3.3 Long-term developmental processes as an unintended consequence of human action
Jiří Šubrt, paper “Long-Term Developmental Processes As an Unintended Consequence of Human Action: Some Theoretical and Methodological Questions of Historical Sociology,” presented at the conference Imaginaries in Intercultural Perspective. The international conference on Johann P. Arnason’s 80th birthday, held at the Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna, Austria, March 21, 2021.
A characteristic feature of Elias’s sociological thinking is a figurational approach and a processuality (Arnason 1987). His research interest is attracted by processes of continuous, long-term change. What is especially important is that these are processes which take place unintentionally and are unplanned. These are processes that nobody wanted or intended but which still exist and significantly affect our lives. Another feature of these processes is their persistence, that is, the stability of the direction that some processes have taken for many centuries. However, according to Elias (1977), the fact that a particular process has taken place in a certain direction, does not mean that it must do so in the future. Therefore, we should not talk about the necessity of any development but about possibilities and probabilities. Shifts of different kinds and intensities occur simultaneously, during which, time changes in one direction can create space for changes in the opposite direction (e.g., the prevailing process of integration may be accompanied by a partial disintegration, or on the contrary, the dominant process of disintegration may lead to a new type of reintegration). In opposition to historical sociology, we may put a different type of sociological thought, which is today often promoted as a kind of 98