Randall Collins is one of America's great sociological theorists, but his new book, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, may have succeeded in writing him out of his own rather considerable reputation. The Sociology of Philosophies is a book of breathtaking range, offering a provocative theory of intellectual creativity and reputations that challenges the very category of a "great theorist" while solidifying Collins's place at the forefront of the sociology of ideas and knowledge. Using a world history of philosophy as case material, Collins outlines a powerful theoretical framework for the social scientific analysis of intellectual networks, academic disciplines and the world of ideas itself. Collins's book will start arguments as well as inspire new research, and it is not difficult to predict the controversies that will emerge.
The Sociology of Philosophies is practically a recipe for a turf war. Many intellectual historians will be shocked at the hubris of Collins's analysis. Never one prone to thinking in narrow and specialized terms, Collins offers us a global analytic history of philosophical thinking from the Greeks, Romans, the Enlightenment philosophes, the Reformation and Medieval Catholic theology through to the existentialists in the West, as well as dealing in great detail with non-Western thought over many centuries in China, India, and Japan. Many philosophers will be outraged by Collins's argument that the concept of a "great philosopher" is a social construction, reflecting the needs of intellectual networks fixated on a competition for attention more than on the intrinsic quality of ideas or on a disinterested search for truth. Collins treats many major philosophers with skeptical irreverence, as when he calls F. W. J. Schelling a "niche hog" and refers to Ludwig Wittgenstein's "personality cult" and brooding over suicide as a claim for status in the intellectual elite. Collins's book-length attempt to explain philosophers' creativity and reputations by social, organizational, and network factors will ruffle feathers, as when he offers a sociological account of why G. W. F. Hegel made it and Arthur Schopenhauer did not. And intellectuals more generally will find little comfort in Collins's brutally unsentimental critique of the cult of the intellectual hero. Collins draws a picture of intellectuals as self-interested, calculating status climbers who are as concerned with gaining eminence and financial security as they are with the various social and intellectual movements and causes often associated with what we now call "public intellectuals."
Collins's critics have a point. The norms of contemporary intellectual history rightly call for specialization in specific geographical areas in particular times, allowing for the consultation of primary documentary evidence in original languages and the mastery of the relevant literature. Collins, in contrast, writes a global intellectual history based on secondary sources. Errors of detail are inevitable in this book, as is a sacrifice of depth. And while Collins's discussion of world philosophical ideas is well written and impressive, specialists will have many interpretations to challenge and nuances to add. These legitimate criticisms of Collins's book, however, should not deter us from taking his theory of intellectual creativity and reputation very seriously indeed.