APPENDIX 2
£The Incompleteness of
Our Historical Picture
Historical sources, especially for remote periods, are often fragmentary, and
the whole enterprise of reconstructing intellectual communities may seem like
looking for landmarks in the mist. But history itself was not mist but structure,
however it may sometimes seem to us trying to catch a glimpse in the distance.
For all the failings and biases of our sources, I am nevertheless moderately
confident of having included most of the creative philosophers in my pool,
with a fair sense of the more routine or ephemeral intellectuals who made up
the surrounding communities. For one slice of history, for example, Liu Hsin’s
catalogue of the imperial library ca. 20 b.c.e. gave a total of 198 authors (53
classified as ju, or “scholars”—i.e., Confucians—37 as “Taoist,” 21 Yin-Yang,
10 Legalist, 6 Mohist, 7 Logicians, 64 others; Knoblock, 1988: 65–66). About
a quarter of these books survive today. My networks for this period of ancient
China, covering about 15 generations, include some 75 names, something more
than one third of those who had enough distinction for their works to last that
long.
More complete historical data (and more patience in working through the
details of what is available) could add hundreds more figures to the kinds of
networks I have presented; in an ideal situation of unlimited data, we might
imagine charting the networks among all active intellectuals (maybe on the
order of thousands in some epochs). But as Price ([1963] 1986: 69, 107–108,
257) has demonstrated for modern citation and publication data (extending
back to scientists of the 1600s), the proportion of publications by and citations
to (and hence the influence of) intellectuals falls off rapidly as one leaves the
central core. This kind of work would add only to the tails of the distribution,
further demonstrating the disproportionate success of the tiny sector at the
center. Many figures lapsed into oblivion because they were indeed minor.
For these reasons I am doubtful that new archaeological discoveries would
drastically revise our view of the main events of intellectual history. To be sure,
we would love to have additional information. Who wrote the Tao Te Ching,
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