Richard Kilminster: From Praxis to Process

Abstract

In this paper, I want to reflect upon and assess the enormously rich contribution that Richard Kilminster has made in elaborating and extending Elias’s work, especially in the fields of sociological theory and the sociology of knowledge. I will do this by examining three of his major books and interrogating two persistent arguments running throughout them: his discussion of Hegel and Marx, and the relation between sociology and philosophy. Throughout his work, Kilminster has sought to elaborate upon and develop themes from Elias’s writings, attempting to find a middle position between the excesses and conceptual failures of Marxism, philosophy, and sociology by developing and expanding upon the sociological synthesis of Norbert Elias, and in that respect, the corpus of work has been underwritten by an attempt to reflexively provide a sociology of sociology. I want to argue that Kilminster’s discussion of these important and recursively developed themes, though insightful, is paradoxical. He is highly critical of Marx as compared to Hegel, yet he foregrounds the importance of sociology above what he takes to be an otiose philosophy.