tional structures which later turn out to be stagnant, such as the Han bureauc-
racy, foster creativity at the moment of transition when the networks recom-
bine cultural capital.
On the personal level, the stars of intellectual life tend to be those who are
directly involved in the organizational transformations, or are close in the
networks to the center of action. Such are the Neo-Confucians, emerging at
the moment of struggle over the contents of the Sung examination system; or
the Kyoto school, arising when Japanese professors gain control of the newly
imported university system. We shall see it again in the circle of German
Idealists who fought to construct the modern university.
Sixth: Because intellectual life is structured by oppositions, leading innova-
tors are often conservatives. In their own eyes they oppose the intellectual and
institutional changes of their time. Instance the ultra-reactionary Mimamsas,
setting off the wave of higher epistemological argument in India; the Sung
Neo-Confucians, arising to oppose the Wang An-shih reforms; or the waves
of Ancient Learning and National Learning in the Tokugawa, which bring
about a secularizing Japanese “Enlightenment.” Such intellectual movements
are nodes in a larger field of forces. In Europe we will see the creativity of
anti-modernists from Rousseau to Heidegger. Conservative opposition under
new conditions of heightened abstraction and reflexivity results in innovations
under a veneer of pseudo-conservatism.
Historical specificity is the result of combining general principles of social
causality; it is too little appreciated that specificity and generality are not
mutually incompatible, and that combinations of a fairly small set of causal
principles can generate a huge variety of historical realizations. When we add
the successive recombinations that can take place over time, the total number
of distinct historical paths becomes infinite. Sociological analysis is our x-ray
vision, allowing us to see the combinations which make up the specific configu-
rations of history as the arrangement of universal ingredients.
Using the sociological ingredients just set forth, we could go on to review
how combinations of social conditions have constructed the historical unique-
ness of Indian, Chinese, Japanese—and indeed European—philosophies. To
pursue this argument would take us to background conditions of geopolitics
and political economy, the place of monasticism and the strength of govern-
ment bureaucracy, conditions which varied widely among the parts of the
world. Even on this level the histories of social structures are not so diver-
gent as Western-centered narratives—including Max Weber’s—have supposed.
Viewed in the perspective of the long run, China and Japan worked out the
variants on a set of institutional ingredients; the combination of Buddhist
monasticism with a balance between centralized bureaucracy and decentraliz-
ing feudalism eventually led to the takeoff of the capitalist market, and to
Conclusions: The Ingredients of Intellectual Life^ •^381