This article asks what becomes of Norbert Elias’s figurational sociology when its developmental grammar of control - particularly over extra-human entities - is read from the standpoint of the nuclear Anthropocene. Elias treated the bomb largely as a Cold War symptom of human groups unable to master the dangers they create for one another. The article starts from a different premise: the bomb is more than a technological instrument or a fetish of interstate fear. As a technoscientific chimera, it becomes the critical figure for earthing figurational sociology: a threat that enters Earth materials and temporalities, returning through radioactive matter as a durable condition of future interdependencies. The article first revisits Elias’s theory of levels and the triad of controls, showing how biological and extra-human processes are integrated yet subordinated within a developmental hierarchy of security and danger. It then treats the bomb as a limit-case of figuration: an artefact produced within human interdependencies that, as an extra-human agent, can nevertheless reorganize valences, balances of power and the architecture of constraint. Finally, it follows the bomb through deep Earth temporalities, where the problem of control reappears as geological residue, planetary exposure and apocalyptic species imagination.
This paper analyses Norbert Elias’s understanding of the role of relational power within figurations and of the formation of the modern state. It compares classical sociological theories in which the basis of power is the possession of resources or institutional positions with Elias’s relational model, in which power is based on uneven distribution of dependence among figurational actors. Subsequently, the article examines Elias’s conception of the state as a processual outcome of long-term changes in the balance of power and the extension of chains of interdependence. Special attention is paid to Elias’s account of state formation as a transition from feudal fragmentation to modern centralisation. The article also addresses the role which monopolisation of physical coercion and taxation, as well as the demographic, economic and political changes played in this process. Finally, the paper considers the limitations of Elias’s model, particularly with regard to the absence of comparative analysis, the partial neglect of capitalism as a cause of social change and the lack of a hierarchy of figurations. It proposes the concept of fundamental figurations as a possible basis for further development of Elias’s figurational sociology. In conclusion, the paper indicates the value of Elias’s figurational sociology for a better understanding of the present and the future and refers to Elias as one of the most significant historical sociologists.
While Mannheim’s “The Problem of Generations” has remained the most widely recognized classical reference in the sociology of generations, Elias’s contribution has received limited attention in contemporary research in this field. Hence, this paper offers a discussion of the work of Norbert Elias as an underexplored resource for the study of generational relations and conflicts. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct a figurational approach to the formation of generations and the emergence of generational consciousness based on Elias’s analysis of generational conflicts in the Weimar Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany, developed most thoroughly in “The Germans”. The paper first presents Elias’s reflections on generational conflicts and places them in dialogue with Mannheim’s approach, before turning to a discussion on how his insights may illuminate the process of generation formation along with the emergence of generational consciousness through generational self-identification and differentiation. The analysis shows how socio-historically embedded conflicts between older and younger generations may acquire generational meaning through discursive practices and collective action, thus becoming a basis for a shared sense of generational belonging.
The article draws on Elias’s theory developed in The Established and the Outsiders, The Civilizing Process, and The Court Society, applying it to the case of racism, and particularly anti-Roma racism. The content of the stigma attached to the outsiders in Winston Parva is strikingly similar to that attached to the Roma people. Moreover, the Roma and their ancestors simultaneously constitute local communities stigmatized by established neighbours, while also forming a transnational community through which stigmatization can be observed as a longterm process unfolding in parallel with the civilizing process. The article examines how the topos of “Gypsies who steal disobedient/badly behaved children”, reproduced for centuries in everyday discourse, reveals not only the nature of the figurations into which Roma enter with majority populations, but also the established groups’ we-image, their attribution of group disgrace to Roma communities, and their fears of losing status prestige and the group charisma associated with membership in the established group through failure to conform to prevailing standards of conduct.
This paper examines the theoretical convergence and interdisciplinary contribution of Norbert Elias and Fernand Braudel through the prism of their critique of the “short-sighted present.” Rejecting event-based history (l’histoire événementielle), both authors prioritize slow rhythms and long-term processes (longue durée). Although Braudel’s geo-historical structures do not fully coincide with Elias’s figurations and cultural habitus, the paper argues that the rhythms of long duration can be complemented by a processual character (Prozesshaftigkeit) understanding of social change at both the collective and individual levels. At the core of this theoretical affinity lies time as a fundamental dimension of social life. The paper further demonstrates that, unlike Braudel, Elias develops a more explicit theory of time as a symbolic and socially learned category. Through a discussion of the history of mentalities, imagination, and utopian thought, it highlights the significance of Elias’s psycho-historical perspective for understanding post-Braudelian developments within the Annales School and contemporary debates on social temporality. Finally, Elias’s and Braudel’s critique of the present is interpreted, on the one hand, as a methodological critique of event-based history and sociology’s orientation toward the present and, on the other, as a basis for criticizing the presentist “preoccupation with the now” deprived of a utopian horizon.
