tellectual action for which they became famous. This is not to say that the
most famous philosophers were typically the organizers of these groups. Stud-
ies of similar intellectual groups in recent fields show that there is usually a
division between an organizational leader who builds the material underpin-
nings and an intellectual leader who makes its doctrine famous (Mullins, 1973;
Griffith and Mullins, 1972). This is a division of labor which describes the
relation between Mersenne and Descartes, or between Bauer and Marx. Some
of the greatest philosophers are connected to multiple circles, members of none;
especially in the late 1600s, we see in such network positions Spinoza, Leibniz,
Locke, and Bayle, along with the great freelancing scientists Newton and
Huygens. The greatest creativity consists in making new conceptual combina-
tions, playing off the oppositions of existing groups, and laying down new
alliances that become institutionalized in the groups of the immediate future.
Circles are the accumulators of attention and the resonators of emotional
energy; the sparks which fly between them are the thoughts of persons situated
at the nodes where the networks intersect.^4
The question lingers: Why these circles rather than others? There were
many more salons and discussion groups than these eminent 15; academies
existed in every provincial town in pre-Revolutionary France, just as in the
following century students and lecturers gathered for talking as well as drink-
ing in every Germany university town and in many a British college. Most of
these groups were patterned on earlier and more famous ones, the pioneers
who located a new intellectual base. Even where the circles were all on the
same footing materially, there was advantage in being the first or nearly first
on the scene; where several early networks began to form, the first to acquire
a reputation for its arguments could build an accelerating lead, attracting
recruits and pulling away from the others. Whether composed of circles or of
individuals, the intellectual world is constructed on a limited focus of attention,
a space that allows only a small number to be successful.Philosophical Connections of the Scientific Revolution
The Emergence of Rapid-Discovery Science
Why are philosophical networks implicated in scientific creativity? To solve
this problem, we need to answer two related questions. First, what is the
difference between the social organization of science before and after the
scientific revolution? And second, what is the sociological difference between
science and philosophy?
The scientific revolution was not the emergence of science. Observational
and calculational knowledge existed in all of the major world regions before532 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Western Paths