Interview with Stephen Mennell

SE: It was Norbert Elias’s aim to uncover ‘wrong idealizations, ideologies and myths’.

In the interview with van Voss and van Stolk from 1984, he mentioned that he is a

little sad about only ‘partly reaching’ this target. And he explains: ‘because I am

not sure whether my work will be continued. Also I have the strong conviction that

this is not the task of only one human being, but the task of many generations. I do

not believe that I alone can cause something’. (Elias: 2005: 230) Elias saw himself

standing in a chain of the generations. With you Professor Mennell, I have now a

representative of the addressed next generation in front of me, and I am very

pleased that you are keen to answer my questions.

SE: How early on and where did you become acquainted with Norbert Elias? How old

were you, how old was Norbert Elias?

SJM: I corresponded with him for about two years before I actually met him. When I

first came into contact with him must have been about 1970 when I was 26. In my

case its more complicated than most of the people, because unlike Eric Dunning or

Richard Kilminster and several others, I was never his student.

I was already a lecturer at the University of Exeter and the background was that I

had taken a degree in Economics from Cambridge and then I went on a scholarship

to Harvard and I studied with Talcott Parsons among others, came back after a year

and took a job at the University of Exeter and (I can talk about the intellectual

reasons as to why his work appealed) but it was at Exeter, I think about 1969 after

I’d been there about two years. I was talking one morning to someone called Mike

Morrissey who was a colleague in economic history and he said that his wife,

Grace Morrissey, was bringing up children somewhere remote in the Devonshire

countryside, had a good degree in German from Manchester University, and that

she has heard that there was a lot of German sociology that needed translating and

that she would like to try her hand at it. I said, ‘airily, oh well my German’s not

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very good but I know a fair bit of sociological vocabulary so I could help her if that

would be useful’, thinking that this would be quite a minor commitment. But she

didn’t have any particular work in mind so I asked around and my then Professor

Duncan Mitchell, suggested translating Alfred Weber’s Kulturgeschichte als

Kultursoziologie which is ironic in view of the connection that there was

eventually with Norbert Elias. But no British publisher was interested in publishing

Kulturgeschichte als Kultursoziologie and it still hasn’t been translated so it went

quiet.

But word got around on the grapevine and my literary agent, I had one then, had

contacted me and said would I be willing to help with a translation for

Hutchinson’s, a little book by Norbert Elias, called Was ist Soziologie? In fact I’ve

written about this, I can give you an offprint of an article where it is all explained.

The irony is that, first of all, the name of Norbert Elias rang the most distant of

bells, I couldn’t remember any … it turned out that on my undergraduate reading

list at Cambridge, John Goldthorpe must have put down Norbert’s article

‘Problems of Involvement and Detachment’, published 195?. I hadn’t read it but I

must have vaguely remembered the name. I didn’t know anything about Norbert!

In fact, apart from those who knew him personally in Leicester, he was very little

known in Britain and at that stage was just beginning to become famous in the

Netherlands and Germany.

So, to cut a long story short, we did a test piece, which he was pleased with and

then started to do the translation. I corresponded with him and send him draft

translation and hew as a bit less pleased with Grace’s. I thought I wouldn’t have

much to do but it turned out that I had to understand the sociology, that I couldn’t

use conventional vocabulary and it turned out that he was trying to get away from

conventional vocabulary. Gradually I became the senior partner in the translation

although Grace Morrissey did the first draft.

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It was all of two years later that I actually met him for the first time. When the

translation was complete, we arranged to meet at the offices of Hutchinson’s, the

publishers, which was then in Fitzroy Square in London. This is a very long

anecdotal reply but you can see the accidental nature of the contact. I still didn’t

really know anything about him but gradually as I was involved in the translation –

I didn’t really understand the introduction or the first couple of chapters, but when

I got to the Game Models, Chapter 3, everything clicked. I knew nothing about the

theory of The Civilizing Process apart from the fact that it was in footnotes. And in

those days, I would have shared all the conventional scepticism about the idea of

civilization and so on.

SE: In the beginning sorry, you said you were [unclear] Talcott Parson’s model.

SJM: No, I know Talcott Parsons, a very nice person, but I already thought that he was

mad even when I was working with him. I think Parsons went completely off the

rails in 1950 with all the AGIL stuff. I arrived at Harvard in the summer of 1966 as

a hardnosed economist in the same crop graduate students for example as Siegwart

Lindenberg, the rational choice theorist from Kroningham. Siggy, as we called

him, with less economic background than me, went on to be, still is, a champion of

rational choice.

And I could have gone that direction I suppose but I also saw through, I was also

discussing with George [Hom? unclear] his theory of social exchange and so on

and we read Blau’s Exchange and Power in Social Life in great detail. But the

point is that the big issue, what’s called the macro-micro problem, or the individual

in society problem and I was enough of a hardnosed economist to see that the use

that sociologists were trying to make of economics, was a load of nonsense. As

Lord Mcaulay said way back in the 1830s, ‘when correctly viewed the principle is

that a man would rather do what a man would rather do’. In other words, it’s a

completely empty proposition. Obviously, I was a young and inexperienced

lecturer, and I was struggling and I thought Parsons had gone completely off the

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rails, he was just playing with Mechano sets. But I was still struggling in my

lecturers with the macro-mirco problem in those first few years at Exeter and then I

read the Game Models chapter of ‘What is Sociology?’ and everything slotted into

place.

So when I finally met Norbert on that day in the summer of 1972 when he would

have already been 77, several first impressions. One is that I arrived at the office

and the editor of the publishers said, ‘Oh Professor Elias came yesterday, he got

the days wrong, he’s very old’. Meaning that he was a little bit gaga but he had

said, ‘Oh no day in London is ever wasted’, and he went off to The British

Museum (now the British Library). And he came back the next day. But of course

he was then an enormously vigorous 75 year old.

And the other more serious first impression is that as we walked down the street -

he took me to Bertorelli’s, the famous Italian restaurant in Charlotte Street, in

London. And as we walked down the street he said, ‘now tell me Mr Mennell what

you are interested in’. I said I taught sociological theory and I that I’m quite

interested in Phenomenology, which was all the rage at that moment. And he said,

‘I thought you might be’{laughs}. And between there and the 200 meters or so that

it took us to get to the restaurant, he explained to me why phenomenology was a

load of rubbish. So my second impression…

SE: So did he convince you?

SJM: Yes, you have to remember that this is only what, five year after I’d been working

with Talcott Parsons who was the most famous sociological theorist in the world.

Okay partly, because I’d read at this stage ‘What is Sociology?’, nothing else but I

had read that. And remembering that I had worked with Parsons. Quickly after

meeting Norbert, I realised that he was a sociological intellect in a different league

from Parsons. He was infinitely the greater sociologist. He had such a penetrating

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mind whereas poor old Talcott was building castles in the air but that was clear to

me as a young man almost immediately on meeting Norbert.

Again there was this problem of where did Norbert come from. Because he

appeared to have published almost nothing. Yet he quite clearly – Norbert wasn’t

exactly a modest man, he quite clearly thought of himself as a great sociologist and

behaved as a great sociologist even though no one had heard of him{laughs}. I

remember I think the second time I met him in Leicester maybe a few months later,

we were again walking to a restaurant together, and he mentioned that he had been

Karl Mannheim’s assistant in Hamburg. And I said, ‘Ooooh Karl Mannheim!’.

And it was completely the wrong … he was quite offended because I immediately

gave the impressions that Karl Mannheim was a big name and that Norbert was

not. That wasn’t the way Norbert saw it. Norbert saw himself as a much more

important sociologist that Karl Mannheim, which I think would now be the general

opinion. But you had to tread carefully with Norbert.

But particularly with British sociology, was [the problem] that people wanted to

situate him. They were happy to read his work and so on as it gradually became

available very late. But people want to place people on the intellectual map and its

very difficult to make sense of Norbert unless you know what intellectual stable he

is coming out of. And Norbert really hated that.

Much later at a conference that Eric Dunning and I organised, I don’t think you

were there, it was just before your time, at the beginning of 1980, Burnell College

Oxford. Big audience, Giddens came. And there was a young graduate student who

kept asking Norbert questions along the lines of how much did he owe Simmel and

Mannheim and so on. And Norbert said, ‘well if you look backwards over your

shoulder for long enough – pause – you get a stiff neck’. {both SJM and SE

laugh}. The other famous reply, and I can’t remember where it was, not at that

same conference, was, someone else persistently questioning Norbert and he

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patiently replied and still the question came back in refrain and Norbert said, ‘well,

if you are right, then I am wrong’. {laughter}.

Anyway, that’s how I came to know Norbert. As you can see its quite a

complicated story, it was really an accident.

SE: If I can come back to your relationship – you were younger colleague, a lecturer

when you met him, a translator, and some people say that after a while, one

became a friend with Elias. Can you remember when it happened in your

relationship? Can you remember a particular point at which this happened? A

particular year?

SJM: Erm, there was no single point, I think. I think probably a friend by … The

translation was finished in 1972 but it wasn’t published until 1978 and that was

because you couldn’t persuade Norbert to sit down and go through a translation

line by line. You could highlight words that you wanted to discuss with him but

you couldn’t get him to concentrate. He always wanted to move on to the next

work on his own agenda. What is fact happened eventually was – I don’t think he

ever trusted me as an editor and translator! I’ll explain why in a moment.

But what happened was at the beginning, literally at New Year 1975; I went up to

Leicester to work with him ostensibly on the translation, that was a disaster (all this

is set out in the article on reminiscing, I can give you an offprint). Again I couldn’t

get him to sit down and look at it but the important thing is that, after a few days

there, Joop and Maria Goudsbloom came to visit him and Barbara was with him as

well and the four of us became very good friends. So, in a way, in fact in many

respects, I often say I’m more a student of Joop Goudsbloom‘s than I am of

Norbert’s because I never actually thought myself that Norbert was very good at

explaining … he would explain one brilliant idea but he wasn’t very good at

explaining the bigger picture of his theories. In fact much later, when he objected

to me writing a book about him, he said that, ‘while I am alive Stephen, I am the

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best person to explain my ideas’. I didn’t have the courage to say, ‘oh no you are

not’ but in fact that’s what I thought. To be blunt, I wrote the first book in English

about Norbert and his ideas and I think frankly, it explained a lot more about

Norbert to the sociological public in the English-speaking world than he ever

managed to explain himself.

His ideas are complicated and everything is connected to everything else, the

theory of involvement and detachment is directly related to the civilising process

but he wasn’t very good at explaining that. Anyway, I used to get rather impatient

with Norbert, he was very good at … he’d been in psychoanalysis and he could

pick up little signs of my impatience with him, even down to things like, when

translating, I think that the task of the translator is to hack mock Gothic Teutonic

sentences into bits and join them back together again as if they’d been written in

English whereas Norbert always essentially thought in German and wrote English

sentences on German models and I got impatient with that. But there are all sorts of

other things, we are jumping forward to the last years, he actually accused me of

wishing him dead at one point. I had no disagreements with Norbert until he last

two or three years when I was working on my book about his work and he tried to

stop me writing it. There was never an actual break but it was a bit unpleasant.

SE: Was it a proof of his former mistrust of you in the beginning when you were a

translator?

SJM: Well, that’s a little bit too strong. He was very unwilling to delegate editing to

anyone; he didn’t really think anyone understood his ideas. The two people he

trusted were Joop, and he delegated to Joop the task of working with me to sort out

the English translation which is why the book came out eventually in 1978. So he

trusted Joop and he trusted Michael Schroter. For example, Richard Kilminster

worked with him on the symbol theory and on the symbol theory and the symbol

theory needs the machete taken to it. I mean if it had been left to me and he would

have trusted me, I would have taken it apart, sentence by sentence and paragraph

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by paragraph and shuffled it all together and it would have been a very difficult

task. Its so repetitive and very much spoiled by that. He delegated to Richard the

task of even dividing it into sections and even paragraphs but he didn’t allow

Richard to say, ‘look Norbert you’ve repeated this here and wouldn’t that it be

better if that bit was somewhere else’, and so on.

So the late work often goes around in circles because he can’t remember and he

can’t read, what he’s already dictated. And I had some of that experience even 20,

not 20, 15 or 17 years earlier when he was much more vigorous but on the whole,

all that he would do … well Michael Schroter often refers in his book to being a

human or a living Dictaphone. And Norbert tended, with me, on ‘What is

Sociology?’, when he did try to work on it, he just started re dictating chunks of

chapter 3. He started writing them again. He didn’t say anything new, he just

couldn’t remember what he had said and what he hadn’t said.

SE: Oh, that’s difficult to work then together.

SJM: He was impossible to bloody well work with!! {laughs}

SE: So am I right when I say that you had a special kind of distance in your

relationship? You never became real friends? You only became friends within

figurations with Goudsbloom in a group?

SJM: I think we were friends but yes friendship tends to be a within a figuration anyway,

within a network. I would perhaps say that, I would certainly say that Cas Wouters

and Joop and perhaps even Richard were closer personal friends that I was. But I

was pretty close.

SE: Maybe, it was because Elias settled in the Netherlands later on.

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SJM: I think it also has something to do with what I, I don’t know whether this is an

accepted term, but I sometimes refer to it as, ‘a paranoia of the extremely old’.

That the power ratio between patrons and their protégées sometimes changes. You

know, I was obviously a protégée of Norbert’s, and a late one, because I didn’t get

to know him until the 1970s. But by the 1980s and particularly the later 1980s,

Norbert was intellectually in terrific form but he was physically in decline. He was

nearly blind afterall. And he became more dependent on his former protégées so

we were protecting him whereas {before} he had protected us to some extent. And

I think this is often the case with very old people and I think they resent that they

are now the weaker party in the relationship.

SE: Yes, I am experiencing with my father at the moment, he is 87. So you get to know

Elias as an expert, but what about the emotional and personal side of Elias? He

delegated things but he wanted to control them you said? What was another part of

his emotional side?

SJM: I haven’t noticed him very noticeably delegating things, he would send things to

me for comments and in particular, because I’m a bit obsessional about style, and

English. Its almost like marking a student essay, I can’t take in the content until

I’ve corrected the English and I’d often spend hours going through his English.

Norbert’s English was actually very good, he had a huge vocabulary, a great grasp

of idioms and so on but like many people who learn a language late in life, there

were tiny details, and particularly with English which is so irregular, the wrong

preposition, slightly the wrong tense, proverbs and so on and I would correct these.

But whether he took any notice. For example, when we came to edit ‘Involvement

and Detachment’ for the collected works, we looked at obviously, the published

English texts, which came out in 1987, and I retrieved from my files the

photocopies of my typescript of my corrections to his typescript of The Fisherman

in Maelstrom and had he taken up my suggestions?! No he hadn’t. Because he just

couldn’t be bothered with something like that. Also I think the fact, if he’d trusted

his assistant they could have gone through my typescript and made the corrections

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to his typescript but a) probably didn’t trust them and b) they are all Dutch or

German and so they were not native English speakers. With one or two very early

exceptions in Leicester, he never had as assistant who was.

So anyway, hours of work correcting Norbert’s English went down the drain

because he would just write back and say thank you and then take no notice.

SE: Oh that’s not nice to experience. So do you think that in Elias, there existed

problems connected to being an exile, speech for example?

SJM: Oh yes. It’s very difficult to disentangle. Undoubtably, there is a large literature on

exiles and their experience and Norbert didn’t have an easy time of it. If you think

you know that there are, particularly Jewish, Germans, that fled abroad, there are

the famous cases of who slotted straight into British or American universities.

Albert Einstein and downwards. And then there are Karl Mannheim and

Hawkhiemer {spelling?} and [unclear] didn’t have a lot of difficultly. And at the

other end of the spectrum, I suspect that we will never know how many German

Jewish refugees ended up working on a production line in Detroit or something

like that, instead of getting a job in a university.

And then there were a small number of people like Norbert who struggled for

effectively two decades before he got … he arrived in England in the summer of

1935 and he finally got a secure job at Leicester in 1954 so it was 19 years on

which he had struggled on very little money. Joop Goudsbloom said that when he

first met him, Norbert radiated an air of poverty. That wasn’t the case when I knew

him because he had already been made a Professor Emertitus and a pension and the

back pay, as we later discovered, from the University of Frankfurt.

But he struggled and you have to remember that he didn’t speak very much

English, he wrote it, I think he read English, he probably read English like I read

German, that is to say, that I can read it but slowly. I suspect that he didn’t speak

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much more English than I do German, which is to say that I can order a meal in a

restaurant in passable German but my fluency doesn’t go much further than that.

I know he told me that it was a terrific ordeal for him the first time he gave a

lecture in English. Of course he got quite good English, rather slightly old

fashioned kind of English, he must have picked it up in Cambridge during the war.

You always felt that it was a slightly courtly elite academic English.

But that must have been awful, he had no economic security but what we do know,

we can’t really understand in any detail but he always said that the death of his

mother in Auschwitz was the great trauma of his life and he made no secret of that.

And he said, that he still had nightmares where he woke up to see his mother being

gassed and so on. But there is this enormously long gap when he is not doing

anything at all really, not publishing anything very much from 1939 to 1950.

SE: Yes, so eleven years.

SJM: We dug up one or two things. For example, a short and rather unfinished lecture on

social anxieties that he gave at King’s College London in 1949 I think.

SE: So could imagine that there was a certain kind of homelessness or loneliness in his

life, in this early period?

SJM: {pause, thinking}. Loneliness would not have be been a term that I would have

used. I never had any sense of him being lonely; he was desperately keen to see

people. By the time I knew him, he seemed to have a lot of friends. He obviously

did, if you go through the correspondence in Marbach. He was in correspondence

with lots and lots of very prominent people in both England and Germany. But

certainly he seems to have known a lot of the intellectual elite. But what can one

say about … and then he had lots of close friends like the Glucksmans {spelling?},

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for example, we talked about Miriam Glucksman she remembers him being a close

friend of her father’s.

So I wouldn’t say lonely but on the other hand, for some reason, that I still can’t

quite fathom, none or few of us who were close to Norbert, fully recognised that he

was gay, until after his death. And this is a very strange psychological [unclear].

Eric was quite adamant and Eric had known… actually none of that you can

interview now, knew Norbert before he went to Leicester in 1954. There is this

huge gap. There were a few people like Francis Carstands (spelling?) and Alfred

Glucksman but they are all dead. And we didn’t know him then. Very likely he

was lonely and very likely he was disorientated then. Although he was always an

optimist and seemed very sure that things would always work out in the end as he

said.

But the whole question of his sexuality is a great puzzle and its not really that

important in my view, it doesn’t greatly affect his work although if you want you

can see his work on ‘Established Outsiders’ through that lense if you wish to. But I

never quite understood that why it was that even Joop and Maria, who lived

downstairs from him, and who were perfectly familiar with the fact Bramham

Stolker and Rudolph Knafe (spelling?) were openly gay and they quite visibly

acted as he emmanuiesie in the last few years. I talked to this about Bram about

this after Norbert’s death and not very long before Bram himself died and he said

‘of course I knew he was gay, because he fell in love with me’. Which seems like a

clincher of an argument. But when you ask if he was lonely, that whole side of

things was very much hidden and he would not even to close friends like me and

Eric and Joop, for some reason, and I think also Herman, didn’t really perceive him

as being gay. It may well have been that he never made any mistakes and he could

judge that we were hetero. The only case I know where he made a mistake was

with Bram de Swan. When they first met, Norbert asked him if he was a dancer

and of course if he’s asked me that, I would have been completely naive and said,

‘oh no, I hate dancing’, or something like that. Apparently, Bram de Swan

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understood the connotation and then repressed it. It was only later that he said he

must have almost consciously decided to forget the question being asked. And

again in his case, it was only after Norbert died that he remembered this. So I can’t

really answer your question about him being lonely

SE: Maybe I can ask Abram de Swan. But what brings me to this question is, the first

time I interviewed Joop Goudsbloom, he said, ‘well when I met Elias and he was

working with Ilya Neustadt, I thought that they were a couple’. Also in the paper

from Chris Rojek, was Eric Dunning’s interview, there was a reference to this idea.

SJM: What Eric said that?

SE: He said that there were a good couple at this Department. They arranged some

good policy.

SJM: Well, that’s certainly true

SE: But Joop had this connotation that they could have been a couple, a pair, love.

SJM: A gay couple. Well Eric never believed that he was heterosexual. Funnily enough

I remember asking Eric when I’d only just met … I think I met Eric after I met

Norbert which seems strange. But yes I suppose I would have been inducted into

the network. I remember asking Eric, ‘Norbert’s not married is he, has he ever

been married?’ ‘Oh not, he’s not married’. But then immediately said he thought

that he’d had heterosexual affairs in the past. And after he died, I remembered he

(Eric) said that he remembered Norbert reminiscing about the brothels in Paris.

And it was only after Norbert died that Eric said to me, ‘ Actually, when I thought

about it, it never occurred to me that brothel could mean a gay brothel as well as a

heterosexual brothel.’ I mean, Norbert was always very careful about that side of

his life for the very good reason that for the greater part of his life, he could have

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been sent to jail for homosexual acts. It was only in 1967/8 that homosexuality

between consenting adults was legalised in Britain. Roy Jenkins.

SE: And in Germany, not until the late 70s. And that’s why I ask myself, if you have to

hide this, you must need great control and power to oppress this. When I prepared

this interview something I found in this interview book three years ago, led me to

ask about homelessness or loneliness, in an interview with Fontaine (spelling?) he

speaks about the connection of increasing constraints of civilisation and sexuality

to uncover that function mode. The quotation (a translation from German) was

‘this bleeding of human desire that sometimes tied my heart together’.

SJM: Oh well that’s very implicit.

SE: Was this an expression of neurotic constraints or what did it mean?

SJM: I think, if I may speculate. That’s probably true of Norbert but I think it may also

be true of several others of us. That consciousness of the constraints of social life.

It may be one of the ingredients in why we are so interested in Elias’s work. A lot

of sociology has gone off into doing little bits of policy related research and so on

but for a lot of us, it seems to me that Elias’s work does speak to our own

experience. Just as you have to link it to the appeal of Freud. Freud clearly

appealed very widely, Elias not so widely. But to sociologists of a certain kind. If

you look at people like me and Joop Goudsbloom for example. I think both of us

are quite highly restrained…

… speaking autobiographically sometimes people ask me why Barbara and didn’t

have children. Not speaking for Barbara but for myself, I sometimes say, ‘Well,

never liked children very much’. I mean there are reasons for that … children are

essentially barbarians. When I was young I had quite severe eczema, I got the

asthma, hayfever, eczema and syndrome so I always had bandages on my legs and

I can remember children being rather horrible. I disliked children of my own age

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when I was a child myself. And I think you become very aware … and also other

things in my background. I think I got a Victorian upbringing one removed because

my parents were very respectable working class, both born in 1910 which I think

was just at the point when high Victorian morality had trickled down the social

scale to the point where the respectable working classes of northern England were

more respectable than anyone else!

I think I was quite conscious of these self- restraints that were expected and I

already had a very early distaste for children who didn’t know how to behave and

so on. So you can see how that personal experience … and I think Joop is not very

different in many ways. A kind of secular version of a Presbyterian preacher. Joop

and I have talked about these things, we are both of us only children for example.

As indeed was Norbert. Something quite interesting - myself, Joop, Norbert and

[unclear] all of us are only sons, only children.

SE: Ok. Coming to the next point, Elias often speaks in his work of so called double

binding situations. Was he bound between love and the desire for

acknowledgement? Were there certain double binds in his own life?

SJM: Oh, that’s a very difficult question. Well, he occasionally let things slip didn’t he.

In think its in The Loneliness of the Dying or one of the related essays, he says that

the sexual needs, particularly of men, can continue into advanced old age which

kind of suggests that he was quite active until a late stage. But that’s a difficult

question to answer.

The double bind - it could be a different way of saying what I said about the

paranoia of old age. I think on the one hand he didn’t want to be forgotten, he

didn’t want his tasks and his work to be forgotten but at the same time he found it

very difficult to delegate, to trust other people. I was very conscious, for example,

when I’d taken it upon myself as general editor of his collected works. When you

read all his works, you realise that here was a man of enormous intellect and

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several, say me and Eric and Richard, although we are by most people’s standards,

pretty intelligent people. But I suspect that by Norbert’s standards, he didn’t really

regard us as all that brilliant! I think when you meet world- class intellect such as

Norbert, you realise that there is someone who is more intelligent that you are. And

I think that might have been the source of some kind of frustration to him.

He also was internally conflicted over I think, he often said he didn’t wish to found

the school of sociology. Of course this was complete rubbish. It was either self-

deception or an attempt to deceive other people. What he actually wanted to do,

was to take over the whole of sociology, he didn’t want a school of sociology

because he wanted his ideas to conquer the sociological world and indeed a sort of

guiding thread, an approach that could have been useful to the whole of humanity.

So this was not a modest ambition. I think there must have often have been an

enormous conflict on the one hand of what he could practically achieve and maybe

some us seemed full of imperfect tools for that end.

Of course I’m not talking about this being all at a fully conscious level but I think

it may have been some of the frustrations that he faced on an intellectual front. As

for the personal front, who knows. That’s the very odd thing about Norbert, you

couldn’t remotely describe him as a very closed or secret person, he seemed so

outwardly friendly and easy to talk to and yet there was another sense in which he

was quite a private person.

SE: Yes. And something that comes to my mind now, you mentioned that you’ve come

from a working class background and so does Eric Dunning. Norbert Elias came

from a bourgeois background. Do you recognise some problems on this level?

SJM: Do you think he thought of us at some level as horny handed sons of [unclear]?

SE: I don’t know what I think, its just that in Germany, the class conflicts are a bit

subtle.

16

SJM: Well, no, I certainly don’t think he did. There was never any question of him

looking down his nose at these working class upstarts or anything like that.

Sometimes I think I’m more likely to look down my nose these days. I find myself

actually quite intellectually snobby about the people who come to university

without any intellectual motivation.

No, but you see, people like me and Eric, Eric is what seven years older than me,

we are absolutely archetypical instances of the scholarship boy as it was called. In

the 1950s and 1960s, there was quite a lot of discussion and research into this

figure of the working class scholarship boy. Richard Hoggart – does the name

mean anything to you?

SE: No.

SJM: He was actually an English teacher in universities, quite a famous figure actually,

still alive, but he wrote a book called Uses of Literacy, which is a famous, partly

ethnography about what it was like growing up in a working class area of Leeds

and the intellectual ambitions of the respectable working class. I think Eric is

probably more working class than I am. To explain, Eric’s father was a London bus

driver and would certainly have been classified as manual working class. Mine

started as a railway clerk and finished as an assistant manager on the railways. If

you were doing quantitative sociology, I’m not really working class at all. I would

come out as some lower middle class or what David Locke would have called 50

years ago, the son of black-coated workers. My father wore a uniform.

But on the other hand, my parents themselves were from absolutely working class

backgrounds and never ceased to be anything other than culturally working class.

You could only really pick that up from qualitative interviews but not from

statistical surveys, Sorry, to come back to the point, people like Eric and me were

17

nothing very unusual and Norbert would not have regarded us as something the cat

brought in. Nice English phrase.

SE: And now I go back years ago, back to Germany in the 1930s. But maybe you also

know about things that belong to the 50s or 70s. Norbert’s everyday life is the next

topic. Norbert has had close relations with Margarethe Freudenthal, Ilse Seglow,

Gisèle Freund and Fuchs later Foulkes. Did you know them? Were you a witness

of special meetings? What was his everyday life like here? Did he tell you about

this or did you experience something?

SJM: I met Ilse Seglow, I think I right in saying that I have a photograph somewhere in

my album, not a very good quality one, but I think at his 90th birthday. I have a

photograph of her, Norbert and Pierre Bourdieu talking together in the corner.

I met Ilse Seglow at the Arken meeting when we presented a festschrift to Norbert

on his eightieth birthday. Norbert was a strapping young man of 80.

SE: 1977 then?

SJM: Yes. But always felt … no I’ve never really felt part of that kind of personal

friendship. I think he spent Christmases with the Glucksman’s as well. I’d never

met Alfred Glucksman. But Miriam Glucksman is remembered always.

SE: Where is she living, is she still alive?

SJM: Yes, she is about my age. She’s a Professor of Sociology at Essex. Again, how

much do I know and how much have I picked up from other people. I think Eric

would tell you, and he did tell you, that he always a sense that Norbert had a life in

London. I think for a time even at least he may have had a small apartment or there

is a hotel called The White House. The other person I met in Arken was Francis

Carstens (sp?). Some of these friendships went back many years. I think Norbert

18

must have know Francis Carstens, the historian, in probably Frankfurt, though I

think Carstens was a Berliner.

But one of the oddities of Norbert’s time in England was, way back in the 1940s,

an attempt was made to get Über den Prozeß (?) published in English and the

person who was behind that was Patrick Gordon Wal, which is interesting,

because not only was he a fairly major academic, he wrote a book in which he

made use of Norbert’s ideas, but more to the point, later, in the 50s and 60s, he was

a member of parliament, he was for a time, the British Foreign Secretary.

And the connection, shows how these networks extend though time, because the

connection between Patrick Gordon Walker and Norbert was that when Patrick

Gordon Walker, as a left wing intellectual in the 1930s, visited Berlin under Hitler,

his guide to the underground in Berlin, was Francis Carstens who had already

befriended Norbert. And that’s how Norbert and Patrick Gordon Walker got to

know each other. The point is, I didn’t really witness any of this but you could

infer that there were very extensive networks of acquaintances. Carstens

presumably was also a German refugee, I suppose he was Jewish, and must have

fled to London before the war.

SE: He was a left [wing] politician?

SJM: No no, Francis Carstens was a Professor of History. He wrote on German history in

English. There were all these networks. Foulkes, I never knew, I’m not sure when

Foulkes died in fact. One of the oddities about the English friends of Elias, is that

we all knew that he had been involved in group analysis but I didn’t realised how

big a thing it was. In fact, you’ve just missed the International Gathering of group

analysis in Trinity College at the end of last week. I missed it too because I was …

[unclear] Hundreds of them. Very important, it was much bigger than I realised.

19

And its only since Norbert’s death that I became aware that there was this huge

great scene. They all vaguely know about Norbert having been involved in

[unclear] at least until a few years ago until we all began to talk to each other. I

gave a day school about five or six years ago. I talked to a National Conference for

what felt like about 12 hours, it was supposed to be an hour and a half. I ended up

speaking for the whole day, morning and afternoon. But they didn’t really know

anything about Norbert as a sociologist. And we didn’t know anything very much

about group analysis. Its only know, particularly through the work of [unclear de

lal?] who is a group analyst whose written a book which says roughly that what

group analysis means is less Foulkes and more Elias. So we began to know each

other. In other words Norbert had different circles. Isle Seglow’s son of course is

still alive and I have his email address if you want it…

SE: I know that I should not ask …

SJM:… we used to speculate that he was Norbert’s son.

SE: Yes, I heard about it. One should not ask in this [context].

SJM: Probably not.

SE: Okay, part of his network was women, I started with Margarethe Freudenthal, Ilse

Seglow. When we were talking about Elias’s homosexuality before and coming

back to Gisèle Freund and maybe we can ask if he was a bisexual because in the

Marbach archive I found letters from Gisèle Freund and Elias said that he had

female intellectual friends but he said that there were not good for a twosome life,

that women were always jealous of his work and then I found some quotation…

SJM: I think that was a camouflage.

20

SE: and then I looked at the letters from Gisèle Freund and I think they had a very

affectionate relationship. This is noticeable because of the exchange of letters

between 1936 and 1990. In these letters, one can identify sentences like, ‘as more

ever affectionately your’ or ‘love’, quotations like these in the letters. So maybe

there was a one sided love. What do you know about Elias in this regard? We were

speculating about his homosexuality.

SJM: Well, the point about his homosexuality is that its not so speculative. We were

discussing it but I think there is no serious doubt that he had gay relationships. In

the case of heterosexual ones, I think it is more speculative. I think he was

bisexual, I feel quite sure he was. What does any of us really know about what our

friends get up to in the bedroom? But my strong impression is that he probably had

relationships with women in the 1930s and perhaps later. Certainly, Eric who knew

him better, was quite convinced that he had a long relationship with Isle Seglow.

Similarly, one thinks that probably in Paris, he may have had a relationship with

Gisèle Freund. But how the hell do we prove it? Its like the old limerick – ‘they

argued all night about who had the right to do what with which and to whom’.

SE: Yes, I found this striking about the formulas in the letters.

SJM: I think he was bisexual. My impression is though is that his heterosexual

relationships were earlier in his life and in later life, he made do with gay ones.

Except of course in the case of Renatta Reubenstein (sp?). I don’t think that anyone

has suggested that they went to bed together. For one thing, by the time that they

became close friends, Renatta was probably ill, he was very old, but I know that he

said to Renatta something like, ‘If I were younger I would marry you’. I mean they

were very close friends and I don’t think its in fact and accident that Renatta ended

her life, I think she had an euthanasia, about four months after Norbert died. She

was very prominent ... do you know who she was?

SE: Yes.

21

SJM: Did you ever meet her?

SE: No.

SJM: Last time I remember she was in one of those self-propelled buggy things you

know. I know, Joop said to me, of course she would never had opted for euthanasia

if Norbert had still been alive. He wouldn’t have allowed it. He had very close

friendships with women.

SE: And he supported them. Because I compared him with Ilya Neustadt in Leicester. I

read in this interview from Chris Rojek that Ilya Neustadt had many problems with

women, he oppressed them a bit as colleagues.

SJM: I don’t think Ilya had any problems with women. I think women had problems with

Ilya!

SE: [laughs] But we know from figurational sociology that its not one-sided!

SJM: I didn’t know Ilya all that well, I met him several times, he was more or less,

openly gay. And in fact John Sutherland, just retired as Professor of English,

University College London, in his autobiography, published just a year or two ago,

I think its quoted in the last issue of Figurations, he talks about being invited back

to Ilya’s flat to listen to jazz and it becoming gradually apparent that Ilya had other

ideas in mind as well. So he made his excuses and left. I think Ilya was to some

extent, predatory.

I mean one footnote to all this is that no one really knew how Ilya Neustadt and

Norbert came to fall out which happened about the time I met Norbert about 1972,

not later than 1973. But there was, if you look in the … , there is an essay on

communities, which has two things, it has a note at the end, which has this

22

appalling, really awful attack on Ilya Neustadt showing that they had fallen out,

and also has thanks to someone called Brian Martin. I never met him, but he was

around, I think he was lodging with Norbert, about the time I met him. I think he

had just moved out from Norbert’s house. This is pure speculation but its seems

that Brian Martin was gay but there is just the suggestion that Ilya and Norbert fell

out over a boy. But this is tittle-tattle.

SE: So now, coming to something completely different. Elias in his time and beyond

his time. Elias focuses structures, relationships, processes, deliberations,

coincidences, He was a mentor for his assistants and students, starting from when

an eye level was adjusted. When did you become a colleague? You told me in the

beginning that you were already a lecturer so you have not been a student (of his).

So there was not this extreme power balance or one sided power balance. But its

another thing when you say you were a young lecturer so when did you become a

colleague? Did you become a colleague?

SJM: Well, you’ve got to remember that Norbert was forty seven years older than I was

and in a way I was a colleague that’s true, he never had any power over me. I could

have walked away but then the power ratio is such that he wouldn’t want me to

walk away because he could see that I was a potentially useful disciple and I of

course deferred to him because of his quite extraordinary sociological mind. As I

said, I was able to compare him directly to Talcott Parsons.

SE: So you were a mentee? Can I say this?

SJM: Well, horrible word mentee, well yes I often describe Norbert as my mentor and

that’s the most accurate description and I did learn lot from him, often in sort of

throwaway lines that I would go and think about, although I think really as I said, I

learnt more from Joop Goudsbloom, who is 12 years older than me.

23

Actually there’s an interesting story. Between me and Joop, we were definitely

colleagues, okay senior and junior colleagues, until in a certain sense, the day that

he suggest that I submit my food book as a PhD to the University of Amsterdam

where in a way … I can remember mildly … I had been sending him draft chapters

for his comments, but as a colleague. And I was mildly unsettled when he became

my supervisor and in a way, in that case, quite by accident, the balance of power

tilted more in Joop’s favour. We started relatively equal and it became a bit more

unequal and latter it became much more titled back towards the equal colleagues

thing as it is now.

In the case of Norbert, I don’t think any of our generation became to be fully equal

colleagues. I think the age gap … apart from Norbert’s brilliance and all that, I

don’t think that Richard or I, even Eric, there is some sort of … funnily enough I

get on rather well with older people. In fact, Joop said that that’s something that he

noticed and he wondered if it was a characteristic of only children. So I actually

have rather easy relationships with people who are older than me. But if you are

nearly a half century older, I don’t think you ever become equal colleagues. I

would still call him a mentor.

SE: So what would you say was important for equal or for really collegial relationships

from your perspective?

SJM: Well, you have to have major works on both sides. Norbert for example, would

always say when I (quite early on) started trying to propagandarise his viewpoint,

even in my first book there is a short summary of the Game Models, and that

would have been at a point where almost no-one in British or American Sociology

knew anything about Norbert. But Norbert always said you mustn’t spend anytime

propagandarising for him, I should do my own work. In the end of course, I wrote

a major book with the book on food in England and France. It was published in

German [gives title in German].

24

I got my doctorate very late you see, a lot of my generation did. People like Nico

Winterdink and Cas Wouters and Johan Heilbrun. Lots of them didn’t take their

PhD’s until late thirties, early forties. I think at the pint where you have a really

successful major book to your credit, then you being to feel a little bit more equal

with Norbert. Norbert always encouraged that. I would say that I’ve written three

major books, I’ve written a lot more but the ones that I would regard as major,

were the food book, the book about Elias, which he was resentful about, and the

more recent book on America. Then you begin to feel that you are out of the

apprenticeship stage. But I don’t think that I ever felt anything like a remotely

equal colleague with Norbert.

SE: How many books had you written when Elias was alive?

SJM: Well, of course I’ve been busy being Head of Departments and Institutes and

sitting on research councils and all sorts of other things so I’d slowed down in the

1990s and the early 2000. I’d written, depends how you count them, the text book

on sociological theory, the food book, the book on the council of Europe, the book

about Norbert, about five I suppose. Two major ones by then. Actually, I was

reconciled by then with Norbert. The trouble was, I was sending draft chapters to

Joop and Cas and Eric, and Cas in particular kept putting his foot in it by saying,

‘look what Stephen has written about you Norbert, isn’t this good!’ and Norbert

would get all angry. Things were a bit … also Joop had a major falling out with

Norbert or rather Norbert had a falling out with Joop for some months in

1979/1980 no sorry, that’s wrong, right at the end of his life, 1988-89. Only about

a year before Norbert died.

In my case, it was centered on my book but in fact, the last time I saw him, he said

he thought it might do some good. In fact, it was at the end of January in 1990, just

before I was leaving for Australia and I suppose we must have known that it might

be about the last time I would see Norbert. He died1 August, six months later. He

gave me a copy of Studien über die Deutschen. And he had written, Dear

25

Stephen, [german phrase]. So there was a reconciliation. It was never daggers

drawn, I still went to see him and talk to him and so on but it was a uncomfortable

for a little while. But that was the only time.

SE: So what do you think Elias learnt from you?

SJM: Well, maybe a little bit about food…

SE: Do you think the master, if I may say so, prophets also from his colleague and if so

what was it?

SJM: On one or two really minute things, you know that Norbert, like everyone in his

generation used to use what we call gender specific terminology like men, and man

and so on and he when he meant he or she. We had a discussion about this and he

said well how can you avoid it, you can’t for example say he or she all the time, it

becomes tedious, should I always say human beings? And I said, well I think you

should just say ‘people.’ And he said, what a very good idea. A small point! Little

things like that about English. But on the other hand, you had to tread really

carefully there because if you suggested that his English wasn’t quite up to it, he

could become resentful.

SE: Its difficult.

SJM: Also, you have to remember that Norbert could navigate around the streets of

London alright but his eyesight declined very rapidly. The last five or ten years of

his life he must have been effectively blind. I’m not convinced that he actually read

anything by me. I mean I would talk him about it. I remember when I was starting

the food research. He told me some things I should read on English food and I was

absolutely ashamed that I hadn’t read them. He was very well read. Towards the

end of his life … the big thing you have to understand about Norbert, is that he

26

wasn’t really likely to have read anything, he picked things up by talking to people

but he could no longer read, to all intents and purposes.

SE: So I think you already told me, but you didn’t publish anything together?

SJM: No one did. I mean, there are only two people who ever co-authored anything with

Norbert. One was Eric and the other was John Scotsoun. People worked on books

with him, and I think some of his late book underwent a process of [unclear in

German?]. When are dealing with the translations for the collected works we are

dealing with a kind of [unclear in German] process to some extent. Even Schroter

never co-authored anything, although I think he ghost wrote.

SE: I recently read a very interesting biography about Max Weber from a German

colleague from [unclear?] although it is said he lived in a ‘nervous age’ of

mechanization and it was also an age of industrialization and acceleration of life.

Van Voss and Van Stolk in 1984 stated that Elias had certain transmissionness

'with a regular working time from daily 11-22h.’ Which type of rhythm did Elias

prefer? Did he rush rather hectically, being at permanent pressure, or did he follow

his own rhythm?

SJM: Oh, his own rhythm. Years ago, while Norbert was still very much alive, I said that

Norbert continued to follow the life of a keen graduate student right to the end. I

remember when I was at Harvard just for one year as a graduate student we would

stay up until two o’clock in the morning, sometimes working. Graduate students or

at least of a traditional type, often worked very regular hours, working through the

night. Norbert was rather like that. In many ways, it was rather infuriating.

Certainly when I was in Holland in 1987 to 1988, I used to ring him up (this is

when relations were a little bit tense) and used to say, ’Can I come up and see you

Norbert?’ about once a fortnight. He would say ‘yes, come round at 11 o’clock’.

And I would arrive, and go upstairs, more dead than alive and Norbert would be

just beginning to unfold, and have a drink and so on.

27

So, in spite of everything that he says about the constraints of time in [Uber de

unclear], he seems to me to have been almost entirely … he never showed any

signs of … I did see him worried once. When I was in Leicester at the beginning of

1975, when were supposed to be working on the translation of Was ist Soziologie?,

he was supposed to be giving a talk, which was being included in Heicker Hammer

[spelling?] edition of Stages of African Art, Visual and Social, he was sort of

worried about that, he couldn’t concentrate on What is Sociology? because he was

supposed to be going to give this lecture the next day. The lecture was a disaster by

the way. It’s a brilliant essay but I think he wrote it afterwards. And he did seem a

bit under pressure then. But that’s about the only time I ever saw it.

In one sense he was always under this kind of internal pressure, he used to refer to

[mein auf…unclear]. He always had this sense of the task and the reason he

wouldn’t sit down and do sensible things like going through lists of difficult

passages for translation and so on was that he always had this send of moving on to

his own next task. And yet there was something highly irrational about it because,

again as I’ve argued in my little sort of essay of [unclear]. I must look the off print.

I think I’ve got it in the green boxes up there.

He was his own worst enemy, because he more or less, systematically obstructed

the diffusion of his own work. So he has this enormous sense of commitment, it

was a kind of inner commitment to his task – he worked these strange hours. The

assistant would come in at two o’clock in the afternoon and worked until 10. You

can talk to Saskia about that for example.

SE: [unclear] told me he was his assistant for half a year. When I met him on the tram

at a conference in Amsterdam, a few months ago in July, he told me, that he was

sitting there with Elias, waiting, waiting…

SJM: Nothing happened?

28

SE: Nothing happened, and then after half an hour he said, ‘write it down’. It must have

been very exhausting.

SJM: Apart from when he tried to re-dictate chapter 3 to me, I didn’t have that

experience although he did try to use me as a living dictaphone at one point.

But the point is, there was his own inner rhythm, and he worked like a keen

graduate student. But on the other hand, once he’d written the stuff, he lost all

interest in it. This is completely irrational. He could have had a bigger impact

much earlier, if he’d behaved in a more conventional way. By the way, Norbert

was very acute in picking up these things, he certainly picked up my exasperation

with him, ‘for godssake Norbert, sit down, get the bloody thing into good English

and then we will publish it. And all you need is two days work.’ Of course I didn’t

dare talk to him like that when we were first working on What is Sociology?

I remember when I visited him in [unclear] and he had been working…you know

in English there was this disastrous gap between the publication of the first volume

of The Civilising Process and the second. And the reason was not that there was a

delay in the translation but he sat on it because he wanted to write a new

introduction to the second volume. He had written screeds of stuff, the whole

history of the world! I read this stuff through and I said, ‘if you will allow me

Norbert I’ll take this home and I will look at it and I will extract the main ideas

from it and write something that is about the right length for an introduction to the

book’. And so he agreed to that and then of course I got this letter, it was long

before email, we wrote by letter and you posted it and waited two weeks for a

reply. And it said, ‘Dear Stephen, thank you very much, I very much appreciate

your … but my conscience does not allow me to use it. And in a way it worked as

a strategy, because he then allowed the book to be published without an

introduction either by him or by me. There was this strange thing that he just – at

one level he cared and at another level he was deeply impractical.

29

SE: Maybe it was his double bind. {laughs}

SJM: Yeah, I think so.

SE: And I also found hints that Elias was characterised as an actor of self-production.

Do you agree with this?

SJM: Aren’t we all?

SE: {laughs}

SJM: What do you mean? He was also an actor on stage. I think he once played [unclear]

in Hamlet.

SE: At the beginning of our interview, you described some episodes where Elias

behaved as being very proud and conscious of his own work and his wealth and

maybe he was not so very cooperative in many things. He was friendly but he was

very convinced about his own work.

SJM: Mmm. He was very single minded. He knew where he was going.

SE: Ok. So you wouldn’t say he was an actor of self-production?

SJM: No, I find that a difficult phrase to understand. I think its too strong.

SE: Ok. Now we come to the last chapter, to his opus. Would you say that his opus is a

canonical or durable living work?

SJM: Oh, will it survive? Oh yes I think so. He was very conscious of this, very

confident of it I should say. One reason why he was confident I think erm. Sorry,

30

I’m going to change that. One reason why he was sort of irrational in the way that I

have described - that he didn’t do the final things of polishing things off, working

with people to do careful editing and things like that was that he was so confident

that his work was of great importance and that it would be recognised eventually.

And I’m convinced that it will but Norbert wasn’t really willing to do very much to

promote himself, to be on the public stage. Of course he often spoke at conferences

and things like that but many of the opportunities when he did promote himself in

that way would have been conferences or events organised or promoted or initiated

by me or Goudsbloom or whoever, not Eric Dunning, because Eric Dunning is not

capable of initiating a conference! {laughs}. Don’t worry, its not malicious, Abram

De Swan once described Eric and me as an old married couple! We are always

making digs at each other.

The point about Norbert is that I think his work will survive. All the signs are … if

you look at Figurations for example, the newsletter, his reputation is still going up.

And while in a way its depressing that once Joop, and more recently Abram de

Swan, had retired from Amsterdam, it no longer seems that there is that big school

of Eliasasions in one place, if you look at the influence that he’s had, it seems to

me … although its an uphill struggle, there are surprisingly more people, for

example, in American Sociology who seem to be reading Elias. I don’t want to

appear to be deluding myself because it’s a minority point of view. But all the

signs are that he is more and more celebrated in many parts of the world. To give

you one small example, the Stitching’s income from Royalties has been going up,

not with German and English sales so much because those have been available for

a long time but we have been selling a lot of translations into Portuguese which

have been selling in Brazil. So I think it will survive but you could argue not very

much because of Norbert. Other people have had to do that for him. Joop in

Holland, me in Britain and Ireland particularly in an English speaking world and

there are others in other countries. Roger [unclear] played an important part in

France for example.

31

SE: So you would agree of course that we can use Elias’s theories for the future. But do

you think that one deal with his theory eclectic? Is his theory suited for the

explanation of world processes of today's kind or is it limited only to Western

phenomena? You for example wrote about American civilising processes but it’s a

Western concept?

SJM: Well, yes but there are people working on China and Russia and all sorts … No no,

it’s a very general applicability and contrary to what Sir Jack Goode argues, for

example, in his book, The Theft of History [?], he is also a friend of mine. Jack

Goode is a doyenne of British social anthropology, he’s nearly 90 now, he met

Elias in Ghana in the early 1960s, they seemed not to have got on but there is a lot

in common between them. He accuses Norbert of being Eurocentric which I don’t

think is true. There is a difference between developing a theory on the basis of

European evidence and developing a theory that can only be applied to Europe. I

think its very generally being applied.

My worry is of a different kind, its that I think we will have to wait for a new

generation of sociologists. Younger sociologists seem to understand Elias better

than older ones. The older generation, particularly in America, even now most

American Sociologists are closest Parsonians. They wouldn’t admit to it but in

many respects underneath their empirical work is something very much like

structural functionalism. Again in spite of the fact that Elias and Bourdieu were

good friends and that they are fundamentally dealing with similar problems, my

own view is that Bourdieu also creates a kind of Mechano set. Do you know what

that is? It’s a toy, a very old toy but I think you can still get it, metal strips and

wheels and so on and you can bolt them together to make all sorts of structures and

machines and what most sociologists want is a Mechano set – a box of concepts

that they can bolt together. They still have an enormous tendency to [German

phrase, unknown to me] and I think they find it difficult to think in processual

terms.

32

My view is that figurational sociology branches of from the main line of sociology

quite early in the 1920s effectively and if you think about Parsons… Parsons

actually described himself as fundamentally a Kantian whereas we know that Elias

was fundamentally an anti-Kantian from an early stage. In spite of the fact that

Bourdieu calls one of the chapters in Distinction something like ‘An Anti-Kantian

Critique of Judgement’, or something like that. I think that people on the whole in

Sociology, want a nice static framework of concepts, things that they think are

fundamental. Its actually quite difficult, it took me a long time, I didn’t quite grasp

… I had the advantage when I met Elias of having been an economist, and

economists I think find it easier to think in processual terms than sociologists do

but sociologists not sure…

SE: [unclear]

SJM: Neo-classical growth theory and so on. I mean it helps if you’ve done

calculus, mathematics and so on, which comes into economics and so on. If you

are accustomed to thinking in terms of first differentials and so on, you can more

easily think in terms of processes. I still think that most sociologists, at least the

older generation still think in terms of you know the wind, which then blows.

The point is that is branches of … at the Leicester conference, two years ago, its

struck me as being like the Celtic languages, Irish and Welsh and so on, they are

indo-European but they branched off from the main stem of indo-European

languages at such as stage … they are very difficult languages for those of us who

know standard European – English, French, German, Italian and so on, the

grammar and everything about Irish is very different. I think that in a way, I think

figurational sociology is a bit like that in relation to the rest of sociology. A lot of

sociologists don’t really understand where we are coming from and there is a

greater commonality between the Parsonian tradition and stucturalists – Biourdieu

and so on, than there is with us. So that’s a barrier.

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SE: So what would you recommend to the younger generation? You mentioned that the

younger generation has its own task. What do you think?

SJM: Well, they certainly need to think … can I just say one other thing. Another

thought that came to me at the Leicester meeting was a very striking thing that

Elias’s work quite consistently appeals to people working on the boundaries of

different things. It appeals less to people who have never been anything other than

Sociologists, never read any history or economics or psychology. They don’t

understand Elias. You’ve got to be very broadly educated, you’ve got to know a lot

of history and psychology, maybe some economics. So its really an approach for

social scientists rather than sociologists in general.

But the younger generation. Certainly globalisation - its not something new, as

Norbert said, nothing so futile as … , you can trace the beginning of globalisation

back several thousand years. But, what we are seeing in the world today, and this is

partly what my book about America is concerned with, is that because we are no

longer in bounded state societies, the power balances are shifting enormously.

That, for example, pretty well all the gains that working class people made in trade

unions and collective bargaining and getting a voice in government and so on are

being turned back so that employment rights and so on are being … in many way

the countries are in the position of parishes before the Elizabethan poor law, that if

one parish is more generous than another, then all the poor will flock to it.

I’m not talking about migration particularly, but you’ve got part of the problem of

migration, which is a problem, its not wholly a problem, its got many virtues as

well. But I’m also thinking of the flight of capital, so that too often welfare

provision is being undermined by the fact that in most countries now, businesses

are able to say, get stuffed, if you put up corporation tax we will move our

businesses to Malaysia or Timbuktu or wherever.

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The next generation of social scientists are going to think anew about the whole

dynamic of power relations in a world society. Start again in effect where Karl

Marx did circa 1948.

SE: Do you know whether Elias adopted new developments or flows? Did he specify

his previous work? I think about, for example, symbol theory. Where did he stand

in his theoretical scientific development from your perspective?

SJM: Differences?

SE: Mm hmm.

SJM: Well I think my mind has been colonised by Norbert. It took a long time. Um, the

symbol theory is an interesting case, I actually implied to him that I thought it

might spoil his reputation as I thought he didn’t seem to be saying anything new.

He did not take that well at all and I was wrong of course.

Actually, I find it slightly embarrassing that I’ve become such a leading spokesman

for Elias that its difficult now to find a respect in which I differ from him. But

perhaps there is still a lingering element of my original economics training that I’m

still inclined to make more use of economic thinking than he would have done,

think in terms of marginality and so on. But I think its basically compatible.

SE: When Elias died, after his death, did you think that your reading of Elias’s work

changed.

SJM: Not much, in fact it was surprising to find how much I hadn’t read of Elias. The

trouble is he went back to writing so much in German and its hard work, it still is

hard work to read in German and I would tend to miss the nuisances in German

anyhow. I don’t think I read it in anyway very differently with the exception that

when we found out more about his life, it maybe changed slightly the way we read

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some things. For example, we’ve talked about his homosexuality. I think its not

important, funny how it fascinates some many sociologists, I’ve been involved in

conversations where someone, quite a well known younger sociologist said, ‘oh

that’s interesting!’. Its not so interesting but it does perhaps put a slight spin on his

writing about outsider groups and so on.

But I think more important to me, was that he had been such a leading young

Zionist which was something that he covered up very thoroughly. The most he said

about it was that there were these student fraternities but Jewish students weren’t

allowed to belong to them and I was for a while was a member of a Jewish

fraternity that aped them and so on. That is a complete lie! Norbert didn’t always

tell the truth about himself.

One of the big puzzles is why he stopped being a Zionist and I don’t know. I’ve

read some of his work in retrospect trying to find clues to it but its difficult to

know. There is some suggestion that he may once have visited Israel in the very

early days and its complete speculation. If he did, he was such an acute observer, I

wonder whether he smelt disaster in the case of Israel long before the disaster

actually happened. There is no record of his visiting Israel after the six day war in

1967 which is when most of the problems from Israel date from. The occupied

territories and so on and the complete souring of Israeli society. He was such a

very sharp old bird, I wonder whether he did go to Israel and when he saw the

situation that had been created for the Arabs, he knew it would go wrong. And so

in a way you can read his work backwards a little bit like that in certain aspects.

SE: Somewhere I had found a note that he disagreed with Israeli state processes against

the Palestinians. For the Jewish part of the state, he wished all the best but he was

also …

SJM: Oh yes. And he actually says that in a letter?

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SE: Maybe it was in this [unclear] this book from three years ago

SE: Ok to sum up, and I that now it is a very difficult question to answer but in one

sentence Stephen, what would you say, what personal meaning did Norbert Elias

have for you?

SJM: Well, in the end, he was the most important intellectual influence, not just on my

career but on my whole world outlook. In other words, just to add one more

sentence to the one sentence. One thing I got from Elias, Elias looked at everything

as a sociologist which is what Saskia (visus) says in her article and I got that from

Norbert as well.

SE: Ok, well that was a very interesting interview, I enjoyed it. Thank you.

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