book by Randall Collins.

Highlights

Introduction

Intellectual life is first of all conflict and disagreement

the forefront where ideas are created has always been a discussion among oppositions

Even at the height of discussion, the number of opinions is not multiplied as far as might be possible. Intellectual conflict is always limited by focus on certain topics, and by the search for allies. Not warring individuals but a small number of warring camps is the pattern of intellectual history. Conflict is the energy source of intellectual life, and conflict is limited by itself.

Chapter 1: Coalitions in the Mind

Life-Trajectories as Interaction Ritual Chains

In all this there are structural constraints. Where there exists competition for membership in egalitarian rituals, some individuals dominate attention because of their relatively higher CC and EE, while others are less attended to because they lack these resources. In groups stratified by property or coercive power, the constraints are even sharper; there is a limited amount of structural space in the ruling coalition, and there may be severe limits on the ability of the powerless to withdraw from being coerced. For intellectuals, there is a special kind of limitation on how much space there is at the top of the hierarchy of ritual attention, which I shall discuss presently as the “law of small numbers.” In all these respects, the local macro-structure determines which ritual encounters will be relatively most attractive or unattractive to a given individual, and hence how that person will channel his or her cultural capital and emotional energy.

Intellectuals’ Cultural Capital

Emotional Energy and Creativity

The Opportunity Structure

The sheer numbers of persons in the field and the shape of their network connections is the macro-context within which any micro-situation is negotiated. A sociological theory can move in three directions from this point. (1) We can ask a still more macro-question: What larger social conditions determine whether intellectual networks will exist at all? This directs us to the macro-foundations of networks in political, religious, and educational organization. (2) We can concentrate on the shape of the network structure itself and its dynamics over time; this leads us to considerations of the internal stratification of intellectual networks, and to the principle of change through structural rivalry that I call the law of small numbers. (3) We can dig more deeply into the micro-level and ask how the individual reacts to being in various positions within a network. The first question will occupy us in later chapters. Let us consider the second and third here.

Whatever the mode of eminence, some individuals always have more access than others to the cultural capital out of which it is produced

Imagine a large number of people spread out across an open plain--something like a landscape by Salvador Dalí or Giorgio de Chirico. Each one is shouting, “Listen to me!” This is the intellectual attention space. Why would anyone listen to anyone else? What strategy will get the most listeners? Two ways will work. A person can pick a quarrel with someone else, contradicting what the other is saying. That will gain an audience of at least one; and if the argument is loud enough, it might attract a crowd. Now, suppose everyone is tempted to try it. Some arguments start first, or have a larger appeal because they contradict the positions held by several people; and if other persons happen to be on the same side of the argument, they gather around and provide support. There are first-mover advantages and bandwagon effects. The tribe of attention seekers, once scattered across the plain, is changed into a few knots of argument. The law of small numbers says that the number of these successful knots is always about three to six. The attention space is limited; once a few arguments have partitioned the crowds, attention is withdrawn from those who would start yet another knot of argument. Much of the pathos of intellectual life is in the timing of when one advances one’s own argument

Stratification within Intellectual Communities

The most thorough data we have on intellectual stratification concern scientific fields. There is good reason to believe that the basic structures are similar in philosophy and indeed in most of the humanistic (perhaps also the artistic) disciplines.12 Productivity is very unequally distributed among scientists

the number of scientists who produce a very large number of papers in vanishingly small

Stratification of Cultural Capital and Emotional Energy

The Sociology of Thinking

Chapter 2: Networks across the Generations

High levels of intellectual creativity are rare. Why this is so is the result of structural conditions, not individual ones. A famous rhetoric has it that philosophies are lengthened shadows of great personalities

The Rarity of Major Creativity

Who Will Be Remembered?

What Do Minor Philosophers Do?

This viewpoint may leave us with a nagging doubt. Are we dealing only with fame, not with creativity itself? Is it not possible that there have been many creative individuals, buried in obscurity, who have simply not received credit for their advances?

The Structural Mold of Intellectual Life: Long-Term Chains in China and Greece

Chapter 3: Partitioning Attention Space: The Case of Ancient Greece

Creative persons are typically linked to one another in chains, and appear as contemporary rivals. But is there not a sense in which networks of creativity beg the question? Another factor is presupposed that generates some creativity in the first place. The structural factors so far identified are part of the pattern in which creativity occurs. Within chains over time, creativity often increases. Secondary philosophers in an earlier generation give rise to major philosophers, and the biggest stars usually have major philosophers upstream. The process is not merely the transmission of cultural capital but its intensification.

The Intellectual Law of Small Numbers

The structure of intellectual life is governed by a principle: the number of active schools of thought which reproduce themselves for more than one or two generations in an argumentative community is on the order of three to six. There is a strong lower limit; creativity can scarcely occur without rival positions, and almost always in any creative period there are at least three. There is also an upper limit; whenever there are more than about four to six distinct positions, most of them are not propagated across subsequent generations.

The Forming of an Argumentative Network and the Launching of Greek Philosophy

How Long Do Organized Schools Last?

Small Numbers Crisis and the Creativity of the Post-Socratic Generation

The three generations from Socrates’ students down through 300 b.c.e. were a time of structural crisis for the philosophical community. The law of small numbers was being seriously violated. At the outset, a new organizational form came into existence. Half a dozen formally organized schools rushed into this new space, while there were two older schools still operating (the Pythagorean and the Abderan); in addition, there appeared two lifestyle movements, unorganized anti-schools so to speak: Skeptics and Cynics. The new schools all had an initial burst of creativity, intellectual energy stirred up by the opening structural opportunities. They divided the cultural capital already available by applying it in divergent directions and elaborating explicitly against one another

COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF INTELLECTUAL COMMUNITIES Part I: Asian Paths

COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF INTELLECTUAL COMMUNITIES Part II: Western Paths

Chapter 8: Tensions of Indigenous and Imported Ideas: Islam, Judaism, Christendom

Philosophy in the medieval societies of the West built on earlier cultural capital. In the long historical view, we are tempted to skip over that which is derivative and to concentrate on that which is originating. Our deprecating image is an unsophisticated society overwhelmed by imports from a previous civilization and unable to get its own creativity off the ground. The image is doubly misleading

Chapter 9: Academic Expansion as a Two-Edge Sword: Medieval Christendom

Medieval Christian philosophy builds on the same ingredients as Muslim philosophy: the politicized, socially activist monotheism of Judaism, together with imports of sophisticated abstractions accumulated across many generations in the intellectual community of the Greeks. The intellectual fields of Christendom and of Islam go through much the same structural conflicts. The important differences between medieval Islam and Christianity are quantitative, not qualitative, matters of weight and timing rather than intellectual substance

Chapter 10: Cross-Breeding Networks and Rapid-Discovery Science

In comparison to what went before, modern European philosophy comes on with a bang. Creativity revives in many directions, beginning around 1600, and is sustained for generations. Not least is the core of abstract philosophy itself

In addition, and most spectacularly, there is the scientific revolution of the same period. This overlaps with the networks of philosophers, especially in its formative generations. Henceforward science becomes a key reference point, whether positive or negative, for philosophers. Science rearranges the rest of intellectual space.

Why all this innovation? Our general theory holds that creativity results when intellectual networks reorganize

In this revolutionary period, there are two major structural changes:

1. Specialized branches of the intellectual networks concerned with naturalistic knowledge suddenly attract wide attention, then gradually separate off into a distinctive form of intellectual organization, leaving behind a sparer but more clearly delineated activity of philosophy. This is conventionally called the scientific revolution, but it will need considerable unpacking.

There is a double revolution, a takeoff in mathematics as well as in science, with the mathematics revolution building up several generations earlier.

The social change in the intellectual world consists in focusing attention on a rapidly moving research front; and this in turn comes from technologizing the research front. The key here is not so much the material research equipment as, more broadly, the invention of technique, first in mathematics, then in empirical research

Here is a genuine revolution in the inner organization of the intellectual world, overthrowing the law of small numbers which keeps the philosophical community fractionated. There now appears an alternative organization focused on rapid discovery which leaves a trail of consensus behind.

2. There is another, very different structural change in the bases of intellectual life: displacement of the church from control of the central means of intellectual production. Secularization is long-term and goes through many twists and turns. It is by no means reducible to the Protestant Reformation; it had already begun with the courtiers and lay officials of the late Middle Ages.

These two structural changes--the revolution in math and science and secularization--are analytically distinct

The connection between the two great changes is structural: the organizational breakdown of the church led theological intellectuals on all sides to seek new alliances, energizing conflicts in astronomy and mathematics and endowing them with general significance

It is conventional to begin this history with Hobbes and Locke, but the pattern first becomes visible in the Catholic sphere, with Vitoria, Suarez, and the Spanish liberals who created international law. Modern political philosophy emerged from the power relations of Church and state.

All three institutional patterns--science, secularization, social sciences-give some grounds for interpreting philosophy as dying

A Cascade of Creative Circles

The skeletal structure of creativity is its network lineages, and the history of modern philosophy can be traced through a surprisingly small number of social circles (see Figure 10.1 and its continuation in Figures 11.1, 12.1 and 12.2,

FIGURE 10.1. EUROPEAN NETWORK: THE CASCADE OF CIRCLES, 1600­1735

These are circles in a strong sense: groups which regularly meet, in which everyone knows everyone else. In the network figures they are designated by an enclosed border within the network. They are self-conscious; typically they have a name, as well as allies and often enemies on the outside; usually they have a program and issue their manifesto. They are the material core of intellectual movements; in the terminology of modern social movement theory, they are SMOs, social movement organizations. They are the nodes at the center of networks, recruiting and publicizing and thereby building waves of creative energy in intellectual attention space.

The key circles of modern Europe are those which reorganized the means of communication; they set up networks of correspondence and created the first intellectual periodicals. The intellectual networks of the 1600s were full of diplomats, refugees, and commercial travelers; in the absence of a postal system, they controlled the key resource for organizing a truly cosmopolitan network, making possible the meta-circle of circles which emerged in this period

In 1623 from his monastic cell in Paris, Mersenne formed a circle of correspondence, working closely with Gassendi and connecting to Kepler, Galileo, Campanella, Descartes, Hobbes, Torricelli, Fermat, and other mathematicians and scientific researchers of the time. Mersenne was the organizational leader; Descartes emerged as the intellectual leader whose works became the movement’s emblem and program statement. Mersenne’s circle lasted until 1648; in 1657 its survivors began regular meetings at the houses of wealthy patrons, Montmor and the Cartesian leader Rohault. This circle too served as a clearing house of letters announcing scientific and mathematical discoveries, and it made available Descartes’s unpublished manuscripts to Malebranche and Leibniz.2 Another temporary visitor was Leibniz himself, who went on to organize the first scientific journal in Germany, Acta Eruditorum, in 1682, and the academies at Berlin and St. Petersburg; together these provided the base for much of mathematics in the next century.

A parallel and to some extent derivative structure emerged in England; a scientific correspondence circle formed in the 1630s around German Protestant travelers settling at London. This gave rise to the famous Invisible College at Oxford in the 1640s during the Commonwealth, from which came Boyle’s famous scientific experiments in the early 1660s. In 1662 its members formed the Royal Society in London, whose Transactions became the first scientific periodical. Meanwhile at Cambridge from 1633 to 1660 was an oppositional Platonist circle of Whichcote, Henry More, and Cudworth; Newton was intellectually initiated by its members early in his life, and Locke connects to it too, as well as to the other major circles of his generation

In the early 1700s the only notable circles were in London, organized around the emerging publishing business: the Whig literary circle of Addison and Steele and, more important, the Tory literary circle of Pope, Bolingbroke, and Chesterfield. Through Swift the latter circle connected with Berkeley; and its members hosted and inspired the young French visitors Montesquieu and Voltaire in the 1720s

In the mid-1700s Paris had another major circle: the Encyclopedists (1745­ 1772), whose core was a new kind of publishing enterprise; contact with it inspired Rousseau and the wealthy Helvétius

The English counterpart in the late 1700s was a prominent scientific circle, the Birmingham Lunar Society, in contact with the French circles. More important for philosophy were the Philosophical Radicals at London (1810­ 1830), followers of Bentham including James Mill and Ricardo. Institutionally they controlled the Encyclopedia Brittanica

The history of German philosophy is likewise a chain of circles. In the mid-1700s the Berlin Academy under the patronage of Frederick the Great sponsored Euler’s mathematics and offered asylum to Voltaire; it recombined the older French network with Leibniz’s lineage

German philosophy was established within academic chains thereafter, and there were no more important circles until 1925­1936, when Schlick, Neurath, and Carnap led the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, with its manifestos and its journal, Erkenntnis. In the late 1930s to 1940s in Paris appeared the counterpoise: the existentialist circle of Sartre, Camus, Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir, and the young Lacan, importers of German cultural capital from the phenomenologists and Freudians. Once again the circle has a distinctive base of publicity: the Gallimard publishing house, with its pioneering mass-distributed but intellectually elite paperbacks, the avant-garde theater, and politically militant publications, especially Les Temps Moderne.

Philosophy in the United States came alive with three circles: in the 1830s and 1840s the Transcendentalists around Boston, led by Emerson and Thoreau; the St. Louis Hegelians of the 1860s and 1870s, who eventually migrated to New England; and in 1871­1875 the Cambridge Metaphysical Club, whose members later to be famous included the young Peirce, William James, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Out of this group came the renowned Harvard philosophy department of 1885­1920.

In the 11 generations from 1600 to 1965, European thought has been organized by some 15 circles: half a dozen circles in the mid-1600s (two of them predominantly scientific); the Whig and Tory literary circles of the early 1700s; then the three great intergenerational successions: the EncyclopedistsAuteuil-Idéologues in France; in Germany the overlapping circles of BerlinKönigsberg from the 1750s to the 1780s and Weimar-Jena-Romanticists in the 1780s to 1810, revolving back to Berlin at the end of the period with the Young Hegelians in the 1830s as the last of this chain.

There were a few anti-modernist religious circles in the anglophone world: the Oxford Tractarians of the 1830s, the New England Transcendentalists in the 1830s and 1840s, the Green-Jowett circle of Idealists at Balliol College, Oxford, the St. Louis Hegelians in the 1860s and 1870s, and the Society for Psychical Research in the 1880s

On the scientific side during the 1800s were the Philosophical Radicals and Evolutionists in London, and an offshoot, the Cambridge (Massachusetts) Metaphysical Society, in the 1870s

Finally there were the three great centers of the early 1900s: the Cambridge Apostles, the Vienna Circle, and the Paris existentialists.

The question lingers: Why these circles rather than others? There were many more salons and discussion groups than these eminent 15; academies existed in every provincial town in pre-Revolutionary France, just as in the following century students and lecturers gathered for talking as well as drinking in every Germany university town and in many a British college

Philosophical Connections of the Scientific Revolution

The Emergence of Rapid-Discovery Science

Why are philosophical networks implicated in scientific creativity? To solve this problem, we need to answer two related questions. First, what is the difference between the social organization of science before and after the scientific revolution? And second, what is the sociological difference between science and philosophy?

The scientific revolution was not the emergence of science. Observational and calculational knowledge existed in all of the major world regions before

Leaving aside these issues about the contents of science, there are two major social differences

First, European science moved much more rapidly. It focused on a fastmoving research front, making and discussing new discoveries for a few years and then moving on to something else. European intellectuals became highly conscious of this movement of rapid discovery. We find it in the explicit scientific ideologies of Francis Bacon, Descartes, and Boyle: the notion that a method of making discoveries had been found, and that future problems would be rapidly solved. This was not only an ideology; the accumulation of scientific research literature did indeed accelerate continuously from this point onward.6 We might thus designate science before and after the scientific revolution as “traditional science” and “rapid-discovery science,” respectively.

Second, European science acquired a higher degree of consensus. This is not to say that there were no controversies, but rather scientific controversies became socially resolved over a period of years, and the community of scientists came to treat old issues as settled while concentrating on new ones.

The emergence of European rapid-discovery science sharpened the difference between science and philosophy

Nevertheless, there is similarity and even overlap among scientific and philosophical networks. In both kinds of networks, creativity clusters in groups and builds up in intergenerational chains

In fact science shows both patterns at different phases of the research process. Science is based on rivalries and controversies while a topic is on the research forefront. Eventually these controversies are resolved, and the losing positions are abandoned. At this point the winning position is taken as secure knowledge, while the field goes on to controversy over something else.

These are Bruno Latour’s (1987) two faces of science: science-in-the-making operates like philosophy; science-already- made is science after the research front, when consensus and cumulation prevail

Science on the research front follows the law of small numbers

But this is given up in time, primarily because scientists are more eager to move on to a new research front than they are to stay and defend losing positions

technologizing the research front

mathematics becomes a discovery-making machine

Overlaps among the Networks: World Comparison

How then did this revolution come about? Why did a genealogy of research technologies build up, promoting rapid discovery, first in mathematics, then in natural science? For a sociological answer, let us look at the networks.

an east-west divergence in scientists’ and philosophers’ networks

why do philosophical networks promote science?

how do scientific networks affect philosophy?

Three Revolutions and Their Networks

What is commonly called the scientific revolution was actually three overlapping restructurings of the intellectual field. The math and science revolutions consisted of transformation into rapidly moving research fronts, in effect the discovery of discovery-making techniques

The takeoff of philosophical creativity that began at this time was not a revolution in the same sense as the math and science revolutions; philosophy remained philosophy, which is to say it continued to be structured by irreconcilable rivalries and did not acquire a rapidly moving research front distinguishing it from previous philosophy

The Mathematicians

The Scientific Revolution

If by scientific revolution we mean the invention of the techniques of rapid discovery making, the scientific revolution came later than the mathematical revolution. From the early to mid-1500s we can speak of a quickening pace of innovation

The Philosophical Revolution: Bacon and Descartes

The philosophical revolution began as the announcement of the supremacy of science as the one true path to knowledge. Appropriate hedges were expressed to avoid infringing on the status of religion, but the thrust was clear enough. The names that became famous for expressing this were Bacon and Descartes; they represent the networks on the observational and mathematical sides of the scientific revolution, respectively. But why should fame for this move have gone to philosophers, instead of to the statements of the scientists themselves? And indeed, why should philosophy have continued to exist at all after this point, since the avowed ideology was to replace the old philosophy with new science?30

There is another characteristic of the philosophical break engineered by Bacon and Descartes. Instead of mingling their science with theological positions, they presented it in as pure and unentangled a form as possible. This was in sharp contrast to previous self-announced radicals. Bruno, a defender on occasion of Copernican astronomy and other scientific innovations, proclaimed Christ a magus and hermeticism and magic as the bases for universal religious reform. Campanella, less heretical, limited the appeal of his philosophy by attaching it to the religious politics of church reunification under the pope. The strategy of Bacon and Descartes went entirely the other way. Both were conventionally respectful to religion; both assiduously avoided theological specifics and any taint of heresy. Their philosophy was designed not to rise or fall with the fortunes of religious reform. It was a philosophical revolution precisely because it successfully claimed an autonomous attention space.

Chapter 11: Secularization and Philsophical Meta-territoriality

The shifting power of the church was bound to change intellectual life. This was the material base on which most intellectual networks had centered, and these networks would necessarily respond to the closing of some opportunities and the opening of others. The intellectual revolutions were not simply a matter of breaking down the alliance of church and state which had imposed authoritarian control over the limits of thought. In the narrow sense, the liberalization of thinking had less effect on creativity than one might suppose. Many episodes of creativity had gone on within the authoritarian church, and when liberalization came, the most extreme freethinkers were not generally the most innovative, in either philosophy or science. Often their products were narrow and banal, while greater subtlety in constructing philosophy came from the conservatives defending religion, or in cautious halfway houses. Freedom of thought is a wonderful thing; but it is realistic to recognize that it is not the main engine of creativity.

Nor can we attribute the major changes to Protestantism. For one thing the timing is wrong. Luther nailed up his theses on the Wittenberg church door in 1517; by 1560 the major Protestant sects and the lines of the national churches had been established. But the thought of the 1500s still moved largely in well-worn paths: Humanists, Aristoteleans, scholastics, Cabalists, mystics. The big reorganization of philosophy did not come until the mid-1600s.

Secularization of the Intellectual Base

Geopolitics and Cleavages within Catholicism

The Spanish Intellectual Efflorescence

Expansion and Crisis of the Spanish Universities

The Intersection of Movements in France

Raison d’État and Secularization by Opportunism

Reemergence of the Metaphysical Field

Jewish Millennialism and Spinoza’s Religion of Reason

Leibniz’s Mathematical Metaphysics

Leibniz was so full of network opportunities that he hadn’t enough time for all his projects, and many of them were left in fragments. Law, history, diplomacy claimed his most immediate attention.

Rival Philosophies upon the Space of Religious Toleration

FIGURE 11.1. FRENCH AND BRITISH NETWORK DURING THE ENLIGHTENMENT, 1735­1800

Anti-modernist Modernism and the Anti-scientific Opposition

We are now in the midst of the great reversal of intellectual alliances between religious positions and science. Most creative intellectuals from Kepler through Leibniz and Newton argued for the compatibility of science and religion. Religious intellectuals such as Gassendi and Mersenne appropriated science for their own theological purposes; on the other side, most scientists liked to claim religious legitimation for their activities. The English scientists around Boyle were particularly concerned to show the religious orthodoxy of their science, and Boyle funded public lectures for the confutation of atheism by means of the evidence of science. With Locke, however, science went over to the side of secularization; henceforward, scientists and their philosophical advocates would become increasingly associated with a minimalist religion such as Deism, and eventually with outright atheism. At the same time, religion began to turn against science; this trend emerged in the British milieu during Locke’s lifetime, with Berkeley and Swift. In short, we are now arriving at the “modern” lineup in which a “liberal” in religious matters tends to claim the support of science, while religious “conservatives” turn against science.23

The period from 1765 to the present is institutionally all of a piece. The continuity may not be apparent at first glance; Kant and the German Idealists seem epochs away from the themes of our own century. But Idealism was the intellectual counterpart of the academic revolution, the creation of the modern university centered on the graduate faculty of research professors, and that material base has expanded to dominate intellectual life ever since. Kant straddled two worlds: the patronage networks of the previous period, and the modern research university, which came into being, in part through Kant’s own agitation, with the generation of Kant’s successors. The time of the Romantics and Idealists was a transition to our contemporary situation. University-based intellectual networks had existed before, but never with such autonomy for researchers to define their own paths and such power to take over every sphere of intellectual life. The philosophical issues of the last 200 years have been those generated by the expansionary dynamic of that system.

FIGURE 12.2. NETWORK OF AMERICAN PHILOSOPHERS, 1800­1935: GERMAN IMPORTS, IDEALISTS, PRAGMATISTS

Pragmatism in the hands of Peirce was just the sort of Idealist block-universe that James had created his own pragmatism to replace. Peirce allowed himself to be attached retrospectively to the pragmatist movement, grasping at a few straws of fame amid his general failure

In his day Peirce struggled for recognition, and was overshadowed by much more clear-cut Idealists such as Royce, and on the other side by pragmatists such as James and Dewey

Experimental Psychology and the Pragmatist Movement

A cleaner transition from religious Idealism to pragmatism is exemplified in the career of Dewey. Unlike the scientist-hybrids James and Peirce, Dewey was an offshoot of theological connections and the core curriculum of the old religious colleges.

Even in their heyday, the pragmatists did not dominate American philosophy. By the 1920s, Dewey was famous, but largely in connection with progressive education, his application of pragmatism to the reform of the secondary school curriculum, overturning the classical subjects in favor of life adjustment.

Chapter 13: The Post-revolutionary Condition: Boundaries as Philosophical Puzzles

The upsurge of Idealist philosophies is the creativity of transition one expects when an organizational base changes. But what of the generations after the transition? The German universities, the first to undergo the revolution, were also the first to repudiate Idealism and settle down into academic routine. Nevertheless, German philosophy continued to be creative, even underwent new rounds of intellectual upheaval: materialist, positivist, logicist, phenomenological, existentialist, and others. We are used to seeing the German university system as a trendsetter, from the time of Feuerbach to the time of Carnap and Heidegger. This familiarity hides a theoretical problem.

FIGURE 13.3. REALIGNMENT OF THE NETWORKS IN THE GENERATION OF 1900

FIGURE 13.5. PHYSICISTS’ METHODOLOGICAL CONTROVERSIES

Chapter 14: Writers' Markets and Academic Networks: The French Connection

If academic disciplines have been the main driving force of modern philosophy, a rival if subsidiary base has also existed. This is the popular market for writing. Both are products of organizational revolutions: the reforms which removed the university from church domination and made it the center of autonomous research specialties, and the shift from patronage as the chief material support of writers’ careers. In Germany the two revolutions occurred at about the same time; for this reason, Germany has been the archetypal modern culture in the intellectual sphere, the center from which leading ideas have been exported elsewhere. In England and France, the shift to the open market for writers began a little earlier, while the academic revolution lagged several generations behind, giving a special skew to their intellectual cultures. Indeed in France, the German-style university structure combining research and teaching was never adopted, and the French organizational base for intellectual life has remained distinctive to the present time.

META-REFLECTIONS

The long-term tendency of an active intellectual community is to raise the level of abstraction and reflexivity.

The Future of Philosophy

It is often supposed that social constructivism undermines truth. If reality is socially constructed, there is no objectivity and no reality. I deny the conclusion. Social constructivism is sociological realism; and sociological realism carries with it a wide range of realist consequences.

NotebookLM notes

from (2025-06-14) Collaborative Groups Of Thinkers That Instigated Significant Technological And Political Changes context

Randall Collins's "The Sociology of Philosophies" offers a sweeping, macro-level theory of intellectual change, fundamentally aligning with Joseph Henrich's "The Secret of Our Success" by asserting that intellectual creativity and philosophical development are primarily products of social interaction and collective dynamics, not isolated individual genius. Collins posits that "networks are the actors on the intellectual stage", mirroring Henrich's "collective brains" concept.

Here's a summary of "The Sociology of Philosophies" from this perspective:

1. Ideas as Products of Social Networks, Not Isolated Minds: Collins directly challenges the notion of "singular geniuses" and "pure observers" as the source of intellectual breakthroughs. He argues that "ideas are not rooted in individuals" and that thinking itself is an "internalized conversation," deeply social in nature, motivated by emotional energies accumulated in social interactions. Individuals are seen as "nodes in networks of social interaction", "uniquely constituted by the flows of emotion and thought within us and through us". This parallels Henrich's argument that human success stems from "collective brains" and the ability to culturally learn and transmit information, rather than innate individual intelligence.

2. Mechanisms of Intellectual Development – The "Collective Brain" in Action:

• Interaction Rituals and Cultural Capital: Intellectual products, like the concept of "truth," gain their "sacred status" through "interaction rituals" where intellectuals gather for "serious talk". These rituals circulate "cultural capital"—ideas, paradigms, and methods—which fuels further creative work. This is analogous to how Henrich describes the accumulation and transmission of cultural know-how within a collective brain.
• Importance of Personal Ties and Circles: Creativity is concentrated in "chains of teachers and students" and "circles of significant contemporary intellectuals". Collins emphasizes "groups of friends, discussion partners, close-knit circles" as central to intellectual movements, such as German Idealism or Socrates' circle. The density and quality of these personal ties are directly correlated with intellectual eminence and influence. This directly supports Henrich's emphasis on social interconnectedness as crucial for the efficacy of a collective brain.
• Conflict as a Driver of Innovation ("Law of Small Numbers"): Intellectual development is driven by "conflict and alliance" within intellectual networks. Collins introduces the "law of small numbers," which states that any attention space can only sustain "three to six distinctive positions". This inherent competition forces intellectuals to maximize their distinctiveness, leading to "creativity of fractionation," or to "synthesis" as weakening positions form alliances. This dynamic of "rivalry" and "opposition" ensures that ideas are constantly refined and transformed, analogous to the cultural evolution in Henrich's work where successful modifications spread and less effective ones are filtered out.
• Abstraction and Reflexivity: A long-term tendency of active intellectual communities is to "raise the level of abstraction and reflexivity". This self-consciousness about intellectual operations and the "process of increasing reflexivity" is a key evolutionary path for "collective brains," leading to deeper questions and new conceptual levels.

3. Macro-Level Influences and Universality Across Civilizations: Collins proposes a "two-step causality": external sociopolitical and economic conditions (e.g., political pluralism, secularization of institutions) influence intellectual life indirectly by shaping the organizational bases (e.g., universities, monasteries, writers' markets) that support intellectual networks. These organizational changes then create opportunities for internal intellectual struggles and creative realignments. He demonstrates these dynamics across diverse civilizations—China, Greece, India, Japan, Islamic/Judaic, and European Christendom—arguing that the "basic ingredients of intellectual life" and "structural relationships within the intellectual community" are remarkably similar, despite differing content or starting points. This broad comparative scope reinforces the universality of the "collective brain" principle in human intellectual evolution.

4. The Redefinition of Creativity and "Sociological Realism": For Collins, "creativity is for the long haul", measured by how well ideas are transmitted across generations and hold the interest of future intellectual networks. What is considered "great" or "canonical" is a retrospective social construction, not an inherent quality of an isolated individual. He argues for "sociological realism," stating that recognizing the social construction of knowledge does not undermine truth or objectivity. Instead, it reveals the objective reality of social networks, their material bases, and the processes by which they generate knowledge and ideas. The very "deep troubles" that drive philosophical creativity are "discovered by the network, not merely contrived; they are obdurate and unmalleable", akin to objective problems that a collective brain collectively tackles.

In essence, "The Sociology of Philosophies" provides a detailed, historically rich, and structurally driven account of how human thought, particularly philosophical thought, emerges and evolves as a complex adaptive system, mirroring Henrich's "collective brains" by emphasizing social learning, transmission, networks, and the transformative power of interconnected minds in the face of intellectual challenges and opportunities.*