The Blackwell Companion to Sociology (59 page)

modern times.

To be sure, rejection of the internal/external distinction remains far from a

matter of universal agreement. Critiques of various aspects of thè`strong

program'' have been numerous and have brought forth alternative research

agendas in which the internal/external distinction remains more or less intact

(see Cole, 1992; Schmaus et al., 1992). With little doubt, however, such critics are currently swimming against the tide.

Tenet 3: Contextualism

New sociologists of ideas insist that the meaning of ideas is not transparent: that meanings are always embedded in socio-intellectual contexts which must be

opened up to in-depth investigation before the ideas themselves can be under-

stood. The formation of this viewpoint has been stimulated principally by trends in the field of intellectual history, which has become more sociological in recent decades. This is not to say that contextualist intellectual historians now regard 246

Charles Camic and Neil Gross

themselves as sociologists of ideas; few have taken the social processes by which ideas develop as their central topic, and many hold to the traditional particularist/generalist division of labor between history and sociology. Nevertheless,

contextualist intellectual historians have played an important role in shaping

the new sociology of ideas.

They have done so by developing a contextualist methodology. Rejecting

the view that ``the text itself should form the self-sufficient object of inquiry and understanding'' for the intellectual historian, proponents of contextualism ±

such as Skinner, Pocock, and Dunn ± insist that ``the proper way to read an

historical text is as an historical product, in which the actual intentions of the author (in so far as they can reasonably be reconstructed) should be our principal guide as to why the text took the particular form it did'' (Skinner, 1969, p. 4; see also Tuck, 1991, p. 194). To understand these intentions, contextualists argue

further that texts must be situated in the immediate socio-linguistic contexts

where they were produced ± contexts that can be reconstructed by careful

examination of the writings of a thinker's contemporaries. The aim of such a

reconstruction is not merely to pin down ``the sense and reference allegedly

attaching to words and sentences.'' The goal instead is tòìdentify what their

authors were doing in writing them,'' i.e. to recover the illocutionary dimension of textual statements, understood as stemming from authorial intentions to

makè`moves in an argument'' ± a procedure Skinner applies in his research on

Hobbes tòìndicate what traditions [Hobbes] reacts against, what lines of

argument he takes up, what changes he introduces into existing debates''

(Skinner, 1996, pp. 7±8). (Also pushing intellectual historiography in the direction of contextualism is thè`New History'': see Chartier, 1982; LaCapra, 1983;

Burke, 1991.)

To date, contextualism has entered sociology mainly through revisionist work

on the history of sociology by Jones (1986), Camic (1995), Strenski (1997), and

Abbott (1999). Of these contributions, Camic's work (discussed in the next

section) on the social processes by which American social-scientific thought

developed is the most explicitly concerned with the problematic of the sociology of ideas. But works by other contemporary sociologists of ideas, such as Bryant's (1996) study of moral codes in Ancient Greece and McLaughlin's (1998)

research on the development of neo-Freudianism, also make fruitful use of

contextualist methods, demonstrating the inadequacy of the assumption that

the meanings of texts are transparent and understandable without reference to

the contexts where they were produced.

Tenet 4: Localism

Closely linked to contextualism is an increased emphasis on localism. In insisting on the need to reconstruct the context where ideas were produced, new sociologists of ideas generally hold as well that this reconstruction must have a

strong local focus. Without discounting the relevance of the macrosocial, the

context ordinarily considered most fundamental for analyzing the development

of ideas is no longer taken to be the general economic, political, and cultural

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247

milieu but the particular local institutional settings in which intellectuals find themselves when formulating their ideas.

Present throughout the new sociology of ideas, this emphasis on the local

derives in part from work in anthropology. Most important here has been

Geertz's dictum that ``to an ethnographer, sorting through the machinery of

distant ideas, the shapes of knowledge are always ineluctably local,'' and

his extension of the same idea to the analysis of modern intellectual commu-

nities. In Geertz's view, ``thinking (any thinking: Lord Russell's or Baron

Corvo's; Einstein's or some stalking Eskimo's) is to be understood èthno-

graphically,' that is, by describing the world in which it makes whatever sense

it makes'' ± bearing in mind that ``most effective academic communities are not

that much larger than most peasant villages and just about as ingrown. . . .

Laboratories and research institutes, scholarly societies, axial university departments, literary and artistic cliques, intellectual factions, all fit the same pattern: communities of multiply connected individuals'' (Geertz, 1983, pp. 4, 152, 157).

From this perspective, understanding the social contours of these local institu-

tional settings is a prerequisite for understanding the ideas generated within

them.

This perspective informs Shapin's work on seventeenth-century science. Hold-

ing that `èpistemic judgment depends upon local contexts of use,'' Shapin

focuses upon the face-to-face interactions of British philosopher-scientists ± a local context in which judgments of the validity of scientific claims were made in relation to assessments of the gentlemanly character and veracity of the claimant. In this context, the scientific statements of a man like Robert Boyle easily acquired truth-status, according to Shapin, because Boyle's gentlemanly identity led others to trust his claims to such an extent that ``his factual testimony was never negated by the Royal Society or by those whom it recognized as competent

practitioners'' (Shapin, 1994, pp. xix, 291).

This stress on localism also appears in the work of Camic, which proposes that

``the factor of localism . . . be incorporated into the study of the history of the American social sciences ± understanding by `localism' the pattern of relations

obtaining among different [academic] disciplines at this or that particular uni-

versity'' (Camic, 1995, p. 1011). Examining the development of the discipline of sociology in the 1890±1940 period, Camic notes that the field faced, in all

American universities, thè`newcomer's dilemma'': the problem of establishing

its legitimacy according to prevailing conceptions of science, while simultan-

eously differentiating itself from more established sciences. On Camic's account, however, this common dilemma was resolved very differently at different institutions, as distinctive local interdisciplinary conditions structured the different conceptions of the sociological enterprise that took shape. This emphasis on

local institutional factors also appears in Camic's (1991, 1992) work on Parsons, which traces the process by which Parsons's theoretical and methodological

ideas emerged in response to the credibility demands made on him by local

academic conditions at Harvard University. Further examples of this growing

micro-level focus would be easy to multiply (for example, Collins, 1998b;

Harding, 1998; Abbott, 1999).

248

Charles Camic and Neil Gross

Tenet 5: Struggles for Intellectual Position and the Importance

of Fields

In much of the work considered so far, we have already glimpsed the importance

that new sociologists of ideas assign to contests for intellectual position and

scientific credibility. Whereas contributors to the old sociology of ideas tended to view intellectuals as ``special custodians of abstract ideas,'' new sociologists of ideas see the women and men who produce ideas as engaged in historically

specific struggles with one another, and with various audiences, to establish their legitimacy and respectability as intellectuals of particular types (scientists,

humanists, etc.) ± struggles that can have significant effects on the ideas that these actors produce and on the fate of the ideas that they generate.

Two brief examples will illustrate this point. Consider first Collins's explana-

tion for the rise of idealism in Germany. According to Collins, German acad-

emics in the late eighteenth century faced a serious crisis. Universities, long

intellectual backwaters in the hands of the Church, were suddenly confronted

with the educational demands of the expanding Prussian state bureaucracy. This

situation gave academics the opportunity to elevate their standing by transform-

ing the universities into real centers of intellectual activity. To this end, philosophers like Hegel and Fichte, who were active participants in this struggle,

fashioned philosophy along idealist lines: conceiving it as a lofty domain of

inquiry distinct from theology; yet making it the source of the dialectical methods that they defined as indispensible tòàll the fields of knowledge opened up

by the academic revolution'' (Collins, 1998b, p. 660). A second example is

furnished by Lamont's (1987) analysis of the spread of Derridean ideas in

contemporary France. Lamont suggests that the decisive factor in this develop-

ment was the legitimation of Derrida's ideas through the packaging of his work

`às a sophisticated cultural good'' (Lamont, 1987, p. 595) attractive both to the upper middle-class public and to academics embroiled in the structuralist controversy, a controversy in which Derrida skillfully positioned himself.

These examples should not be interpreted to suggest that new sociologists of

ideas view struggles for legitimacy and credibility as occurring willy-nilly, as intellectuals of different stripes fight out some no holds barred contest. To the contrary, contemporary research insists that status struggles occur within distinct ``fields'' of intellectual production; that the credibility of intellectuals is typically assessed in relation to other thinkers in the same field; and that the field itself establishes the range of tactics that are deemed acceptable to achieve

legitimacy within it. The production of ideas may be primarily a local affair,

but it is the thinker's intellectual field that links local sites together in what most sociologists of ideas regard as a hierarchical structure.

The concept of structured intellectual ``fields'' has been developed by Bourdieu (1975) and Whitley (1984). For Bourdieu, as summarized by Ringer, ``The

intellectual field at a given time and place is made up of agents taking various intellectual positions. Yet the field is not an aggregate of isolated elements; it is a configuration or a network of relationships. The elements in the field are not

The New Sociology of Ideas

249

only related to each other in determinate ways; each also has a specific `weight'

or authority, so that the field is a distribution of power as well. The agents in the field are in conflict with each other. They compete for the right to define or

codefine what shall count as intellectually established and culturally legitimate''

(Ringer, 1990, p. 270). In Bourdieu's view, each intellectual field is relatively autonomous from the other fields of social life; although it is `ìnfluenced by the concerns and conflicts of the larger society, its logic is its own'' (Ringer, 1990, p.

271). (Contemporary sociologists of culture and analysts of ideology also stress the relative autonomy of cultural fields: see Wuthnow, 1989; Thompson, 1990;

Eagleton, 1991.) In addition, Bourdieu argues that the workings of each field

give rise to particular intellectual contents, for to each field attaches what he calls à`habitus,'' a distinctivè`scheme . . . of perception, thought, and action''

(Bourdieu, 1980, p. 54). Using other terms, Whitley's position is similar. Intellectual fields, on Whitley's account, `àre the social contexts in which scientists develop distinctive competences and research skills so that they make sense of

their own actions in terms of . . . collective identities, goals, and practices as mediated by leaders of employment organizations and other major social influences'' (Whitley, 1984, p. 8). So understood, intellectual fields vary from one

another along a number of basic socio-organizational dimensions, which Whit-

ley identifies and then relates to the content of the intellectual work produced in any particular field. For Whitley, as for other new sociologists of ideas, struggles for credibility and reputation ± and their effects on the substance of ideas ± are thus always structured by the social properties of the specific intellectual fields where these struggles occur.

Conclusion

Despite broad consensus around these tenets, the new sociology of ideas is

plainly not an internally cohesive area of scholarship at the present time. Pur-

sued, in little mutual awareness, by researchers in a variety of existing academic specialties, both in and out of sociology, work in the area has thus far focused on different intellectuals, different intellectual fields, different times and places, and the development of different ideas ± inevitably bringing forth different conceptions of the social processes by which ideas emerge and change. Insofar as

scholars in the area overcome their current fragmentation, more clearly articu-