Functional Democratisation and Disintegration as Side-Effects of Differentiation and Integration Processes

Abstract

In What is Sociology? (2012 [1970]), as he is about to outline the common origin of social science and social ideology, and building up to set sociology against ideology, Norbert Elias introduces the concept of ‘functional democratisation’. More recently, in his The American Civilising Process (2007) and in two articles (2014a; 2014b), Stephen Mennell launched the contrasting concept of ‘functional de-democratisation’. This essay opens with quotations from Elias and Mennell in an attempt to show how the concepts and processes of functional (de)democratisation are introduced, followed by a discussion from along-term perspective on processes of social differentiation and integration, in which I explore how functional democratisation and de-democratisation could fit together as trends and concepts in a wider sociological framework. The observation that, as a rule, integration processes go hand in hand with integration conflicts and also some disintegration, leads to the hypothesis that the trend towards global integration is increasingly lagging behind the trend towards the global differentiation of specialised activities or social functions.