ABSTRACT
The last chapter linked insights from the sciences of complexity with the process sociology of Elias, which explains how patterns of social interaction evolve simultaneously with individual personality structures over long periods of time in a process of interweaving individual human intentions and plans that no one engaging in them can control. Social and individual personality patterns emerge in the local interactions between people, analogous to the emergence of patterns in the local interaction of entities in nature according to complexity theories. Elias presented a theory of process and argued against understanding social and personality patterns in terms of systems. The notion of `system' brings a spatial metaphor to what is a temporal process and, furthermore, the notion of `system' unjusti®ably rei®es that process. A central concept in systems thinking is that of a whole, often thought of as a `supra individual.' In relation to human action, this amounts to an abstraction from, and a mysti®cation of, direct human experience. Elias held that there was nothing mysterious about the process of social evolution and argued against looking for any cause outside the process of interaction itself. In other words, the cause of social/personality evolution lies is the process of interaction itself, an idea that seems to me to be quite consistent with insights coming from the sciences of complexity.
