The Sociology of Philosophies

(Wang) #1

intellectual world, are periodically rearranged; there is a limited amount of
attention that can be distributed through the total intellectual network, but
who and what is in those nodes fluctuates as old intellectual movements fade
out and new ones begin. These nodes in the attention space are crescive,
emergent; starting with small advantages among the first movers, they accel-
erate past thresholds, cumulatively monopolizing attention at the same time
that attention is drained away from alternative nodes. The identities that we
call intellectual personalities, great thinkers if they are energized by the crescive
moment of dominant nodes of attention, lesser thinkers or indeed no one of
note if they are not so energized, are not fixed. It is precisely because the social
structure of intellectual attention is fluidly emergent that we cannot reify
individuals, heroizing the agent as if each one were a fixed point of will power
and conscious insight who enters the fray but is no more than dusted by it at
the edge of one’s psychic skin. This reified individuality can be seen only in the
retrospective mode, starting from the personalities defined by known ending
points and projecting them backwards as if the end point had caused the career.
My sociological task is just the opposite: to see through intellectual history to
the network of links and energies that shaped its emergence in time.
The first three chapters present the general theory. Chapter 1 lays out the
theory of interaction ritual chains, which is the micro-core of the argument for
the social predictability of intellectuals’ thinking. Chapter 2 gives a theory of
the network structure which determines the location of creativity, and com-
pares the evidence of networks of Chinese and Greek philosophers over several
dozens of generations. The subsequent chapters confront the theory with
long-term segments of these intellectual networks and those of India, Japan,
the medieval Islamic, Jewish, and Christian worlds, and the European West
through the 1930s. Each chapter highlights a particular analytical theme. The
chapters need not be read in any particular sequence, although Chapter 3, on
ancient Greece, presents some central principles that figure in what follows. A
brief summary of the analytical model is given in “Conclusions to Part I: The
Ingredients of Intellectual Life.” Chapter 15 presents the conclusions of the
entire analysis in a sketch of the pathways along which intellectuals through
their debates drive the sequence of ideas during long periods of time. The reader
may find it useful as a road map of the book. The Epilogue draws epistemo-
logical conclusions from the whole argument.


Introduction^ •^15
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