Beyond Dichotomous Thinking. The Society of Individuals

Good manners, African art, death, genius, the modern state, naval profession, time, war, psychiatry are some of the many different questions that Norbert Elias dealt with in his long life of academic activity. That he dedicated himself to the analysis of court society or that he addressed to the issue of the socialization of parents, that he questioned the mechanisms underlying the reproduction of social inequalities, or that he attempted to explain the rise of Nazism in Germany or the spread of sport in Western societies, at the end we always find a more general question: what is society? Or in other words: What allows human beings to be who they are? What are the mechanisms allowing the formation and transformation of social groupings? What bonds different human beings, and what distinguishes them, in time and space? One can observe some constants: 1. The unavoidable and irreducible dynamic of social processes in the life and relations of human beings. 2. The rejection of the use of reified concepts with the consequent search for new processual words and expressions. 3. Overcoming the dichotomous approach to social analysis through a reconstruction of the main contradictions typical of Western thought, which are nothing but an approximation to the observable reality. Elias attempts to restore sociological analysis as closely as possible to its object of investigation: society.That is a constantly dynamic reality. This proposal might be termed a dynamic sociology, a sociology in motion, which is different from the sociology of change - in the sense that in some way it lies within a sociological tradition that accepts the contrast between order and social change. Eliasian sociology instead makes movement a founding element for the analysis, whether we observe phenomena4 in their change or in their persistence. In this essay I attempt to explain how the introduction of a dynamic element could help to over- come some impasses of sociology, with a focus on dichotomous oppositions that have accompanied the development of the discipline: individual/society, above all, but also then nature/culture, order/change, local/global. To look at society in movement means to look at society at all. Elias clearly expressed his position in a passage in What is Sociology? Precisely when he reflects about what he identifies as universals of human society, the first of them is «humankind‟s natural changefulness as a social constant» (Elias 1978: 104)5. All static forms are artificial forms. Sometimes they could be useful for analysis (in lesser or greater measure) but the empirically observable reality, is always and inevitably a reality in motion.