which, far from being self-undermining, is self-exemplifying and self-reinforc-
ing. The argument is best made at the end of the book, in the Epilogue, after
the full weight of the historical networks has been encountered.
The objection from the alleged skeptical or self-undermining consequences
of the sociology of ideas is an epistemological objection. A different kind of
objection is a moral one: that the sociology of ideas, with its general principles
of social causation, is anti-humanistic. Individuals are nodes in networks of
social interaction, human bodies where emotional energies accumulate and
streams of idea-symbols crystallize into coalitions in the mind. Doesn’t this
denigrate us, reducing our lived experience to epiphenomena and our hard-
fought human dignity to the totalitarian imposition of the group? I put the
point harshly in order to deny that any such consequences follow.
Do we not have agency? It is a matter of analytical perspective. Agency is
in part a term for designating the primitives of sociological explanation, in part
a code word for free will. Do not human beings make efforts, strain every
nerve or let themselves go lax, make decisions or evade them? Such experiences
clearly exist; they are part of micro-situational reality, the flow of human life.
I deny only that the analysis should stop here. One has the experience of will
power; it varies, it comes and goes. Where does it come from? How do you
will to will? That chain of regress comes to an end in a very few links. The
same can be said about thinking. Are not one’s thoughts one’s own? Of course
they are; yet why do they come into one’s head at a certain moment, or flow
out upon one’s lips or beneath one’s fingers in a certain sequence of spoken or
written words? These are not unanswerable questions if one has a micro-so-
ciological theory of thinking. To explain thinking is not to deny that thinking
exists, any more than to explain culture is to deny that culture exists. Culture,
on a macro-level, is the medium in which we move, just as thought and feeling
are the medium of micro-local experience in our own conscious bodies. Neither
of these is an end point, cut off by a barrier to further analysis.
To continue on, to understand how our emotions and thoughts are flows
in sociological networks, does not deny our human condition. One can perceive
all these levels simultaneously. You and I are thus, as particular individuals,
with all our uniqueness, and yet uniquely constituted by the flows of emotion
and thought within us and through us. The tension between the particular and
local, and the surrounding links which are the social, and which define our
very particularity: this is the human condition.
To pursue social causation everywhere, without privileged exemptions, does
not mean that history is a rigid sequence. The social structure of the intellectual
world, the topic of this book, is an ongoing struggle among chains of persons,
charged up with emotional energy and cultural capital, to fill a small number
of centers of attention. These focal points, which make up the cores of the
14 •^ Introduction