periods of intellectual life, those tumultuous golden ages of simultaneous
innovations, occur when several rival circles intersect at a few metropoles of
intellectual attention and debate. The ancient Chinese philosophers circulating
among the four great centers of court patronage in the late Warring States; or
the mahavihara at Nalanda where all the Buddhist sects debated and Hindu
thinkers joined in cosmopolitan shifts from camp to camp: these are archetypes
for Athens and Alexandria, Baghdad and Basra, Paris and Oxford, Weimar
and Berlin, Trinity College Cambridge and Cambridge Massachusetts.
Fourth: The law of small numbers sets upper and lower limits to these
oppositions. The number of contemporaneous creative schools successfully
propagating their ideas across the generations is between three and six, a
recurrent pattern for focal nodes in intellectual attention space.
Several corollaries follow. When external conditions enforce a single ortho-
doxy (as in the heavy hand of official bureaucracy in the Han dynasty, or again
in the Ming examination system), creativity dries up; the stasis of Hindu
philosophy was constructed after Mogul and British conquests drove Hindu
thinkers into a monolithic defensive coalition. At the upper end of the scale,
when the law of small numbers is violated by too many rival positions, as in
the period of Upanishadic and heterodox sages at the time of the Buddha,
skeptics attempt to reduce the cacophony by a stance of epistemological plague
on all houses, and synthesizers emerge who reduce the number of contenders
by constructing systems.
Fifth: The law of small numbers structures dynamics over time, connect-
ing the outer conditions of social conflict with the inner shifts in the net-
works which produce ideas. Causality is two-step. First, political and economic
changes bring ascendancy or decline of the material institutions which support
intellectuals; religions, monasteries, schools, publishing markets rise and fall
with these external forces. Intellectuals then readjust to fill the space available
to them under the law of small numbers. Expanding positions split into rival
philosophies because they have more slots in the attention space. On the losing
side, weakening schools amalgamate into defensive alliances, even among
former enemies. Winners and losers are reciprocals of each other. In the history
of India, there are the successive splits and recombinations of Vedic, Buddhist,
Hindu, Advaita Vedanta, and Vaishnava ascendancies and declines. In China,
splits and recombinations take place among pre-Han philosophies, the Bud-
dhist schools imported from India, the Zen schools, and the Neo-Confucians,
like the opening and closing of a fan.
Two further corollaries follow. Creativity does not happen only during the
happy times of material prosperity; there is creativity in the moments of closing
down, sometimes the most memorable creativity, because it takes the form of
crowning syntheses at a high level of reflexive awareness. And even organiza-380 •^ Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths