Intellectual Networks

Randall Collins's Sociology of Philosophers

Marcel Duchamp, “Nework of Stoppages,” 1914

The group is present in consciousness even when the individual is alone: for individuals who are the creators of historically significant ideas, it is this intellectual community which is paramount precisely when he or she is alone. A human mind, a train of thinking in a particular body, is constituted by one’s personal history in a chain of social encounters.

Randall Collins

Sociology and / or Aesthetics

It’s hard to be a sociologically inclined aesthete. Today, sociology and aesthetics often appear in opposition, enemies facing off on the intellectual battlefield. On the one side, individualism, preferably on the heroic scale, and a sharply graded sense of artistic quality; on the other, collectivist accounts of meaning and the reduction of art to mere ambient culture. On the one side, great men and great books, rising like Mount Parnassus above the level plain of humanity; on the other, the mundane, inglorious forces of history that encompass us all and in which we all participate. The muses versus the market; idealism versus materialism; right versus left.

In reality, of course, most of us still occupy some kind of middle ground. We’re dazzled by works of genius and interested in the conditions in which they were made. The closer we are to novels or plays or poems, the more easily we can see both at once: ask a novelist about his or her fellow writers, and you’re unlikely to remain in the pristine world of ideas for very long.

Usually, our movement between questions of aesthetics and questions of social or biographical history is pragmatic, driven by the imperatives of a particular mode of discussion or our own curiosities. “I don’t want to just read about a line from ‘The Bridge,’” a friend of mine, a poet, remarked the other day. “I want to know what Hart Crane was having for lunch the day he wrote it.”

But it’s also possible take a more theoretical approach to the intersection literary quality and social history.¹ After all, there’s sociology of elites² as well as sociology of the masses; sociology of institutions and networks as well as sociology of populations and classes. By all rights, it should be possible to write a sociology of intellectual achievement.

The Sociology of Philosophies

That’s precisely what Randall Collins set out to do in his magnum opus (emphasis on magnum) The Sociology of Philosophies, first published in 1998. Collins is a former president of the American Sociological Association, but he’s also a brilliantly idiosyncratic scholar. His books touch on everything from violence to ritual interactions to credentialization, moving between topics and methods with the elegant touch of a latter-day Durkheim. To write his book on violence, he apparently watched tens of thousands of hours of surveillance footage of brawls; he also seems to have reread The Iliad pretty carefully. (It’s an interesting study.) Insights, and page counts, evidently come easily to him.

Even by his own standards, though, The Sociology of Philosophies is an odd, ambitious book. It’s a theory of intellectual life in the abstract, but it’s also a global history of philosophy, with chapters on the major events in European, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian philosophy. It’s full of massive, unwieldy diagrams and detailed tables. Abstract, lapidary formulations of the nature of thought alternate with detailed accounts of internal rivalries among medieval Franciscans or Warring States era Confucians. As this precis should imply, it’s also very long: about 1,000 pages.

Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies, 607

Here’s how the theory works.

According to Collins, intellectual life, at its core, is conversation. No matter how solitary we think we are when we arrive at our ideas in the quiet of a monastic cell or the privacy of a study, we inevitably reproduce, reply, and react to the words of others. Language is social; so are its mental echoes, thought. In the case of philosophy, it’s not just any kind of conversation: it’s argument. Conflict, not agreement, propels ideas forward.

The competitive character of philosophy doesn’t make it anti-social, though. Quite the opposite! Just as a soccer match can’t be reconstructed without all of the players’ moves on each side, rivals’ ideas are made possible by each other’s. Hence the Socratic dialogues, which make obvious the structure of real, highly charged, interpersonal debate that informs all philosophy, have such a totemic quality. Someone—the abysmally ignorant rhapsode Ion; the arrogant rhetorician Gorgias; the dangerous political realist Thrasymachus—is always offered up as provocation to philosophical progress.

As with soccer matches, though there may be tiny scrimmages everywhere, the number of important events at a given moment, the arguments that attract strong adherents and opponents, is finite. For one thing, it’s difficult to develop genuinely new lines of thought. More fundamentally, attention is limited. In any generation, within any intellectual field or subfield, interest invariably coalesces around a small number of positions or tendencies. In fact, according to Collins, that number is between 3 and 6. (One of the charms of the book is in such moments of daring, and possibly unjustifiable, precision.) “Not warring individuals,” Collins writes, “but a small number of warring camps is the pattern of intellectual history.”

The philosophers at the center of these networks of rivals and allies are the important ones: the intellectual luminaries who configure the space of debate in their own moment and for the ages to come. They’re connected to the other ideas and other figures worth knowing via their predecessors, whose arguments they use and react to; their contemporaries, with whom they debate or ally; and their successors, who take their thought in new directions. In fact, that web of intellectual connections is what genius is, sociologically speaking. “Reputation is not really distinct from creativity,” Collins remarks. “What we consider intellectual greatness is having produced ideas which affect later generations, who either repeat them, develop them further, or react against them.”

This, then, is the theory at its core: intellectual achievement as network centrality.

Today, thanks to digitization—and our tendency to project the nomenclature of our perpetually online lives into the past—Collins’s insight might have the ring of cliche. Network analysis has become something of a micro-industry, including innumerable reconstructions of historical networks, from sixteenth century political letter writers, to the world of Renaissance print, to the complete contents of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, to name just a few. There are also growing numbers of studies of texts that see them as nodes within networks, linked by structures of reference and allusion.

In 1998, when The Sociology of Philosophies appeared, network analysis was still a relatively new field, and Collins’s account was unique in both its historical emphasis and its sheer scope. And in some important ways, it remains unique.

What distinguishes it from any other network analysis I’ve read is how seamlessly Collins brings together real, embodied social networks and the structure of debates conducted mostly in books. Even in his account, they’re not identical: peripheral figures can and do make central contributions to thought. But they’re brought far closer, made far more relevant to one another, than in any other study I’ve read. The human social world, where real conversations happen, blends seamlessly into the abstract world of philosophical argument without doing injustice to the complexity, abstraction, and autonomy of the life of the mind. It’s a sociology of intellectual life that doesn’t feel reductive.

The reason real relationships between people converge with philosophical achievements in books and articles is that debate, even on apparently perennial questions like the metaphysics of ideas or the reliability of the senses, is fast-moving. The field shifts constantly as new participants and perspectives enter the landscape. Talking to people helps you navigate it in a way that reading alone never can. So does being part of a concrete, social world, since institutional shifts frequently create new intellectual openings.

To take one example: the rise of Christianity could hardly have had a more profound impact on the topics of open to philosophical debate; a bishop, like Augustine, was in the thick of this transformation, and was therefore poised to grapple with its implications long before most of his contemporaries.

Here’s another. Over a millennium later, the beginning of the separation of the natural sciences from philosophy created a different set of possibilities. John Locke, who was a member of the Royal Society alongside Boyle and Hooke, was far better positioned to revolutionize philosophical empiricism in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (the word “essay” in the title is the giveaway, as I’ve noted elsewhere) than contemporaries in other countries.

Literary Networks

Does Collins’s massive intellectual history give us a key to the sociology of aesthetics, of literature as well as philosophy? Yes—up to a point. A few elements of his analysis are obviously useful: intellectual life as conversation, the constant, dynamic partitioning and restructuring of the space of ideas, the reciprocity between institutional change and intellectual life. At the moment, I’m in the early stages of thinking through a project on literary generations, in which I want to reflect precisely on the relationship between personal connections and literary change. I can see how a lot of Collins’s ideas will come into play.

But the way the sociology of philosophy diverges from the sociology of literature is also interesting. Networks are so powerful a tool for philosophical analysis because the field’s orientation is internal: it’s ultimately philosophers, not lay readers, who make or break philosophical reputations.³ (Kuhn made the same point about science in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; scientists’ autonomous network, in his view, was the enabling condition of progress.)

That isn’t true of literature, which has two faces, inward and outward. At least up to a point, lay readers, and not just other writers, matter to literary reception and canonicity.

The exact relationship between the two depends on the type of literature in question. In some cases, lay readership is everything. The opinions of other writers may matter to the author of commercial fiction in a personal sense, but they’re trivial in comparison with the public reception of the work, and they don’t shape its structure. The audience is ordinary people, not initiates.

Conversely, in certain kinds of experimental or avant-garde literary writing, almost all the immediate readers will be other writers or intellectuals (including aspiring writers and intellectuals, e.g., students: potentially a sizable audience). As Collins observes, there’s “a division between writers oriented toward the mass market and an inwardly oriented elite of writers pursuing their own standards of technical perfection.”

When literature is responsive toward its own networks, it tends to resemble, or even to become, philosophy. It’s argumentative, highly intertextual, and typically engaged with abstract ideas. Collins himself discusses a few cases of convergence, including the French Enlightenment (Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot) and Existentialism (Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus). But if we’re willing to cast our nets a bit wider, we can find similar tendencies among Renaissance humanists, metaphysical poets (the name, again, is the giveaway), modernists, and so on and on.⁴

I think there’s also something of the kind happening on Substack. There may not be another Voltaire or Diderot on here just yet.⁵ But I think we are seeing genuinely new modes of writing emerge among poets and fiction writers who are composing their posts largely for networks of others on the platform. It’s a model where there are few, or no, passive and silent lay audiences. Instead, the structure of the network presses fiction to become conversational, blurring the line between author and narrator, reader and interlocutor. It’s also frequently argumentative, at the edge of opinion and fiction, literature and theory (lowercase t). Perhaps that’s why the most exciting literary fiction I’ve read on here, like that of Paul Franz, Naomi Kanakia, John Pistelli or whatever it is Justin Smith-Ruiu is doing (I couldn’t possibly begin to characterize it, but I love it) tends toward the metafictional and the polemical.

Julianne Werlin writes

Life and Letters

1. Without recourse, I should add, to Bourdieu!

2. As

Daniel Oppenheimer

explains in his account of Shamus Rahman Khan’s work here, and in his excellent interview with him.

3. When philosophers attract enough lay readers, like Plato or Nietzsche or Kierkegaard, we often start to think of them as literature as well as philosophy. Philosophers can attempt to appeal to lay audiences, as well as to each other. But, Collins remarks, “the defensive syncretism in which intellectuals ally themselves predominantly with lay audiences has a strongly retrogressive effect on abstraction.” Ouch!

4. There’s an argument to be made that this is true of most poets.

5. We definitely aren’t in an era when princes and literary Substackers mingle in a modern-day Sans Souci, and, delusions of grandeur aside, I’m not sure we want to be. We all know how that story ends!