Wittgenstein, Gellner, and Elias: From the Philosophy of Language Games to a Figurational Sociology of Knowledge

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of relativism in the social sciences and the related notion that the political life of modernising societies necessarily presents a choice between regressive/Gemeinschaftlich and progressive/Gesellshaftlich visions of community and society – between Mannheim’s ‘liberal/natural law’ and ‘conservative thought styles.’ Starting from Gellner’s account of Wittgenstein and Malinowski as instantiations of this ‘Hapsburg Dilemma’, it is argued that the Gellner/(early) Malinowski solution of epistemological co-habitation is unsatisfactory. Linking the development of human knowledge to long term dynamics of social development, Elias’s processual concept of involvement and detachment, conceived as a (highly) variable balance, allows social scientists to move beyond the dualities of ‘thought styles’. Involvement and Detachment provides the foundation for a historical sociology of language games and are invigorated social science, understood as contributing to the cumulative expansion of the social stock of knowledge.