addressing 'has
also been posed for a long time by American sociology', (1994a: 543) mentioning Sumner's
Folkways. He cited Sumner's remarks about the necessity of examining exactly what any given

culture's morals, norms and values were and how they arose, adding that it was also important to
apply the analysis to 'our own society and its history'. Elsie Parsons' (1914) book also drew Elias's
attention to Franz Boas's work and William James's conception of 'habit' as 'the enormous flywheel
of society' (James 1892: 143; cited in Elias 1994a: 543). Elias had come across the notion of the
'unintended consequences of human action' in Hegel's 'cunning of reason', and in Marx, both of
whom had read Adam Smith. But it was Sumner's Folkways (1906) which seems to have provided
the most thought-through linkage of Elias's concerns with culture and behaviour with the concept's
original formulation in Adam Ferguson and the other Scottish Enlightenment theorists.
Bogardus's (1933) collection on the concept of social process also drew Elias's attention to the work
of Albion Small, Charles Ellwood, George Herbert Mead, Howard Becker, Charles Cooley, as well
as Florian Znaniecki, Pitirim Sorokin and Robert MacIver. So enamoured were this generation of
American sociologists with the concept 'social process', that Read Bain felt obliged to sound a note
of warning that it was being used too loosely and too broadly, emptying it of its explanatory value
and becoming another example of 'pseudo-scientific jargon' (Bain 1933: 110). There would have
been much about this book that Elias would have found confused and inadequate, but approaching
social life in terms of processes at all was important for Elias, and most of these writers had an
interest in trying to analyse long-term processes of social change without lapsing into normative and
teleological conceptions of evolution and progress. Robert MacIver, for example, maintained that it
was important to look for the formative processes which lie behind any given social pattern:
Beyond the fabric there is not only the loom and the weaver but also the weaving. Beyond the social
pattern there is the play of forces emanating from the endless interaction of group and environment.
By studying the fabric alone we could never understand the process of weaving, and we will never
come to grips with the problem of social causation by studying its contemporary resultant patterns.
(MacIver 1933: 145)
MacIver argued, in terms which were to be echoed in the 1970s and 1980s, that 'the time-dimension
is seriously lacking in our sociological studies today, and our presentation of social change is apt to
be merely a series of successive pictures as lacking in the dynamic of real life as those we see upon
the screen' (1933: 146), although today we may disagree about the realism of the screen!
Like Freud's demonstration that 'the ego is not master in its own house' (Freud ??), Elias's argument
inflicts a narcissistic wound on modern sensibilities, because it emphasises the extent to which the
human world is resistant to direct control. 'It is dreadful to think that people form functional
interconnections in which what they do is to a large extent blind, aimless and helpless. It is much
more reassuring to think that history - which is, of course, always the history of particular human
societies - has a meaning and a destination, perhaps even a purpose' (Elias 1978: 58).
In analysing the relationship between intentional human action and unplanned surrounding social
preconditions and outcomes, Elias emphasized, on the one hand, the dependence of any given
individual, no matter how central a position they held, on the surrounding network of social,
economic and political relations. 'No individual person, no matter how great his stature, how
powerful his will, how penetrating his intelligence, can breach the autonomous laws of the human
network from which his actions arise and into which the are directed' (Elias 1991: 50). He indicated
a very clear preference for understanding social transformations in terms of changes in social
conditions, or in the structuring of social relationships, rather than attributing very much causal
significance to the decisions and actions of particular, supposedly powerful individuals or groups
(Elias 1994a: 266).

On the other hand, although within the broad sweep of history it is apparent how much individuals
are buffeted by forces beyond their control, 'the person acting within the flow may have a better
chance to see how much can depend on individual people in individual situations, despite the
general direction' (Elias 1991: 48). It is equally unrealistic to believe 'that people are
interchangeable, the individual being no more than the passive vehicle of a social machine' (Elias
1991: 54). Elias saw social life as both 'firm' and 'elastic': 'Crossroads appear at which people must
choose, and on their choices, depending on their social position, may depend either their immediate
personal fate or that of a whole family, or, in certain circumstances, of entire nations or groups
within them' (Elias 1991: 49). Agency thus consisted of the strategic seizure of opportunities which
arise for individuals and groups, but not in the actual creation of those opportunities, which 'are
prescribed and limited by the specific structure of his society and the nature of the functions the
people exercise within it' (Elias 1991: 49). Moreover, once an opportunity is taken, human action
'becomes interwoven with those of others; it unleashes further chains of actions', the effects of which
are based not on individual or group actors, but 'on the distribution of power and the structure of
tensions within this whole mobile human network' (Elias 1991: 49-50).
One of the primary focuses of sociological analysis is, then, the relationships between intentional,
goal-directed human activities and the unplanned or unconscious process of interweaving with other
such activities, past and present, and their consequences. Often Elias emphasized the unplanned
character of social life, largely because he was concerned to counter the notion that there can ever be
a direct and straightforward relationship between human action and its outcomes. However, all his
observations taken together indicate a more complex understanding, for he always believed that
improved human control of social life was the ultimate objective of sociological analysis. In his
words, 'people can only hope to master and make sense out of these purposeless, meaningless
functional interconnections if they can recognize them as relatively autonomous, distinctive
functional interconnections, and investigate them systematically' (Elias 1978: 58). Elias saw an
understanding of long-term unplanned changes as serving both 'an improved orientation' towards
social processes which lie beyond human planning, and an improved understanding of those areas of
social life which can be said to correspond to the goals and intentions of human action (Elias 1997a:
[14]). In relation to technological change, he commented: 'From the viewpoint of a process theory
what is interesting is the interweaving of an unplanned process and human planning' (Elias 1995:
26).
INTERDEPENDENCE - FIGURATIONS - HABITUS
For Elias, the structure and dynamics of social life could only be understood if human beings were
conceptualized as interdependent rather than autonomous, comprising what he called figurations
rather than social systems or structures, and as characterized by socially and historically specific
forms of habitus, or personality-structure. He emphasised seeing human beings in the plural rather
than the singular, as part of collectivities, of groups and networks, and stressed that their very
identity as unique individuals only existed within and through those networks or figurations.
The civilizing process itself, argued Elias, had produced a capsule or wall around individual
experience dividing an inner world from the external world, individuals from society, and this had
come to be reproduced within sociological theory itself. Rather than seeing individuals as ever
having any autonomous, pre-social existence, Elias emphasised human beings' interdependence with
each other, the fact that one can only become an individual human being within a web of social
relationships and within a network of interdependencies with ones family, school, church,
community, ethnic group, class, gender, work organisation, and so on. The essential 'relatedness' of

human beings, said Elias, began with being born as a helpless infant, over which we have no
control: 'Underlying all intended interactions of human beings is their unintended interdependence'
(Elias 1969: 143).
He developed this point in part through his critique of what he called the homo clausus, or 'closed
personality' image of humans. Elias argued for a replacement of this homo clausus conception with
its emphasis on autonomy, freedom and independent agency with:
....the image of man as an "open personality" who possesses a greater or lesser degree of
relative (but never absolute and total) autonomy vis-a-vis other people and who is, in fact,
fundamentally oriented toward and dependent on other people throughout his life. The
network of interdependencies among human beings is what binds them together. Such
interdependencies are the nexus of what is here called the figuration, a structure of mutually
oriented and dependent people. Since people are more or less dependent on each other first
by nature and then through social learning, through education, socialization, and socially
generated reciprocal needs, they exist, one might venture to say, only as pluralities, only in
figurations (Elias 1994a: 213-4).
Elias introduced the concept of 'figuration' in the 1960s because it 'puts the problem of human
interdependencies into the very heart of sociological theory' (Elias 1978: 134) and he hoped it would
'eliminate the antithesis....immanent today in the use of the words "individual" and "society"' (Elias
1994a: 214).
Before he started using the word 'configuration' in 1965 and then 'figuration' from 1969 onwards, the
German concept he used was Verflechtungsmechanismus, or 'mechanism of interweaving'. Elias felt
it expressed 'what we call "society" more clearly and unambiguously than the existing conceptual
tools of sociology, as neither an abstraction of attributes of individuals existing without a society,
nor a "system" or "totality" beyond individuals, but the network of interdependencies formed by
individuals' (Elias 1994a: 214). Elias regarded societies as basically 'the processes and structures of
interweaving, the figurations formed by the actions of interdependent people' (Elias 1978: 103). He
also believed that it made it easier to overcome the tendency to apparently deny human agency and
individuality with the use of concepts like 'society' or 'social system'. Indeed, 'it sharpens and
deepens our understanding of individuality if people are seen as forming figurations with other
people' (Elias 1983: 213).
Unlike 'system', it also did not convey the suggestion of harmony or integration characterizing the
organic or machine analogy; it referred to 'harmonious, peaceful and friendly relationships between
people, as well as to hostile and tense relationships' (Elias 1983: 141). This means that figurations
are always organised around the dynamic operation of power:
At the core of changing figurations - indeed the very hub of the figuration process - is a
fluctuating, tensile equilibrium, a balance of power moving to and fro, inclining first to the
one side and then to the other. This kind of fluctuating balance of power is a structural
characteristic of the flow of every figuration (Elias 1978: 131).
It was 'a generic concept for the pattern which interdependent human beings, as groups or as
individuals, form with each other' (Elias 1987: 85), and Elias saw the analysis of the formation of
dynamic figurations as 'one of the central questions, perhaps even the central question, of sociology'
(Elias 1983: 208). Indeed, 'it is this network of the functions which people have for each other, it and

nothing else, what we call "society". It represents a special kind of sphere. Its structures are what we
call "social structures". And if we talk of "social laws" or "social regularities", we are referring to
nothing other than this: the autonomous laws of relations between people' (Elias 1991: 16).
He used the analogy of dance to illustrate the concept figuration, saying that 'the image of the
mobile figurations of interdependent people on a dance floor perhaps makes it easier to imagine
state, cities, families, and also capitalist, communist, and feudal systems as figurations' (Elias 1994a:
214). Although we might speak of 'dance in general', 'no one will imagine a dance as a structure
outside the individual'. Dances can be danced by different people, 'but without a plurality of
reciprocally oriented and dependent individuals, there is no dance'. Figurations, like dances, are thus
'relatively independent of the specific individuals forming it here and now, but not of individuals as
such' (Elias 1994a: 214). In other words, although it is true that figurations 'have the peculiarity that,
with few exceptions, they can continue to exist even when all the individuals who formed them at a
certain time have died and been replaced by others' (Elias 1983: 142), they only exist in and through
the activity of their participants. When that activity stops, the figuration stops, and the continued
existence of the figuration is dependent on the continued participation of its constituent members, as
the East European communist countries discovered in 1989. Figurations 'have a relative
independence of particular individuals, but not of individuals as such' (Elias 1983: 27).
The dynamics of figurations are also dependent on the formation of a shared social habitus or
personality make-up which constitutes the collective basis of individual human conduct. In his
words:
This make-up, the social habitus of individuals forms, as it were, the soil from which grow
the personal characteristics through which an individual differs from other members of his
society. In this way something grows out of the common language which the individual
shares with others and which is certainly a component of his social habitus - a more or less
individual style, what might be called an unmistakable individual handwriting that grows out
of the social script (Elias 1991: 182).
Elias gave the example of the concept of 'national character', which he called 'a habitus problem par
excellence' (Elias 1991: 182). He also referred to is as 'second nature', or 'an automatic, blindly
functioning apparatus of self-control' (Elias 1994a: 113, 446). The organisation of psychological
make-up into a habitus was also, for Elias, a continuous process which began at birth and continued
throughout a person's childhood and youth. It is, he wrote,
....the web of social relations in which the individual lives during his more impressionable
phase, during childhood and youth, which imprints itself upon his unfolding personality
where it has its counterpart in the relationship between his controlling agencies, super-ego
and ego, and his libidinal impulses. The resulting balance between controlling agencies and
drives on a variety of levels determines how an individual person steers himself in his
relations with others; it determines that which we call, according to taste, habits, complexes
or personality structure (Elias 1994a: 454-5).
Moreover, the development of habitus continued through a person's life, 'for although the self-
steering of a person, malleable during childhood, solidifies and hardens as he grows up, it never
ceases entirely to be affected by his changing relations with others throughout his life' (Elias 1994a:
455).

Finally, the ways in which the formation of habitus changed over time, what Elias called
psychogenesis, could also only be properly understood in connection with changes in the
surrounding social relations, or sociogenesis. He argued against the disciplinary separation of
psychology, sociology and history as follows:
The structures of the human psyche, the structures of human society and the structures of
human history are indissolubly complementary, and can only be studied in conjunction with
each other. They do not exist and move in reality with the degree of isolation assumed by
current research. They form, with other structures, the subject matter of the single human
science (Elias 1991: 36).
In his critique of Lloyd de Mause's psychogenetic theory of the history of childhood, Elias said that
'psychogenetic studies alone, without the closest connection with sociogenetic studies, are hardly
suitable for revealing the structures of social processes. This is only possible with a theory of
civilization which links psychogenetic and sociogenetic aspects to each other' (Elias 1997b: [8]).
The formation of habitus is a function of social interdependencies, which vary as the structure of a
society varies. 'To the variation in this structure,' wrote Elias, 'correspond the differences in
personality structure than can be observed in history' (Elias 1994a:249) . While he used the notion of
'correspondence' between habitus and social structure in The Civilizing Process (Elias 1994a: 156),
later he modified his position to accommodate the possibility that social habitus might change more
slowly than the surrounding social relations (Elias 1991: 211). Our 'whole outlook on life' said Elias,
'continues to be psychologically tied to yesterday's social reality, although today's and tomorrow's
reality already differs greatly from yesterday's' (Elias 1995: 35; see also 1991: 211, 214, 217).
RELATIONISM
Elias consistently maintained that it was necessary for sociologists avoid seeing social life in terms
of states, objects or things, what Georgy Lukács called the reificiation of what are in fact dynamic
social relationships. His attempt to transcend reification in sociological theory consisted of a double
movement: the first was towards a consistent emphasis on social life as relational, and the second
was an insistence on its processual character. We will look at the first in this section and the second
in the following section. It is important to emphasise both sides of this double movement away from
reification, because many sociologists undertake one or the other (Berger & Luckmann 1971), but
very few pursue both. All of the rest of his theory flowed in one way or another from this starting
point.
The principle is simple enough, that it is necessary in sociology 'to give up thinking in terms of
single, isolated substances and to start thinking in terms of relationships and functions' (Elias 1991:
19). A 'person' or 'individual' is thus not a self-contained entity or unit, she or he does not exist 'in
themselves', they only exist as elements of sets of relations with other individuals. The same applies
to families, communities, organizations, nations, economic systems, in fact to any aspect of the
world, human or natural, for the concept arose from Einstein's physics. Relations between people,
the ties binding them to each other are, for Elias, the primary object of sociological study, the very
stuff of historical change:
What changes is the way in which people are bonded to each other. This is why their
behaviour changes, and why their consciousness and their drive-economy, and, in fact, their
personality structure as a whole, change. The "circumstances" which change are not

something which comes upon men from "outside": they are the relationships between people
themselves (Elias 1994a: 480).
The explanation of any sociological question thus has to focus on the social relations composing the
object of study, rather than any of its elements in isolation. This applies even to understanding
individual experience; as Elias put it: 'Even the nature and form of his solitude, even what he feels to
be his "inner life", is stamped by the history of his relationships - by the structure of the human
network in which, as one of its nodal points, he develops and lives as an individual' (Elias 1991: 33).
We have to start, Elias said, 'from the structure of the relations between individuals in order to
understand the "psyche" of the individual person' (Elias 1991: 37).(15)
What Elias found most important about relationships between people was the way in which they
were constituted as power relations, so that he develops this argument in most detail with reference
to 'the relational character of power' (Elias 1978: 75). He felt that there was a particularly strong
tendency to reify power, to treat it as an object which was possessed to a greater or lesser extent.
'The whole sociological and political discussion on power', he wrote, 'is marred by the fact that the
dialogue is not consistently focused on power balances and power ratios, that is, on aspects of
relationships, but rather on power as if it were a thing' (Elias 1984b: 251). If we see it more as a
relation, it also becomes possible to recognize that questions of power are quite distinct from
questions of 'freedom' and 'domination', and that all human relationships are relations of power.
Building on both Hegel's famous discussion of the master-slave relation and Georg Simmel's
reflections on power and domination, Elias wrote:
The master has power over his slave, but the slave also has power over his master, in
proportion to his function for the master - his master's dependence on him....In this respect,
simply to use the word 'power' is likely to mislead. We say that a person possesses great
power, as if power were a thing he carried about in his pocket. This use of the word is a relic
of magico-mythical ideas. Power is not an amulet possessed by one person and not by
another; it is a structural characteristic of human relationships - of all human relationships
(Elias 1978: 74).
He went on to consistently refer to power in terms of power-ratios or 'shifting balances of tensions'
(Elias 1983: 145), and regarded these concepts as the best successors to debates about freedom and
determinism. Referring to Sartre's conception of existential freedom, he said that the recognition that
all human beings possess some degree of freedom or autonomy 'is sometimes romantically idealized
as proving the metaphysical freedom of man', its popularity arising primarily from its emotional
appeal (Elias 1983: 144). However, he argued that it was important to go beyond thinking in terms
of a fictional antithesis between 'freedom' and 'determinism' - fictional because of human beings'
essential interdependence - and move to thinking in terms of power-balances.
He stressed the reciprocal workings of power, so that within the network of relations binding the
more and less powerful to each other, apparently less powerful groups also exercise a 'boomerang
effect' back on those with greater power-chances. As he put it, 'in one form or another the
constraints that more powerful groups exert on less powerful ones recoil on the former as constraints
of the less powerful on the more powerful and also as compulsions to self-constraint' (Elias 1983:
265). This was, he felt, a problem with concepts like 'rule' or 'authority', since they 'usually make
visible only the pressures exerted from above to below, but not those from below to above' (Elias
1983: 265). He gave the example of the relation between parents and children: parents clearly have

greater power-chances than their children, but because children fulfil particular functions and needs
for their parents, they also have power over their parents, such as calling them to their aid by crying,
requiring them to reorganize their lives (Elias 1997b: [5]).
To say that the less powerful also exercise power over the more powerful within a power relation,
however, only applies to the internal dynamics of that relationship, but not to any capacity to
transform it. For example, when one of his assistants, Angela Rijnen, suggested to him that slaves in
ancient Rome could have acted on their masters' dependence on them, refused to cooperate on a
collective basis, and thus escaped their enslavement. Elias became furious: 'How dare you say
something like that?...You must know that the figuration was not of a type that slaves could resist
it?' (Rijnen 1993: 92-3). Unlike Foucault, then, Elias did not conceptualize power relations in terms
of an opposition between power and resistance, but as consisting of more or less even 'balances' or
'ratios'.
It is true that ethnomethodologists, phenomenologists and symbolic interactionists (Becker 1970;
Mead 1934; Blumer 1969; Goffman 1959; Strauss 1979; Laing 1962) also emphasis the dynamic,
emergent character of social life, and argue against seeing social reality as independent from human
practices (Layder 1986; see also Haferkamp 1987: 548). They had also read Simmel, and in
Goffman's case, Elias. Similar relational approaches can be found in a wide variety of other writers
and schools of thought, including R.D. Laing, Gestalt psychology, field theory, Jean Piaget and
Rom Harré. However, the comparison should be approached with caution, since Elias was never
satisfied with the concept of 'social interaction'. He argued that, at best, it only 'scratches the surface
of the relatedness of human beings' (Elias 1969: 143), to the extent that it fails to move beyond the
homo clausus model of human beings as possessing some basic identity prior to their interactions
with others. Social interaction creates 'the impression of something arising solely from the initiative
of two originally independent individuals - an ego and an alter, an 'I' and an'other' - or from the
meeting of a number of originally independent individuals' (Elias 1983: 143). He felt that without an
adequate understanding of the essential interdependence of human beings within a wide network of
relationships, even theories of interaction would posit a pre-social individual who only became
social when they engaged in social interaction (Elias 1969: 143).
Elias's critique of the concept 'interaction' is basically the same as that of the 'transactionalism' of
John Dewey and Arthur Bentley (1949). They distinguished between 'interaction' - where
independent elements are seen as engaging in a relation with each other, so that the elements are
primary and the relation secondary - and 'transaction' - where the elements in a social process
emerge from the relations between them, so that the relation is primary, and the elements secondary
(Dewey & Bentley 1949: 108; Meacham 1977: 264). Indeed, Arthur Bentley, who had been taught
by Dilthey and Simmel, suggested that human activities should be regarded as 'interlaced':
That, however, is a bad manner of expression. For the interlacing itself is the activity. We
have one great moving process to study, and of this great moving process it is impossible to
state any part except as valued in terms of the other parts (1908: 178, italics added).
Bentley thus came to much the same position as Elias, stressing both the 'interlacing' (interweaving)
of human activity and its dynamic, processual character. One could also draw parallels with the
ideas of network theorists, who focus on the 'pattern of ties' and networks of relations linking the
members of a social system (Granovetter 1973; Powell 1991). For network analysis, 'the
organization of social relations [is] a central concept in analysing the structural properties of the
networks within which individual actors are embedded, and for detecting emergent social

phenomena that have no existence at the level of the individual actor' (Knoke & Kuklinski 1991:
173), an approach which bears a strong resemblance to Elias's use of the concept of figurations.
AGAINST PROCESS-REDUCTION
The second step Elias took away from the reification of social life was to see it as having an
inherently processual character, and this needs to be seen in combination with his emphasis on
relationism. Figurations of interdependent individuals and groups can only be properly understood
as existing over time, in a constant process of dynamic flux and greater or lesser transformation. The
analysis of the interrelationships between intentional action and unplanned social processes had to
be undertaken over periods of time, for as Johan Goudsblom has put it, 'yesterday's unintended
social consequences are today's unintended social conditions of 'intentional human actions' (Elias
1977: 149). Elias spoke of the 'the transformational impetus (Wandlungsimpetus) of every human
society', and regarded 'the immanent impetus towards change as an integral moment of every social
structure and their temporary stability as the expression of an impediment to social change (Elias
1997a: [14]).
A historical approach to sociological analysis was, in fact, self-evident to most sociologists up to
World War II. In The Civilizing Process itself the main disciplinary argument was with psychology,
which was why like-minded writers such as Mannheim always spoke of the need for a 'historical
psychology' (Mannheim 1940: 16); there was no need to argue for a 'historical sociology'. However,
Elias pointed out that in the course of the twentieth century a momentum had been building up
against theories of 'progress' and 'evolution', especially their normative and teleological dimensions,
their assumption that all social change was essentially 'progressive' and that the current form of
society was the apex of human development. In the process, social scientists lost interest in
development of any sort. Rather than merely rejecting the normative and teleological elements of
evolutionary theories, the whole idea of examining long-term processes of change became
unfashionable, and most sociologists stopped concerning themselves with a historical approach to
their discipline altogether. In Elias's words:
...it is not simply the ideological elements in the nineteenth century sociological concept that
have been called into question, but the concept of development itself, the very consideration
of problems of long-term social development, of sociogenesis and psychogenesis. In a word,
the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater (Elias 1994a: 200).
The notion that 'present social conditions represent an instant of a continuous process which, coming
from the past, moves on through present times towards a future as yet unknown, appears to have
vanished' (Elias 1987: xvi). In 1970 Elias pointed out that where the concept 'development' was
used, it was restricted to non-Western, 'underdeveloped' or 'developing' countries, implying that
Western, highly-industrialised nations were not in a developing state (Elias 1972: 274-84).
The expression Elias used to identify the tendency in sociological thought which he was arguing
against was Zustandsreduktion - literally, 'reduction to states', although in English he preferred
'process-reduction', i.e. the 'reduction of processes to static conditions' (Elias 1978: 112). A
manifestation of process-reduction was sociologists' turning-away from historical analysis, the
emphasis by both functionalists and structuralists on synchronic rather than diachronic analysis, and
the assumption that stability was the normal condition of social life, and change a 'disruption' of a
normal state of equilibrium. By 'long-term' Elias meant periods of not less than three generations
(Elias 1986c: 234).

Just as individuals, families, communities, and so on, should be conceived as embedded within a
network of relations, rather than being seen as isolated objects, Elias argued that they should also be
seen as dynamic, in a state of flux and change, as processes. Individuals, for example, rather than
having a fixed identity,
are born as infants, have to be fed and protected for many years by their parents or other
adults, who slowly grow up, who then provide for themselves in this or that social position,
who may marry and have children of their own, and who finally die. So an individual may
justifiably be seen as a self-transforming person who, as it is sometimes put, goes through a
process (Elias 1978: 118).
Indeed, suggested Elias, although it is not how we are used to thinking about ourselves, 'it would be
more appropriate to say that a person is constantly in movement; he not only goes through a process,
he is a process' (Elias 1978: 118). We can only understand and explain any given sociological
problem if it is seen as the outcome of some long-term process of development, if we trace its
sociogenesis.
Instead of speaking of static 'states' or phenomena such as capitalism, rationality, bureaucracy,
modernity, postmodernity, Elias would always wish to identify their processual character, so that he
would think in terms of rationalization, modernization, bureaucratization, and so on. Often it is
difficult to come up with the appropriate concept. For example, 'capitalism' is difficult to render in
this way - but the point is to attempt a conceptualization along these lines, to identity the process
underlying what one was studying. If, for example, one observes what appear to be a large number
of single parents in Western societies, a productive approach for Elias would be to look for the long-
term trends in marriage and fertility, to see how this current phenomenon fits in with other processes
of social development, in order to possibly explain its occurrence. This example also illustrates
Elias's emphasis on the existence of a plurality of processes, all which interweave with each other,
with no causal primacy being given to any one of them. Transformations in social relationships are
thus intertwined with a variety of other process of change: economic, political, psychological,
geographical, and so on. The main long-term trends Elias concentrated on included increasing social
differentiation, industrialization, urbanization, political centralization, integration from smaller to
larger social units, state formation and nation building, functional democratization, psychologization
and rationalization - these will be discussed in the next chapter.
Social processes had no particular beginning; he said: 'Wherever we start, there is movement,
something that went before' (Elias 1994a: 48). They also have no end, Elias always assumed that we
find ourselves in the middle of any given process, and that the point of looking to where it came
from was to provide some sense of its future development. He said a number of things about the
question of directionality: often he seemed to insist that the overall direction of a long-term trend
was all that mattered, and that any divergences from this direction would only be temporary
interruptions to the broader tendency. For example in a letter to Gerhard Schmied in 1982, he said of
the Roman Empire that it 'was in turn again only the apex of an integrative movement' and that 'All
in all, there is only one single developmental process. One should demonstrate it in all states in the
world' (Schmied 1988: 213). It is this type of argument which leads some critics to regard Elias as a
unilinear evolutionist. However, he also said that 'two main directions in the structural changes of
societies may be distinguished: those tending toward increased differentiation and integration, and
those tending toward decreasing differentiation and integration' (Elias 1994a: 182), leading
commentators such as Peter Burke to describe his theory as multilinear (1992: 149). Any given
trend 'is always linked to counter-trends. A trend might remain dominant for a long time; then a

counter-trend can again completely or partially gain the upper hand' (Elias 1997a: ??). This
perspective was developed in more detail in his work on twentieth century German history, and the
notion of decivilizing processes which underlay particular historical events like the Holocaust.
These arguments will also be examined in the next chapter.
A major difference between Elias's approach to long-term social processes and earlier theories of
evolutionary change was that he did not think it possible to identify the course of development
which had to take place. His explanatory concern was primarily retrospective, focusing on how:
...a figuration had to arise out of a certain figuration or even out of a particular type of
sequential series of figurations, but [it] does not assert that the earlier figurations had
necessarily to change into the later ones (Elias 1978: 161).
One could not say that figuration C necessarily had to emerge from figurations A and B, only that C
was made possible by the emergence of A and B, that A and B were the necessary preconditions for
C. Figuration C was thus only one of the possible successors to A and B, and there is never a
necessity or teleology to the social development.
Although Elias did distance himself from theories of social progress which simply assumed that all
social change was progressive, he did feel that, overall, humanity was in fact progressing. It is
important to bear his fundamentally ambiguous attitude to progress in mind, because it helps explain
why so many of his critics accuse him of reverting to the ninteenth century evolutionary
perspectives. For example, in 1977 he wrote:
...the twentieth century is an epoch of the greatest experiments and innovations.... Much of
what people in earlier times only dreamed of has become 'do-able'. Human knowledge - not
only about interconnections in the non-human, natural world, but also about people
themselves, on the individual as well as social level - is far more extensive than in the past.
The conscious, planned concern with improvement of the social order and human living
conditions - as inadequate as it is - has never been greater than it is today (Elias 1997a: [3]).
He was also confident that human beings have gradually developed more control over the natural
world, and that this increased control could easily be put in the category of 'progress'. When
challenged about his attitude to the control of the natural world by a Dutch interviewer, he said: 'We
can't go back to nature, that's a dreadful idea, nature is wild, blind, angry, sometimes beautiful....The
most important thing we have is what we make out of nature, not nature itself' (Elias 1984c: 10).
Despite the barbarism which Western 'civilized' people were capable of, for Elias this meant merely
that 'we have not learnt to control ourselves and nature enough', for he was insistent that the
contemporary world was considerably less brutal and violent than it had been in the Ancient or
Medieval world. He felt that relations between classes, men and women, superordinates and
subordinates, adults and children, were gradually becoming increasingly equal and democratic, and
that the point of identifying those instances where this was not the case was to further the process of
'functional democratization', not to suggest its impossibility.
On the other hand, he did also argue that processes of integration could at any time be accompanied
by those of disintegration, civilizing processes by decivilizing processes (Elias 1986c: 235), and he
placed more emphasis on these in his later work, such as The Germans (1996). Elias should be read
both ways, as optimistic about the progress of humanity, and as acutely aware of how easily we can
descend to cruelty barbaric cruelty. The death of his mother in Auschwitz was a permanent reminder

of that, so he can not be accused of being unaware of the dark side of Western civilization.
CONCLUSION
Future sociological inquiry, taking preliminary cues from such areas as the sociology of
emotion and feeling, the philosophical theory of action, and the psychoanalytic theory of
action and affect, must move beyond the present means-ends framework and the problem of
order, if it seriously seeks to illuminate the nature of social action, rather than fragments of
it. (Camic 1979: 545)
The question of whether sociologists continue to see 'the individual' and 'society' as separate entities
seems to have been settled long ago, and the transcendence of the dichotomy seems to be simply
part of sociology's inheritance. If we can read it in Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel, why repeat
the argument? However, in reality the dualistic forms of perception, apparently vanquished in
explicit arguments and in the relevant sections of the textbooks, simply reappear in another form,
built into the structure of sociological thought with different labels attached. The problem, as
Charles Camic (1986) has shown, is that the early sociologists can be read in a variety of ways, and
the effect of both Parsons's construction of the sociological 'tradition' and the criticisms of it has
been, until only quite recently, to perceive human conduct in a way which reproduces the
individual/society dichotomy. Concepts and modes of perception have a habit of rising, phoenix-
like, from the ashes. Elias's arguments about problems in sociological thought need to be addressed
at the level of its deep, underlying structure rather than merely its surface arguments, and from that
perspective they retain much of their force. If they did not, we would not still be puzzling over the
supposed distinctions between agency and structure, social and system integration, or micro and
macro approaches to sociology (Knorr-Cetina & Cicourel; Alexander et al 1987; Mouzelis 1993).
This can also be seen in the criticisms of Elias. Bauman, for example, commented that 'Elias
encourages his followers to close their eyes to the active, creative role of the individual or collective
subject of knowledge' (Bauman 1979: 120), and Dennis Smith suggested that 'his approach leaves
unresolved an important contradiction concerning the human capacity for choice and evaluation'
(Smith 1984: 370). What distinguished Elias from writers such as Marcuse, Habermas and Moore,
said Smith, was 'his 'bleaching out' of the evaluating, choosing side of humanity' (Smith 1984: 373).
Hans Haferkamp also felt uneasy about the emphasis which Elias placed on the unplanned and
'blind' character of social development: 'Elias does not give much weight to the success of intentions
and plans in this framework. Nor does he check to see when the planning of associations of actions
has been successful....there have been many situations where micro- or macro-social actors have
succeeded in their intentions and plans' (Haferkamp 1987: 556).
To the extent that 'agency' is conceived as somehow 'oppositional' to, or 'autonomous' from, social
determination, such criticism merely reinforces Elias's assertion that the individual/society
dichotomy is still a problem in sociological thought. He would have regarded claims like: 'The
residuum of human autonomy and creativity must be reclaimed for social theory otherwise the full
implications of human agency will be totally eclipsed' (Layder 1994: 118) as reflecting a continuing
romanticism about individual 'freedom', and as a misinterpretation of the reality of human social
existence. Elias never questioned the idea that human beings act creatively, with conscious intent,
and that their actions cannot be simply read off in a deterministic fashion from their surrounding
social context. This is different, however, from attributed effectivity to their action, and it is the
effects of human action which have to be regarded as determined by the way a combination of
actions interweave with each other, frequently in conflict and competition with each other. The

process by which the actions of various human agents, individual and collective, combine and
interpenetrate with each other, by definition lies beyond the control of any of the participating
'actors'. Rather than 'bleaching' out' human choice and evaluation, Elias's position concerning agency
is simply one about the 'logic of collective action', about the real effects those choices and
evaluations actually have once they enter social life, especially while human groups continue to
compete with each other. It is the dynamics of competition, conflict and interweaving which
constitutes the 'blindness' of social development and restricts the effectivity of human agency.
The potential contained in both Elias' overall theoretical approach and his empirical studies is that
their basic elements can be mobilized in relation to a wide range of topics in empirical social
research, with great promise of generating powerful lines of inquiry, explanation and debate.
Equally significant, however, is the possible contribution that Elias can make to a reorientation of
sociological theory. All the features of Elias's approach - the emphasis on social relations, long-term
processes, the interweaving of planned action and unplanned development, the importance of seeing
humans as interdependent, the centrality of power in social relations, and the significance of the
concept 'habitus' in understanding human conduct - have considerable potential for taking
sociological theory beyond dualisms and dichotomies, which seem to have rather outlived their
usefulness. As I have argued, many of the supposed problems of current sociological theory can be
traced back to its organization around the fictional 'Hobbesian problem of order'. But there no
'problem of order' as Parsons formulated it, no 'two sociologies' and no problem of 'structure and
action' requiring solution with a 'theory of structuration' (Giddens 1984). Hobbes was right.
There are only, as the pre-Parsonian sociologists understood, changing formations of habitus within
ongoing processes of historical development, of continual adjustment of human conduct to particular
social conditions. Although we may be critical of many of its features, an engagement with Elias's
sociology can help us develop a theoretical space within which we can recover those 'hybridized'
elements of sociological thought which the Parsonian establishment of sociology's 'modern'
constitution rendered invisible, theoretical elements for which Elias used a set of concepts including
habitus, figuration, social relations, unplanned processes, power and power-ratios and
interdependency.
In a very important recent line of argument, Piotr Sztompka has indicated in a related way his own
dissatisfaction with 'the almost obsessive theme of paradoxes, ironies, dualisms, or dualities' (1994:
269) in sociological thought. He suggests that we should regard both individual existence and
society as only existing in a virtual sense (p. 273). 'Social wholes and human individuals,' writes
Sztompka, ' have only virtual existence, their separation and mutual opposition is the product of
false, distorted imagination: common-sense illusions, and theoretical as well as meta-theoretical
fallacies' (pp. 273-4). He argues for a 'third sociology as opposed to both the sociology of action and
sociology of structures, or better as merging both of them in the synthetic, more adequate approach
to social reality' (p. 277). If we interpret this sort of argument for rejecting the oppositions and
dualisms altogether, for a 'third way', in terms of Latour's 'Constitution', it constitutes proposing that
we work only with the bottom half of the constitution, with the hybrids, networks and mediations,
and simply abolish the top half, the work of purification.
I would like to end with this issue as a question. Do we want a 'third sociology' (Sztompka) which
dumps the modern constitution altogether? Latour's own position is that this is not the best way
forward, because 'purification', and its associated concern with dualism, does actually have useful
and productive effects. From Latour's perspective, the oppositions between individual and society,
agency and structure, and so on, are not simply 'false' or 'distortions', contrary to Sztompka's

interpretation - they provide important conceptual and practical resources.(16) The Latourian
argument applied here would be that we need to retain the productivity of the modern constitution
laid down for sociology by Parsons in Structure, but also to 'restrain' it with an awareness of the
bottom half of the constitution, the realm sociological thinking comprised of non-dualistic hybrids
and mediations. Rather than seeing Elias's theoretical position as a 'third sociology' which simply
opposes the post-Parsonian sociology of action, then, it may ultimately be more useful to see it as
complementary. Its primary contribution may be to make it easier to see sociologies of networks,
interdependence, relations, habitus and emotions - the bottom, hybridified half of sociology's
modern constitution - as well as, rather than instead of, the sociologies of action and structure and
the various attempts to bridge, link and synthesise them.(17)
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[17,416]

1. This paper draws on, develops and argues against parts of my Norbert Elias New York:
Routledge, 1997. An earlier version was also given at the 1996 conference of The Australian
Sociological Association in Hobart, Tasmania, 4- 7th December 1996.
2. The second was The Society of Individuals (1991)
3. There is then also, of course, endless scope for the correction of the misinterpretations of the
earlier attempts, as we see in the flourishing industries of commentary on Weber, Parsons, Giddens,
and so on.
4. Dawe (1970) first mentions it in print, but then later (1978: 383) acknowledges, rather
apologetically, that he got the idea from an unpublished paper by Pamela Nixon.
5. Later, Dawe was to suggest that the opposition was not simply a feature of sociological thought,
but mirrored the reality of human experience itself; as he put it, 'the contradiction between the two
sociologies articulates the contradiction which is at the heart of the dominant modern experience and
which permeates our lives as a constant existential tension of our time and place' (p. 368). However,
he also began to point to an instability in the whole argument by indicating that both positions are in
fact theories of action. The opposition is that the social system perspective has a pessimistic view of
human beings and their action - left to our own devices, we will bring about chaos - whereas the
action perspective more optimistically regards human beings as 'self- and socially creative' (Dawe
1978: 380).
6. I am following here Lloyd's (1992) identification of the 'standard philosophical interpretation' of
Hobbes: 'Listen in on most any undergraduate philosophy course in which Leviathan is discussed
and you will hear a familiar story. Hobbes the individualist. Hobbes the theorist of power, advocate
of the view that sheer might makes order. Hobbes the pessimist, defender of the view that the only
alternative to anarchy is absolute subjection, that an overriding fear of death drives men to embrace
an apparent but necessary tyranny' (p. 6).
7. For example, Hobbes wrote that 'a son cannot be understood to be at any time in the state of
nature, as being under the power and command of them to whom he owes his protection as soon as
ever he is born, namely, either his father's or his mother's, or his that nourished him' (Hobbes 1972:
117). Elsewhere he referred to the idea of the state of nature as considering 'men as if but even now
sprung out of the earth, and suddenly, like mushrooms, come to full maturity, without all kind of
engagement to each other' (1972: 205). Hobbes was hardly so dim as to think that we did in fact
spring from the earth like mushrooms, which is what the view of him as a psychological egoist
implies.
8. See also Wagner's (1991) remarks on this question in relation to religion.
9. In 1967 Gert could hardly contain his frustration, and not much has changed since: 'it seems to me
incredible that anyone with an understanding of human nature that Hobbes displays...could be found
guilty of the traditional charge of holding as crude a theory as psychological egoism. An unbiased
look at the evidence, textual, philosophical, and historical shows beyond any reasonable doubt that
the traditional charge has not only not been proven, but that the evidence in its favor is
overwhelmingly outweighed by the evidence against it' (1967: 520).

10. Perhaps any dualism or opposition: micro/macro, real/non-real, male/female, state/society - the
possibilities are endless.
11. Collins argues similarly in this regard, that the 'longing for agency' is a retreat to 'a subjective
world constructed so as to offer the fantasy of subjective power' (1992: 77).
12. Recent work in the sociology of emotions is rectifying this; see, for example Jack Barbalet's
(1997) "The Jamesian theory of action."
13. The famous opening line of Structure was a quotation from Harvard historian Crane Brinton,
'Who now reads Spencer?' (Parsons 1937: 3).
14. Edward Shils has put this well: 'A society is a "trans-temporal" phenomenon. It is not constituted
by its existence at a single moment in time. It exists only through time.....It has a temporal
integration as well as spatial integration' (1981: 327).
15. Recently the significance of this has been underlined by Pierre Bourdieu, who defines this form
of perception as thinking in terms of fields, a mode of thought which 'requires a conversion of one's
entire usual vision of the social world, a vision which is interested only in those things which are
visible' (1990: 192). Referring to Elias, he points out that thinking non-relationally also has the
effect of treating social units as if they were themselves human actors, and mentions the possible
'endless list of mistakes, mystifications or mystiques created by the fact that the words designating
institutions or groups, State, bourgeoisie, Employers, Church, Family and School, can be
constituted...as historical subjects capable of posing and realizing their own aims' (1990: 192).
16. Hence the continued attachment to them - for example, Mouzelis (1995) - and the inclination to
bridge, link or synthesise rather than abolish (Alexander et al 1987; Ritzer 1990).
17. I have here left out of consideration another implication of Latour's analysis, which is that we
may need to think about the history of sociology very differently, recognizing no clear dividing line
between premodern social and political thought and modern sociology. Both this question, and
whether Latour's analysis means rethinking Elias's own conception of history and social process, I
will have to leave to another paper.