Designing a History of Ideas

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'Intellectual history' or 'history of ideas' is a subfield of historiography dealing with the history of human thought: philosophical, scientific, religious, and so forth ideas. Hence, a history of ideas includes a history of religion, a history of science, and a history of philosophy, but not a history of the institutions associated with those (such as churches, temples, schools, and universities).

(This page needs to be expanded.)

Collins's Sociology of Philosophies

According to Randall Collins [1], a small number of key principles including the law of small numbers structure any (real, historical) history of ideas, and assuming that he is right, these may be useful principles for designing a 'good' history of ideas.

  1. 'Intellectual creativity is concentrated in chains of personal contacts'. (p. 379) Often these are (chains of multi-generational) (vertical) teacher - student contacts, but there are also important horizontal contacts (between contemporaries).
  2. 'Creativity moves by oppositions'. (p. 379) New ideas arise in opposition to the ideas of rivals.
  3. 'Creativity is concentrated at the center of networks'. (p. 379) Where and when many of the aforementioned horizontal and vertical ties come together, and oppositions and rivalries arise, and creativity flourishes.
  4. 'The law of small numbers sets upper and lower limits to these oppositions. The number of contemporaneous creative schools successfully propagating their ideas is between three and six'. (p. 380) See further the sub-section on the law of small numbers below.
  5. 'The law of small numbers structures dynamics over time. (...) Political and economic changes bring ascendancy or decline of the material institutions which support intellectuals. (...) Intellectuals then readjust to fill the space available to them under the law of small numbers'. (p. 380) For example, growing schools wills split up; declining schools will merge (or just die out). Decline does not imply lack of creativity, however, there may be considerable creativity involved in the intellectual merger or synthesis of declining schools.
  6. 'Because intellectual life is structured by oppositions, leading innovators are often conservatives. In their own eyes they oppose the intellectual and institutional changes of their time'. (p. 381)

the law of small numbers

The law of small numbers sets the upper and lower limits to the number of opposing schools of thought in the same period and in the same 'attention space'. Such an attention space can be an academic field, or religion, or philosophy, but it should be noted that what was one attention space in a previous time may be split up in many different attention spaces later. For example, in Greek antiquity most of the sciences shared a single attention space, limiting the possible total number of schools, while in modern science, any particular scientific field is its own (more or less isolated) attention space with its own schools (often called 'paradigms' after Kuhn's the Structure of Scientific Revolutions).

According to the law of small numbers there will be between 3 and 6 contemporary schools (within a single attention space).

  • If there are less, more will arise in opposition.
  • If there is one, a oppositional school will arise denying the ideas of the first.
  • If there are two that oppose each other, a third school will arise denying some shared foundation of the first two. This is the most common source of skepticism.
  • If there are more, the attention spaces gets too fragmented and many of those receiving insufficient attention will disappear or merge soon. Synthesizing and eclectic schools will arise, but this situation can also be a source of a different form of (more nihilist) skepticism, denying (almost) everything.

However, there may be reasons for deviation from this pattern. Especially under the influence of external conditions a single orthodoxy may arise (and creativity dies). For example, if an external power drives thinkers into a defensive position (as in India after the Moguls and Brits). Or if a single orthodoxy gets institutionalized in such a way that there is little room for others (as in China, where everyone aspiring to become a civil servant (or politician or bureaucrat) had to pass a state exam). Attempts to enforce an orthodoxy directly by law have generally been less successful, on the other hand - institutions can be banned, but (effectively) banning thought is more difficult.

notes and references

  1. Collins, Randall (1998), The sociology of philosophies: a global theory of intellectual change, Cambridge MA: Belknap.