Here are excerpts of a review of this Randall Collins book:
* Great doctrines must have great imperfections it they are to continue to generate excitement (32). And those who are most theoretically creative in developing these doctrines will typically be individuals with exceptional amounts of drive, stamina and independence of mind. Such attributes of emotional energy (EE) are in part reducible to individual character formation; but they also ebb and flow in intensity to the degree that their bearers are at the center of the cultural fray. Those who possess EE are likely to cultivate more of it in a value-added spiral as their careers’ progress; however, EE may also dissipate when a thinker overreaches himself or when the stakes of the debate in which he has been focally implicated change. Moreover, while cultural capital (CC) and EE typically feed off and reinforce each other, they are best thought of as independent variables. Hence someone with a great deal of EE, but without the cultural capital to exploit it, is likely to become frustrated and disappointed; as a result, native ambition and enthusiasm may simply drain away.
* “It is a deep-seated part of intellectual structures that questions are asked, debates take place; polemics and denunciations also often occur, in a circulating structure that resembles equally the kula ring, the potlatch, and the vendetta. Even when intellectuals sit silently in the audience, they are conscious of their own part as members of this ongoing community. Their own ideas have been formed by the chain from the past; the situation before them is merely one more link in that formation” (28).
Yet intellectuals, directly or vicariously, face a key constraint: the boundedness of their audience’s “attention space.”
* “The attention space is limited; once a few arguments have partitioned the crowds, attention is withdrawn from those who would start yet another knot of argument. Much of the pathos of intellectual life is in the timing of when one advances one’s own argument.”
* Creativity – the transformation, recombination or negation of ideas – is prompted by rivalry but mediated through various “circles,” the number of which turns out to be remarkably small: some 15 of them have dominated European philosophical thought in the eleven generations from 1600 to 1965 (531). Typically, such circles are characterized by an organizational leader who arranges the group’s material resources, and an intellectual leader who is the legendary symbol of its doctrine: respectively, for example, Mersenne and Descartes, Fichte and Kant, Bauer and Marx. Occasionally, however, organizational and intellectual roles are combined in one person, as they were in the case of Goethe (626-7) and, one might add, in that of Durkheim.
* Intellectuals, in Collins’s portrait, are essentially attention seekers faced with the constraints of a finite attention space; their goal is to prevail in the battle of ideas which requires access to and, if possible, a predominance over intellectual networks. The “feeling of exultation” accompanying bursts of emotional energy arises from the sensation of “ideas that feel successful” (52), and it is “the ideas which have mattered historically” (3) that Collins wishes to explain. “My sociological criterion for creativity is the distance across generations that ideas are transmitted” (58). Furthermore, “creativity comes to those individuals optimally positioned to take advantage” of “market opportunities” (51). But what, then, has happened to the “inner processes of intellectual life” now that creativity has been subsumed under attention seeking, the emulation of heroes, and the brute realities of success and reputation (69)?
