Method and Measurement in the Sociology of Knowledge

Unformatted Document Text: The study of intellectuals has been an area of research
quite amenable to sociological methods. It is an almost traditional problem of
mapping a social structure and a set of cultural variables that affect the formation and
mobility of intellectuals and their influence on one another and on various strata of
society at large. It has also been an area that other figures of the sociological tradition
have addressed themselves to, among them Tocqueville, Durkheim, Simmel, and
Weber, as well as Mannheim, Parsons, Merton, and Shils. Here I want to raise some
questions about the relationship between the “sociology of intellectuals” and the
“sociology of knowledge,” and to evaluate some of Randall Collins’s and Pierre
Bourdieu’s use of concepts. I want to argue, first, for using the concepts of Bourdieu,
Collins, and others in a way that can overcome what I believe are a limitation of their
schemas, namely, that they the factors they highlight are impossible to “measure,” that
they have created models from which “nothing can escape;” and second, for
considering a greater range of cultural factors and structures of thought. These
limitations derive, not from their use of somehow “false” or inappropriate concepts,
but from the effort to “universalize” their models, which transform them from “ideal-
typical” and hermeneutically-useful perspectives for measuring the world into
adequate and sufficient explanatory models or descriptions. They have thus insulated
sociology of knowledge from the “multi-dimensionality” of culture, to use an
expression of Jeffrey Alexander’s, by making claims that go beyond what can be
justified and restricting what can serve as relevant data, by excluding other spheres of
experience from a role in the decisive production of thought. In the heyday of Marxist
theory, Marxists solved problems of knowledge by assimilating them to a sociology of
intellectuals founded on a view of the determinations of knowledge production by
specific class positions within a clearly defined class struggle. Even for serious
Marxist thinkers, one problem with this reduction of the sociology of knowledge to
the sociology
Unformatted Document Text: of intellectuals was that it was too often linked to a
conviction that the class situation was exactly like the simple one laid out in the
Communist Manifesto as a model. Thus explanations in a Marxist sociology of
knowledge were themselves simple, because every intellectual product could be
“explained” by being put into correspondence with an objective class position or the
interests it served. Since the scheme of history had already been “solved” for the
future and hence also for the past, everything could be located accurately. Thus, a
sociology of intellectuals explained through the sociology of the class struggle made it
easy to explain knowledge and culture broadly understood. Another great weakness of
Marxist sociology of culture emerges if we take as a problem how to explain the
unique event, the particular work, the career, the individual, the exception, the outlier.
It was unable to provide compelling accounts of individual cultural works or careers,
except in easy cases, or to interpret them more richly, since they were all viewed as
comparable to any other object of ordinary commodity production, namely, as
crystallizations of the labor of someone with a particular class consciousness or
ideology in a particular relation to the market and the means of production. Even
sophisticated versions cared little about the origins and meaning of an individual work
beyond that, rather than about its symbolic or expressive value in terms of social
conflict and class. Not even “great” works were exempt from this scheme, ranked by
the extent to which they revealed the “true” workings of the class system. Karl
Mannheim, though not a Marxist, refined its approaches. Yet for Mannheim too,
writing before Gramsci, knowledge "is clearly rooted in and carried by the
desire for power and recognition of particular social groups who want to make their
interpretation of the world the universal one," and intellectuals are the
formulators and carriers of the task of elaborating interpretations for their groups of
origin or affiliation. In our time, democratization has led to a situation where
"each particular perspective" aspires to be "the universally accepted
frame of
Unformatted Document Text: reference." Hence the importance of revealing
that conflicts of perspective embodied in ideologies are fundamentally conflicts
between "social forces and social impulses." Yet, though Mannheim tried
to lay out other forces at work in the production of intellectuals, including competition
and the relation between generations, he ended up arguing that “Competition, victory,
and the selection based upon it, largely determine the movement of thought."
The problem is that, while the identity of intellectual producers can usually be
specified unproblematically, the actual relation between the dense social conditions in
which they are embedded and the actual forms of “knowledge” they produce has
always been much harder to specify, and not only for the Marxist tradition. From
Hegel who saw intellectuals as particular embodiments of a stage of the development
of “spirit,” and Marx, who saw them in a dependent relation on the economic base, to
Mannheim’s attempt to specify the extent to which they could “float” free of strong
class determinations, no-one has been able to specify with great theoretical precision
how an understanding of intellectuals’ social position could account comprehensively
for the claims of knowledge they put forth. That is because no analysis of social
position can, by itself, give such an account. While it is customary to think of the
features that are decisive for a sociology of intellectuals as being somehow “super-
structural,” dependent on an already-existing social or economic structure of some
kind, I want to suggest that the sociology of intellectuals be treated as itself one of the
material conditions, part of the structural foundation, for the analysis of the actual
production of knowledge. For example, in the particular area of twentieth-century
French intellectuals that I am studying, there are numerous “factors” that one would
draw on to ground or frame a study of knowledge: competitive social and educational
structures, the formation of academic elites, relations to wealth or power, and the
influence of the media on the production and trajectory of intellectuals. Some factors
are shared with literary and artistic producers in this
Unformatted Document Text: and other epochs, as, for example, the dependence or
independence of “creators” on distributions of wealth or patronage; the effects of the
rise of the market for cultural goods and the displacement of sponsors; the changing
role and situation of universities; the changing prestige of different “forms” of art and
knowledge in different periods and national or regional settings, or different
approaches to knowledge; the expansion and changing nature of audiences; the
changing relations between intellectuals and power-holders, etc. But a study of
institutions and material conditions like these does not, by itself, aid in understanding
very specific cultural and intellectual productions. For example, the formation and
reproduction of elites through the educational process, of a “corps” or a “state
nobility,” as Bourdieu calls the products of the French system of the “grandes écoles,”
is more easily grasped than are the very substantive effects of training in high schools
(lycées), preparatory classes (khâgnes), and the grandes écoles themselves, on
concrete thinking, writing, self-formation and self-presentation. Indeed, there has
been too little careful examination of an aspect of the educational system that
contributes to a "national" intellectual style, namely, the practice of
writing and composition, its models, its orientation to the abstract or the concrete, the
nature of a good presentation or interpretation or explication, in humanities, social
sciences, and even other sciences. These styles help to account for not just why, but
how things get said in totally unique and new ways, as part of the process of
distinguishing oneself in a very highly qualified world, or to mask one's newness by
assimilating what one is writing to the previous accomplishments of others, so that the
tradition in which one speaks serves as legitimation. None of the various institutional
and “tangible” aspects of the sociology of intellectuals is the secret “key” to the
“truth” of intellectual knowledge production. They are rather precisely “factors” one
would want to consider in order to situate both individuals and groups of individuals
in various frameworks, spaces, or “fields” of intellectuals. The problem remains of

Unformatted Document Text: finding some kind of algorithm, a ‘translation” of these

factors into features of actual knowledge production. But something else is also
missing from nearly every attempt to account for specific knowledge production by
searching only for factors that have always seemed most directly to affect or to
determine it. That something is the influence of other spheres of cultural and personal
experience from which concepts, language, metaphors, and other forms of knowledge
are drawn to shape thought. The interpretation and critique of theoretical work
requires not only a reconstruction of the "intellectual field," to use
Bourdieu’s language, but also a reconstruction of the complex life and activities lived
everyday with others. The sociology of intellectuals has restricted itself by renouncing
interest in these areas of life, just as the intellectuals it has been interested in have
themselves generally denied, tacitly or explicitly, the relevance of these experiences to
their own theoretical work, like philosophers for whom nothing is relevant that cannot
be construed as somehow “rational.” Yet, despite the tendencies of intellectual
disciplines to define their problems and answers within narrow boundaries, one must
ask whether the significance and meaning of social and political thought, or of any
intellectual work of whatever kind, can be most fully understood without reinserting
that work into the world of the everyday practices and experiences of their producers,
and not only of their disciplinary experiences, for even the most rarified intellectual
work takes place within their confines. Only the relatively recent professionalization
of disciplines and spheres, especially those of the university or of literary and artistic
academies – what Weber called Eigengesetzlichkeit, the emergence of spheres ruled
by their “own laws” – could have led Bourdieu, Collins, or Weber to think that new
combinations of older elements or traditions derive primarily or exclusively from a
pure “inside” of the “space” of disciplines, training, university, etc. This is a
projection of a model backwards from the present – and one can have serious doubts
even about

Unformatted Document Text: the present, despite efforts to enforce disciplinary

“purity” – onto a time and situation historically in which such things did not exist in
this form. Thus they obscure the origins of knowledge in situations of radical cultural
difference. The models that have focused on this more restricted understanding of the
relevant factors of “field”, discipline, structural relations, or forms of circulation of
knowledge and of social relations have ignored the fact that individuals have many
kinds of experience that shape their sense of what is true and what they think
structures the world. These include family experiences of parents and siblings and of
economic and emotional conflict, the experiences of relationships in the school
system and among friends, the experience of serving in the armed forces, the
experiences of marriage and love, etc. Whenever we want to measure the substantive
contribution of a work like that of Bourdieu on Flaubert or Collins on Chinese
philosophy – dealing with a sociological approach to specific historical cases, which
involves so much detailed knowledge of literature or philosophy – we are, of course,
forced to consult area specialists, or at least specialty works, to decide to what extent
the methods and results of these sociological studies are vindicated. So we are obliged
to know the specifics of cases that do not usually come under the normal category of
what sociologists study or know or treat. But these specifics must include every
possible aspect of culture that we can identify, so that we can recognize their traces in
the works we study. To put it differently, the power of culture, but also of economic
experience, or of emotional relationships to shape and suffuse the members of a
society is not only thoroughgoing, it is usually unconscious among its intellectuals,
and, unfortunately, also those who study them. Thus the illumination of such factors,
linked to cultural experience, requires extending research beyond the structures
imagined to be decisive for the practices of intellectuals

Unformatted Document Text: Thus we need to look, not only at structural social
explanations and at the kinds of “common sense” that phenomenological accounts
have tried to add to them, but also to the concepts, language, references to and uses of
experiences of intellectuals’ lives, whether shared by many – like military service,
higher education, or religion – or confined to the person alone – like revelation or the
effects of personal relationships. These things must also be considered for the extent
to which they contribute to shaping philosophical knowledge production, even in
unique and disjunctive ways. Thus, the sociology of knowledge production has to
locate the individual and the group in the many dimensions of the cultural world in
which they operate. It is not easy to analyze intellectual production like philosophy or
social theory from the viewpoint of a sociology of knowledge. Only living producers
can be interviewed by researchers now, and, even if there is such evidence for those
no longer living, the investigator has had no control over the types of questions asked
or been able to observe non-verbal responses. Nor is any standardization possible.
Even statistical surveys of various kinds of literary or other intellectual producers,
from issues like class origin to venues of publication, cannot always provide
comparable information about individuals. Most difficult, of course, is that there is no
possibility of any true “ethnography” of such producers, even when they are still
alive, and letters, memoirs, biographical, and autobiographical sources must always
be carefully evaluated. In some cases, there are other kinds of evidence of the
development of the work, like Flaubert’s early drafts or Beethoven’s notebooks, or
letters describing stages of thought in someone’s work. With the use of computers,
however, this may become the scarcest of resources, although theoretical physicists
seem inclined to keep copies of their e-mail exchanges. At the same time, recent
efforts to study theoretical physicists and mathematicians, which might provide some
parallels for other “lonely” producers, have not yet advanced enough to serve as a
.paradigm for such investigations

Unformatted Document Text: Whatever the problems of the data source, my concern
here is with the kinds of models one can build to use and understand that data and to
contribute to explaining the production. You will recall that Weber observed that
Adam Smith’s model of the market in terms of supply- and-demand and Marx’s
model of history in terms of class struggle were scientific achievements of the “first
rank,” as long as one took them as heuristic devices, conceptual constructions used for
arranging one’s data for analysis, and not as descriptions that could somehow be
thought to “correspond” with external reality. They were, in effect “ideal types” avant
la lettre, constructions from a specific point of view that accentuated certain features
of reality for investigation. They could then be used for the illumination of concrete
historical cases. But any effort to take them as realist descriptions, from which reality
could be predicted or deduced in any reasonable sense – as happened in vulgar
Marxism or the overly positivist versions of economic theory – were nothing but
ideology and no longer science. The danger is that the models are transformed from
heuristic devices and hypotheses into explanatory systems and come to resemble
something like Platonic forms, which Sartre once argued were precisely what had
become of the frozen Marxist categories of dialectical materialism, which excluded
features of reality that were contradictory, and where the answer was known in
advance, with differences only in the details. Nothing that cannot somehow be
measured or weighed against other factors can serve as an explanatory “variable”,
since it does not vary and cannot be found to be absent. Measurement is not only a
problem of quantification of factors, but of relations between them. With the sacrifice
of the ability to measure “factors,” with the elimination of even the hypothetical
possibility of counter-examples, variation and difference that cannot get squeezed into
the categories get ignored. One’s hypotheses become descriptions and no longer need
to be “verified” except by their own logic, no longer need to be “tested” against
,varieties of evidence

Unformatted Document Text: compared with other cases, etc. Peggy Somers has
rightly called this tendency within rational choice modeling a new essentialism. But
this can be just as much a feature of network or social- structural or any other kind of
models, whose epistemological status and limitations are violated. Most recently,
Collins and Bourdieu have tried to specify sets of factors “mediate” the experience
(conscious or unconscious) of position and of culture and the intellectual products that
their producers created. And while Collins has tried to apply his categories to a wide
range of historical examples, Bourdieu left this task to other sociologists and
historians. I want to take up a few concepts from Collins’ extraordinary work, The
Sociology of Philosophies. Collins sees conflict as a perpetual feature of the relations
between intellectuals. But is this generalization from the Greek agon universal in fact?
Collins treats it virtually as an ontological principle, a universal feature of
(intellectual) life, as if it were either part of an unchanging human “nature” or as
something derived from the nature of societies as such. The problem is that “conflict”
is not a used enough like a “variable” that can be studied empirically for its origins,
degree, or consequences, as a broader cultural form, rather than an essential fact. All
recent observers of Greek culture, from Weber to G.E.R. Lloyd, have noted that the
agon reaches a height of intensity in ancient Greece unlike anything seen in any other
Western culture. It is derived specifically from its place in the training and games of
aristocratic warriors, and it pervades politics, law, athletics, war, artistic competitions
of drama and poetry, intellectual and scientific debate, etc. Thus, the sociological task
of any study of intellectual conflict should be to look at its concrete forms in different
societies and in different spheres of action within each society (and their possible
mutual influence), so that the particular intensities of agons, as well as their
differential consequences, can be measured. Otherwise, “conflict” cannot be used to
explain the particular social and intellectual forms or outcomes of intellectual debates
.across cultures
Unformatted Document Text: In the case of the interaction ritual chains and the
significance of emotional factors that Collins valuably brings to the study of
networks, such intense relationships do not automatically induce specific outcomes,
thoughts, or creative activities. Nor can evidence for their intensity and effects be
found easily in secondary histories of philosophy, on which he so often relies, but
themselves must be studied, so that it becomes possible to specify and measure their
effects. If one is to show that emotional networks of this kind are decisive for the
development of thought, they must be shown against other models or in terms of other
factors and their “weight,” so that the degree or extent of network influence can be
shown. The only way to determine concretely the effects of emotional networks or of
conflict, and thus to measure them appropriately, is through concrete studies of
individual cases, coupled with detailed comparative study. In his quest to explain
philosophical change on a global scale, Collins extracts universal “ingredients of
intellectual life.” He then explains “difference” largely by the presence or absence of
these ingredients, which are “applied” universally. Each of his examples confirms the
universal importance of identical factors, which are held to account for the dynamics
of change. What is somewhat surprising is that little attention is given to the range of
experience of particular groups of philosophers and their schools, as compared with
the structure of the discipline and the “relational” experience within the “schools”
themselves. While the state and religious institutions are brought in for several cases,
where is the experience of other cultural and social institutions outside narrow
philosophical networks, of other relationships or events in the lives of the groups or
individuals of the culture? Do they not contribute to “intellectual motivations” at all?
The question is whether one can thus restrict the range of possibly relevant factors,
while claiming to explain intellectual change. It would be one thing if Collins were
trying to show the influence of only the particular factors he isolates, but he claims to
account for all that is relevant to intellectual change by focusing on the few
dimensions that he studies

Unformatted Document Text: The knowledge producers that Collins, and also .
Bourdieu, treat have inevitably seen themselves working within a specific discipline,
but these thinkers also partly resemble the bricoleur of Levi-Strauss, drawing on
elements available outside of the “narrow professions” or of any other systematic
program. It must be assumed that the materials of “creativity” or innovation, whether
one thinks in terms of the creativity of networks or society, or in terms of what
concrete or specific kinds of individuals contribute, are drawn from many possible
sources, not just from philosophical schools, argumentative networks, and elite ritual
chains, until it is shown to be otherwise through a different kind of comparative
project of global extent, more like a Weberian comparison, I want now to consider
Bourdieu’s practice of reflexivity and his construction of what he called the
“intellectual field” of science in France. As Bourdieu pointed out repeatedly, the most
necessary form of reflexivity in social science is the “objectivation,” as he called it, of
one’s own “positions” and “position-takings” and, by implication, of the personal
stakes of one’s intellectual practices. This requires a special kind of distance that
allows one to “bracket” as many as possible of one’s own determinations, of one’s
commitments and convictions, in order to better grasp their dynamics and, again by
implication, to understand what is gained and what is lost by consciously adhering to
them. Bourdieu argued for the necessity and possibility of giving an account of the
origins of these “determinations” and values, not only in the structure of a “field” but
in the “habitus” that structures one’s perceptions, dispositions, and practices. Yet,
although Bourdieu was a committed participant in an intense and widespread struggle
over the meaning and practice of “science” in France and in the search for some
“queen” of the disciplines, nowhere did he really subject his own form of
objectivation and of argument, or his conception of science and its practice, to such an
analysis, which might have raised questions about his own practice and its role within
the French intellectual “field”. Instead of

Unformatted Document Text: situating his chosen role within the broader arguments
of French intellectual life outside the narrowly construed field, Bourdieu identified
himself with true science as against false science and metaphysics, while claiming
that critiques of his views were based on false understanding, narrow political interest,
or “metaphysical” principle. This is one reason why he understood so poorly the
social effects of his own supposedly scientific rhetoric. In particular, Bourdieu
attacked what he called the “professors of false sciences” who served “to produce and
maintain false consciousness,” and their “learned fields” and “learned language.”
These attacks, along with the defense of his own approach to sociology, sound at
times like the rhetoric of 16 th- and 17 th -century-debates over science versus
religion. Indeed, in these attacks, Bourdieu spoke as a moralist and not as a social
scientist, and a moralist attacking individuals’ motives. This moralism is visible not
only in his criticisms of Levi-Strauss or in his attacks on Sartre or Derrida. They are
just as clear in his attack on laboratory studies in the sociology of scientific
knowledge, which disparage not only the knowledge-value of that approach, but also
the “motives” he imputes to its practitioners and the terrible “consequences” for the
practice and understanding of science that he believes have followed from such work.
Despite calling for a study of the “rhetoric of scientificity,” Bourdieu did not himself
provide one. Indeed, despite his arguments for sociology as a science, Bourdieu
provided no real alternative investigation of his own, either of laboratories or of
“science,” nor did he investigate the nature of the rhetoric of intellectual debate and
social science argument, despite his criticisms of other Parisian intellectuals. Nor did
he understand the affective “effects” of his own way of speaking within the structure
of the “field”: he was at the very top of a hierarchy, with all of the institutional and
intellectual prestige that that accorded, attacking everyone else, except for a few other
privileged “giants” like himself, for supposedly questionable motives, poor thinking,
.and overall failure to live up to his own high standards

Unformatted Document Text: Worse, Bourdieu took outsiders’ reactions against his
arguments as “resistance” to truth itself. While claiming to be able to objectify all
positions, Bourdieu characterized his “opponents” as “objective enemies” (even if
unconscious) of true science, similar to the way the French Communist Party attacked
dissident members as objective enemies of the proletariat, and in his view all
intellectuals partook potentially of this opprobrium: they were portrayed essentially as
“pariahs”, again a characterization that could only remind intellectuals and academics
of the forms of accusation used by the Communist Party to delegitimate them over
against the “authentic” workers of the party hierarchy. To put it differently, Bourdieu
freely chose the manner and substance of his rhetorical assaults, chose particular
words for characterizing his intellectual opponents, and chose what aspects of their
work – or the fact of their personal “motives” – to denigrate. In his polemics, he
shattered all possibilities of trust between practitioners, except those committed to his
own system, impugning others’ motives, positions, and actions, as deriving almost
purely from aggressive, power-oriented impulses and needs.` These rhetorical attacks
set him outside any community of debate beyond his own followers. It seems
surprising that someone with so profound a grasp of the conditions shaping French
intellectuals in general, would be so insensitive to his own interactions with other
intellectuals. Yet he dismissed the value for his own work of any analysis of these
interactions, and instead of working toward the construction of a broadly based “city
of science,” a kind of “popular front” of intellectuals and knowledge producers, he
argued invariably like a sectarian. Strangely, despite his claims about the relation of
truth to social struggles, Bourdieu seemed to act in his own world as if there were a
kind of compulsory power of “objectivity” or “truth,” his own, as persuasive in itself,
a truth that should prevail no matter what the rhetoric or the form of argument or the
social relations. He attacked critics and other points of view as if he

Unformatted Document Text: were the philosopher-king of the city of science,

generating a staggering hostility that he ascribed totally to others and to their
structural situation, as if otherwise they would have accepted the “truth” of his
positions. He thus ignored a crucial aspect of cultures of knowledge, namely the
potentially negative power of even “scientific” words as performatives, speech acts,
or even “signals,” as Wittgenstein called them. Thus, due to his self-identification
with the cause of science, Bourdieu did not “objectify” his own utterances and their
“effects”. This aspect of the “culture” of science and of “truth claims,” of the problem
of the form in which “truth” is expressed, both in writing and in speech – as sociology
of scientific knowledge, which Bourdieu disparaged, shows – is not something that
the study of science can take for granted. If part of the goal of effective scientific
practice is persuading others of the truth of one’s arguments, then Bourdieu, despite
his control of material resources, the weight of his own writings, a journal, and a book
series, was only partially successful. This raises the question whether it is possible to
accede to a real construction of one’s own “field,” no matter how it is conceived,
while belonging to a world so riven by intense hostility, criticism, and competition
and a target for one’s own aggression. Bourdieu did have an opportunity to consider
his relationship to science and rhetoric and the weight of different factors contributing
to forming his own habitus in the sketch of some details of his childhood and later
experiences in his autobiographical Esquisse pour une auto- analyse. Here he
mentions some experiences that influenced both his own “affective” response to the
intellectual world and his sense of an appropriate way to cope with it through
intellectual creation and rhetorical attack. But he did not provide a more complete
analysis of the origins of his own “habitus,” nor of the ways in which it might have
affected his own practice of science or choice of direction as an intellectual and
sociologist, so central to an understanding of his theoretical project and for his
“.situation as an exception and an “outlier

Unformatted Document Text: The problem, for Bourdieu as for others, is, as Aaron
Cicourel has argued, to work out the local processual features of the construction of
one’s own habitus. This should mean to specify as precisely as possible how a
“habitus” is formed, what its many “aspects” are, how it is produced by a complex of
“conditions,” how its “structured structures” are really acquired, how therefore its
“dispositions” are developed and played out, why some forms of habitus seem well-
suited to the “world” while others do not, why some individuals seem to “break out”
of these early determinations, while others may lapse into neurosis, bad adjustment,
poor strategies, etc. Without a theory of the acquisition of dispositions and of a
“practical sense” of social structure, and of the interrelationship between experiences
of parents and experiences of the social world of peers, schooling, etc., the habitus
remains vague and unspecified, more on the level of a mystery or a “miracle” of
social life, than a scientifically analyzed construct. Without this, one cannot account
for the great variation between people even of the same class and social origin. These
elements are missing from Bourdieu’s analysis of his own case. Bourdieu radicalized
his claims in opposition to all other modes of sociological explanation. This is
extremely valuable “scientifically,” from the point of view of sharpening concepts,
models, and ideal types, but, because of his conviction that his radical models, based
on the study of France as a microcosm of all social structures, actually described
social reality and provided categories for its analysis universally, he hypostatized his
concepts and hindered the construction of a more comprehensive, persuasive, less
dogmatic model of concrete social action. We can advance the goals of the sociology
of knowledge, and have a better chance of fulfilling the tasks of self-critique, self-
clarification and reflexivity, first, by including other aspects of culture in our study of
the formation of products of knowledge, and second, by treating concepts as
hypotheses, with the possibility of measuring their influence and setting

Unformatted Document Text: them up against other concepts. The question is

whether we can also use typological social science concepts to compare cases both
within and across cultures and so to discover more factors to account for the “reality”
we see. There is no “essential” scheme that can perfectly account for intellectual
production, either collectively or individually. The schemes we propose to use to
model intellectual relations not only vary over time, but may even be at work
simultaneously. The metaphors we use to account for them cannot easily incorporate
this fact. It is impossible to explain any feature of the personal and cultural life of
humans without regard for the social, but it is also impossible to explain all of these
features with it alone, without the personal and individual, self and experience. It may
seem that the social is the fundamental and essential key, extrapolating from
traditional anthropological analyses in which the personal seems lost in the social. But
this is more chauvinism than reason. We must separate from these sets of ideal-types
their claims to overarching “validity” as description in order to use them as tools of
analysis – recall that Merton preferred the expression “functional analysis” to
Parsons’ “structural-functionalism.” The problem, so far unsolved, remains of how
they are to be combined, their weight measured, in an algorithm that will give a
satisfactory interpretation or explanation. Mannheim, following Hegel, thought the
solution lay in an “enlarged” perspective, a “synthesis”. This, of course, presumes that
there exists a valid “dialogical logic” that could somehow lead to a synthesis,
whatever that means. Instead, we must engage in a 2-part process: a hermeneutic and
interpretive study of texts should serve as the foundation of analysis, and a search for
explanatory “factors” through a broad and detailed “area study,” in order to know
what to “listen” for. Both parts are empirical. Both are also informed by theory. But
there is no formal discovery procedure, no formula or algorithm we can rely on in
advance, without importing precisely the kinds of comprehensive schemas I have
.cautioned about. This will not provide us with a reliable cultural sociology

Unformatted Document Text: See Harvey Goldman, "From Social Theory to

Sociology of Knowledge and Back: Karl Mannheim and the Sociology of Intellectual
Knowledge Production," Sociological Theory 12:3 (November 1994): 266-78;
idem, "Innovation and Change in the Production of Knowledge," Social
Epistemology 9 (1995): 211-232; and idem, "Knowledge Production among
Contemporary French Intellectuals," pp. 123-36, in David Sciulli, ed.,
Comparative Social Research, Supplement 2: Normative Social Action. Greenwich
CT: JAI Press, 1996. Karl Mannheim, "Die Bedeutung der Konkurrenz im
Gebiete des Geistigen," in Karl Mannheim, Wissenssoziologie: Auswahl aus
dem Werk, edited by Kurt Wolff (Berlin: Luchterhand, 1964), pp. 573-74, 585, 592.
This is what happens, for example, in Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth:
Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1994) See Harvey Goldman, "Structures and the structure of
thought in France," Semiotica 131 (2000): 393-401. On this subject, see
Priscilla Parkhurst Clark, Literary France. The Making of a Culture (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1987) and Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel. Studies in
Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964). For
how the study of in the Ecole Polytechnique, influences not only the approach of
engineers to their projects, but also the approach of elite managers and figures of state
to broader problems, see Terry Shinn, L’Ecole Polytechnique, 1704-1914, preface by
Francois Furet (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des sciences politiques,
1980), pp. 52-58. Some examples for physics are Martina Merz and Karen Knorr-
Cetina, “Deconstruction in a ‘Thinking’ Science: Theoretical Physicists at Work,”
Social Studies of Science 27 (1997):73-111; and David Koester, Daniel Sullivan, and
D. Hywel Smith, “Theory Selection in Particle Physics: A Quantitative Case Study of
the Evolution of Weak-Electromagnetic Unification Theory,” Social Studies of
Science 12 (1982):73-100. In sociology of mathematics, see Donald MacKenzie,
“Negotiating Arithmetic, Constructing Proof: The Sociology of Mathematics and
Information Technology,” Social Studies of Science 23 (1993):37-65. Among French
historians and sociologists, see, for example, works of Louis Pinto, Christoph Charle,
Didier Masseau, and Anna Boschetti. For Americans, see Walter Adamson and Fritz
Ringer. There are also studies of France and Finland Keijo Rahkonen and Niilo
Kaupi. There are some discussions of Collins’ book in Philosophy of the Social
Sciences 30 (June 2000) - SPECIAL ISSUE: "The Sociology of Philosophies: A
Global Theory of Intellectual Change," by Randall Collins. See also Austin
Harrington, “From Hegel to the Sociology of Knowledge: Contested Narratives,”
Theory, Culture & Society 18 (2001): 125-33. I leave aside the questions raised
by Stanley Lieberson, “Small N’s and Big Conclusions: An Examination of the
Reasoning in Comparative Studies Based on a Small Number of Cases,” Social
Forces 70 (1991): 307-320. Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global
Theory of Intellectual Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp.
379-83. Pierre Bourdieu, Esquisse pour une auto-analyse (Paris: Éditions Raisons
d’Agir, 2004).See Pierre Bourdieu, “The Genesis of the Concepts of Habitus and
Field,” Sociocriticism no. 2 (December 1985): 11-24. Pierre Bourdieu, “The
specificity of the scientific field and the social conditions of the progress of reason,”
Social Science Information 14 (1975), p. 35, 39. Bourdieu, Science of Science and
Reflexivity, translated by Richard Nice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004),
p. 8. See in particular P. Bourdieu, J.-C. Chamboredon, and J.-C. Passeron, Le Metier
de sociologue (Paris: Mouton Bordas, 1968). On the “rhetorical turn” in science
studies, see Marcello Pera and William R. Shea, eds., Persuading Science: The Art of
Scientific Rhetoric (Canton, MA: Science History Publications, 1991); Steven Shapin,
“Here and everywhere: sociology of scientific knowledge,” Annual Review of

Unformatted Document Text: Sociology 21 (1995): 289-321; and Alan G. Gross, The
Rhetoric of Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). On the
“status” of Bourdieu’s science and of the criticism of “resistance,” see Hubert Dreyfus
and Paul Rabinow, “Can there be a Science of Existential Structure and Social
Meaning?” in Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, edited by Craig Calhoun, Edward
LiPuma, and Moishe Postone, pp. 35-44 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1993). Aaron V. Cicourel, “Aspects of Structural and Processual Theories of
Knowledge,” in Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, edited by Craig Calhoun, Edward
LiPuma, and Moishe Postone, pp. 89-115 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1993). Also idem, Cognitive Sociology: Language and Meaning in Social Interaction
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Education, 1973), and idem, “Interpretation and
summarization: Issues in the child’s acquisition of social structure,” in The
Development of Social Understanding, ed. By J. Glick, K. A. Clarke-Stewart, pp.
251-81 (New York: Gardner, 1978). For reflections on this problem, see Stanley
Lieberson, “Einstein, Renoir, and Greeley: Some Thoughts about Evidence in
Sociology,” American Sociological Review 57 (1992): 1-15; and Jeffrey C.
Alexander, The Meanings of Social Life:A Cultural Sociology (New York: Oxford
(.University Press, 2003