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The achievement of Norbert Elias was to develop a paradigmatic foundation for sociology as the lynchpin in a broader human science encompassing the social and biological dimensions of human development. The extent to which he remains at the margins of a discipline profoundly suspicious of the biological sciences is perhaps an index of his originality. But this outsider status also obscures the unoriginality of his work. Elias’s unifying epistemological framework centring on ‘integrative levels’ and ‘emergent dynamics’ drew heavily on a long tradition of organicist biology. Reviewing developments in twentieth-century biology, it is argued that Elias simply absorbed an organicist Zeitgeist that had become subtly paradigmatic at around the time of the elaboration, in the 1940s, of the ‘modern synthesis’ in genetic-evolutionary theory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For the last three decades, sociology has been in a permanent state of theoretical and programmatic disarray. Symptoms of the crisis include ambivalence about the possible scientific status of sociological knowledge, theoretical and methodological fragmentation and ambivalence about the appropriate degree of political and ethical 'involvement' in the sociological stance, and deep-seated anxieties about the relationship between sociology and neighbouring disciplines across the human sciences. Through a comprehensive exegesis of his major contributions, it is argued that Norbert Elias provides the foundations for a 'central theory', integrating diverse theoretical traditions within sociology, while providing a clear framework for establishing a synthesis across the full range of (social and biological) human sciences. In short, Elias provides us with the rudiments of a comprehensive human science, with sociology well placed to play an orchestrating role in the investigation of phenomena at the highest level of integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]