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From Figuration to Coordination: An Analysis of Social Interdependence Mechanisms

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Norbert Elias and Social Theory

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Abstract

If there is a central concept in Norbert Elias’s thinking, a concept present in most if not all of his writings, it is figuration. In that one notion we are given both the orientation of his epistemological understanding and his firm intention to escape the dichotomies of classic sociology, first among them an opposition between individual and society in which the two seem posited as independent substances. Less familiar, perhaps, is Elias’s relational sociology. Here his reasoning in terms of related levels for which no ultimate positioning relative to each other can be determined was also, as he saw it, an invitation to construct a unified science of social beings situated at the intersection of the various human and social sciences.

Translated by Amy Jacobs.

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Authors
  1. Jean-Hugues Déchaux
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Laurentian University, Canada

    François Dépelteau (associate professor of sociology) (associate professor of sociology)

  2. department of social sciences, Universidade Federal de São Paulo, Brazil

    Tatiana Savoia Landini (associate professor) (associate professor)

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© 2013 François Dépelteau and Tatiana Savoia Landini

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Déchaux, JH. (2013). From Figuration to Coordination: An Analysis of Social Interdependence Mechanisms. In: Dépelteau, F., Landini, T.S. (eds) Norbert Elias and Social Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137312112_18

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