caused by science or any other novel rationality. Nor is science the ideology
of the Reformation, or indeed of the secularizers. We must beware of adopting
Protestant propaganda, or of projecting the alignment of secularizers and
scientizers which would predominate in the 1800s back into the intellectual
politics of earlier generations. The connection between the two great changes
is structural: the organizational breakdown of the church led theological intel-
lectuals on all sides to seek new alliances, energizing conflicts in astronomy
and mathematics and endowing them with general significance. For a time,
competition over technical innovation became a main focus of intellectual
attention. As techniques of rapid discovery built up, the newly prestigeful
mathematics and science became resources taken up by virtually all the factions
struggling over the shifting power base of the church.
One consequence of secularizing the means of intellectual production is that
philosophy entered the political arena as an independent actor. Courts had
been a source of intellectual patronage, alongside the church, throughout much
of history. What was new is that intellectuals were no longer merely praising
their patrons but shaping a new intellectual and political turf. One result was
that the intellectual network became the base of political factions in its own
right; we have here not merely political ideologies but intellectualized ideolo-
gies. Another result happened within the inward focus of the intellectual
networks: the topics of political concern became new pieces of the intellectual
attention space and were turned into specialized disciplines. Thus arose the
social sciences, further subdividing the old philosophical networks.
It is conventional to begin this history with Hobbes and Locke, but the
pattern first becomes visible in the Catholic sphere, with Vitoria, Suarez, and
the Spanish liberals who created international law. Modern political philoso-
phy emerged from the power relations of Church and state. Before it became
secularized, the turf was carved out on issues such as the reunification of the
church and the pacification of Europe, the subject of schemes ranging from
Bruno and Campanella to Leibniz. As the church became institutionally dis-
placed, political philosophies turned secular; every philosophical turn, includ-
ing Idealism and Utilitarianism, was pressed into duty. The lineage passes
directly from the German universities training theologians for the Prussian state
church, to the state-conquering movement of Marxian socialists. At the same
time, the structure of intellectual space is freed up for new disciplines. As we
see in Figures 10.1 through 14.2, the retroactive founders of virtually every
social science, from Hobbes and Smith to Comte and Wundt, Freud and
Durkheim, branch off from the main philosophical networks.
All three institutional patterns—science, secularization, social sciences—
give some grounds for interpreting philosophy as dying. For almost 400 years,
one or another faction in the intellectual wars has declared philosophy to be
nothing more than embryonic science, whether natural or social, perhaps with
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