Eisenstadt and Elias: Static and Dynamic, Competing and Complementary Accounts of the Social World in the Modern Age

The complicated interrelationships between particularity and generality, the abstract and the concrete, or atomistic and holistic conceptions of causation, ‘history’ and society continue to afflict the socio-cultural sciences. This also applies to the relations between ‘modern culture’ and its diverse ‘actualizations’ as well as relations between competing conceptions of the social world without and within history. Elias’s and Eisenstadt’s works belong to the sustained and coherent efforts among sociologists to explain the defining qualities of the world in the modern age and their genesis. Some understand their theories as retreads of the post-WWII modernization discourse. Although there is some truth in this perspective, it should not deflect from the fact that Eisenstadt’s has been the perhaps most elaborated attempt at revising the essential constituents of this discourse, whereas Elias’s theory represents a radical alternative (of pre-Parsonian and pre-war provenance) to it, in terms of basic terminology and basic vision of the social world as well as its methodology – in a manner reminiscent of the polarity between Kantian and Hegelian epistemologies or concepts respectively. Whereas Eisenstadt refined and differentiated the concept of modernity, Elias generally abstained from using this term and suggesting a total break between the modern and the preceding periods and emphasized long-term continuities and patterns in European and human history, while anticipating some central ideas of the recent discourse on globalization. Whereas Eisenstadt focused on the implementation of “cultural and political programmes”, Elias emphasized the unanticipated consequences of actions and the unplanned nature of collective processes and phenomena. The paper will analyse how far insights and concepts of two eminent scholars of historical sociology are mutually compatible or complementary as well as explicate their methodological, conceptual and material differences.