important intellectuals (though fewer) are isolated in time, without contempo-
raries of stature who can act as structural rivals. Besides these empirical
objections, there is a more basic matter of principle. Creative intellectuals are
generally introverts, not extroverts. Intellectual creativity is done not in group
situations but by working alone, usually for many hours of the day. The
contradiction is only apparent. Intellectual groups, master-pupil chains, and
contemporaneous rivalries together make up a structured field of forces within
which intellectual activity takes place. And there is a pathway from such social
structures into the inner experience of the individual’s mind. The group is
present in consciousness even when the individual is alone: for individuals who
are the creators of historically significant ideas, it is this intellectual community
which is paramount precisely when he or she is alone. A human mind, a train
of thinking in a particular body, is constituted by one’s personal history in a
chain of social encounters. For intellectuals, these are special kinds of social
chains, and therefore special kinds of minds.
The sociology of mind is not a theory of how intellectuals are affected by
“non-intellectual motives.” To frame the question in this way is to assume that
thinking normally takes places independently, in a pristine realm driven by
nothing but itself. But thinking would not be possible at all if we were not
social; we would have no words, no abstract ideas, and no energy for anything
outside of immediate sensuality. The lesson of Chapter 1 is that thinking
consists in making “coalitions in the mind,” internalized from social networks,
motivated by the emotional energies of social interactions. My concern is not
with “non-intellectual motives” but to show what intellectual motives are.
That ideas are not rooted in individuals is hard to accept because it seems
to offend against a key epistemological point. Here the question is analytically
distinct from the propensity to worship intellectual heroes. It is assumed that
objective truth itself depends on the existence of a pure observer or thinker,
untrammeled by anything but insight into truth. The notion is that the social
is necessarily a distortion, an alien intrusion in epistemology; if ideas are
determined by social interactions, then they cannot be determined by truth.
This objection comes so naturally that it is hard to think except within this
dichotomy: either there is truth which is independent of society, or truth is
social and therefore not objectively true. There are two prejudices here. One
is the assumption that constructing an idealized individual, outside of the
social, provides a vantage point that social networks cannot provide just as
well. On the contrary: there is even more difficulty in connecting such a
disembodied individual to the world than there is in connecting a social group
to the world, since a group is already to some degree extended in the world
of time and space.
The second prejudice or tacit assumption is that the criterion of truth exists
Introduction^ •^7