CHAPTER 14
£Writers’ Markets and Academic Networks:
The French Connection
If academic disciplines have been the main driving force of modern philosophy,
a rival if subsidiary base has also existed. This is the popular market for
writing. Both are products of organizational revolutions: the reforms which
removed the university from church domination and made it the center of
autonomous research specialties, and the shift from patronage as the chief
material support of writers’ careers. In Germany the two revolutions occurred
at about the same time; for this reason, Germany has been the archetypal
modern culture in the intellectual sphere, the center from which leading ideas
have been exported elsewhere. In England and France, the shift to the open
market for writers began a little earlier, while the academic revolution lagged
several generations behind, giving a special skew to their intellectual cultures.
Indeed in France, the German-style university structure combining research and
teaching was never adopted, and the French organizational base for intellectual
life has remained distinctive to the present time.
Philosophy is the discipline which explores the most abstract portion of
intellectual space; therefore the autonomous and inwardly oriented networks
of the university, wherever they have existed, have usually dominated the
philosophical attention space over the products of the commercial marketplace.
Nevertheless, the writers’ market has created some unique niches for intellec-
tual production, and these in turn have made possible various interplays and
blends with academic philosophy. During the patronage era which preceded
the writers’ market, both literary and nonfiction writing was generally set apart
from abstract philosophy. In the networks we have examined throughout this
work, abstract philosophy was usually produced by professional teachers,
monks and priests, in organizational structures turned inward and away from
the ordinary world. In contrast, writers’ networks are more closely connected
to, even embedded in, the status order of society, and their cultural content is
much closer to lay concerns of class-appropriate entertainment, topical moral-
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