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CARTA DE RANDALL COLLINS
Randall Collins es autor de numerosos
libros y artículos. Uno de sus libros más recientes es The sociology of
philosophies; a global theory of intellectual change, Harvard University
Press, Cambridge MA, 1999, 1098 p. Se
trata de una obra fundamental, discutible como muchas pero sobre todo fértil.
Presentamos aquí una carta que ilumina sobre su carrera intelectual y a la vez
la lectura de su libro. Ver también: Hoja informativa
de Galileo, diciembre de 2000.
I am happy to hear of your interest in The
Sociology of Philosophies, and the related papers. You asked for copies of the
1981 and 1987 papers and the 1983 paper with Restivo. Unfortunately I do
not have my files here with me at Cambridge; when I return to Philadelphia in
the autumn I will look for copies for you.
In response to your other request, I do
have available a lengthy description of how I developed the ideas and the
research for the book on philosophies. It is attached at the end of the
letter. With best wishes, ....how I got the idea of attention space. I had
been working on comparative networks of philosophers -- already having a good
deal of the apparatus of the theory -- and the "law of small numbers"
jumped out at me from the data. I think I first saw it when charting the
long-term pattern of factions in India, the splits of schools into rival
branches in some periods, their dying out and recombining in other periods. 4 to
6 factions seemed to characterize this. Then I looked at the ancient Greek
schools; a similar pattern, except that there were occasions where the field was
swamped by 10 or 12 factions; it was revealing to see that this didn't last
long, that most died out until the "normal" 4 to 6 was reached, which
was often stable over long periods. A third corroborating instance came
from charting the early centuries of Islamic intellectuals; again the pattern of
settling down into 4 main schools stood out. Eventually in extending this
to all my world data [the tests of this are briefly summarized in Appendix 1 of
SP, a condensation of a great deal of poring over the data] I decided to modify
the "law of small numbers" to 3 - 6; in part to accommodate empirical
instances, in part out of theoretical reasoning. I.E. Two factions are
minimally necessary to play off of each other; a third "plague on both
houses" is always possible.
Given the character of reflexivity in the sociology of knowledge and its
contemporary branches, I have indeed thought about how my model applies to
myself. -- In fact, I have been challenged by critics in sociology to pass this
test. Thus I can give you the following account of where the theory came from.
My own teachers connect to the lineages providing most of the theoretical
ingredients. My undergraduate sociology teacher at Harvard in the early
1960s was Talcott Parsons. Come to think of it, it was just at that time that he
was preparing to publish his book on the evolution of societies, and I was in
his seminar on this topic. But that wasn't so much what impressed me as his
emphasis on combining the theoretical ingredients of Weber and Durkheim; and his
famous course on sociology of religion which laid out on Weberian lines the
cultural pathways of the main world civilizations. Ever since then I have been
very conscious of the power of world comparisons; and the cases in SP are
essentially those of Weber's uncompleted studies of the world religions. Parsons
was also an exemplar for me of the theorist who works on all levels of analysis,
micro as well as macro; Parsons' own micro model was Freudian psycholgy adapted
to explain internalization of societal norms, which I repudiated as I got to
graduate school, but the general model of how to be a theorist stuck. ---
Later I came to realize that one's teacher could be highly influential even as
one repudiated his ideas; and this was part of what led me to the notion of the
transmission of emotional energy, as distinct from cultural capital.
At Berkeley, where I did graduate school in sociology during 1964-68, there came
several other key connections through teachers and peers. Reinhard Bendix, the
then-famed Weber scholar, encouraged my comparative historical sociology -- at
this point this was largely in political sociology; my initial set of
publications took their slant (found their niche) by giving a left-wing
interpretation of Weber, combining his intellectual tools with the Marxian slant
that was burgeoning among my friends in the campus social movements of that
period. Again there was a type of personal influence from my teachers over
and beyond their ideas; Bendix, like Leo Lowenthal, Wolfram Eberhard and several
others, were German émigrés, and they often talked about their own teachers,
and who the lineages of teachers and students were in the German universities.
(For instance one heard that Weber was a student of Dilthey and of Mommsen, and
friend of Rickert, from whom he took the method of ideal types and value
relevances.] Thus I got in the habit of thinking in terms of academic lineages;
and also developed a sense that something of institutional importance had
happened in Germany in the 19th century which made its universities, for a time,
a magnet for scholars from elsewhere. This gave salience to incidental knowledge
that my own father, who had gone to Johns Hopkins in the early 1930s, had
travelled around various German universties for a couple of years before taking
his Ph.D. (in German literature -- he became a diplomat however and never talked
with me about academic topics.) Later I came to realize how much this was
the pattern for Americans in the period when American universities were being
reorganized along the lines of the German research university -- when the entire
institutional structure was being propagated by networks overseas.
At Berkeley my most impressive teachers and influences were
micro-sociologists: Preeminently, Herbert Blumer, who made symbolic
interactionism into an articulate intellectual movement, then at its moment of
success in battling for respectability against functionalist theory and
positivist methodologies. Blumer was the pupil of George Herbert Mead, as he
never ceased to remind us, since his typical mode of lecturing was to claim to
be relating what Mead had said. [This was not entirely true, as Blumer was as
much shaper as conduit of Mead's ideas; later this point too got incorporated in
SP in the notion that the intellectual significance of an individual's ideas are
not intrinsically given but depend on what the network downstream makes of
them.] Blumer provided a key micro-mechanism, thought as internalized
conversation, which I developed into a model of how thinking is internalized
interaction rituals, "making coalitions in the mind".
Besides Blumer the other famous, intellectually charismatic sociologist at the
time was Erving Goffman. He was just publishing his collection of key papers
under the rubric "Interaction Ritual", a term which I later appropriated for my
micro-sociology of "interaction ritual chains". Goffman was more of an influence
than a direct teacher; I occasionally heard his lectures but never formally took
a course with him, and got to know him mainly the year I was on the Berkeley
faculty as an Instructor, and then later through correspondence and professional
contacts. Goffman was encouraging to me (a number of my early writings were
interpretations of his work), I think mainly because I saw him in the lineage of
Durkheimian social anthropologists -- he had been a pupil of W. Lloyd Warner at
Chicago, and earlier, Erving told me, influenced by a British anthropologist at
Toronto named Hart --- whereas most people assimilated him to the symbolic
interactionist movement. Goffman was concerned to break free of this reputation
-- one could say he wanted to be recognized as having his own niche space.
It was the combination of my own lineages that made it possible for me to see
Goffman in a way that most other sociologists didn't, and thus to use him in a
different manner in my thinking; Parsons had strongly emphasized Durkheimian
theory, whereas most of Blumer's other students lacked this bit of cultural
capital (and would have strongly disparaged it, since Blumer was engaged in a
crusade against functionalists).
Goffman's students, at that particular moment, included a clique with a
reputation for being extreme radicals on an epistemological level: these were
what became the ethnomethodologists (Sacks, Schegloff, Sudnow, et al.). This
group was slightly older than me and was just leaving while I was at Berkeley,
but they were subject of much gossip in the department. They were in the process
of elevating the reputation of Harold Garfinkel as a radical alternative to the
entire sociological enterprise; instead of studying society the aim should be to
study how a sense of social reality is constructed. This raised many hackles but
provided energy and attention to issues of social epistemology -- indeed just
the kind of reflexive sociology of thinking that we are engaging in now. This
encouraged my interest in a radically complete explanation of what thinkers
think; but my niche was different than the ethnos -- instead of repudiating most
sociological lineages of ideas and methods and substituting Schutz and Husserl
as theory and exclusively using micro-methods of research, I brought the Weber/
Durkheim/ Goffman/ Blumer tools to bear on similar issues. The
ethnomethodologists indeed became organized as a rather exclusive network, which
gave them a reputation as a cult; it chanced that I nevertheless developed quite
a lot of network ties to that group. I was at UC San Diego for a number of years
in the early 1970s, and was friendly with Aaron Circourel -- who had taught the
key generation of younger ethnos, and had acted as broker to get Garfinkel's
ideas into the light -- and by friendly ties with Cicourel's graduate students
was kept abreast of what Sacks, Schegloff and others were doing in formulating
conversation analysis. Although I am an outsider to the ethnos,
nevertheless I have been in a position to act as broker between their position
and mainstream sociology, a position which I have pushed as the
micro-foundations of macro-sociology, micro-translating macro concepts into
chains of
micro-interactions. Later I got connected to network analysis as a way of
linking micro-situations together without reifying macro institutions. In this
sense, once again, I rather consciously found a niche in the sociological
attention space by combining positions usually taken as antithetical.
Finally, the crucial piece of the puzzle that would eventually become the
sociology of philosophies was also put in place in my graduate days at
Berkeley. By chance I was hired by a visiting Israeli sociologist, Joseph
Ben-David, to assist him in writing a book about the rise of the social role of
the scientist. I also took his seminar in the sociology of science, a field
which was just then burgeoning -- Kuhn [also at Berkeley at the time] had just
published his famous book on paradigm revolutions; Derek Price [who was a friend
of Ben-David's] had just published his theory of the growth of scientific
literature; and a very recent Berkeley Ph.D. Warren Hagstrom had published his
dissertation research on competition among scientists over priority in
recognition. I had just spent a year in the psychology department at
Stanford, and transferred to Berkeley after concluding that psychology (I had a
job working on brains of rats) was not what I wanted to pursue. In the spirit of
analyzing what I had just repudiated, I did a seminar paper for Ben-David in
which I analyzed the social origins of academic psychology. Ben-David, who was
an expert on the reorganization of the 19th century German university system and
its consequences for scientific innovation, put me onto historical materials,
and I did a network analysis of masters and pupils instrumental in the
development of psychology labs (e.g. the networks around Wundt, William James,
etc.). I'm not sure how I came to do the network analysis, as Ben-David
hadn't used that method before. This became one of my early publications, as
Ben-David sponsored it (as co-author) and got it into ASR.
In the process of writing my M.A. thesis on this topic, I pushed back earlier in
the history of the German university, and noticed that the period of reform from
the medieval religious organization to the research university was exactly the
generation of Kant and his Idealist followers; I interpreted this in sociology
of knowledge style as an intellectual movement operating as the ideological wing
of the university reform movement. This was the germ of the book on
philosophers, although it took decades before I fully worked it out.
Ben-David, by the way, had been a pupil of Martin Buber, who had been the early
teacher of sociology at the Hebrew University; so adding things all together, I
can trace my own network grand-teachers back to Buber; Parsons' teachers
including Malinowski; Goffman's social anthropology roots which go back to
Radcliffe-Brown and Durkheim; and G.H. Mead. I also had some -- relatively
slight -- undergraduate connections with Harvard philosophers, including Paul
Tillich and Quine; later, having given up a philosophy major for Social
Relations was doubtless one more ingredient in my turning
sociological tools back onto philosophy. Come to think of it, the reason I left
philosophy was because I wanted to study existentialism -- then highly
prestigeous in the student culture -- while my professors wanted us to learn
analytical philosophy. It was an introduction to factional conflict as a
driving mechanism in intellectual life, although I didn't see that at the time.
Insofar as I have any "creative" energy it follows in typical pattern
from networks of the previously successful. Of course reflecting on my own
example underscores the corollary that eminent teachers have many pupils, and
their relative success depends also on the competition over ecological space in
their own generation, as well as further down the future chain.
In retrospect, I would say that pretty much all the ingredients -- the cultural
capital of different schools of thought, the energy and prestige of lineage
connections, the motivational force of opposition among intellectual factions
and the tactic of making "coalitions in the mind" -- were there by the
time I left graduate school. Thereafter it was largely a matter of working
up the empirical materials. There were some emergent insights along the
way; as noted, the "law of small numbers" dividing an attention space "jumped
out at me" from the data by some time in the late 1970s. Which is to
say it jumped out because I was looking for a social pattern in networks. That
it was a partly conflictual, partly solidary pattern is not surprising given my
theoretical work during that decade in promoting a neo-Weberian "conflict
theory" which uses Durkheimian/Goffmanian interaction ritual at the micro
level.
Randall
Collins
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