comparisons are not entirely lacking; scholars such as Braudel, Needham,
McNeill, and Abu-Lughod have continued to widen East-West perspectives,
and Malraux opened the doors of a “museum without walls” of world art.
Although contemporary Western scholars are often hedged in by historicist
particularism, Asian scholars such as Shigeru Nakayama and Hajime Naka-
mura have made bold efforts at trans-parochial history from the other side.
Further on in the twenty-first century, when economic linkage and intermigra-
tion will indeed produce a common world culture, educated people will likely
be embarrassed to know so little about the intellectual history of other parts
of the world than their own.
But how to deal with the practical problem? To be a literate person today
is like living in the library of Jorge Luis Borges, where near-infinite corridors
of books contain the universe but we lack a key to their contents. My strategy
has been to focus on intellectual networks: the social links among those
thinkers whose ideas have been passed along in later generations. I have chosen
philosophers because theirs is the archetypal intellectual role, which goes back
several thousand years in each of the world civilizations, and from which have
branched off most of the specialized disciplines. My first labor has been to
assemble such networks for China, India, Japan, Greece, the Islamic world,
medieval Christendom, and modern Europe, over very long periods of time.
Assembling these networks has become a little history of its own; I have been
working on some parts of this project for over 25 years.
The networks are a mnemonic device, a way to keep track of the expanses
of history outside the few places that are familiar to us all. The networks are
also the basis of a theory; I am arguing that if one can understand the principles
that determine intellectual networks, one has a causal explanation of ideas and
their changes. In a very strong sense, networks are the actors on the intellectual
stage. Networks are the pattern of linkage among the micro-situations in which
we live; the sociology of networks penetrates deeply into the very shapes of
our thought. The network dynamics of intellectual communities provides an
internal sociology of ideas, taking us beyond the reductionism of traditional
externalist sociology. The historical dynamics of social identities in networks,
too, casts the question of canonicity in another light. We need not fall into a
Platonism of eternal essences to avoid the polemical simplification of reputation
to sociopolitical dominance; there is a social construction of eminence which
does justice to the inner processes of intellectual life.
I have attempted to render names of historical places and persons in their
most accessible forms. Chinese names are romanized following the Wade-Giles
conventions. Indian names are generally given in their most familiar Sanskrit
forms and, like Greek, Persian, Arabic, and Japanese names, are printed here
xviii • Preface