religious secularization—a China-Japan sequence which parallels on separate
tracks the Christian dynamic culminating in modern secular capitalist Europe.
Indian history combines the ingredients in a rather different way, although
the intellectual results are more similar to European philosophy than the
Chinese are. Structural analysis enables us to pick out some turning points. It
is likely that without the Mogul conquest in the 1500s and the timing of its
disintegration, which left the way open to European intrusion, Indian intellec-
tual life would have continued along the pathways of highly technical abstrac-
tion already reached by its networks.
Before moving on to the second part of this book, we already have the
theoretical tools in hand for understanding the social dynamics of Western
intellectuals. That is not to say that there is nothing analytically new to address
in the West. Islam and European Christendom are second-order civilizations,
in the sense that their intellectual networks started out with cultural capital
imported from an ancient civilization, Greece. Once they threw off the subser-
vience that comes with being an idea importer, they were able to launch
themselves on a level of abstraction and reflexivity already built up in the
previous networks. But this pattern is not unique to the West; China had a
period of dependence on idea imports from India, and Japan was similarly
dependent on China. After about 1765, however, European networks added
levels of reflexive self-analysis on the nature of conceptual knowledge which
are distinctive in world philosophy. This is connected with two innovations in
intellectual life.
One is that an offshoot emerged from philosophical networks in the 1600s,
resulting in a version of intellectual life that escaped from the law of small
numbers. This was not the birth of natural science, which had existed in many
places around the world, but a distinctive form of social organization which I
shall call rapid-discovery science. Not that scientists’ networks now displaced
philosophers’ networks; rather, they added another network alongside the
older intellectual genealogy—indeed, two such networks, one of scientific and
mathematical researchers, and in symbiosis with it a second network compris-
ing genealogies of machines and techniques which generated an ongoing stream
of new phenomena for scientific research. Rapid-discovery science became a
kind of cyborg network that challenged European philosophers, who remained
locked in the oppositional dynamics of the law of small numbers. The result
was not the disappearance of philosophy into science, but a new problem in
philosophical space which spurred reconceptualization on a higher level of
reflexivity.
The second structural innovation of the West was the research university,
an organizational revolution in the expanding educational system which put
philosophers, for the first time in history, in control of their own material base.
382 •^ Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths