Contradiction and interdependency

the sociologies of Karl Marx and Norbert Elias

Christopher Powell

pp. 91-107

in: François Dépelteau, Tatiana Savoia Landini (eds), Norbert Elias and social theory, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

Synthesizing ideas from two authors as similar and as different as Marx and Elias is a tricky and dangerous undertaking. Each of them proposed not only specific explanatory claims about the workings of social phenomena but also methodological approaches for generating explanations, epistemological standards for evaluating explanations, and ontological concepts for defining the phenomena to be explained. Each articulated these claims in a body of work that has been institutionalized as paradigmatic for a network of researchers. As Kuhn (1996) pointed out, explanatory claims made under the auspices of different scientific paradigms are not only different but incommensurate. For this reason, even simple comparisons between two paradigms can be problematic.

Cited authors

Marx Karl

Elias Norbert