Figurational Sociology

Figurational sociology is a term used for the research tradition stemming from the work of Norbert Elias (1897–1990), especially his theory of civilizing processes, and the sociologists who work in it, taking its name from their use of the distinctive word figuration. Critics of the group of researchers who had gathered around Elias and Johan Goudsblom in Amsterdam in the 1970s were the ones who first described what they did as “figurational sociology,” but the label stuck and came to be used by friend and foe alike. Elias himself, however, did not much like it and advocated instead the term “process sociology.” But Elias always denied that he wanted to create a “school” of sociology. His ambition was less modest: He wanted to reform the habits of thought of sociologists at large.

Elias began to use the word figuration in the 1960s. He was, as much as anything, attempting to avoid using the word system, with its connotations of teleology, of consensus, and particularly of stasis that had been so current in the heyday of Parsonian functionalism in sociology. At first he wrote configuration, but then dropped the con, pointing out that it implied a figuration or pattern with something else, whereas he wanted to signify the social patterning in itself.

In the early part of his career, particularly in Frankfurt (1930–1933), Elias had come into contact with pioneers of Gestalt psychology such as Max Wertheimer, and arguably the terms figuration, field (in Kurt Lewin, and perhaps more recently in the work of Pierre Bourdieu), and matrix (central to the theory of group analytic therapy, in which Elias played a founding role along with S. H. Foulkes, in the 1940s and early 1950s) all represent attempts to render some of the connotations of Gestalt into English. The key feature they have in common is that they are all associated with attempts to break away from the homo clausus assumption, which Elias contended were so prevalent in the social sciences and of which he was so critical.

Elias always considered himself a sociologist, not a “social theorist,” and had a low estimate of the potential contribution of philosophical reflection to the understanding of human society if it were divorced from the empirical investigation of human social interdependence. Throughout his career, Elias argued that the whole central tradition of modern Western epistemology, from Descartes through Kant to twentieth-century phenomenology, was misconceived. It was based on asking how a single, adult, human mind can know what it knows. Elias called this the model of “homo clausus,” the “closed person,” and found it lurking in much of modern sociology. He argued that social scientists must instead think in terms of “homines aperti,” “open people,” and in particular of “long lines of generations of people” building up the stock of human knowledge. His crucial point, however, was that the image of homo clausus corresponded to a mode of self-experience that was not a human universal, but was a social product, particularly of European society from the Renaissance onward. The development of this culturally specific human self-image among the secular upper classes in Western Europe was a key theme of his magnum opus, The Civilizing Process ([1939] 2000), which figurational sociologists take as their paradigm in precisely Kuhn's sense of a major research achievement: While offering an answer to some questions, it raises many other issues for further research.

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