Introduction to ‘Interaction and All That’

Abstract

This short article introduces Norbert Elias's hitherto unpublished essay entitled 'Interaction and All That', originally written in the 1960s. We propose that the essay can be understood as part of a considerably larger critique of methodological individualism where Elias takes aim at the 'genetic idea' that social life can be reconstructed from the interactions of already constituted persons — an assumption he traces from Spencer and Weber through to Parsons, Ginsberg and the interactionist traditions. We show how Elias traces two key sources for this tendency in Western thought: firstly, sociology's borrowing of atomistic models from physics, and secondly, the insufficient detachment of sociologists from the individualistic societies whose 'personality-centred vista' they inhabit and, in their own way, help to reproduce. Against this, we suggest, Elias reorients sociological explanation towards the structures of interdependence within which interaction becomes possible: an idea that he later develops more concretely in his discussion of the game models in What is Sociology? We suggest that Elias'ss questions remain pressing amid the naturalisation of the autonomous individual in neoliberal thought of the present day.