CHAPTER 1
£Coalitions in the Mind
Intellectuals are people who produce decontextualized ideas. These ideas are
meant to be true or significant apart from any locality, and apart from anyone
concretely putting them into practice. A mathematical formula claims to be
true in and of itself, whether or not it is useful, and apart from whoever believes
it. A work of literature, or of history, claims the same sort of status, insofar
as it is conceived as art or scholarship: part of a realm that is higher, more
valid, less constrained by particular occasions of human action than ordinary
kinds of thoughts and things. Philosophy has the peculiarity of periodically
shifting its own grounds, but always in the direction of claiming or at least
seeking the standpoint of greatest generality and importance. This continues
to be the case when the content of philosophy is to assert that everything is
transient, historically situated, of local value only; for the relativistic statement
itself is asserted as if it were valid. This is an old conundrum of the skeptical
tradition, discussed at great length in Hellenistic philosophy. Skeptics in at-
tempting to avoid making assertions implicitly stand on a meta-distinction
among levels of assertion of varying force. This illustrates the sociological point
admirably, for only the intellectual community has the kind of detachment
from ordinary concerns in which statements of this sort are meaningful.
Intellectual products are felt, at least by their creators and consumers, to
belong to a realm which is peculiarly elevated. They are part of Durkheim’s
“la vie sérieuse.” We can recognize them as sacred objects in the strongest
sense; they inhabit the same realm, make the same claims to ultimate reality,
as religion. “Truth” is the reigning sacred object of the scholarly community,
as “art” is for literary/artistic communities; these are simultaneously their
highest cognitive and moral categories, the locus of highest value, by which all
else is judged. As Bloor (1976) has pointed out about mathematics, intellectual
truth has all the characteristics Durkheim stated for the sacred objects of
religion: transcending individuals, objective, constraining, demanding respect.
What gives particular ideas and texts this sacred status? It is possible to
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