takes at least that long for a significant change to take place in philosophical
premises; and it takes at least another generation or two to see if the change
has a structural impact on what later intellectuals can do. Sociologists can see
this in our own discipline: we are clear on who are the classic sociologists
(Weber, Durkheim, Mead, Simmel) of 1900–1930 or so, but the generation
immediately after them was just in the process of winnowing down those
names from a larger pool;^8 and in their own lifetimes and shortly after, their
reputations were fluctuating and sometimes rather localized and minor. A
creative work that receives attention for 5 or even 10 or 20 years may be only
a minor fluctuation, too brief to be picked up in the long-term perspective of
intellectual history. To get a sense of the magnitude of processes involved here,
one might attempt to estimate how much space the “postmodernist” philoso-
phers making a stir in the 1980s are likely to take up in the histories of
philosophy that might be written two centuries, or even two generations, from
now—and the same, of course, for today’s participants in the future histories
of sociology, or any other discipline. The sociological issue is to see the
relationship between the human foreground of any particular generation (and
indeed the still shorter periods of a few years or decades that make up the
focus of an intellectual’s immediate projects), and the vastly more impersonal,
ruthlessly structured sequence of generations that is the realm of creativity we
call historically “great.”
What Do Minor Philosophers Do?
This viewpoint may leave us with a nagging doubt. Are we dealing only with
fame, not with creativity itself? Is it not possible that there have been many
creative individuals, buried in obscurity, who have simply not received credit
for their advances? This is a powerful image because it sustains most of us
intellectuals, who rarely get the credit we think we deserve. And, like a
resurrection myth, it holds out a promise: retrospective discovery after our
deaths. Let us see.
The instances of posthumous fame that we do know are never pure rags-
to-riches stories. The most important case in Western philosophy is Spinoza,
whose vogue came, about 100 years after his death, as the favorite of one
faction in the Idealist controversies at the time of Kant. But Spinoza had a
certain notoriety in his own day; he was well enough situated to be visited and
plagiarized by Leibniz, and he began in the Cartesian network near its most
active center. Nietzsche struggled in obscurity for 20 years before becoming
famous during his last years of madness. Schopenhauer had a longer drought,
and receiving fame only when he was very old, and mostly after his death. But
both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer from early adulthood were well connected
Networks across the Generations • 61