When his books were published in well distributed editions and translated in many languages at the end of the 60s. Elias feared that his readers might not understand what he had really wanted to accomplish with those books. Books that were, by now, three decades old. So he wrote a new introduction to his book on the civilizing process, and he published a small but a very important book that contains his sociological program under the deceivingly simple title [FOREIGN], What is Sociology? But also in some other articles and books, such as his book on problems of involvement and detachment, He tried to clearly locate his own brand of sociology on the playing field of sociological theory. Two words that are often used to label his theory are figuration and process. Elias is often said to be a figurational sociologist or a process sociologist. But he wasn't fond of those labels. In fact, Elias wasn't keen on being labeled at all. But then the book, What is Sociology, the concept of human figurations is an important concept indeed. Sociologists should not study individual human beings. As the methodological individualists tell us, sociologists should not study social structure as the American functionalists following up Duchamp. The thing that sociologists should study is figurations of human beings. The long chains of interdependency that we find ourselves in from the moment we are born. Maybe even before that moment. Nothing can be more misleading than this weird opposition between the individual on the one hand. The society on the other hand. Dichotomy that has been very popular in the social science from its very first days on. There can be no individuals without a society. The isolated, socialized individual doesn't exist. It's a figment of the philosopher's imagination. It's not an existing entity that can be studied in an empirical science. And on the other hand, of course, they can be clearly no society without individuals. So, when we oppose those two concepts, we can be certain that our theories will lead us into a dead-end street. We should therefore start from figurations of interdependency. Those figurations are constantly in motion, and in their changes we can recognize recurring elements. And it is those processes that we as sociologists should focus on. And this is why figurational sociology cannot be anything else than process sociology. The study of figurational processes. Now we already saw in the description of the civilizing process that this is a blind process, unplanned, unforeseen, unintended. And the same thing can be said about other processes, such as the state formation process or the process of rationalization that Weber analyzed or the process, two words, organic solidarity that Durkheim wrote about. But the fact that those prophecies are not steered by anyone in particular does not imply that they do not have their own structure. Social prophecies possess their own structure. A structure that can be recognized by the perceptive and well trained process. Sociologist who can describe and interpret and ultimately explain that structure. And the Elias says if you don't believe it have a look at my book, the book on the process of civilization. There you can see that this can be done, it's feasible. But why should we do that? Apart from the pleasure, of course, of better understanding how human figurations develop over time. Elias was a bit reluctant to answer that question, but in discussion with his students, he sometimes indicated that those blind processes have caused much suffering all over the history of mankind. And that behind the whole sociological enterprise, there is this, well, bit of secret hope that maybe in the very long run, one day, we may better understand those figurational processes and learn how to steer than in such a way that it will lead to less human suffering. There's only on very rare occasions that Elias could be seduced into saying something like this. Because I always had the feeling that this was the strongest force in his own tribe economy. That you could feel it behind everything he said and everything he wrote. It may explain why this friendly, soft-spoken German professor was, until the last weeks of his long life, such a devoted, such a passionate sociologist. [SILENCE].
