Norbert Elias and Hannah Arendt are both major twentieth-century thinkers, lionized for their striking and powerfully original visions. Yet rarely are they treated together or their perspectives compared. The foremost reason for this is doubtless the sharply divergent ways in which they both conceived of the value and significance of sociology. Elias was, throughout his life, an indefatigable defender of the discipline, seeking to promote its autonomy and to critique traditional philosophy from a sociological perspective. Arendt's early allegiance to Existenz philosophy drew her to heavily criticize what she perceived to be the pretensions of sociology, and although in her later years she became more sharply critical of philosophy, she always retained an intense, even vituperative, dislike of sociology.¹