Elias and the Sociology of Ideas: A Critique of Randall Collins's Microsociology of Intellectual Change

Abstract

This article applies Elias’s research on the emotional mechanics of civilising processes to the sociology of intellectual life. Randall Collins’s The Sociology of Philosophies (1998), representing the dominant paradigm in this subfield, suffers the same analytic and theoretical problems that Elias dissected in the work of Talcott Parsons, reducing the long-term historical dynamics of emotion regulation to face-to-face interaction. I examine the case of the philosopher-theologian Søren Kierkegaard, demonstrating that the psychogenesis of existentialism has sociogenetic roots in structural shifts in the make-up of Denmark’s court society during the early nineteenth century. I claim that process sociology has further applications to the social history of intellectual movements.