NEW EDITION OF DIE GESELLSCHAFT DER INDIVIDUEN

The German publisher Suhrkamp has brought out a new edition of Elias’s Die Gesellschaft der Individuen (The Society of Individuals) originally compiled in collaboration with Elias by Michael Schroeter as editor. It comes as volume 10 of the Elias Gesammelte Schriften (‘Collected Writings’), a project comprising 19 volumes altogether and to be completed in 2006. It was commissioned by the Elias Stichting in Amsterdam and is carried out by an Editorial Board, whose members are Reinhard Blomert, Heike Hammer, Johan Heilbron, Annette Treibel and Nico Wilterdink, with Annette Treibel being specifically in charge of this volume.

Perhaps the most important addition to the book is an index which now makes its complexity and richness of subject-matter accessible through a large number of entries and cross-references. This new index was created from the English one in The Society of Individuals, but was thoroughly revised and considerably expanded. Also, one now finds, in Annette Treibel’s editorial report, a detailed account of how the different parts of the book originated. 

A very distinct trait of Elias is the continuity with which he worked throughout his scholarly life on problems that he saw as central to (his) sociology – tackling them from different angles, carrying them through different stages of development. (Incidentally, the collected works edition is an opportunity to re-discover just that.) In Die Gesellschaft der Individuen, whose three essays span a period from the 1930s to the 1980s, we find Elias grappling with the question of the relationship between the plurality of humans when considered individually and the same plurality as it forms societies – hence the programmatic title. In his preface, Elias says that the book originally was a spin-off (not his exact words) of the Civilising Process, where this problem had preoccupied him. At a later point, his own further development of the question prompted him to introduce ‘figuration’ into his conceptual apparatus.

In Die Gesellschaft der Individuen, the core of Elias’s argument is as follows: the concepts and realities of ‘society’ and ‘individual’ should not be thought of as separate and opposed entities. Instead, it is the plurality of interdependent individuals that make up and form societies, and in turn it is the simple fact that interdependent humans form societies that gives each human existence within them its unique place, shape, and course. By living in societies, humans become individuals.

The first essay, written in 1939 and giving the book its title, elaborates the core argument in different ways. Elias starts with a criticism of the traditional ‘society vs. individual’ dichotomy, pointing out how this false dichotomy was established and maintained by the partisan and value-laden views of those who placed superior value on either side of it, society or individual. He then puts forward his own conception: the functional interdependency of humans and human groups is what holds any society together; the first essay, written in 1939 and giving the book its title, elaborates the core argument in different ways. Elias starts with a criticism of the traditional ‘society vs. individual’ dichotomy, pointing out how this false dichotomy was established and maintained by the partisan and value-laden views of those who placed superior value on either side of it, society or individual. Verflechtung comes in as a key concept at this point. Here and elsewhere in this essay, Elias’s argument is about fundamental positions. He sketches the great outline; his style is, even by Eliasian standards, largely non-technical and quite often metaphorical.

The second essay, entitled ‘Probleme des Selbstbewusstseins und des Menschenbildes’ (‘Problems of Self-Consciousness and the Image of Man’) and dated ‘1940s–1950s’, is more technical in an Eliasian sociological sense. In the first of its three sections, Elias begins by stating the parallel between the low degree of control over nature in simpler societies and the equally low degree of control over social events in more complex societies. In the latter case, Elias suggests, the value-laden ‘society vs. individual’ dichotomy may be just another example of ‘wishful and fear-inspired self-images’, in a form specific to the present stage of human history. He then asks how we could step out of the vicious circle that is constituted by a low degree of control over events in society on the one hand and a high degree of fantasy and feeling in the prevalent mode of thinking about society on the other hand. In the second section of this essay, ‘Die denkenden Statuen’ (‘The thinking statues’), we enter philosophical terrain. One of Elias’s longstanding targets of criticism, the homo clausus concept and some of its derivatives, such as the ‘subject vs. object’, ‘inside vs. outside’, or ‘I vs. world’ dualisms, are placed by Elias into the historical context where they were formulated (by Descartes, Locke, and others), and thus historicised or ‘sociologised’. Elias concedes that these dualisms do in fact represent a stage in the development of human thought marked by an increase in self-detachment and reality-congruence, but that we would take yet another step in this direction if we could overcome them. Lastly, there is the third section of the second essay, ‘Individualisation in the Social Process’. It comes across as a small ‘process book’, only that its scope is world history and its central focus is on individualisation. Here, Elias delineates the overall shift that took mankind from small kinship groups of hunter-gatherers, where interdependencies between members were few and less varied but intense and almost inescapable, down to our own age, where members of modern societies are faced with a set of opportunities and problems that is equally specific to them – loneliness being a good example – and with a different route to individualisation. The ‘Social Process’ from the section’s title is multi-faceted – here you find the usual candidates for modernisation theories like (functional) differentiation, urbanisation, increasing role of knowledge and education, etc., but also (partial) processes that are familiar from Elias’s theory of civilising processes, like an increase in the control over nature and over oneself, thereby opening new room to manoeuvre for individuals. Individualisation in this processual sense forms part of this bundle, and it takes place in spurts.

The last of the three essays, ‘Wandlungen der Wir–Ich Balance’ (‘Changes in the We–I Balance’) was written by Elias in 1987. Again, its scope is as broad as the history of mankind, and as in The Civilising Process, Elias’s double focus is on interrelated changes on the two levels of figurations: the psychic and the social organisation of humans. This time however, today’s world and ‘society’ conceived of as ‘world society’ receive the most attention. Elias observes that, contrary to a deeply entrenched self-image in Western societies, there can be no ‘we-less I’, no personal identity, without a ‘We’ element. Instead, the ‘I’ and the ‘We’ elements presuppose one another, and all that can empirically be found are changes in their balance – a tilt towards one or the other side. Moreover, the feeling of ‘We’ may become attached to several integration units of different size in the course ofmhistory. The group-specific psychic structure or habitus with its association to one or more ‘We’ groups may also be ‘out of sync’ with the development of social organisation. People may cling to a ‘We’ unit that, in the course of social transformation, has ceased to fulfill the functions for the group’s survival which it had when the ‘We’ identification, usually carrying a strong affective change. Elias specially focuses on two fields where the ‘drag effect’ can be observed. One is the transition of nation states which used to serve as primary survival units but are now gradually being replaced by supra-national units and institutions – as in the cases of European integration or the emergence of global political institutions. Here too, the difficulties associated with a ‘we’ identification in transition are not the least of political problems. ‘This book’, Elias writes in his preface, ‘offers tools for thinking about and observing people. Some of them are quite new’. Given the current state of sociological debate, this is still true.

source: Figurations no. 17 (Newsletter of the Norbert Elias Foundation), S. 6-8

Recently my edition of Gesellschaft der Individuen was re-published as part of the Gesammelte Schriften of Norbert Elias. This happened without my having been informed. I regard such a procedure as inconsiderate and disrespectful, to say the least, and wish to declare that I have nothing to do with this re-publication. In the philological end-note, added by the re-editor, my account of the complicated events which determined the present shape of this book (see my Erfahrungen mit Norbert Elias, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 1997, pp. 307–11) was left unmentioned. By this omission future readers have been deprived of what I believe to be a basic and relevant piece of factual information.