- The term is Pierre Bourdieu’s ([1979] 1984; Bourdieu and Passeron, [1970] 1977).
There are some similarities between my approach and Bourdieu’s. Both of our
works derive from empirical studies of education’s effects on stratification and of
the inflationary market for educational credentials. In early work (Collins, 1971)
I used the term status group culture for what I now call cultural capital. I disagree
with Bourdieu’s principle that the intellectual field is homologous to the social space
of non-intellectuals, however; the dynamics of struggle over the intellectual space
is shaped in a distinctive way by the law of small numbers; and the cultural capital
specific to the forefront of intellectual competition is not the cultural capital of
educated persons generally, and it is not directly transposable with economic
capital, in either direction. - The short-term, disruptive emotions are best explained as departures from a
baseline of emotional energy, and thus are affected by the EE trajectory at any
particular time. A full theory of emotions must include both levels. See Collins
(1990); and on the sociology of emotions more generally, Kemper (1990); Scheff
(1990). - A writing style is the precipitate of a particular kind of emotional energy flow. A
crabbed and involuted style, full of false starts and shaky transitions, comes from
a weak and hesitant EE flow. The writer who hides the speaker’s voice behind an
unbroken wall of abstractions and technicalities is clinging to his or her identity
inside the community of intellectual specialists, not at its creative core but near
enough the outer boundary to be concerned mainly with marking oneself off from
the lay world of non-specialists outside. The distinctive styles of successful intel-
lectuals, too, are tracks of their dominant EE flows. The sonorous periods of
Gibbon bespeak his membership in a world where leading writers could be parlia-
mentary orators, and belonged to an aristocracy of pomp and circumstance. The
social sources of Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s ultra-confident styles are analyzed in
Chapter 13. - In Sung China, there are the Ch’eng brothers, studying and discussing together
from an early age, then spearheading the Neo-Confucian movement. In France of
the late 1920s, there was the student circle of future literary and philosophical
eminences Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Nizan, Raymond Aron, Simone de Beauvoir, and
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Cohen-Solal, 1987: 74–75). In London of the early 1850s,
a youthful group of friends comprised Herbert Spencer, T. H. Huxley, Mary Ann
Evans (George Eliot), John Tyndall, and G. H. Lewes, their important creativity
still in the future. There was the youthful friendship of Marx and Heine, or for
that matter Marx and Engels. Centuries earlier we find the schoolmates Descartes
and Mersenne. This structure seems to burst forth across various fields of creativity,
again suggesting that what is being circulated is not so much cultural capital as
emotional energy. We could add the friendship of future novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald,
critic Edmund Wilson, and poet John Peale Bishop during their student days at
Princeton University (Mizener, 1959: 36–55); or the youthful Bloomsbury circle
which nurtured the incipient creativity across a range of literary, artistic, and
scholarly fields that became famed as the work of Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey,
John Maynard Keynes, and others (Bell, 1972).
948 •^ Notes to Pages 29–37