"This is a truly inter-disciplinary work that breaks through artificial boundaries and challenges us to rethink our conventional categories," writes Hava Tirosh-Samuelson in her review of Randall Collins' book "The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change." Tirosh-Samuelson presented this paper at a recent strategic planning session of the Metanexus Board of Directors. Part one of this three part review is a summary of this monumental piece of the sociology of intellectual movements -- "outstandingly comprehensive in its scope" -- that covers 2,500 years of intellectual activity and attempts to "expose the principles that govern the birth, maturation, flourishing, and decline of intellectual networks all over the world." According to Tirosh-Samuelson, Collins structures the dynamics of intellectual traditions with interrelated elements and laws such as "cultural capital," "the law of small numbers," and a dialectic of intellectual creativity.

In part two, also included below, Tirosh-Samuelson critiques Collins' analysis from her position as an intellectual historian of the Jewish tradition. Her main points of contention center on sources, time periods, and categorization, as well as the general absence of women from this study of 2,500 years of intellectual discourse. In the forthcoming part three, Tirosh-Samuelson will discuss how the principles of analysis in Collins' work are useful tools to assess the complex dialogue of science and religion.

Dr. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson is a Professor of History in Arizona State University. She was born in Kibbutz Afikim, Israel in 1950. She holds a Ph.D. in Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1978), and a BA in Religious Studies from SUNY in Stony Brook, New York (1974). Prior to joining the faculty of Arizona State University, she taught at Indiana University (1991-1999), Emory University in Atlanta (1988-1991), Columbia University in New York (1982-1988), and Hebrew Union College in New York (1980-1982). In these institutions she has taught courses in Jewish history, Jewish philosophy and mysticism, and Western religions for graduate and undergraduate students.

Prof. Tirosh-Samuelson’s research focuses on medieval and early-modern Jewish intellectual history, with an emphasis on the interplay between philosophy and mysticism. She has published articles in academic journals, such as AJS Review and Science in Context, and book chapters in volumes such as History of Jewish Philosophy (Routledge, 1997), The Cambridge Companion of Medieval of Jewish Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2002), and The Jewish Studies Bible (Oxford University Press, 2003). Her book – Between Worlds: The Life and Work of Rabbi David ben Judah Messer Leon (SUNY Press, 1991) – received the Arnold Viznitzer Award of the Hebrew University for the best work in Jewish history for 1991. Her most recent book is Happiness in Premodern Judaism: Virtue, Knowledge and Well-Being in Pre-modern Judaism (Hebrew Union College Press, 2003). She is also the editor of Judaism and Ecology: Created World and Revealed World (Harvard University Press, 2002) and Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy (Indiana University Press, 2004).

In addition to her academic position, Prof. Tirosh-Samuelson has taught for the Wexner Heritage Foundation and has served as scholar-in residence in Reform and Conservative congregations throughout the US. She sits on the editorial boards of Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy and Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History and the Advisory Boards of Hebrew Union College- Jewish Institute of Religion, the Metanexus Institute on Science and Religion. She is also a member of the Forum on Religion and Ecology.

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Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson Department of History Arizona State University

I. What is the book about?

I would like to thank Dr. William Grassie for bringing to our attention Randal Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. This is an exceptionally erudite, comprehensive, and insightful book that I find especially useful for this board. The book constructs the history of several intellectual traditions that have existed longest in world history. Geographically the book encompasses the civilizations from China and Japan in the East, to Europe and England in the West, and the vast region in-between. Temporally the book spans about twenty five hundred (2,500) years, beginning with the ancient Greek philosophers of 600 BCE, through the schools of ancient and medieval China, India, and Japan, to the intellectual developments in the Greco-Roman world, medieval Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, and finally the developments in Western world in the modern period. Within this immense scope, the book refers to hundreds of individual philosophers, scientists, religious figures, translators, commentators, and educators. Their key ideas, written texts, and organizational activities gave rise to intellectual networks whose dynamics is the subject matter of the book.

Collins attempts to expose the principles that govern the birth, maturation, flourishing, and decline of intellectual network all over the world. To do so he poses the following questions: How do network emerge? Why do they emerge at a particular point in time? What is the intellectual identity of founder of a given network and how does it help to explain the orientation of the network? How do members of a given intellectual networks relate to each other? How do intellectual networks interact with each other? What accounts for the creativity of a network and/or its decline? What are the main literary products of network and how have they evolved over time. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis, Collins attempts to outline the laws that govern the rise and fall of intellectual network.

The book is outstandingly comprehensive in its scope. It covers diverse religious traditions such as Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism, Jainism, Hinduism, Shintoism, as well as diverse philosophical schools, including Platonism, Aristotelianism, Skepticism, Stoicism, Kalam, Kabbalah, Spinozism, Cartesianism, Kantianism, Utilitarianism, and Logical Positivism, to mention just the most notable ones. Within each of these religious traditions and intellectual strands, individual contributors and subgroups, or networks, are delineated and discussed to various degrees of detail, conveying the richness and complexity of the tradition under consideration. By differentiating between "major" and "minor" thinkers and identifying the various members of the network with specific locations, the reader is provided with a spatial-temporal mapping of intellectual life worldwide. This book is can be viewed as a narrative attached to a global atlas of intellectual life in human history.

Methodologically the book belongs to "sociology of knowledge." This is a contextual approach to intellectual activity that insists on the embedded nature of all forms of thinking and mental acts. Thinking is never done in a vacuum but in a specific institutional setting that is inseparable from a given material base. Even when philosophers entertain the most abstract concepts such as Being, Nothingness, or God, they do so in a given social context. Thinking is a social activity par excellence. Not only it is carried out by language, which is itself a social product, thinking is a product of a community, and thinking requires material support.

Therefore, analysis of intellectual activity must pay attention to the social reality that gives rise to it and the institutional setting in which it is carried out, be it a school, a university, a monastery, a princely court, or a state bureaucracy. The sociological approach to intellectual activity entails that understanding intellectual activity can never be divorced from other aspects of society, such as politics, economic, and education. By taking all these factors into consideration, Collins has given his reader a rich, "thick description" of global intellectual activity and elicited the principles that account for the emergence, growth, demise, and afterlife of intellectual traditions.

Collins's mapping of intellectual activity worldwide is based on enormous erudition and wide ranging scholarship in the academic disciplines of history, religious studies, Asian studies, philosophy, science, and education. This is a truly inter-disciplinary work that breaks through artificial boundaries and challenges us to rethink our conventional categories. Thus the distinction between "East" and "West," between "religion" and "philosophy," or between "science" and "philosophy" disappear. Instead, Collins shows how philosophical debates that take place centuries apart in different parts of the world from ancient Greece, through medieval India, to modern Europe have much in common, grappling with a shared fundamental theoretical quandary. Concerned with accounting for intellectual changes, Collins gives us a dynamic picture of intellectual activity: ideas are not frozen in time; they have a life of their own, governed by principles that Collins attempts to delineate on the basis of quantitative and qualitative analysis.

The basic unit of intellectual life is the intellectual network. Collins defines intellectual networks as communities comprised of individuals who are engaged in face-to-face encounters as well as in textual interpretations. While much of the interaction among members of intellectual community is oral, he tells us that "intellectual communities arose historically at the same time as public systems of writing" (p. 27). "Intellectuals, as a community [are] uniquely oriented toward writing .... [They] could only come into existence with the text-distribution structure. Their ideals of truth and wisdom are the central sacred objects of this structure." Intellectual network, then, are in the business of generating, disseminating, and interpreting texts. Membership in a given intellectual network is of two kinds: on the one hand, there are face-to-face exchanges either between master and his disciples or membership of a given family. Much of the book consists of spelling out the personal relationship among members of a given network. But network is also more loosely understood to comprise of textual interpretation by people who have never met each other. The act of interpretation itself generates a given intellectual network as an "on-going chain that will be further repeated, discussed, or augmented in the future."

The privileging of textual interpretation in the evolution of intellectual life has two consequences. First, it means that to analyze intellectual traditions we need to understand their seminal, authoritative texts, or canons, and pay attention to the process that brought the canon into existence as well as to the process that perpetuated the canon through the act of interpretation. Thus within a given intellectual tradition, or intellectual network, not all members and not all texts are of equal standing; some are more central than others, resulting in the distinction between "major" and "minor" contributors within a given network. The so-called "minor" contributors may be in some way derivative or dependent on the "major" ones, but the former are no less important than the latter. To understand the evolution of a given intellectual network one must explore both types of contributors. For the history of the tradition under consideration, the minor ones are extremely important.

Second, within a given intellectual communities there are various "intellectual rituals" that shape the solidarity of the group. The canonic texts of the group function as "sacred objects" that shape up the identity of the group, delineate the consciousness of its projects, and generates "peculiar kinds of speech acts" (p. 28). The identity of the group is forged by the link to the shared past. As Collins put it: "their own ideas have been formed by the chain from the past; the situation before them is merely one more link in that formation" (p. 28). This means that in order to understand a given intellectual network one must pay close attention to its history. Only through historical inquiry that situates ideas in their temporal context, can one understand how ideas emerge, proliferate, transform society, or influence world views. Given the centrality of the past in shaping the collective identity of the intellectual network, Collins arranges his vast material chronologically. For me this is one of the most important messages of the book, a point to which I will return toward the end of my remarks.

Within a given network, Collins focuses on three related elements: "creativity," "emotional energy," and "cultural capital." "Creativity" implies "new ideas," but Collins also reminds us that very often "intellectual creativity comes from combining elements from previous products of the field" (p. 31). Creativity, then, is not only about innovation and new directions but synthesis and even syncretism. "Cultural capital," is understood by Collins to consist of having learned a certain powerful paradigm as well as solving puzzles generated by this paradigm and creating new ones. Cultural capital is transmitted from one generation to another due to writing and it growth over time because of on-going interpretation. And "emotional energy" is defined by Collins as "the surge of creative impulse that comes upon intellectuals or artists when they are doing their best work. It enables them to achieve intense periods of concentration and charges them with the physical strength to work long periods of time" (p. 34). By contrast, "depression" or "writer's block," means "shifting of one's attention away from intellectual projects and back onto the everyday world." (p. 35). These categories are used throughout the book to characterize and to measure the creativity of different individuals, networks, or ages. Thus a creative age is one which facilitates "one's own discoveries" and in which "great intellectual work is carried out which creates a large space on which followers can work" (p. 32). High levels of creativity become crystallized in symbols that circulate through the intellectual field, energizing whoever can most closely attach to them." (p. 36). Very often, the most creative individuals of a given network themselves become the symbols of an entire system of ideas.

How do intellectual networks evolve over time? Collins' analysis of the massive data revolves around three principles: a) the nexus of creativity and conflict; b) the law of small numbers, and c) the material basis of intellectual life. Let me say a few words about each one.

In a good Hegelian fashion, Collins treats intellectual life dialectically: "intellectual creativity is a conflict process." (p. 81). The conflict may emerge within a given network, even in relationship between masters and disciples, or in the relationship between opposing networks. Conflict, competition, debate, polemics are all good, as far as Collins is concerned, since they refine ideas, challenge creators to a higher level of self-awareness, push thinkers to ever more sophisticated abstractions and subtle speculations. Conflict energizes, gives birth to new ideas, and opens up new vistas for further developments. Conflict is the life line of creativity.

Yet conflict is not infinite: as positions become diversified and ever more subtle, the second law of intellectual life begins to operate: "the law of small numbers." This law states that "there is room for three to six positions to command public attentions" (p. 446). Six is the upper limit and three is the lower limit. When the upper limit is violated, as it happens occasionally, the weaker positions will be consolidated or amalgamated according to the law of small numbers, but consolidation too has its limits. Fewer than three entails stagnation and lack of growth. If I understand it correctly, the "law of small numbers" is not a description of what is always the case, but rather the optimal situation that captures a healthy, properly flourishing intellectual environment. The range of 3 to 6 spells what is neither "too little" nor "too much" but rather "just right," reminding us of Aristotle's celebrated doctrine of the mean.

The nexus between creativity and conflict and "the law of small numbers" operate in-tandem, because intellectual life takes place in a finite, material world. Institutions depend on material wealth that supports them, whether the wealth comes from land holdings, commerce and trade, taxation, or inheritance. And since the production and perpetuation of wealth are intrinsically related to politics, intellectual life stands at the intersection of politics and economics. As the case of India shows, "external politics favors one or another organizational base within which intellectuals build their network; inside the dominant base, factions divide to take up the lion's share of the space available under the intellectual law of small numbers, while factions on the weakening side ally into syncretism" (p. 177). The book provides massive data from across the world to explain in detail the interplay between intellectual activity, social institutions, economic and politics.

II. Critique of Collins's Analysis in Light of Judaism

So far I told you what the book is about. Now let me turn to the second part of my response by looking more closely at one section of the book. Let me preface my somewhat critical comments with a disclaimer. To properly respond to Collins's work, one must know at least as much as he does. I definitely do not command his vast knowledge, since I am not conversant in the history of Eastern religious traditions discussed in the book. My specialization is the Jewish tradition, a tradition into which I was born and which I have chosen as the focus of my academic career. Since Judaism gave rise to Christianity and Islam, I also know these two traditions, especially their medieval and early-modern chapters, but not with the same depth. I will reflect on Collins's claims from the vantage point of what I know best.

The methodology:

As an intellectual historian of the Jewish tradition, I resonate with Collins' approach to intellectual activity. I also seek to understand ideas in their socio, economic, cultural, and political context, and I never lose sight of the identity of knower and the context for the production of knowledge. As an intellectual historian of Judaism, I was particularly pleased to read Chapter Eight of Collins's work devoted to the interplay between Islam, Judaism, and Christendom in the Middle Ages. The chapter explores how Greek philosophical and scientific ideas were absorbed by the three monotheistic traditions, how Jewish, Islamic, and Christian scholars fructified each other, and how each of them gave rise to distinctive educational institutions. By portraying the interwoven relationship between these three civilizations we move gain a richer and more accurate understanding of Western thought, precisely because it is less Eurocentric and less Christocentric. As Collins tells the story, the Jews emerge as major players, especially in medieval Spain, functioning as transmitters and mediators of culture.

Needless to say, since I devote my life to the study of Jewish life in the Middle Ages I was quite pleased to read Collins's reconstruction. Yet, as a specialist in this field, I also find some problems with Collins's account. Collins derives his information about Jewish thought from the works of other scholars, especially Isaac Husik, Shlomo Pines, and Colette Sirat. Until 1997, these were the standards overviews of medieval Jewish philosophy and Collins was right to rely on them for factual data. Since then, a better reference work has come out -- Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman (eds)., History of Jewish Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1997). While some of the essays support Collins's sociological approach to intellectual activity, they also make clear why Collins's analysis is limited because his information is derived from older scholarship, especially Collete Sirat's A History of Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Here are three areas where Collins's work could have benefited from the more recent analysis.

Sources of information:

Following his sources, Collins clearly delineates between Jewish networks that follow Kalam, Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism. While these categories still inform the organization of Frank and Leman work, we must realize that there is no simple identity between a given intellectual identity and the thought of a given thinker. Yes, some thinkers fit neatly into these categories - such as Saadia Gaon, Ibn Gabirol, and Abraham ibn Daud respectively -- but in the 13th, 14th centuries, and 15th centuries the categories do not work so neatly. Medieval Jewish thought is really a fusion of Neoplatonic and Aristotelian elements. The map out the intellectual networks we need much more subtle tools, such as copying practices that establish manuscript tradition. The most helpful scholarship that could help substantiate Collins's work is done by Malachi Beit-Arie, Benjamin Richler, Israel Ta-Shma, Tzvi Langermann, and others, including Collet Sirat, who trace the dissemination of manuscripts in medieval Jewish communities. In other words, Collins's generalization about the dynamic of Jewish life are based on rather schematic, albeit generally true, scholarship of earlier decades. To really do the sociology of Jewish thought in the Middle Ages would necessitate attention to different studies and different practices.

The use of labels:

Another problem concerns the labels of "cosmopolitan" and "nationalist" which Collins ascribes to Maimonides and Halevi respectively. Yes, it is true that Maimonides' privileging of the intellect and his reliance on non Jewish sources, especially Aristotle and Alfarabi, could lead one to view him as a "cosmopolitan." But we need to remember that for Maimonides, intellectual perfection, or happiness, is possible only for those who live in the just society, the one established by revealed law, or the Torah of Moss. The privileging of the Torah makes Maimonides' position much more ambivalent. Conversely, Judah Halevi's "nationalist" interpretation is not devoid of science, but actually reflects a certain scientific-philosophic tradition in medieval Islam, the blend of Hermeticism and Neoplatonism espoused by the Brethren of Purity. Once again, when one examines closely medieval Jewish intellectual networks, the story is much messier and more complex than the neat structural analysis provided by Collins.

A glaring omission:

The best case study to examine Collins's generalizations about the role of personal relationships in intellectual networks, the link between intellectual activity and social location, and nexus of conflict and creativity was the Maimonidean Controversy of the 13th century. Yet, surprisingly this topic receives very little attention, again because the sources at his disposal did not pay sufficient attention to the social context of intellectual activity. When we examine the controversy in detail and pay attention to the acting personae and personal relationships, it become harder to fit the data into neat generalizations. It is especially difficult to assess the Maimonidean Controversy in terms of Jewish creativity. On the one hand, one can say that Kabbalah came to the fore as a self-conscious movement in order to curb the spread of Maimonidean rationalism. In this regard, conflict enhanced creativity. But on the other hand, one can also argue that the ban on the study of philosophy under 25 signals the decline of Jewish creativity in terms of the sciences, even though it will take at least 400 years before this loss of creativity becomes patently evident. In the short run, the ban on the study of philosophy did not hamper Jewish creativity; in fact, the full absorption of the Aristotelian-Averroian corpora took place in the decades after the ban was imposed. In other words, the nexus of conflict and creativity in medieval Jewish philosophy requires further, much more detailed analysis than the one offered by Collins.

Judaism is not limited to the Middle Ages:

Collins focuses on medieval Jewish philosophy as a case study of the principles of intellectual networks, relegating other intellectual networks (e.g., the German Pietists and the kabbalists of Spain and Provence) to the indexes. Yet, we all know that Jewish intellectual life did not begin in the Middle Ages, but at least with the rabbinic movement which flourished from the first to the sixth centuries CE. Collins leaves the six centuries of that movement and its enormous literary output out of his analysis. I suspect that Collins chose not to apply his analysis to the rabbinic corpus because the material poses intractable methodological difficulties. Even though we have hundreds of individuals identified by name, a given name does not necessarily mean an actual person, but rather an intellectual tradition ascribed to that person. Therefore, it is quite misleading to take the anecdotal and try to construe a sociological-structural analysis on its basis. Does the law of small numbers work for the rabbinic corpus? Is the dialectic of conflict and creativity supported by the literary sources at our disposal? I do not know, but I am inclined to believe that many scholars of rabbinic Judaism today will be very hesitant to apply Collins's sociology of knowledge because they insist that the material is a vast literary construct rather than a picture of a given social reality. The move from literary text to social context, which Collins's take for granted, will be resisted by many scholars of rabbinic Judaism.

As much as Collins omits the pre-medieval material, so does he excludes the post- medieval story of Jewish intellectual life. After 1600 we barely hear of Jews. Yes, there are some allusions to Kabbalah in the Renaissance, to Spinoza, and to Mendelssohn. Occasionally, as in case of Husserl, we are told that a person was born Jewish and converted to Christianity either in childhood by the parents or later in life. But the peculiar role of Jews in modern intellectual life simply disappears from view. The story of modern philosophy, as Collins constructs it, highlights the mathematization of philosophy (as Arthur Hertzberg has noted, this may have been directly related to the Emancipation of the Jews), the loss of faith among those seeking integration in Western society and culture, and the shift of intellectual energy from the study of the Talmud (a highly abstract activity) to the study of mathematics and the natural sciences. It seems to me that the analysis of mathematization of philosophy in the modern period could be enriched if the Jewish background of some noted mathematicians and physicists is highlighted.

What about women?

Obviously when one covers 2500 years of intellectual activity, seven major religious traditions, scores of intellectual networks, and hundreds of individuals, one must leave a lot out and cannot possibly do justice to the material under consideration. There is one particular omission, however, which concerns me most, not as a Jew but as a Jewish woman. Only five female philosophers are mentioned in the book - Ann Conway, Catherine Cockburn, George Elliot, Madame de Stael, and Julia Kristeva. Collins, I must admit, anticipates this challenge from his readers and in the introduction he raises the questions "where were the women?" In the Introduction he mentions four women, whose names appear again later in the book. Yet, in truth, this book is but another illustration that the story of philosophy is "His-story" rather than "Her-story." This is not a cheap shot on my part simply to waive the feminist "party card" and rebuke Collins for not consulting the massive material that has been collected about the work of female philosophers from ancient Greece to the present. Rather, my point is that Collins's exclusion of the women from the sociological analysis distorts his reconstruction of intellectual networks. How can one discuss Sartre while omitting Simon de Bauvoir, or Nietzsche without a reference to Lou Andreas-Salome, or Jacques Lacan without a reference to Luce Irigaray? These women are not only crucial to the analysis of the ideas of their male counterparts, they are essential to the critique of their ideas as well as the reception of those ideas. There can be no global theory of intellectual change without paying attention to the dynamic between men and women, and without recognizing that at least half of social reality in which all philosophic activity is embedded includes women.

Published   2004.04.15