ABSTRACT
Other sociologists, including Marx, Durkheim (and others in his circle, such as Simiand) as well as Mannheim and Bourdieu, have perceived the dwindling area of competence of philosophy in the age of social science and have also distanced themselves from the subject with varying degrees of fi nality. Few, however, have taken this perception as far as Elias did. Unlike Elias, most sociologists have conceded the autonomy of philosophical questions and have generally deferred to philosophers. Elias’s emphatic abandonment of philosophy in any shape or form included the rejection of the intellectual value of any conception of ‘transcendence’ whatsoever. In proclaiming this, he thereby decisively alienated himself from much of the academic world. Neither the products of Kantian a priori arguments on the ‘preconditions’ of knowledge or culture, nor the belief in the divine groundedness of existence, nor any of their variants, were to play any part in his work. For Elias, transcendental thinking produces empty generalizations buttressed by nothing more than the authority of the philosophers’ establishment. The high level of abstraction means that these enquiries cannot provide the vivid, useful and realitycongruent knowledge that can help humans to understand their relations with each other. Indeed, it would obfuscate and impede that aim. Not for Elias, therefore, the appeals to the ‘utopian moment’, the ‘ideal speech situation’, ‘regulative principles’, the ‘pre-social moral awareness’, ‘transcendental foundations beyond reason’ and the other ‘new prioris’ of contemporary philosophy and social theory. These transcendental tropes represented the last vestiges of philosophy and theology still lingering in academic discourse. Elias returned again and again in his later years to taunt transcendental philosophers with the ominous emptiness and forbidding abstraction of their life’s work. It was a challenge that begged the uncomfortable question of the basis of philosophical authority itself.
