The Blackwell Companion to Sociology (58 page)

the process of moving upwards'' (Mannheim, 1929, p. 9). In a similar vein,

Merton attributed the substance of the sociology of knowledge itself to its

development in an era of `ìncreasing social conflict'' and growing ``distrust

between [social] groups'' (Merton, 1949, p. 511). Likewise for Gouldner,

``Plato's social theory [was] a response to the [economic and political] problems and tensions current in his historical period'' (1965, p. 171), and Parsons's work an alarmed reaction to thè`mass meetings, marches, [and] demonstrations'' of

the Depression era (1959, p. 146). For practitioners of the old sociology of ideas, any and all macro-level factors might easily be cited to explain intellectuals'

concepts, beliefs, and arguments.

Assumption 5: Intellectuals as an Objective Social Category

The old sociology of ideas was much occupied with conceptualizing `ìntellec-

tuals.'' Efforts in this direction ranged from Shils's definition of intellectuals as thosè`with an unusual sensitivity to the sacred, an uncommon reflectiveness

about the nature of their universe and the rules which govern their society''

(Shils, 1958, p. 3); through Coser's reference tò`special custodians of abstract ideas like reason and justice and truth, jealous guardians of moral standards that are too often ignored in the market place and the houses of power'' (Coser, 1965, p. xvi); to Gouldner's description of intellectuals as part of an authoritativè`New Class,'' `à new cultural bourgeoisie whose capital is not its money but its control over valuable cultures'' (Gouldner, 1979, p. 21; see also Aron, 1955).

What these formulations have in common is the assumption that in most

societies, and certainly all modern societies, groups of persons can be found

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exhibiting the defining properties of intellectuals. The sociologist interested in knowledge producers proceeds, therefore, by locating these groups and examining how their macro-historical circumstances affect their various intellectual

activities.

But by approaching intellectuals in this way ± i.e. as an objective social

category ± the old sociology of ideas tended to efface important forms of

variation among specialized knowledge producers. To be sure, those in the

area were sometimes well aware that different fields of knowledge production

exhibit different forms of social organization, which might condition ideas in

different ways (see especially Merton, 1949, p. 521). Nevertheless, insofar as

they considered intellectuals an objective social category, those working in the old sociology of ideas tended to occlude the extent to which the attributes

identified in different definitions of intellectuals may systematically vary across groups of knowledge producers. This is so because attributes such as intellectual standing and authority, rather than inhering in all intellectuals as a category, are valuable and scarce resources, resources for which knowledge producers vie,

individually and collectively, with profound effects on the ideas that they

espouse.

The New Sociology of Ideas

This brief review of the old sociology of ideas is not intended to question the

importance of some of the individual works discussed, nor to deny their com-

bined success in establishing the sociology of knowledge as an active specialty

area until the late 1960s. As early as 1968, however, Coser observed fewer

explicit references to the sociology of knowledge and a tendency for the field

tò`merge . . . with other areas of research'' (p. 432). This trend toward dissolution continued in the 1970s and 1980s, with the sociological study of ideas

increasingly concentrated in five other more or less disconnected domains of

inquiry: (a) the sociology of science, as reconstituted originally in Britain as thè`sociology of scientific knowledge'' (for review see Lynch, 1993; Hess, 1997); (b) the study of ideology, pursued now under the cross-cutting rubrics of Marxism,

poststructuralism, and feminism (for review see Thompson, 1990; Eagleton,

1991; McCarthy, 1996); (c) the sociology of culture, a vibrant new American

specialty area focused on ``how kinds of social organization make whole order-

ings of knowledge possible'' (Swidler and Arditi, 1994, p. 306); (d) the field of intellectual history, reshaped by a growing emphasis on intellectual discourses

(for example, Foucault, 1969; White, 1973) and on contextualist methods (for

brief reviews see Tuck, 1991; Miller, 1997); and (e) general sociological theory, where prominent figures such as Bourdieu (1984a) and Collins (1975, 1998)

turned attention toward the intellectual sphere. By no means are these diverse

lines of work concerned exclusively with the social processes by which ideas

grow, emerge, and change ± the central problem of the sociology of ideas.

Nonetheless, not only have scholars in all these areas addressed this problem,

they have done so on the basis of a common set of principles which differ

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markedly from the assumptions of the old sociology of ideas. In the section that follows, we identify the five major tenets of the new sociology of ideas. Although not every thinker who works in the area embraces every tenet, we believe that,

taken together, these tenets characterize the current state of the field.

Tenet 1: The Sociology of Ideas Is an End in Itself

New sociologists of ideas tend to view their research as an end in itself, taking the question ``How do intellectuals come to hold the ideas they do?'' as a

legitimate concern in its own right and choosing their objects of investigation

accordingly. This is not to characterize the new sociologists of ideas as naive

positivists committed tò`value-free'' social science and blind to the connections between scholarship and power. To the contrary, most reject this outlook, even

as they oppose selecting their research questions because of their immediate

relevance to social-critical aims. (Of course, not every work in the area takes

this view. Feminist sociologists of science and knowledge, for example, explicitly adopt a standpoint aimed at ``countering eurocentric and androcentric science

and technology policies and their effects'' (Harding, 1998, p. 18), and choose

empirical foci that help advance this aim.)

Bourdieu's work on intellectuals illustrates the general trend. His Homo

Academicus, for example, is a hard-nosed analysis of the modern French uni-

versity field, a multidimensional space where agents are distributed on the basis of prestige and capital and where academics jockey with one another for position, thus gravitating toward topics and arguments that are in their professional interest. Despite this conception of academic life, however, Bourdieu has nothing but derision for thinkers like Gouldner who would use the concept of `ìdeology''

to commit ``symbolic aggressions'' on behalf of their own political positions

(Bourdieu, 1979, p. 12). Bourdieu's own forays into the sociology of ideas

aim, accordingly, to examine sociologically neglected aspects of the know-

ledge production process ± e.g. the historical conditions under which the

French intellectual field attained relative autonomy (Bourdieu, 1966), or cross-

national knowledge transfer in the age of globalization (Bourdieu and Wac-

quant, 1999) ± not to advance some critical interest in the particular ideas

under investigation.

Contemporary sociologists of scientific knowledge have likewise insisted that

cases be selected on the basis of their value for sociological understanding. This is one of the main themes of thè`strong program'' for the sociology of scientific knowledge (discussed below), with its injunction that sociologists attend impartially to all scientific claims, regardless of their own attitude toward these claims and their truth or falsity (see Bloor, 1976; Collins and Pinch, 1993).

The same point is evident in Gieryn's (1999) recent analysis of scientific

``credibility'' contests. Examining episodes such as the nineteenth-century debate over the relationship between science, religion, and ``mechanics,'' or the modern controversy over cold fusion, Gieryn portrays science as an ever-changing,

locally variable cultural construction whose boundaries ``will be drawn to pur-

sue immediate goals and interests of cultural cartographers, and to appeal to the 244

Charles Camic and Neil Gross

goals and interests of audiences and stakeholders'' (Gieryn, 1999, p. 23). Here, too, sociological interest in understanding the process by which ideas develop

drives object choice.

Tenet 2: Rejection of the Internal/External Distinction

In a recent account of the science studies field, Shapin (1992) observes a

transformation: until the 1970s, a majority of scholars viewed the distinction

between internal and external explanatory factors as legitimate and doubted that external factors could affect the content of scientific knowledge; contemporary

researchers, in contrast, decisively reject the internal/external distinction. While warning against overdrawing this contrast, Shapin reports that by the 1980s the

internal/external distinction, eclectically mobilized through the 1960s, had

``passed from the commonplace to the gauche'' (Shapin, 1992, p. 333). We

believe that this shift has taken place not only among sociologists of science,

but among other sociologists of ideas as well. (For a parallel line of thought,

see the discourse-centered intellectual historiography of Foucault, 1969; White, 1973.)

There can be no question, however, that developments in the sociology of

scientific knowledge precipitated important aspects of this broader turnaround.

Particularly relevant in this regard has been the work of Bloor. Laying out the so-called ``strong program'' for science studies, Bloor urges sociologists not only to develop causal explanations for why some scientific claims (rather than others)

come to be made, disseminated, accepted, and rejected, but to develop explana-

tions that are symmetrical in that they treat ``true'' and ``false'' scientific claims in the same way. Bloor grants that the objective nature of the world is not irrelevant to explaining why a particular scientific claim comes to be made or accepted. But he refuses to set true scientific ideas apart in an asocial realm of `ìmmanent

determination.'' In Bloor's view, the scientific process itself ± the rational process of hypothesis formation and testing, of communicating experimental results to

colleagues, and of having those results accepted by the scientific community ± is shot through with sociality, in particular with rhetorical tactics and vocabularies that acquire their efficacy and meaning within historically specific frameworks

of scientific convention and understanding (Bloor, 1976). From this point of

view, the social is as much internal to science as it is external, and the distinction loses its cogency.

This view is not peculiar to Bloor. Since the articulation of the strong program, the sociology of scientific knowledge has grown tremendously and taken many

different directions. On the whole, however, its practitioners have agreed that

both institutional and rational factors are thoroughly social and that, for this reason, there is no justification for the construction of a firewall around the

content of scientific claims (Lynch, 1993; Hess, 1997; for important founda-

tional statements, see Barnes, 1977; Lynch, 1977; Latour and Woolgar, 1979;

Knorr-Cetina, 1981).

The internal/external distinction has retreated as well in the work of sociolo-

gists who study ideas outside the natural sciences. Kusch (1995), for example,

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245

places the content of philosophical ideas squarely on the sociologist's plate. He does so through an analysis of an intense controversy that arose (c.1880±1920)

among German philosophers over psychologism ± the belief that logic and

mathematics rest on psychology. To account for the substance of this debate,

Kusch links it to the academic emergence of German empirical psychology,

relating the claims of both psychologistic and anti-psychologistic thinkers to

their institutional position in the German university system. ``Pure'' philoso-

phers, threatened by empirical psychology, which was then housed in depart-

ments of philosophy, reacted to its growth with abstract arguments denying that

psychology could advance the study of philosophical issues; in contrast, psycho-

logists, still attempting to legitimate their work as a contribution to philosophy, towed the psychologistic line (Kusch, 1995).

An even more ambitious effort to subject philosophical ideas to sociological

explanation is the work of Collins (1998b). This work builds on Collins's earlier skepticism about the internal/external divide: ``The distinction between explaining background conditions and explaining content is not so easy to main-

tain . . . [for to] state when and where science will exist in an historical analysis is to give conditions under which particular kinds of ideas are formulated and

believed in'' (Collins, 1975, p. 474). Collins's recent work elaborates this position into a full-fledged theory of intellectual production, which (among a large number of other claims) maintains that ``conflict [for] attention space is a

fundamental fact about intellectuals'' ± a fact entailed by the very structure of the intellectual world, which `àllows only a limited number of positions to

receive much attention at any one time'' (Collins, 1998b, pp. 876, 75). Faced

with this situation, intellectuals necessarily ``thrive on disagreement, dividing the attention space into three to six factions, seeking lines of creativity by negating the chief tenets of their rivals, rearranging into alliances or fanning out into disagreement'' (Collins, 1998b, p. 876) ± a sociological proposition that Collins uses to cut to the substantive core of intellectual life and to explain the range of philosophical positions that has taken shape the world over, from antiquity to