Using Fantasy: Notes on Elias's Sociology

Abstract

This article discusses the different meanings that Elias ascribes to fantasy and reality and those deducible from his method of working. The undeniable contrast between the two concepts must be qualified. Elias preferred to use the term reality-congruent instead of reality, meaning the knowledge of it that is possible. As for fantasy, it must be distinguished from the term imagination. Elements of fantasy can foster the cognitive process if transmuted into imagination, harnessed by factual knowledge deriving from serious empirical research. Elias’s entire work, which confronts a virtually limitless space-time frame, demonstrates the methodological fecundity of resorting to imaginative leaps. It is no accident that his fundamental figurational model of sociology is suggested as the result of an exercise of sociological imagination unfettered by traditional ways of thinking.