partisan judgment by an active participant. Others who greatly impressed their
contemporaries were James Martineau (Merz, [1904–1912] 1965: 4:376),
Clifford, and Sir William Hamilton, as well as iconoclasts such as D. F. Strauss,
Büchner, and Buckle. Of course, given the seesaw rivalry between adjacent
generations, it is not surprising that thinkers who are very influential in the
long run go through a reputational trough a generation or two after their death.
Hegel’s reputation was at its nadir in the 1850s, before the wave of neo-
Hegelian revivals. Even Kant, whose fame was never seriously eclipsed once
established in the late 1780s, was regarded as outmoded by his immediate
successors.^2 Aristotle’s reputation, like Mencius’, declined markedly in a few
generations and rose to towering heights only in the very long run. Scientists
are not immune; Darwin was rather on the outs of his profession around 1910
and only recovered his preeminence in the 1930s (Degler, 1991).
This is not to say that everyone whose reputation dips after his or her death
will be revived still later; the law of small numbers makes it certain that most
of the big names of the early twentieth century will fade into minor ones in
the twenty-first century and thereafter. It is important to discipline ourselves
not to make this a game of “which heroic individual will survive.” The theme
of my sociological argument is that creativity is not a one-shot event, but a
process stretching around the persons in whom it manifests itself, backwards,
sideways, and forwards from the individuals whose names are the totemic
emblems thrown up by their networks. It is intergenerational networks dividing
up attention space that make intellectual history in every sense. The creativity
of the thinkers of our own century is literally not fully created yet.
It would be safer to bring my analysis to a close around 1865. But I
continue it nevertheless two generations forward, even as the haze of living
partisanship closes in. The period of the 1930s (with a slightly later continu-
ation of the same cast of characters) is just now coming into a calmer sight.
The Vienna Circle and the existentialists, shrouded in polemic both in their
own day and in the decades immediately following, are becoming subjects of
historical study; the sediments are settling as the stream passes on. The socio-
logical structures of early 1900s intellectuals are familiar enough: philosophers
continue to group into rival circles, to divide up the attention space under the
law of small numbers; there is the same clustering of the eminent with one
another that we saw in China and Greece; the intergenerational chains of
teachers and pupils run right down through Frege and Russell to Wittgenstein,
and from the Vienna Circle to Quine (who also descends from Royce through
C. I. Lewis), or from Husserl to Heidegger to Marcuse. Whatever the future
historical significance of these last named, the chains at the center of the
attention space are still there. And so my concluding chapter will run out in
Intellectuals Take Control: The University Revolution^ •^621