the same thing as the politics of gaining power in the state, or the politics of
men and women in their homes or sexual encounters. Winning the focus of
attention within the contests among philosophers is done with specifically
intellectual resources, which are social resources specific to intellectual net-
works. There is abundant historical evidence that when players in this arena
try to win their way solely with the weapons of external politics, they win the
battle at the cost of their intellectual reputations in the long-term historical
community. These are not the same game; and at those times in history when
one game reduces to another, the intellectual game does not so much give in
as disappear, to reappear only when an inner space becomes available for it
again. Without an internal structure of intellectual networks generating their
own matrix of arguments, there are no ideological effects on philosophy; we
find only lay ideologies, crude and simple.
It is fashionable in some quarters to declare that there are no distinctions
among internal and external, between micro and macro, the local and the
far-flung and long-lasting. What gives force to such claims is that micro and
macro, local and distant, are indeed connected; the macro is built out of chains
of micro-encounters in local situations, and in some respects there is analytical
primacy in the local rituals which constitute momentary reality in those chains,
and charge up the symbols with significance which makes it possible for
humans to maintain what continuity they can from one micro-local situation
to another. This is not the same thing as dissolving all such concepts; one
cannot formulate the relations between the micro-situational and the trans-lo-
cal if one lacks concepts with which to designate them. Any sociology which
attempts to abolish such terms soon finds itself smuggling the distinctions back
in under other words.
Postmodernism is a radicalization of the sociology of ideas, under the
impetus to some extent of disillusioned ex-Marxism, to some extent of the
militant ideologies of newer social movements. In the academic world, its
alliances with specialized departments of literary and cultural studies tend to
reduce the explanatory focus of sociological theory. These several layers of
intellectual politics do not make a sociology of philosophies impossible. They
do make it one of a family of warring cousins; but conflict in intergenerational
lineages is nothing anomalous; indeed, it is a main pattern of intellectual
history.
If there is a kinship among all the branches of the sociology of ideas, does
that mean that my sociology of philosophies, like all its kin, is reflexively
self-undermining? Some branches of the family embrace the paradox willingly
or even enthusiastically; others reject it. My own stance is that the sociology
of philosophies is not a self-undermining skepticism or relativism; that it has
definite historical contours, as well as a general theory of intellectual networks
Introduction^ •^13