piricism, nor even experimentation per se, as historical comparisons will show.
The social change in the intellectual world consists in focusing attention on a
rapidly moving research front; and this in turn comes from technologizing the
research front. The key here is not so much the material research equipment
as, more broadly, the invention of technique, first in mathematics, then in
empirical research. The new technique consists in procedures which can be
manipulated to produce new discoveries at the same time that it makes results
repeatable and hence exportable in standardized forms to other locations. It is
a machinery for making discoveries, a machinery that breeds and cross-breeds
into new techniques which further accelerate the speed of innovation. A net-
work of techniques and machines now comes into symbiosis with the inter-
generational network of human intellectuals. Here is a genuine revolution in
the inner organization of the intellectual world, overthrowing the law of small
numbers which keeps the philosophical community fractionated. There now
appears an alternative organization focused on rapid discovery which leaves a
trail of consensus behind.
- There is another, very different structural change in the bases of intel-
lectual life: displacement of the church from control of the central means of
intellectual production. Secularization is long-term and goes through many
twists and turns. It is by no means reducible to the Protestant Reformation; it
had already begun with the courtiers and lay officials of the late Middle Ages.
Through the mid-1600s its intellectual center of gravity was the politics of the
Catholic Church under the Spanish and French monarchies, the matrix for a
surge of Catholic religious movements—Jesuits, Jansenists, Oratorians—whose
intersection undergirds the new networks. Political maneuver among rival
Catholic states, and the convoluted diplomacy of the religious wars, opens up
a new space for Jews and religious cosmopolitans, for Deists, and for outright
cynics and secularizers. The Protestants are more theologically particularistic;
their philosophical developments hinge on contact with the cosmopolitan
network to the Catholic side. The most significant philosophies in the Protes-
tant lands come later, with the stalemate of religious mobilization and the
emergence of toleration. Still later is yet another wave of institutional seculari-
zation. In Chapter 11 I examine the struggle to secularize the educational
system inherited from the medieval church. This is the university revolution,
set off in Germany around 1800 and gradually adopted in all the other leading
school systems. There are many stages of intellectual reorganization in response
to these changes in the religious-secular base; the alliances, halfway houses,
militancies, reactions, and recombinations of positions drive much of the
philosophical creativity from 1600 through the early 1900s.
These two structural changes—the revolution in math and science and
secularization—are analytically distinct. Secularization represents a long-term
shift in the organizational power of the church, and is not fundamentally
524 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Western Paths