Reconfiguring Elias: Historical Sociology, the English School, and the Challenge of International Relations

Abstract

The essential argument of this article is advanced in four sections. In the first part I set out six founding principles or axioms of Elias’s complex ontology. The second section then reveals the basis of neorealist IR theory by considering the six principles of Kenneth Waltz’s approach, which produces a vision that constitutes the diametric opposite to that of Elias’s. But as I explain in the third section of this article the problem is that a good deal of what Elias has to say about the international realm dovetails with the conception laid out by Waltz and other neorealists (e.g., Gilpin 1981; Mearsheimer 2001). Accordingly, I argue that there is a contradiction lying at the heart of Elias’s theory; one that I believe requires urgent attention. Having revealed all this in the second and third sections, I turn in the fourth and final section to consider how Eliasian integrity can not only be rescued, but can be enhanced by drawing on the English School theory of IR. Nevertheless, I should point out that there is a range of potentially productive ‘partnerships’ between Eliasian HS and IR theory.