13.1 and 13.2, and 13.8, and 14.1). These are circles in a strong sense: groups
which regularly meet, in which everyone knows everyone else. In the network
figures they are designated by an enclosed border within the network. They
are self-conscious; typically they have a name, as well as allies and often
enemies on the outside; usually they have a program and issue their manifesto.
They are the material core of intellectual movements; in the terminology of
modern social movement theory, they are SMOs, social movement organiza-
tions. They are the nodes at the center of networks, recruiting and publicizing
and thereby building waves of creative energy in intellectual attention space.
For the time when intellectual life moved outside the church and the
universities, circles provided the indispensable stage and the backstage machin-
ery of theater. In our two-step model, rearranging the material bases of intel-
lectual production makes possible new networks and sets off intellectual re-
alignment. The key circles of modern Europe are those which reorganized the
means of communication; they set up networks of correspondence and created
the first intellectual periodicals. The intellectual networks of the 1600s were
full of diplomats, refugees, and commercial travelers; in the absence of a postal
system, they controlled the key resource for organizing a truly cosmopolitan
network, making possible the meta-circle of circles which emerged in this
period. Later in the century the dominant circles arose where they could find
new bases of collective material support: academies which did not depend on
individual patronage relations. Still later such circles captured university posi-
tions or formed out of student groups, although the shift back into the
university base usually replaced circles with academic lineages. Groups arise
where they control a special niche in the means of intellectual production. Each
new phase in the development of the publications business tends to have
associated with it a famous intellectual circle. In tracing these circles we are
tracing the major episodes in reorganizing the bases of intellectual production.^1
In 1623 from his monastic cell in Paris, Mersenne formed a circle of
correspondence, working closely with Gassendi and connecting to Kepler,
Galileo, Campanella, Descartes, Hobbes, Torricelli, Fermat, and other mathe-
maticians and scientific researchers of the time. Mersenne was the organiza-
tional leader; Descartes emerged as the intellectual leader whose works became
the movement’s emblem and program statement. Mersenne’s circle lasted until
1648; in 1657 its survivors began regular meetings at the houses of wealthy
patrons, Montmor and the Cartesian leader Rohault. This circle too served as
a clearing house of letters announcing scientific and mathematical discoveries,
and it made available Descartes’s unpublished manuscripts to Malebranche and
Leibniz.^2 Another temporary visitor was Leibniz himself, who went on to
organize the first scientific journal in Germany, Acta Eruditorum, in 1682, and
the academies at Berlin and St. Petersburg; together these provided the base
for much of mathematics in the next century.
528 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Western Paths