Review: [untitled]

Author(s): Anthony Giddens

Reviewed work(s):
The Society of Individuals. by Norbert Elias ; Michael Schröter ; Edmund Jephcott
Source: The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 98, No. 2 (Sep., 1992), pp. 388-389
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2781867
Accessed: 22/10/2009 19:55

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The
American Journal of Sociology.

http://www.jstor.org
 Book Reviews

The Society of Individuals. By Norbert Elias. Edited by Michael

Schroter. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Cambridge, Mass.: Basil
Blackwell, 1991. Pp. x+247. $44.95.

Anthony Giddens
Cambridge University

The Norbert Elias industry continues to flourish. The Society of Individ-

uals, originally published in German in 1987, is composed of three essays
written at widely dispersed periods of Elias's long intellectual career.
The first, written alongside The Civilising Process, dates from the late
1930s. The second was completed in 1950, while the third dates from as
late as 1987. In view of the disparate origins of the papers, that the book
forms an integral whole is a testimony to the intellectual power of Elias's
work. At the risk of some simplification, it could be said that every
outstanding social thinker concentrates upon a strictly limited number of
themes, to be attacked in depth and from various angles. Elias's persis-
tent concern was with the relation of self to society, understood in histori-
cal perspective. The Society of Individuals provides ample evidence of
the richness of Elias's thinking as applied to this most fundamental issue
in social analysis.
Self and society, Elias emphasizes, are not two separate entities, but
are intrinsically and irremediably interconnected. What is "society" and
what is the "individual"? Both terms, Elias says, seem transparent and
familiar, but upon examination turn out to be very complex. In the first
essay, Elias establishes a position from which he does not later deviate:
he sets himself against all views which claim that a society is an organic
whole dominating the lives of individuals. He opposes with equal vehe-
mence the methodological individualism which insists that individuals
are in some way "real" whereas social processes are not. Each of these
contrary positions, as he points out, has political implications. Holistic
interpretations readily lead to the view that individuals are morally unim-
portant when compared to the collective, while the other standpoint often
finds it difficult to accept that there are any communal values at all.
Each rival perspective, in fact, has been too influenced by its attitude
toward moral values: the point, sociologically speaking, is to strip away
these aspects and instead concentrate on the realities of social interaction.
Individuals and society exist in circumstances devoid of purpose, the
condition and result of the endless forms of social association which tie
people to one another. Given the time at which it was written this essay

Permissionto reprinta book review printed in this section may be obtained from the
author.

388 AJS Volume 98 Number 2

 Book Reviews

is an extraordinary achievement, anticipating issues which came to be

generally explored in social theory only at a much later date.
Self-consciousness, Elias argues in the second essay, is not just a given
phenomenon. Modernity is associated with specific conceptions of self
which have a profound impact upon social life. The advent of modern
European society produced the emergence of a less egocentric view of
the social universe than had previously prevailed: people were increas-
ingly able to see themselves "from a distance," in a decentered way.
Here Elias elaborates a standpoint that has interesting connections with
the ideas of Kohlberg and Habermas. People in less-developed societies,
like children in all forms of social order, have little access to forms of
experience which allow them to see themselves as others might see them.
People are not yet "individualized" in the ways characteristic of more
complex systems. The development of individualization goes along with,
and depends on, growing restraint on emotions or feelings, which become
subject to greater internalized control. This, of course, is the very process
Elias seeks to document in The Civilising Process.
In the concluding section of the book, which contains Elias's final
reflections on these problems, the discussion concentrates on changes in
what Elias calls the "'I' and 'we' balance." The "I-we identity"
formed in different societies varies in a radical way, in both its individual
and social components. "I" and "we" statements never have a static
character, whether looked at in terms of social evolution or of individual
development. Thus the "I" of a 40-year-old individual does not refer to
that person when she or he was 10; yet, of course, there are continuities
of development which at the same time link the "I" of the child and of
the adult. It seems on the face of things as though a move toward greater
individualization would mean tipping the balance toward the "I"identity.
However, Elias seeks to show, more individualized consciousness actu-
ally depends on a more thoroughgoing socialization of self. For the "I"
is pinpointed in relation to a far greater array of social influences: what
a person "is" today is formed in terms of a multiplicity of social criteria,
such as date of birth, type of occupation, school records, and so forth.
It is not really possible in a short review to convey the subtlety and
delicate insights that Elias offers in this book. Suffice it to say that it is
a theoretical work of very high order. It was awarded the European
Prize for sociology and social sciences in 1988 and fully deserved that
distinction.

389