读了一些阿Elias的东西，主要是关于“文明的进程”。他的历史感是我最为关心的，他的论点对韦伯一定程度上构成了反驳，但必须放在后现代语境中。
There are at least five interconnected principles underlying Elias’s approach to sociology. First, although societies are composed of human beings who engage in intentional action, the outcome of the combination of human actions is most often unplanned and unintended. The task for sociologists is, then, to analyse and explain the mechanics of this transformation of intentional human action into unintended patterns of social life, which necessarily takes place over longer or shorter periods of time.
A second, related, principle was that human individuals can only be understood in their interdependencies with each other, as part of networks of social relations, or what he often referred to as ‘figurations’. Rather than seeing individuals as possessing an ‘autonomous’ identity with which they then interact with each other and relate to something we call a ‘society’, Elias argued that we are social to our very core, and only exist in and through our relations with others, developing a socially-constructed ‘habitus’ or ‘second-nature’. An important subsidiary principle is that the study of processes of social development and transformation - what Elias called sociogenesis - is necessarily linked to the analysis of psychogenesis - processes of psychological development and transformation, the changes in personality structures or habitus which accompany and underlie social changes.
Third, human social life should be understood in terms of relations rather than states. For example, instead of power being a ‘thing’ which persons, groups or institutions possess to a greater or lesser degree, Elias argued we should think in terms of power relations, with ever-changing ‘balances’ or ‘ratios’ of power between individuals and social units.
Fourth, human societies can only be understood as consisting of long-term processes of development and change, rather than as timeless states or conditions. He spoke in this regard of the ‘retreat of sociologists into the present’. Elias’s sociology is above all a historical sociology, although he himself rejected the term, largely because he argued it should be assumed that sociology is undertaken historically, and such a term implies the possibility and legitimacy of a non-historical sociology. His point was more that sociologists cannot logically avoid concerning themselves with the diachrony of long-term social processes in order to understand current social relations and structures. Here he also anticipated the later development of historical sociology by writers such as Philip Abrams, Barrington Moore, Theda Skocpol and Charles Tilly.
Fifth, sociological thought moves constantly between a position of social and emotional involvement in the topics of study, and one of detachment from them. In contrast to natural science, the fact that sociologists study other interdependent human beings means that they are part of their object of scientific study, and thus cannot avoid a measure of involvement in their own research and theorizing. Social-scientific knowledge develops within the society it is part of, and not independently of it. At the same time, however, this involvement is often a barrier to an adequate understanding of social life, especially one which can resolve or transcend any of the persistent problems characterizing human beings’ relationships with each other. The most obvious problem Elias was concerned with was violence. He felt it was important for social scientists to try to transcend the emotion-laden, everyday conceptualization of the human world and develop a ‘way of seeing’ that went beyond current ideologies and mythologies. Indeed, he often referred to sociologists as engaged in the ‘destruction of myths’.
[此贴子已经被作者于2003-11-22 11:03:27编辑过]
