(1998-09-27) Family Feuds Collins

Family Feuds. Review of *THE SOCIOLOGY OF PHILOSOPHIES, A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. By Randall Collins. Isaiah Berlin once remarked that what philosophers do in the privacy of their studies can change the course of history, and he cited John Locke and Karl Marx as examples.

Even now, a radically different future might be seeding for us

If we live by ideas, and if ideas can be dangerous, it is surely important to understand their dynamics

The history of ideas is a discipline in its own right

But there has not been a sociological study of the history of philosophy, at least on the breathtakingly comprehensive and ambitious scale offered in ''The Sociology of Philosophies,'' by Randall Collins, who ventures nothing less than an analysis of the genealogy of philosophies in all the world's traditions from antiquity to the present. His thesis is that intellectual activity occurs in groups and networks, formed by master-pupil chains and contemporary rivalries. He claims that this pattern is universally exemplified in the history of philosophy from China to the West.

It is a mistake, he says, to think that ideas beget ideas, or that ideas are the work of intellectually heroic individuals, or that they are culturally specific (this last challenges the relativism of post-modernists). Rather, the history of ideas concerns social structures -- networks of people transmitting ''emotional energy and cultural capital'' through chains of personal contact. (scene?)

Perhaps the most definite claim Collins makes is that intellectual dynamics obey the ''law of small numbers'': at any period there are at least three but usually no more than six schools of thought in mutual contention. The numbers are dictated by the logic of what drives intellectual developments: fewer than two schools yields no conflict; more than six is an unstable squabble that soon resolves itself, through synthesis, into a more manageable number of contestants

Under a quarter of Collins's book sets out this theory. The rest contains potted accounts of histories of philosophy from many traditions as empirical and illustrative material. To summarize the accounts, Collins provides diagrams with arrows connecting philosophers' names to denote links -- master-pupil relations, disagreements and acquaintanceships.

Collins, to be sure, has tried to say something more specific -- that the cog driving intellectual history is conflicts within networks

His description of the history of philosophy is, for one thing, unrecognizable to me as a working philosopher. Collins, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, justifies his thesis with scores of thumbnail sketches of philosophers and their views. But they are thirdhand; Collins manifests little or no acquaintance with the original writings.

Moreover, he invariably takes on trust what is stated by the commentators and historians of philosophy he has read, ignoring the energetic debate surrounding interpretation and classification in their fields, so he is oblivious of alternatives, nuances or correctives.

The essential fault in Collins's account is that although he is discussing the history of ideas, he all but ignores the ideas themselves and has his eye only on the sociologist's legitimate prey -- social structures and relationships. Had he focused on the ideas, and understood them, he would see that philosophy has always been concerned with only a few, very fundamental ideas, and that those few ideas are perennial.

The perennial ideas that grip the philosophical imagination and more or less exhaust (in both senses) its endeavors can be summarized as two: the idea of meaning or value in the universe, and the idea that reality has an ultimate nature

Collins does not see that all philosophy concerns these few fundamental matters, so he cannot see that what he interprets as ''change'' and ''conflict'' is really the swelling and continuation of the eternal debate humanity has with itself about these ultimate things.