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xvii writing in German in the 1930s, Elias frequently used the term Habitus, which in the 1970s and early 1980s was quite unfamiliar in English, and was therefore generally translated by expressions such as "personality makeup". Since then, particularly through the writings of Pierre Bourdieu, the more precise term "habitus" has re-entered the vocabulary of anglophone social scientists
p.312 from the interweaving of countless individual interests and intentions - whether tending in the same direction or in divergent and hostile directions - something comes into being that was planned and intended by none of these individuals, yet has emerged nevertheless from their intentions and actions. And really this is the whole secret of social figurations, their compelling dynamics, their structural regularities, their process character and their development; this is the secret of sociogenesis and of relational dynamics.
p.366 plans and actions, the emotional and rational impulses of individual people, constantly interweave in a friendly or hostile way. This basic tissue resulting from many single plans and actions of people can give rise to changes and patterns that no individual person has planned or created. From this interdependence of people arises an order sui generis, an order more compelling and stronger than the will and reason of the individual people composing it. It is this order of interweaving human impulses and strivings... which determines the course of historical change... This order is neither "rational" - if by "rational" we mean that it has resulted intentionally from the purposive deliberation of individual people; nor "irrational" - if by "irrational" we mean that it has arisen in an incomprehensible way.
p.366 Hegel... was preoccupied by the fact that all the planning and actions of people give rise to many things that no one actually intended.
p.367 Civilization... is set in motion blindly, and kept in motion by the autonomous dynamics of a web of relationships, by specific changes in the way people are bound to live together.
p.367 it is precisely in conjunction with the civilizing process that the blind dynamics of people intertwining in their deeds and aims gradually leads towards greater scope for planned intervention into both the social and individual structures - intervention based on growing knowledge of the unplanned dynamics of these structures.
p.367 As more and more people must attune their conduct to that of others, the web of actions must be organized more and more strictly and accurately, is each individual action is to fulfil its social function.
p.401 This courtly art of human observation... is never concerned with the individual in isolation, as if the essential features of his behaviour were independent of his relations to others, and as if he related to others, so to speak, only retrospectively. The approach there was far closer to reality, in that the individual was always seen in his social context, as a human being in his relations to others, as an individual in a social situation.
p.403 What changes in the course of the process which we call history are, to reiterate, the reciprocal relationships, the figurations, of people and the moulding the individual undergoes within them. But at the very moment when this fundamental historicity of human beings is clearly seen, we also perceive the regularity, the structural characteristics which remain constant. Each single aspect of human social life is comprehensible only if seen in the context of this perpetual movement; no particular detail can be isolated from it. It is formed within this moving context... and must be grasped within it, as a part of a particular stage or wave. Thus social drive-controls and restrictions are nowhere absent among people
p.407-408 European society... tensions and struggles... are an integral part of its structure; they decisively affect the direction in which it changes... the spurts in the civilizing process take place by and large independently of whether they are pleasant or useful to the groups involved. They arise from powerful dynamics of interweaving group activities the overall direction of which any single group on its own is hardly able to change.
p.437 In the present no less than in the past, the dynamics of interdependencies which have been so often mentioned in these enquiries, keep people moving and press towards changes in their institutions and indeed in the overall structure of these figurations.
p.472-473 the ideas of social theorists constantly find themselves in blind alleys from which there seems no way out. The individual... appears again and again as something "outside" society. What the concept of society refers to appears again and again as something existing outside and beyond individuals... In order to pass beyond this dead end of sociology and the social sciences in general, it is necessary to make clear the inadequacy of both conceptions, that of the individual outside society and, equally, that of a society outside individuals.
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