Collins - For A Sociological Philosophy

For a Sociological Philosophy
Author(s): Randall Collins

Source: Theory and Society, Vol. 17, No. 5, Special Issue on Breaking Boundaries: Social Theory
and the Sixties (Sep., 1988), pp. 669-702
Published by: Springer
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For a sociological philosophy
RANDALL COLLINS
Dept. of Sociology, University of California, Riverside
Philosophyin the late twentiethcenturyappearsto be in a time of tran-

sition. The Anglophone world is no longer dominatedby the analytic
and positivistschools,at leastnot in the constrictingformthatheld sway
in the decades aroundmid-century.On the Continent,a succession of
modish philosophicalmovementshave displacedone anotherover the
last decades, leading up to the self-questioningof current Postmod-
ernism. Though today's philosophers are heirs to many themes and
techniquesof previousgenerations,the mood has shifted.The enemies
of the dominant schools of thought are no longer the same, and the
structureof intellectualalliances and the field of creativepossibilities
has shiftedaccordingly.
It is my contention that we sociologists can and should play a role in

this new epoch of philosophy. In one sense, philosophy is already
leaning our way.It is widely accepted that questions of knowledge,of
science, of intellectualdiscourse in general, are grounded in a social
context. Yet philosophyhas not made the transitionfrom the social to
the sociological.Philosophersinvoke the social in a generaland taken-
for-grantedway,while theiruse of actualsociology is meagreand often
uninformed. I will suggest that sociological theories provide some
powerfulargumentswithinthe core of philosophyitself. Sociology can
cut throughsome knotted issues, not only in epistemologyand ethics
(where philosophersare alreadyleaningin our direction)but in meta-
physicsas well.
For all that recent epistemologists tend to accept that knowledge is

social, sociology itself is not regardedas havingany knowledgecontent.
This is no conundrum.It is not merelythat sociology has a poor image
in the largerintellectualfield. Partof the motivationwithinphilosophy
for assertingthe social natureof knowledgeis to deny the objectiveor
Theory and Society 17: 669- 702, 1988

C 1988 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands

670
at least demonstrable nature of knowledge in general. The social

groundingof knowledgeis a wayof arguingfor historicityand, general-
ly speaking,relativism.As an anti-positivistploy, the social is invoked,
not to bring in the aid of sociologists,but to exclude any aid whatso-
ever. Nevertheless,havingcreated an opening for us on their intellec-
tual turf, philosophersshould not complain if we move in with more
thana phantompresence.
The point cuts in the other directionas well. I am arguingfor a socio-

logical philosophy;at the same time, a philosophy of sociology also
seems promising.Sociology is a terrainfor consideringthe underlying
conceptual structures, and the knowledge claims, of some of the
deepest and most complex issues anywherein the intellectualworld.
The micro-macroissue, the nature of the self, the nature of social
causes and explanationsare just such issues. Granted, at least some
such issues were alreadytreatedin the previousintellectualgeneration,
but under the narrow aegis of positivist doctrine and in the rather
authoritarianmode of "methodologyof social science."The new open-
ness of philosophy,as well as a shift in the contents of sociology (e.g.
from the problems of functionalismto the micro-macroissue) makes
this an auspicioustime to beginagain.As we will see, though,a polemi-
cal anti-positivismwill not serve us well either.If today'sphilosophy/
sociology nexus is to be a fruitfulone, we need to get beyond debating
with the ghosts of the positivistgeneration.Ideas are framedby one's
opponents as much as by one's own vision of the possibilities;and
today'sfashionableanti-positivismis weighteddown by the carcass it
feels compelledto dragaroundwith it. Fortunately,both sociology and
philosophyhavenew resourcesof theirown.
One more twist. There are possibilitiesnot only for sociological phi-
losophy,and for philosophyof sociology,but also for sociology of phi-
losophy.The last is not a form of philosophy at all, but is simply an-
other area of empirical sociology. It is a branch of the sociology of
science, , whichhappensto take philosophersand theirproductionsas
a topic to study,in the same way that sociologists have looked at bio-
chemical laboratoriesor compared astronomers'researchteams. Not
much has been done in this area as yet.2I bring it up in this context
because the sociology of philosophy occupies a reflexive position in
regardto the questions I have just mentioned.The very reasons why
philosophyis now in a new intellectualconfiguration,and why the rela-
tions between the two disciplines have their peculiar form, are ques-
tions thatcan be answeredin the sociology of science/sociology of phi-

671
losophy.To pursuethis purelyon the level of "sociologyof ", of

course, would be to move the whole inquiryto anotherlevel; it would
bracketthe substantivepoints mentioned above, and divert attention
from the kind of constructionswithin philosophy and within substan-
tive sociology that I am tryingto motivate.But there is nothingto pre-
vent us from actingwith clarityabout the differentkinds of projectswe
are carryingout, and workingboth in the sociology of philosophy,and
in the substantiveborder-crossingsbetween the two fields that I call
philosophyof sociology and sociologicalphilosophy.
It is possible deliberatelyto combine all these modes: the sociological

analysisof philosophy,with the considerationof substantiveissues that
arise within philosophy and within sociological theory. This meshes
with the issue of levels, of "frames"in Goffman'sterminology,of "re-
flexivity"in Garfinkel's.Philosophyitself has wrestledwith this issue,
ever since the paradoxes and methods associated with Frege and
Russell at the turnof the century,later centeringaroundGodel'sproof
and the philosophyof mathematics.But it seems to me that the nexuses
between sociology and philosophy are particularlyimportantgrounds
on whichto confrontthis reflexiveissue. If knowledge(or discoursein
general)is social, then sociology should be in the most importantposi-
tion to reflect on the natureof philosophy as a form of knowledgeor
discourse.The issue is complicatedby the fact that philosophyitself is
a foundational,or at leastgrounds-exploring,discipline,and hence phi-
losophy is also reflexivelyapplicableto sociology.We have a problem
not merelyof boxes withinboxes, but of two shells each of whichmight
claim to frame the other. This puzzle, I suggest, is not something to
cause us to throwup our hands,but somethingto be explored.Withthe
aid of a sociology of reflexivity(Goffman,Garfinkel,the vantagepoint
of a sociology of philosophy),we can work on the problemin a fuller
context than the abstract formalisms on which Russell and Godel
focussed;here sociology should take us furtheraheadin understanding
the multi-levelnatureof reality.
In whatfollows,I firstsketchout the movementof intellectualcampsin

twentieth-centuryphilosophythat have led up to our currentposition.
Obviouslynothingvery complete or definitivecan be attemptedhere. I
will pay most attentionto the Anglophoneviewpoint,and to Continen-
tal philosophymainlyas it comes into counterpoint(largelyantagonis-
tic) with it. My emphasis will be on how one might proceed with a
sociological accountof these intellectualmovements.Though little has
been done on the sociology of twentieth-centuryphilosophy,it is ap-

672
parent that typical processes found elsewhere in the sociology of sci-

ence have been operativehere, includingboth the internalstructureof
factional manueveras intellectualsmake their careers across genera-
tions in the intellectualfield, and the externalcontext of religiousand
political movements in the larger society as they impinge upon the
intellectual world. This sketch of a sociology of philosophy gives
groundsfor some concludingreflectionson the natureof philosophy
generallyas a distinctiveturf withinthe intellectualfield. This in itself
has epistemologicalsignificance,if it can display the natureof knowl-
edge at its most reflexivelevel. I furtherinquireinto the possibilitythat
sociology might play an increasingrole vis-a-vis substantiveproblems
throughoutphilosophy.
Fourphilosophicalgenerationsfromidealismto post-positivism
Perhapsthe most visible sign of our times is the breakingdown of the

barrier between Continental and Anglo-American philosophies. A
generationago, the existentialists,phenomenologists,indeed the entire
Continentaltraditionback to Hegel and before, were generallytreated
with derisionacross the Channeland the Atlantic.Todaythe traditions
are being mixedto an almostastoundingdegree.RichardRorty3claims
his great inspirationsare Wittgenstein,Heidegger. and Dewey, and
makes a big splash. More substantively,Robert Nozick4actuallytakes
up such issues as the meaning of life, and the question that Heidegger
claimed is the most fundamental, and most neglected. in metaphysics:
why is there something rather than nothing'?- and tries to solve them by
invoking Zen, the Atman of Hindu cosmology, and the logical calculus
of the analytic establishment. Charles Taylor5 and others pump for
Hegel, unmediated by Marx. And everywhere in the United States
today we see the vogue of Parisian structuralist/poststructuralist/
deconstructionist terminology. On the other side, Habermas has
importedMead and Austin into the traditionof Schellingand Hegel,
while Peircehas become somethingof a fad throughoutthe Continent.
Some underlying fault-lines of the intellectual field are shifting.
The onset of the Anglo-American versus Continental split goes back to

the turn of the twentieth century, four intellectual generations ago. As
the English and American universitieswere graduallyliberatedfrom
religiouscontrol in the 1870s throughthe 1890s, a transitionalgenera-
tion of Idealist philosophers came to dominance.6This movement
includedGreen, Bradley,Bosanquet,and McTaggartin Britain,and its

673
influence lasted through the Idealist metaphysics of Samuel Alexander

and Whitehead in the 1920s. In the United States a similar Idealist
movement included Royce above all, the early Dewey, Peirce in some
- a movement whose followers
respects, and a host of lesser figures
were still strong almost until World War II.7 The generation that came
of age about 1900, including Russell, Moore, and the early Wittgen-
stein, broke sharply with this metaphysics. In effect, they were com-
pleting the move to secularization: Idealism, as a halfway house to tra-
ditional doctrinal religion, was to be driven out and replaced by scien-
tific philosophy.8 The elder, late-nineteenth-century generation that
Russell, Moore, and their followers were rebelling against consisted of
neo-Hegelian Idealists. The analytic movement of the early twentieth
century was a kind of nativist purge, getting the alien Continental phi-
losophies back out of the land of science and common sense.
To define the Continent as the land of metaphysics and Britain as the

home of commonsense empiricism, of course, was a reconstruction of
history in the interests of contemporary intelllectual ideologies. Even
aside from the turn-of-the twentieth-century Idealisms, the British
scene had included extreme religious metaphysics like that of Berkeley,
while the Continent had its own versions of militant positivism. The
world of philosophy, despite the local strength of particular schools,
was quite international up through Russell's own generation; Russell
himself had sojourned in Germany, and his resources for recon-
structing British philosophy drew upon Frege's new formal logic as well
as Continental developments in the foundations of mathematics. The
Continental/Anglo split that has characterized the twentieth century
had to be created. The forces that did so were partly internal to each
philosophical community (but nonetheless sociological, insofar as they
involved a struggle for power inside that community); partly external,
in the sense that the larger political context came to motivate and re-
inforce a divison between two polar styles of philosophy, and to identi-
fy each with a geographic homeland.
Moore and Russell were forging a militantly anti-metaphysical, proto-

"analytical" philosophy in the years before World War I. But the
Anglo/Continental break was not yet firm. Indeed, the next phase of
the battlefront between two styles of philosophy shifted briefly during
the late 1920s and 1930s to the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle,
and its outliers and sympatheizers in Berlin, Prague, and Warsaw.Here,
the external context affecting philosophy did not have the same polari-
ty as in Britain and the United States, where the underlying issue was

674
one of how much concession was to be made to religious philosophy in

the form of Idealism. On the Continent, the battles over the place of
religion in the universities had been fought much earlier. The triumph
of autonomous, secular scholarship in the German universities around
1810 had constituted the model for the modem university structure
that other national systems were adopting in their own reforms down to
the end of the century.9 Hence the Germanic universities of the early
twentieth century were not battling over the place of religion within
them, and the issue of quasi-religious philosophy was not the same con-
cern as it was in Britain and America.
But the Germanic intellectual world of the 1920s had another conten-
tious external context for philosophy. In this case, there were powerful
political movements directly allied with intellectual positions. No-
where, perhaps, were these divisions more intense than in Vienna. The
Vienna Circle was a stronghold of Social Democrats, opposing the con-
servative romanticism of current Germanic culture.10 Logical posi-
tivism, among other things, was an onslaught on any vestiges of
romanticism in their own discipline of philosophy. Heidegger was
attacked, upon publication of Sein und Zeit in 1927, by the Vienna
Circle as a horrible example of the romanticist philosophy they
opposed. The most militant statements of Vienna positivism date from
just after this time; the efforts to formulate a verifiability criterion or
more generally to tie meaning to truth-conditions, were explicitly
directed toward excluding metaphysical constructions like those of
Heidegger. The conflict with Heideggerian phenomenology was one of
the driving mechanisms in the development of the positivist school.
This should not be surprising, given the general importance of conflict
in paradigm change generally.11
This is not to say that logical positivism did not have its own prior
roots.12Mach, writing as a physicist before the turn of the century, had
proselytized for an anti-theoretical orientation within the sciences;
Schlick (a successor to Mach's chair at Vienna) had organized an
informal discussion group in 1924 that eventually proposed to call
itself the Ernst Mach Society. Schlick was a physicist, who had trained
under Max Planck, and later had migrated into philosophy; by 1918, he
was stressing the verifiability of scientific theories. Carnap, who had
studied mathematics with Frege at Jena and corresponded with
Russell, had written his reductionist program already in 1924. But the
crystalization of a formal, self-conscious movement known as the
Vienna Circle did not take place until 1928. It is from this time that

675
intense philosophicaldevelopmentstook place, as the group struggled

withinitself to makephilosophicalcapitalout of its basic stance.13
The most extreme anti-metaphysicalmovementthus reached its peak

in opposition to the movementof engagemetaphysicsin existentialism.
Here we see internal conflict among factions, defending their turf
within the intellectualfield, reinforcedby external political alliances.
Heidegger'sopportunisticdallyingwith the Nazis afterthey took power
in 1933 helped further reinforce his negative image in the Anglo-
Americancamp.But this did not remainsimplya matterof Left versus
Right. Although some of the Vienna Circle (especially Neurath, its
most militantspokesman)had Communistsympathies,they were more
likely to be sympathizersof the moderatesocialist side. After the con-
servativesand then the Nazis came to powerin Austriaduringthe mid-
1930s, most of the Circlefled to Britainand America,wherethe politi-
cal mood was muchmore exclusivelycentrist/liberal.
Anti-extremismbecame the political order of the day. The fact that

Husserl was a Jew, and that Sartreand the Frenchexistentialistswere
intensely involved in the anti-Nazi Resistance, did not mitigate their
imageamongthe professionalAnglo-Americanphilosophers.Probably
the leftism of Sartreand Frenchphilosophersgenerallygave them dis-
creditable political overtones in America during the height of Cold
Waranti-Communism.Polemicistslike Poppertarredthem, along with
everyone else, with the brushes of "extremism"and "irrationality."
Popper had originallybeen a sympathizerof the Viennese left, and
althoughnot admittedto the Circle itself was closely connected with
the militantpositivistfaction around Carap. At the time of the anti-
Nazi emigration,he became the most stridentexpositorof the political
implications of the philosophical battle, a kind of extremist of the
center;his writingsduringthe Nazi/WorldWarII era explicitlyequate
his positivistfalsificationdoctrine with democracy,and non-scientific
philosophieswith totalitarianism.Since the Viennapositivistsmigrated
en masse to Britainand the United States (exceptfor Schlick,who was
assassinatedby a right-wingstudent),the effect of this politicalconflict
on the Continent was to reinforce and extend the anti-Continental
polemic in Anglo-Americanphilosophy.Though the native-bornana-
lytical movement was less stridentthan the positivists,and disagreed
with its extreme emphasis upon a scientific criterion of knowledge,
neverthelessthe analytic/positivistcoalitionhad its strongestboundary
againsttheircommonexternalenemies.

676
When the external context changed in the 1960s, it washed away sev-
eral of the underpinnings of this anti-Continental mood. The breaking
down of the Cold War, the anti-nuclear movement, and the general
shift to the Left during the period of the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam
War mobilizations, transformed Continental intellectuals from enemies
into allies. There is also an effect of the career transition among intel-
lectual generations. The first generation of analytical, anti-metaphysical
philosophers (Moore, Russell, et al.) was grounded upon a struggle
with well-situated philosophical rivals: the Idealists. Once the Idealists
were gone, much of the point of the intellectual battle was past. The
next generation of philosophers (Carnap, Ayer, the later Wittgenstein,
and the analytical/ordinary language movement), although inheriting
their cultural capital from their elders, no longer had the same motiva-
tion to pursue the attack. This is equivalent to saying that career oppor-
tunities no longer were organized in the same direction. One could not
follow the same strategy to make a name for oneself. Attacking the
Idealists by extolling scientific or commonsense philosophy was
beating a dead horse; it was still done, of course, but consigned one to
the backwaters of the intellectual field.
The Nazis and the Cold War were a godsend, so to speak, for the ana-
lytical/positivist cause, because they provided new, live enemies upon
whom the old intellectual ammunition might still be directed with good
attention-getting and career-building effects. But there was something
strident and artificial about the second generation analytical/posi-
tivists. Their strongest justification was external to the intellectual
world: virtually everyone hated Nazis (and for a while most people in
the West were either fearful of Communist totalitarians or of being
branded one of them); but to apply this mood to put down internal
opponents of the technical positivism in the academic world - advo-
cates of metaphysics, or of literary stylistics, or of a fresh breeze
beyond scienticism and common sense - smacked of arm-twisting.
This is one of the reasons why, when the external props fell away in the
1960s and 1970s, there was such a mood of vehemence, even vindic-
tiveness, against the analytical/positivist Establishment. And not
merely in philosophy: in the social sciences above all, but pretty widely
across the board in academia, a narrow methodologizing positivist
spirit had been reinforced by the mid-century political mood. Hence
much of the intellectual side of "the 60s" (i.e. really the period be-
tween 1964 and 1975 or 1978) was a joyful seizing of the opportunity
to revolt.

677
External forces of the 1960s: student politics and the counter-

culture
We are still too close to the 1960s, perhaps too emotionally involved
with its currents, to have a good sociological understanding of what
happened in that period. Most obviously, it was a time of political shift
radically to the left, an international outbreak of student politics inter-
twining with other social movements (the civil rights movement in the
United States, later the feminist movement, a showdown of class forces
in France ... and many other particulars). It was also the time of the
Counterculture, psychedelic drugs and freeing your mind, mystical reli-
gions, hippie communes, sexual liberation, and a stylistic change -
longhaired men, women in pants - that amounted to a "Goffmanian
revolution" against traditional styles of deference and demeanor. It was
a time of rebellion across a wide front, and it should not be surprising
that intellectually its concomitant was a vehement rejection of the intel-
lectual dogmas of the elders, including science and positivist/analytical
philosophy.
These were external conditions, insofar as they set a surrounding

atmosphere; but nevertheless there still remained the inner networks of
the intellectual world itself, in this case the professional philosophers,
whom one would expect to go on pursuing their careers using their
internally cumulated intellectual capital. Dropping out and joining the
Counterculture just meant leaving the intellectual field; a few intel-
lectuals, mainly young university faculty, tried to preach the Counter-
culture from the lecture hall, but they rarely lasted more than a year or
so. Nevertheless, despite the insulation of the professional network in
philosophy from external forces, there are reasons for seeing the two
levels as more deeply connected in this case. That is because, I would
suggest, the underlying causes of the student political movement, and
the drop-out Counterculture movement, were themselves connected to
a structural transformation that was going on in the universities.
To state the hypothesis briefly: the 1960s political and Counterculture

movements in the United States were basically movements of students
at a time when the higher education had been rapidly expanding,
reaching a level of mass enrollments that was eroding the status value
of the college degree.14Credential inflation was widely apparent. For a
time it seemed as if we were heading for near-universal college educa-
tion, eliminating its social distinctiveness and making the B.A. nothing
but another step toward increasingly extended and specialized graduate

678
training. I believe it was this atmosphere of the sinecure society that

accounted for so many features of the sixties: the feeling that we had
arrived at a society of leisure and the end of serious work; the rapid
decline of intellectual standards, and the explicit rebellion against what
was seen as the arbitrary imposition of scholastic hurdles by an
entrenched elder generation; the mood of dropping out and cultural
rebellion; and also, on the explicitly political side, the availability of
masses of students with the resources to mobilize for idealistic causes
in the surrounding world (the issues of racial discrimination, the
Vietnam war, gender bias). In the case of the civil rights movement, the
original mobilization was fueled by black college students, who them-
selves had become a large group for the first time through the expan-
sion of black higher education.
The very expansion of the higher education system gave the resources
on which these movements could mobilize. The most militant and com-
mitted of the student radicals, as I recall, were graduate students:
seemingly risking their careers, but at a time when the market for col-
lege teachers had been rapidly expanding, and the atmosphere was one
of taken-for-granted economic security. It was a movement, then, based
above all on the universities, even as it rebelled against them. But is this
so surprising? The larger goals - to end the Vietnam war (or war in
- were
general), to overcome racism, to bring about social equality
beyond the means of the student movement alone; attacking traditional
university practices was closer at home, and gave at least some oppor-
tunities for success, the little victories needed to keep up a sense of
momentum.
The situation in Europe was somewhat different. It was not a case of

accelerating credential inflation within an already massive system as in
the United States; instead, most of the European (including British)
university systems had been small and tight elite establishments, and
the 1960s was a period of educational reform opening them up to
moderately sizable middle-class participation.15 The immediate on-
campus goals of the European student movements - to open up the
class basis of universities - were thus different than in the United
States. But what affected the larger mood of those times was simply the
fact of student mobilization. In all countries, the student movements
tried to join with whatever local movements of political upheaval hap-
pened to exist. Movements tried to feed off each other. It was also a
time of international emulation, with the student movements following
developments in each other's countries. In this way the American stu-

679
dent movement and its Counterculture/psychedelic ideology became

for a while an international style-setter - perhaps, ironically, an open-
ing wedge for the Americanization of popular culture in Europe.
As I have said, the professional core of the intellectual world was insti-
tutionally insulated from all this. But influences could not help from
seeping in. The university Establishment, the full professors in place in
the 1960s and early 1970s, were for the most part openly hostile to
Counterculture challenges to the specific content of their own disci-
pline; but many of them (particularly the younger faculty) were never-
theless caught up in at least some of aspects of mobilization - especial-
ly the political crusades of the time. By the 1970s, some of the profes-
sional philosophers were making an explicit connection between their
own work and its political implications. John Rawls16 used analytical
philosophy to put forth a theory of justice that in effect spoke on behalf
of the civil rights movement. Nozick17 put forward an anarchist political
philosophy; this took a neo-conservative direction, but that is not so
incongruous, insofar as the American student movement was not so
typically socialist as anarchist or anti-political. Within technical phi-
losophy, Nozick'8 went on to argue for a cognitive anarchism, refusing
the tyranny of the claim of "truth"by any hegemonic theory. The lead
in this direction was taken by Feyerabend,19 who explicitly identified
with the Counterculture, and used to lecture publically in defense of
occultism as having equally valid claims to truth as science. It is out of
this atmosphere that we have arrived at currently popular positions
such as that of Rorty,20 taking the historicist and relativist line, de-
claring that all sciences and all philosophies are products of a par-
ticular set of concerns and preconceptions, with none taking ultimate
precedence.
The social significance of intellectual styles
The prevailing tone of mid-century analytic philosophy was technical

and dry-as-dust; as a commentator once said, "a dreary kind of phi-
losophy done under a low and leaden sky."21It was a generation whose
leaders explicitly set out to kill metaphysics and other "grand ques-
tions," and who either wanted to abolish philosophy entirely or turn it
into a specialized science. Graduate students were drilled in symbolic
logic as their rite de passage into professional status (the way sociology
students were drilled in statistics - and still are), and for a while it
looked as if nothing but the narrowest technical idiom would prevail.

680
As a sign of the times, therehas been a stylisticupheaval.Not a revolu-

tion - the analyticaltechniquesare still very widespread,and in some
quartersremain in absolute control. But even among those who use
them, the formal techniques have become blended with a style that
goes almost to the opposite extreme.The tone of much philosophical
writingtoday is deliberatelycute, even flippant.Nozick probablywins
the crownwith such sallysas:
I, too, seek an unreadablebook: urgentthoughtsto grapplewith in agitation

and excitement,revelationsto be transformedby or to transform,a book
incapableof being read straightthrough,a book, even, to bring readingto
stop.22
Elsewhere he gets downrightspacy, invokingin the midst of a meta-

physical argumentthe Beatles' cartoon movie The YellowSubmarine,
in which a vacuum cleaner sucks up everythingin sight, includingthe
background,then sucks itself up untilthe scene reappearswith a pop.23
David Lewis perhaps does him one better in the spaciness game,
writinga whole book to defend the realexistenceof all possible worlds,
including those of spirits or auras or deities, and those in which the
laws of physics are differentfrom this one.24Lewis'sbook is studded
with cute and clever phrasings,such as the label of "Ersatzism"for one
version of his opponents, and featuressuch headingsas "Arbitrariness
Lost?"and "The IncredulousStare."The whole possible worlds litera-
ture has not only a science-fictionatmospherebut a propensityto this
kind of playfulness,coming up with such titles as "How to Russell a
Frege-Church"and "Lewis'OntologicalSlum."25
Is all this (and other instances like them) a reflection of the hippie/
psychedelicera of the sixties and seventies a kind of philosophicalver-
sion of the counter-culture?One might instance Michael Dummett,
who in additionto his technicalworkin the philosophyof mathematics,
wrote a long book on the Tarot.This is not to say the philosophers
whose writings constitute the intellectualepoch at hand were them-
selves young dropouts; many of them are older, and many of these
worksappearedlong afterthe flower-childrenhad faded from the land.
But intellectual work is long in gestation and publication, and we
should not rule out the influence of "the sixties" as a background
influenceor conjuncture.It provideddelegitimatingand relegitimating
energies that could be harnessed to the inevitableconflict of genera-
tions as a new crop of intellectuals struggled to make their marks
againstthe intellectualterrainof theirelders.

681
Thus, the literary,even flippant,style of the new leadersis nevertheless

mixed with many elements of the older philosophy. Nozick, Lewis,
Kripke,Rorty,and others were trainedin symboliclogic, and they use
it, sometimes quite frequently,even in the same passages where they
are being most far-out. Substantively,too, they continue lines of
thoughtalreadylaid down in the previousgeneration.All this is to say
that they are professionalphilosophers,trainedwithinthe citadel, and
recombiningtheir inheritedculturalcapitalin ways that challengeand
extend the familiar,while yet being attached to the core that ensures
one the maximalfocus of attentionfrom a professionalaudience.Some
elementsof stylisticfreakinesswere alreadythere in the earlierperiod.
BernardWilliams26could introduceinto philosophicalargumentabout
personal identity science-fiction-likefantasies about transplantinga
brain from one body to another,and about clairvoyantknowledge of
another'slife.27This sounds like hippie-eraoccultism,but the papersin
questionstretchfrom 1956 to 1971:whichreinforcesmy point that the
newerphilosophicalmood neverthelessbuildsupon elementsthatwere
alreadypresent earlier.Lewis and Kripke's"possibleworlds,"despite
their spacy-soundingmetaphysicalimplications, nevertheless derive
from earliertechnicalefforts to build a modal logic, in answer to criti-
cisms of traditionallogic. Modal realismcan be seen as a way of trying
to formalize,and hence tame, speech-act theory and other challenges
to classical logic; the "possibleworlds"line of argumentis a way of
meetingthe challengeof non-constativespeech acts and bringingthem
back into the fold as truth-functionalstatementsabout some other pos-
sible world. Some of the most far-out looking forms of current phi-
losophythus turnout to be amongthe most conservative,in theireffort
to counterthe attackon some of the mainpositivistdoctrines.
Styles and social identities
It is temptingto regardstylisticmattersas trivial,the merest surfaceof

things and of no intellectualsignificance.I want to dispute this way of
looking at the intellectual world. Style is usually taken for granted
withinone's own group;it seems transparent;one sees rightthroughit
to the apparentsubstanceof what one is dealingwith. Not so with out-
siders, with rival groups. The most immediate claim that opposing
intellectualcamps make is that the other is unintelligible.Thus the pri-
mary attackof the positivists and the analyticalschools on the Conti-
nentalphilosophieswas to declare them to be meaningless;even today,
one disposes of Parisian philosophy by declaring it to be gobbledy-

682
gook. The same from the other side: anti-positivists/anti-analyticals

declare their enemies to be wrapped up in meaningless or useless for-
malisms and trivialities.
But the style of an intellectual group usually has been the object of a
rather explicit development. What the opposing side sees as jargon, the
home team uses as a compact way of conveying points that have been
argued out previously at greater length. Technical terminologies are
tokens that crystalize the results of previous discussions, and allow one
to pack many hidden arguments into one's own sentences. Such termi-
nology encapsulates the past history of the intellectual group, thereby
heightening its role as sacred objects in a Durkheimian sense. The style
also is a way,of doing work: The formal tools favored by both the ana-
lytical and positivist schools are an attempt to adopt the methods of
mathematics, so that pared-down symbols can be manipulated on
paper to isolate the structural relations among classes of things (or of
operations, meta-operations, etc.).28 The Hegelian (and to a certain
extent, Marxian) tradition takes the opposite stylistic strategy: its long,
involved, endlessly reflexive syntax expresses the dialectical interrelat-
edness of things that is the core of its philosophical vision. Derrida-
esque deconstructionism plays meta-games with the texts that are its
object through devices like crossing out words or jumping in argument
among pithy and paradoxical turns of phrase.29 So too for phenome-
nologists, existentialists, and others; for every intellectual camp, its
"rhetorical"style structures the field on which its particular intellectual
game is played.
It is not surprising, then, that terminology and the broader aspects of

style mark membership in an intellectual community; insiders recog-
nize each other by familiar use of these devices, and exclude would-be
interlopers for their clumsy use of them; rival groups are recognized by
their commitment to different stylistic devices; the border skirmishing
between alien positions is carried out by mutual deprecation of each
other's styles. What is a positive sacred object for the home group is not
a neutral, but a negative sacred object for the enemy group.
Reorganization of recent intellectual communities
What then can we say about the way intellectual groups are organized,
from the "style wars" that have been going on in philosophy? We know,
generally speaking, that styles of expression and of thought differ by

683
social class,30rangingfrom the more concrete and context-dependent

talkof the localizedworkingclass to the abstractand self-reflectivedis-
course of the upper-middleclasses. But all intellectuals,professionally,
are in specializedenclaveswithinthe cosmopolitanupper-middleclass.
All camps of philosophersdeal with high levels of abstractionand self-

reflection.The discoveryof more and more levels of the self-embed-
dedness of language(or mathematics,or any other symbol system)has
been the common theme of most of the lineages of twentieth-century
philosophy.But they havearrivedat this by radicallydifferenttechnical
routes, and have taken quite differentattitudes toward the discovery.
The positivistsattemptedto reduce everythingmeaningfulto science
and mathematics,and that to logic and observation,but then came up
againstthe paradoxes(like those of Russell and Godel) thatdrove them
to make more and more distinctionsamong levels and kinds of state-
ments.The elaborationof technicalformalismshas been drivenat least
in part by the effort to express all these levels in a calculus.The ordi-
nary languagewing of the analyticalschool similarlyhas pushed out-
wardsinto variouskinds of speech acts and modalities.The dialectical,
phenomenological,and other Continentalmovementshave expressed
an analogousboxes-within-boxesqualityof realitybut throughverydif-
ferent rhetoricaldevices, and have loaded their discoveries with quite
explicitemotionaland sometimespoliticalattitudesthathavebeen very
alien to the Anglophone style.The differenceamongtwentieth-century
philosophicalcamps has not been in their degree of sophisticationor
reflexiveness, but lies on the level of what kinds of intellectual
manueversthey make with this material.This is what I have suggested
stylisticdifferencesare indicatorsof.
The subject merits full-scale treatment,but let me float a sociological

suggestionhere.The 1960s upheavals,and the philosophicalshifts that
seem to be associatedwith it, can be seen as a crossing of boundaries.
But the relevantboundarywas not that between professionalphiloso-
phy (professionalacademics generally) and the outside world of lay
people (whatever that could mean, in class terms - even though
Countercultureideology vaguely implied a mergingwith an idealized,
pre-reflectiveworkingclass). The anti-intellectualismof the Counter-
culturewas only superficiallyanti-intellectual;in fact it drew upon a
long-standingintellectual tradition, that of the literary world. The
French '68 student movement adopted a Dadaesque style of "guerilla
theatre,"which continuedthe style of anti-bourgeoisavant-gardeartis-
tic expressionthat had been dominantin France since the turn of the

684
century. The main innovation was to extend this style from the literary
elite into a mass political movement, based upon students from the
expanding university system.
In the United States the cultural side of the student movement was the
hippie movement. But though this welled up into a massive phenome-
non of wandering dropouts mobilized by networks of psychedelic drug
dealers and touring rock musicians, the initial impetus of the movement
came from intellectuals in the San Fransisco area. The novelist Ken
Keasy and his "Merry Pranksters" popularized the first phase of the
hippie style. The same area (including the Big Sur coast) had previously
been the center for the "Beat Generation" of the 1950s, and there was
some direct continuity in personnel and in lifestyle (marijuana, mesca-
line and LSD, living in rural communes, etc.) between the two move-
ments. The major difference was that the "Beatniks" were explicitly
intellectuals, led by poets and writers like Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and
Kerouac: an elitist movement pessimistically defending high culture
against modern society, whereas the 1960s "Counterculture"expanded
into a mass movement, full of aggressive optimism about being able to
transform the world. The themes of the Counterculture were essentially
those of the alienated literary intellectuals, but stripped of the literature
itself.
The cultural side of the 1960s political movements, then, was exalting
the culture of literary intellectuals over those of specialized academics.
In the long run, of course, the academic intellectuals were bound to
survive because of their superior resource base, while movements
based on emotionalized mass mobilization would turn out to be
ephemeral. Nevertheless, it appears that the period of massive mobili-
zation and upheaval brought the literary culture into a stronger posi-
tion, and gave it some footholds within academic disciplines. The new
line-up of intellectual prestige across disciplines seems to have shifted.
Where once physics and mathematics were the disciplines toward
which others academics looked, now literature and semiotics have
achieved a kind of ascendency - if not domination, nevertheless as
vehement contenders for the throne. The theme is widespread in many
of the social sciences, in history, and especially in literary scholarship.31
"Discourse" and "paradigm"have become as much the clich6s of today
as "empirically testable" and "operational definition" were thirty years
ago.
In this light we can understand the relationship between Continental,

685
especially French, philosophy and the Anglophone academic world. In

France, above all in Paris, the borders between intellectual communi-
ties have been relatively permeable. Philosophy, literature, politics, per-
haps science - all these are activities that the same French intellectuals
might perform successfully, and to public acclaim, during their careers.
The Anglo, and especially the American, intellectual world, on the
contrary, has been based on a sharp organizational separation between
different kinds of intellectual activities. For that reason, there has tradi-
tionally been a strong difference in the "professional ideologies" of
American (and to some extent British) academics vis-a-vis the Conti-
nentals. The French existentialists, for example, combined different
intellectual spheres: Sartre, Camus, Merleau-Ponty, and de Beauvoir
were equally philosophers, novelists, playwrights, political journalists,
and activists. Anglophone philosophers, looking for instance at Sartre's
technical philosophy, condemned it for its crossing of boundaries, for
the intrusion of engag6 elements, including the alienated themes of the
avant-garde literati, into what they were used to treating as an academi-
cally insulated technical pursuit.
Perhaps because the intellectual-academic pursuits in France are so

closely linked to the political, its intellectual movements tend to be
rather short-lived. The existentialists lasted only a brief decade or two
(centering on the time of the anti-Nazi resistance movement), before
coming apart over political splits (the 1950s issue of French policy
towards Communism). Structuralists, deconstructionists, postmod-
ernists, and other intellectual movements seem to rise and fall in
France as their external political alliances change. But the basic organi-
zational structure of the French intellectual world remains constant:
one becomes a leading intellectual by parlaying an academic base into
philosophical, literary, and political implications.32 Only in France
could an academic specialist in the history of mental illness expand the
implications of his specialty in the way that Foucault did, to become the
star of a movement with implications all over the intellectual map.
The upheaval of the 1960s thus was more consequential for intellectual
life in the United States than it was in the Continental world. There, the
relatively undifferentiated structure of the intellectual world remained
intact, and the basic style of doing philosophy (or any other subject)
continued more or less the same, although there have been changes in
factional dominance. In American universities, though, the 1960s were a
strong, if passing, challenge to the prevailing mode of self-contained
academic specializations, each pursuing its own technicalities. Prior to

686
the sixties the ideal to emulate was that of physics or mathematics,

because these were fields that had pushed their own technical self-suffi-
ciency the furthest. After the sixties, something like the French model
has become the challenging ideal. It is not dominant, of course; given
American structural conditions, I would hardly expect that it could
become institutionalized. But the legitimacy of the old math/physics
image of the intellectual specialist has been seriously weakened;
whether fatally or not is hard to say.
The breakup of the analytical/positivist coalition
Perhaps we can now see why it is appropriate to speak of the whole

mid-century era in the Anglophone world as "positivist,"and hence of
the subsequent generation - our own - as "post-positivist." Not
necessarily in a narrow sense; the logical positivists of the Vienna
Circle never achieved a wide hegemony, and themselves split into war-
ring factions almost from the beginning. But for all the differences
between this kind of narrow positivism and analytical philosophy more
generally (especially its ordinary language branch), all these ap-
proaches were modelled on the technical specialization characteristic
of mathematics and the most mathematicized physical sciences. The
social meaning of this can be understood only by its opposite: it was
explicitly antagonistic to the fusion of intellectual spheres characteristic
of the Continental intellectual world.
The reasons for this antagonism were rooted in our history. The Anglo-
American philosophical Establishment at mid-century had inherited its
intellectual identity from a rebellious movement at the turn of the cen-
tury, which eventually grew into near-absolute power. But this consti-
tuted a "school" mainly by reference to its enemies: the Idealists (and
by extension, metaphysicians generally), romanticists, the political
Right, and eventually all political "extremism."The original intellectual
stance came from the battle against Idealism; subsequent opponents
came to the fore as Idealism itself faded away. The rallying points for
the Anglophone Establishment were the opposites of religion and ir-
rationality: common sense, the ordinary world, ordinary language,
science, and mathematics. The 1960s upheavals changed the lineup of
external enemies; at that point, the analytical/positivist camp began to
dissolve.
To be sure, there were always internal instabilities within its philosophi-

687
cal position.But this in itself was not fatal.Quite the contrary:intellec-

tuals live by havingproblems,topics to write about, puzzles to solve.
Kuhn is wrong in believingthat a "normalscience"is necessarilygov-
erned by a paradigmthat promisesroutinesolutionsto problems;even
quite deep and even intractableproblems can be useful, provided a
group can stake them out as their turf and maintainconsensus on a
given techniquefor dealing with them. Instabilitieswithin the analyti-
cal/positivist camps were their life-blood, giving them materials to
work on. It is the opposite situation that would have been fatal: if
indeed it had proved easy to dissolve all philosophicalproblemsby a
clear understandingof language,or by using the formalismsof mathe-
maticallogic, then philosophywould have been completed, and dead,
by 1940, leavingnothingfurtherfor philosophersto do.
The saving dynamics of the positivist/analyticalcoalition came from

the fact that all its parts did not all go in the same direction.Common
sense and ordinarylanguagecame into conflict with mathematicsand
formal logic; hence the searchfor new combinations(modal, deontic,
and other deviant logics) that would broaden formal logic to encom-
pass the other dimensions of speech. But this move itself was not a
stable one; on the one hand, it leads into the neo-positivismof "pos-
sible worlds,"while on the other it has led manypractitionersof formal
logic to declare explicitlylogic's own limits, and the need for multiple
formsof discoursefor differentpurposes.33
Withinthe mathematicaland logical wing itself, there has been a deep

instability:the foundationalissue in mathematics,raised by Cantor in
19th centurymathematicsin the treatmentof infinities,and program-
maticallypushed by Frege'sset theory,by Hilbert'sand Russell'sfor-
malisms, and that provoked the counterattackof Brouwer and the
mathematicalintuitionists.This concern for mathematicalfoundations
has had many ramifications.Some of these are now famous, although
until recentlyconsidered narrowlytechnical,such as Godel's proof of
the incompleteness of any metasystem of logic.34 The branch of current
philosophy specializingin mathematicshas had to deal with just this
unresolvedissue; thus it is not surprisingthat a philosopherof mathe-
matics like Dummett should be part of the post-positivistwave to the
extent of consideringhimself an "anti-realist,"and titlinghis main col-
lection of papers Truthand Other Enigmas.35
There were other instabilitiesin the analytical/positivistcoalition.Mili-

tants like Carnap hoped to build their fortress on a combinationof

688
physical observations and mathematical logic, while writing off ordi-

nary language as meaningless (a move that created bad blood with the
wing specializing in the meanings of just that ordinary language). Then
the observational/instrumentalist side of science started coming apart
from the physicalist/materialist side. The historicism of Kuhn's Struc-
ture of Scientific Revolutions emphasized the activity of doing science
as an ongoing historical project, calling into question the notion of a
material world "out there" to be operationalized.36 Carnap's position
even got it from the other side, as the logician Quine became uneasy
with the rather mechanical logic that was to be applied to observational
sentences; the result was Quine's famous "Two Dogmas of Empiri-
cism"37in which he denied there is such a thing as "analytical"truths at
all - i.e. truths by definition, which Carnap, as well as Russell and
others, had taken as the core of the logical side in their dualistic model
(logic and physical observations).
Some of these internal battles within the positivist/analytical camp

have become raised retrospectively to new glory. Militant post-posi-
tivists like Rorty38 have taken Quine as one of their heroes; not only for
undermining the logical solidity of "analytical" truths, but also for
arguing that scientific theories are always underdetermined by the
facts.39 Oddly, in his time Quine seemed just the opposite of an anti-
positivist hero. He followed up his attack on "analytical" logic by
adopting Skinnerian behaviorism as a basis for a philosophy of
meaning and language and hence for statements of reference. Quine, in
other words, was attacking the non-empirical side of positivism, in
order to move to an even more rigidly positivist position; like Ayer and
others half a generation earlier, Quine was ready to drive out the ves-
tiges of philosophy in order to make his discipline identical with physi-
cal science. But this landed him entirely on the pragmatist/instrumen-
talist/behaviorist side, which has its own instability: the recognition that
science as the behavior of scientists is inherently shifting and historical;
- scientific theo-
though it may appear solid, the idea side of science
-
ries is never tightly linked to its observations. Quine is willing to live
with this, making philosophy an adjuct to whatever scientists discover.
It is only the post-positivist generation that takes Quine's arguments as
warrant for subjectivist conclusions.
The positivist/analytical camp, like any other intellectual movement,

has fed off its internal problems. These produce transformations, but
not a breakdown of the basic mode of doing philosophy. If the genera-
tion of the late twentieth century seems to be wavering in a more funda-

689
mental sense, stretched between opposing ways of doing philosophy, it

is because there have been pressures for a change in the whole under-
lying structure of the intellectual world. This pressures were most acute
during the political upheavals in the universities of the 1960s and early
1970s; but because it takes time for generations of academics to dis-
place one another, it seems that this structural force has come to bear
fully within philosophy itself only recently. The structural transforma-
tion was only partial; the 1960s saw a "university revolt" but not a "uni-
versity revolution." In ways that we do not yet fully understand, the
intellectual infrastructure was shifted part way only, leaving us sus-
pended between different forms of the organization of intellectual life.
The foregoing is only a sketch of the social conditions involved in phi-

losophy during the twentieth century. Perhaps it can serve to introduce
a few general points about the patterns underlying intellectual activity.
Philosophy, like any other discipline, is organized internally into com-
munities. Major innovations within these communities are like social
movements, spreading out from intensely organized groups that may
exist for only a brief period, like the Cambridge/Bloomsbury group at
the beginning of the century, the Vienna Circle, and the Paris existen-
tialists.4"These groups go through stages of structuring and dissolution
like those proposed in Mullins's theory,4' both on the level of social
networks and of intellectual outputs. One can understand these groups
as engaging in the competitive appropriation and creation of cultural
capital in relation to previous generations, and to contemporary
opponents; a crucial dynamic comes from the rivalries between con-
temporary opponents - such as that between the Anglophone and
Continental camps - who shape their identities in contrast to one an-
other. And finally, these groups are anchored in external structures of
the society, including above all their positions in educational, political,
or other institutions. These institutions give them material support but
also generate ideological and motivational forces that rearrange the
conditions for internal struggle within the intellectual field, especially
in times of institutional upheaval.
Philosophy incorporates the social
Just as sociology has built up its resources for dealing with philosophi-
cal issues, current philosophy has come up to borders of sociology.
What has motivated philosophy's turn toward the social? In episte-
mology, this has been done for a limited purpose, to underscore rela-

690
tivism via the allegedly shifting and contextual nature of belief. Phi-
losophers usually play the sociological trump card, not as an opening
for further development, but as the closure of debate, the nail in the
positivist coffin. Another approach to the social has been through the
analytic wing. Wittgensteinians, Austinian speech-act theorists, and
ordinary language philosophers have for a long time been oriented to
see at least some philosophical topics as composed of social activities.
But this sociological turn has not gone very far, as if it comes up against
a barrier to inquiring very deeply into what kind of social processes
these actually are.
One source of resistance is philosophers' commitment to discovering

non-contingent, enduring conditions of judgment, meaning, logic, or
morality that hold for all thought and all knowledge; by their very na-
ture, such eternal verities cannot be affected by merely empirical par-
ticulars, which presumably make up the content of sociology. How can
this objection be answered? Some portion of the philosophical world
- especially the most militant of the post-positivist (and
postmod-
ernist) generation, does evoke the social precisely because it rejects the
ideal of philosophy as detached and grounded on eternal verities, and
instead sees everything as historically contingent. Without necessarily
going that far, we can recognize that whatever fundamental, eternal, or
transcedent verities there may be, we approach them only via the tem-
- world in which we exist. The nature of
poral - and social logic,
truth, and other objects of traditional philosophy, however objective
they might turn out to be, cannot be discovered without confronting the
social dimension in which they are grounded and - many of us would
-
argue through which they are constituted.
Some philosophers seem prepared to admit this. The problem is that

they begin on this path, but fail to go very far down it. An example is
Alasdair Maclntyre, who writes that "A moral philosophy... presup-
poses a sociology,"42 but then goes on to flay misleadingly simplistic
versions of Weber and of Goffman, as if they saw moder society as
completely Machiavellian and lacking in ethics. The irony is that Weber
and Goffman, together with Durkheim (whom Maclntyre does not
cite), provide just the understanding of the historical transformation in
ideals of virtue that Maclntyre was trying to explain. The Durkheim/
Goffman insights provide a better answer than MacIntyre can provide
as to why Enlightenment rationalism could not ground a moder secu-
lar morality. But the sociologists avoid Maclntyre's romanticist fallacy
of harkening back to an allegedly harmonious and integrated society of

691
the past, in contrast to which today's society is degenerate. It is better

sociology to recognize that all forms of social interaction produce their
particular kinds of moral standards and embody them in symbolic
"sacred objects," even in the context of modem everyday life. In effect,
MacIntyre is reaching toward a historical Durkheimian sociology,
without knowing it, and hence getting only halfway there. And this is
emblematic of the current situation of philosophy.
Sociology's resources for doing philosophy
How, then, can we expect sociology to be substantively relevant to phi-

losophy? I suggest that sociology has much to say on a number of
issues, such as the mind/body relation, and on the ontological ques-
tions of realism and anti-realism, materialism and idealism. Having
been invoked at first in epistemology, sociology now seems to point
even deeper into philosophy's core, into metaphysics.
Erving Goffman's later work is a sophisticated entree into these issues,

but it must be read with a theoretical eye. Readers who view Goffman
merely as the purveyer of the exotic backstage side of life tend to miss
the analytical use that Goffman is making of his material. He was pur-
suing a Durkheimian strategy of showing what constitutes socially nor-
mal reality by contrasting it with the occasions on which normalcy
breaks down. Although Goffman never wrote systematically (and in
fact tended to hide his deeper implications in a trendy cuteness of
exposition), his Frame Analysis and Forms of Talk contain pointed cri-
tiques of rival stances in micro-sociology, linguistics, and neighbouring
philosophical schools such as phenomenology and ordinary language
analysis.43These are veins that deserve to be mined in depth.
Goffman conceived of "frames"as the socially accepted reality of each

moment, the answer to the question: "What is going on here?" These
social realities are reflexive and emergent, but nevertheless orderly.
Goffman is not simply making the fashionable point that realities are
constructed and shift with the context; he is stressing that frames are
built up by transformations from adjacent frames, and hence are chain-
linked together. Further, there are primary frames from which the rest
are built. The most basic is the physical world itself, and the human
bodies who are in each other's presence upon it. The world depicted by
idealism and reflexive philosophies certainly exists, and Goffman
shows us how this is possible. But it is built upon a great deal of solid

692
social activity, building up Jacob's ladder to heaven by sensuous human

activity in time and space. Goffman's model thus casts a new and in-
teresting light on ontological issues, transcending the alternatives of
materialism and idealism, while remaining firmly grounded in real-life.
Although Goffman does not put it explicitly, one can say that the pre-
sentation of self of his early works, the front-staging done by human
bodies with material props, is a material construction of ideal realities. I
would say that the subtlety of human realities on all levels has never
been set forth better than in Goffman's total corpus.
In Forms of Talk, Goffman applies his framing/self-presentation model

to give the element of a general theory of language. This might well be
called the social ecology of language, as Goffman shows that language
is meaningful only because it is embedded within an ongoing chain of
social situations; ground zero is always the physical co-presence of
people, of human animals, who are "tracking one another and acting so
as to make themselves trackable" (103). Conundrums of implicit, con-
textual meanings in language can only be resolved by seeing this chain
of groundings (i.e. of reframings, if seen from the other direction).
Goffman shows this, among other methods, by focussing on a typically
"Goffmanian" topic of "self-talk"- cries, mutterings, and so forth that
people utter in the presence of others but without being in conversation
with them. Goffman manages to extract a powerfully Durkheimian -
and Wittgensteinian - point out of this; for these blurted sounds are
generally not sheer a-social expressions, but arise following some
action that others will notice; they constitute a rectifying "invitation
into our interiors," not "a flooding of emotion outward, but a flooding
of relevance in" (121). Like Wittgenstein, Goffman denies the intrinsi-
cally private nature of experience;44 this is consistent with the rest of
his frame analysis, which implies a radically social basis, even for the
most subtle and multi-levelled characteristics of the human mind.
There are some ironic consequences of Goffman's analysis vis-h-vis

philosophy. At the height of the logical positivist generation, Ayer and
Carnap dismissed most of philosophy by an analysis that equated all
statements that could not be verified empirically to the status of
meaningless utterances like "ouch!"Now Goffman has rescued "ouch!"
for the province of meaning, and with it provided a model for the
nested grounding of emergent levels of reality.
A Goffmanian sociology is especially useful now because it can medi-

ate between the extreme positions in the post-positivist world, between

693
the older science-oriented reductionism and the newer tendency

toward radical subjectivismand relativism.Charles Taylor,for exam-
ple, wishes to hoist the flag of human agency and self-definitionand
strike that of mechanism and objectivism.Hence Taylor45points to
emotions and to conversation as realities that his camp alone can
properly recognize. Tayloris right that the older, positivist programs
are a failure on the topic of languageand emotion. But these are not
simply areas of free-floatingindeterminism.Goffman shows a path
towards systematicexplanationof such topics, albeit in complex and
multi-levelled ways, which explicitly account for the emergent and
reflexivequalityof these core humanactivities.
Sociology has further resources on the philosophy front. George

Herbert Mead is an obvious one, Garfinkel and ethnomethodology
another.As is apparentfrom the foregoing,I would preferto see these
sociologies made use of in the context of a Durkheim/Goffmanunder-
standingof social interactionand cognition.46But that can hardlybe
decreed, and they are full of philosophicalinteresteven in their barest
essentials.Ironically,Mead was himself a philosopherfar more than a
sociologist, although sociologists prefer to read his works selectively,
concentratingon the lectureson self and society.A look at his full cor-
pus shows that he was essentiallyconcerned to handle traditionalepis-
temologicaland ontological problems.His social theory of mind, and
especially the device of the Generalized Other, was designed to cir-
cumvent the idealism/realismdebates of American philosophy in his
time. Mead was far more interestedin the epistemologicalconstruction
of the physical world, than in understandingthe macro structuresof
society (upon which he touched ratherglibly).47One of the merits of
Hans Joas's48new treatment of Mead is to point up how powerful
Mead can be, not just in sociology but in dealing with core topics of
philosophy.
In a sense, using Mead in epistemology and ontology is a bit like

cheating;he didn't set out to be sociologist, it is only that he was ig-
nored by his fellow philosophers.For Americanphilosophywas domi-
nated in Mead's day by idealists who dismissed pragmatismas episte-
mologicallyvulgar,while the Young Turkswho took power about the
time of Mead'sdeath were the positivist/analyticalcrowd,ridinga wave
across the Atlantic and upstagingall else by their radicalism.Mead's
philosophyhas lived in exile in sociology,and only now, afterthe posi-
tivisttide has ebbed, does it havethe chance to returnto its nativeland.

694
There is a roughparallelin the case of ethnomethodology.49 As is well

known, ethnomethodologyis a development of Schutz's social phe-
nomenology, which itself was an explicit application of Husserlian
methods to the Weberiansociology of action.50Garfinkelis carrying
out Husserl'sprogram,and in that sense might be regardedas a phi-
losopherworkingwithinsociology,more thana sociologistin any tradi-
tional sense. That would fit the self-definitionof the ethnomethodo-
logicalmovement,whichat one time used to stressthatit was not doing
sociology, but merely used sociology as a topic and a resource for
ethnomethodology.This is the kind of statementthat tended to infuri-
ate main-line sociologists; but it is more palatable if we see that
Garfinkel and his more orthodox followers are doing a Husserlian
bracketingof the contents of sociology,in order to pick out the neces-
sary forms of social understanding.Where Garfinkeldoes draw on
sociological resources, thereby moving beyond Husserl, Schutz, and
the entirephilosophicaltradition,is by eschewing"arm-chair" methods
in favorof actual"experiments," field observations,and other empirical
analysesof everydaylife - a mixtureof sociological researchwith an
existentialist-likemood of detachedinterventionthatis a genuineinno-
vation in the history of both disciplines, philosophy and sociology
alike.
LikeMead,then,Garfinkel'sethnomethodologymightwell returnhome
from exile into philosophy;it would merely have to be invoked as a
continuation,radicalin some respects, of the epistemologicalproject
thatHusserlbegan and neversuccessfullybroughtto a conclusion.Per-
sonally,I think that it would be best if this sojournof phenomenology
in sociology were allowedto soak up some other elementsof the socio-
logicaltraditions.Garfinkelianindexicalityand reflexivity,for example,
can be understoodin less paradoxicalways in the light of Goffmanian
frame analysis;and the outragewith which Garfinkel'ssubjectsreacted
to the breaching experiments should be assimilated to the Durk-
heimianperspectivethatpredictsjust such a moral/emotionalresponse
to the violationof collective symbols.In short,I thinkthat the heritage
of ethnomethodologyis even more interestingwhen treatedas another
ingredient for a more complex vision of sociological/philosophical
issues.
Conclusion
Sociology,then, should prove to be relevantto a host of issues within

695
the traditionalpurviewof philosophy:Epistemologyand philosophyof

science, of course;the issue of solipsismand other minds (as Habermas
has alreadyseen, invokingMead);ontologicalissues of the mind/body
relation,of person/self/identity(on whichthereis a wealthof untapped
materials,from Goffman,Mead, and in the lineage of Durkheimand
Mauss now being rediscovered);51and more deeply the questions of
materialism/idealism,realism and anti-realism.All questions in the
philosophy of ethics, rangingfrom conceptual analysis to critical and
constructive ethics, make sense realisticallyonly if handled with a
sociological understandingof where moral ideals and feelings emerge
from. The extent of possible success of sociological explanationsis a
crucialpoint for any discussionof determinismand indeterminism,and
relatedlyfor the notion of will, free or otherwise.(Obviouslythe soci-
ology of the self is implicatedin the free-willissue as well.)The micro/
macro issue is a wonderfulground on which to consider questions of
universalsand particulars,of the differentordersof causality,of reifica-
tion and reductionism.
Thoughit may seem presumptiousto say so, sociology has implications

right across the board in philosophy,even in its strongholdof meta-
physics:space and time, existence and non-existence,the Ideal and the
immediacyof lived experienceare all parts of our currentsociological
controversies.As yet we have not been very bold in bringing such
implicationsof sociology to attention.But there is recentwork such as
thatof Preston52on the sociology of Zen practice,whichis relevantto a
philosophy of ontology at its deepest levels. Furthermore,I feel opti-
mistic about sociology's capacity to contribute to these issues philo-
sophically,that is to say within the problem-spaceof philosophyitself.
Tools like Goffmanianframeanalysis,with a nested and groundedrela-
tion amonglevels, should cast light even on trickyissues such as infini-
ties and logical indeterminacies, ontological foundations and un-
foundedness.After all, if realityis socially constructed,why shouldn't
our professional understandingof society reveal something central
about the universe?53
As of now, these implicationsremainonly potential.But to buttressmy

claim for the relevanceof sociology in just one area,epistemologyand
the reflexiveissues that arise within it, let me close with a brief reflec-
tion on what the sociology of science implies about the natureof phi-
losophy itself.We can hardlyexpect that sociology will give a final and
definitiveanswer to philosophy'sproblems.I say that, not because of
any pessimism about our intellectual tools, but because of the very

696
nature of intellectual communities. Intellectuals make careers by

gainingfame for theiroriginalcontributions;theremustbe problemsto
solve if there is to be somethingto contribute.This of course is true of
all areas of science and scholarship.But whereas the empiricaldisci-
plines can go on to create new specialties and researchareas, philo-
sophers do not have the same way out of the professional problem
posed by a field'sown past success.
Philosophyhas handledthis problemin a deeper way.For philosophers

have taken as their turf precisely those problems that are themselves
inherentlydeep and, in some sense, intractable.Philosophershave tra-
ditionallybeen concerned with the understandingof knowledgeitself,
with the most fundamentalcategoriesof existenceand experience,with
the bases of value. These are the boundaryproblems of all the other
fields of intellectualinquiry,and of humanlife itself. They are intract-
able, not because significantthings cannot be said about them, but
because they are located at the open edges of everything;they reveal
themselvesfull of reflexivities,whichconstantlyreemergeat a new level
whenever a conceptual solution is proposed, much as in Godel's
incompletenesstheorem- and in the most highlytransformedlevel of
Goffmanianframes.
It is for this reason that the historyof philosophyis full of complaints

thatpreviousphilosophershave come to no agreement,along with new
beginningsthat attemptto finish its business at last. There is a striking
repetitivenessto these claims:we hear them from Descartes,and again
from Kant,from the Logical Positivists,from Wittgenstein,in their dif-
ferent ways;there is more than an echo of this intellectualstrategyin
today'sextremists,such as Rorty and Derrida,who againare abolishing
philosophy. But philosophy has not been abolished; each previous
claim to bringthe uselessly warringsects of the past into a final resolu-
tion has failed to stifle philosophy's perennial inquiries. Just as
strikingly,each such effort at ending philosophy has given rise to a
period of renewedphilosophicalcreativity.
I thinkthis is not an accident.It is because the structureof the intellec-

tual field in general (across the disciplines, not only philosophy) is
being restructuredat a particular historical time that figures like
Descartes, Kant, and others appear;the crisis of intellectualrestruc-
turingis what gives them the intellectualcapital(and the creativeener-
gy) to reconceptualizethe fundamentalboundaryproblems in a new
way. In this sense, philosophy is indeed "foundational";it concerns

697
itself with the ultimatequestions,the borderlinesof all inquiryand all

of life. But there is anothersense of "foundational," the claim that phi-
losophy is the discipline necessary for putting all other knowledge
upon a secure foundation. This is certainlynot true in a practicaland
historical sense; the other disciplines have gone ahead quite well
without guidance from philosophy.Kant's claim to provide a secure
foundation for the physical sciences against Hume's scepticism was
really a rhetoricalploy, a way of building up the importanceof what
philosophyis doing;it really made no differenceto the growthof sci-
ence in Hume'sday,or in Kant's,just what the philosopherssaid about
the foundationsof theirknowledge.The same is true for all such claims
aboutthe significanceof foundationalissues.
But this is not to dismiss the importance of what philosophers are

doing.Theirsis the greatintellectualadventureinto the edges of things.
The rest of the disciplines,the rest of what we consider to be knowl-
edge, nestled in a pragmaticacceptanceof whateverseems to work for
us as intellectualpractitioners,do not rest upon philosophy.The struc-
turalrelationamongintellectualfields is more the other way around,as
far as the dynamicsof intellectualchange are concerned. But philoso-
phy has neverthelesspositioned itself in the intellectualspace where
the deepest explorationsare launched.This will continueto be so, even
as sociology adds its own impetusto the philosophicalproject.
Acknowledgments
For comments and advice on previous drafts I am indebted to Ann

Rawls, Michele Lamont,Sal Restivo, Norbert Wiley,ManfredStanley,
and David Swartz.
Notes
1. Richard Whitley, The Intellectual and Social Organization of the Sciences

(Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1984).
2. But see C. Wright Mills, Sociology and Pragmatism: The Higher Learning in Ameri-
ca (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942/1969); Michele Lamont, "How to
Become a Dominant French Philosopher: the Case of Jacques Derrida," American
Journal of Sociology 93: (1987) 584-622; Randall Collins, "A Micro-Macro
Theory of Creativity in Intellectual Careers: the Case of German Idealist Philoso-
phy," Sociological Theory 5 (1987): 47-69.

698
3. RichardRorty, Philosophyand the Mirrorof Nature(Princeton:PrincetonUniver-

sity Press, 1979).
4. RobertNozick, PhilosophicalExplanations(Cambridge:HarvardUniversityPress,
1981).
5. CharlesTaylor, HumanAgency and Language:PhilosophicalPapers(New York:
CambridgeUniversityPress, 1985).
6. Melvin Richter, ThePoliticsof Conscience:T. H. Greenand His Age (Cambridge:
HarvardUniversityPress, 1964).
7. In the United Statesthe pragmatistsand the New Realistsplayeda role in breaking
away from Idealismsomewhatanalogousto that of Russell and Moore in Britain,
althoughthe early pragmatistsalso incorporatedsome elements of idealism.This
was particularlyso at Harvard,where Peirce, James, Royce (and in his student
days, Mead) developed their philosophies both from and in opposition to each
other. See HerbertW. Schneider,A Historyof AmericanPhilosophy(New York:
ColumbiaUniversityPress, 1963); Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of AmericanPhiloso-
phy: Cambridge,Massachusetts,1860-1930 (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress,
1977); Randall Collins, "Towarda Neo-Median Sociology of Mind" Symbolic
Interaction(1989, forthcoming).
8. Wittgenstein'sstancealso includeda place for quasi-religiousissues such as ethical
commitmentsand the meaningof life. But his Tractatus(1921) placedthese beyond
the bounds of whatcould meaningfullybe said, therebyleavingthe intellectualter-
rainto strictlyconstruedlogical/scientificstatements.See Allan Janikand Stephen
Toulmin, Wittgenstein's Vienna(New York:Simon and Schuster,1973). For all his
sympathieswith an activistmysticismlike that of Tolstoi and Tagore,Wittgenstein
was just as antagonisticas Russell and Moore were to Idealistconstructionswithin
philosophy,becausethese attemptedto speak rationallyaboutthatregardingwhich
one mustremainsilent.
9. See JosephBen-David,TheScientist'sRole in Society(EnglewoodCliffs,NJ.: Pren-
tice-Hall, 1971), 108-125; Collins,"A Micro-MacroTheoryof Creativityin Intel-
lectualCareers."
10. A vivid depiction of this intellectualmood in Vienna, which already predated
World War I, is in Robert Musil's novel, The Man WithoutQualities,published
1930-32. See also WilliamM. Johnston, TheAustrianMind.An Intellectualand
Social History,1848-1938 (Berkeley:University of CaliforniaPress, 1972); and
Janikand Toulmin, Wittgenstein's Vienna.
11. RandallCollinsand Sal Restivo,"Robber-baronsand Politiciansin Mathematics:A
ConflictModel of Science,"CanadianJournalof Sociology8:(1983) 199-227.
12. John Passmore, One Hundred Yearsof Philosophy(Baltimore:Penguin, 1968),
367-423; A. J. Ayer, Philosophyin the TwentiethCentury(New York: Random
House, 1982), 121-141; Johnston,TheAustrianMind,181-195.
13. The developmentof the Vienna Circleappearsto fit the generalmodel of intellec-
tual "theorygroups"formulatedby Belver C. Griffithand Nicholas C. Mullins,
"CoherentGroupsin ScientificChange,"Science 177 (1972): 959-964, and Mul-
lins, Theoriesand TheoryGroupsin Contemporary AmericanSociology(New York:
Harperand Row, 1973). The early statements,before 1924, that were to became
the intellectualingredientsof the Circle, fit in Mullins'spreliminarystage of de-
velopmentswithinthe "normalscience"of some previousintellectualcontext.The
period 1924-1928 is Mullins'snetworkstage,in whichan informalgroupbeginsto
crystallizearound the original intellectualleader (Schlick);there also appears a
organizationalleader (Neurath);institutionalbases are capturedto supportgroup

699
members (at the University of Vienna and a Neurath's Social and Economic
Museum).These activitiesattractnew collaboratorsand students;relationsare es-
tablishedwith friendlygroups (in Berlin,Warsaw),and attacksare issued on rival
positions.During 1928 to about 1933 is Mullins'sclusterstage:the groupbecomes
formally organized (1928), there is the appearance of a manifesto (1929), the
founding of a journal (1930), and a series of internationalcongresses (1929-
1938) to propagatetheir viewpoint.As frequentlyhappens,towardthe end of this
period the group begins to split (with the migrationof Carnap and others to a
secondarycenter at Prague).Internalintellectualdivisions now become hardened,
as the wingsof the school (the Neurath/Carnapphysicalistwingvs. the Schlicksen-
sationalistwing) acquire their own public identities.The success of the Circle in
attractingintellectualattentionbroughtforeign visitors, such as Ayer and Quine,
who began to carryits methods and messages abroad and to combine them with
other positions.Thus even the impetusto dissolutionof the originalCirclegiven by
the ascendancyof right-wingpolitics in Austria after 1934 appears only to have
coincided with the pattern than Mullins finds in the life-history of intellectual
groups more generally:the breakingup of the originalgroup (which Mullinscalls
the "specialtystage")just as its message was becoming widely propagatedand at-
tractingadherentsin the largerintellectualcommunity.A similarstructuralpattern
seems to appearin the case of the Parisexistentialists.
14. For detailed evidence, see Randall Collins, The CredentialSociety:An Historical
Sociologyof Educationand Stratification(New York:AcademicPress, 1979).
15. In the early 1960s, approximately40% of the appropriateage group in the United
States was attendinguniversity-levelinstitutions,and 18% were receivingcollege
degrees;in Franceuniversityattendancewas about 11%,in Englandand Germany
6% (with most of these attainingdegrees, however: the difference between the
"contest mobility"structureof the United States and the "sponsored mobility"
structuresof Europe;data from Collins, The CredentialSociety,1979: 92). By the
1970s, U.S. attendancefigurespeaked out at about 50%, whereasmost European
systemsdoubledor tripledtheir attendancelevels. The expansionof the European
universitieswas thus manydecades behind that of the United States.Perhapsit is
for this reasonthatEuropein the 1980s retainssome featuressimilarto the United
States 15 yearsearlier,such as the Greensmovementand the vogue of Countercul-
turepracticessuch as psychotherapygroups.
16. JohnRawls,A Theoryof Justice(Cambridge:HarvardUniversityPress, 1971).
17. RobertNozick, Anarchy,State,and Utopia(New York:Basic Books, 1974).
18. PhilosophicalExplanations(Cambridge:HarvardUniversityPress, 1981).
19. PaulFeyerabend,AgainstMethod(London:New Left Books, 1975).
20. RichardRorty, Philosophyand the Mirrorof Nature(Princeton:PrincetonUniver-
sity Press, 1979).
21. David Pears, Wittgenstein (London:Collins, 1971), 184.
22. Nozick, PhilosophicalExplanations,1.
23. Ibid., 123.
24. David Lewis, On the Pluralityof Worlds(Oxford:Basil Blackwell,1986), 1.
25. Respectivelyby David Kaplan,Journalof Philosophy72 (1975): 716-729, and
SusanHaack, Reviewof Metaphysics33 (1977): 415-29.
26. BernardWilliams,"PersonalIdentityand Individuation,"Proceedingsof the Aris-
totelianSociety57 (1956-7): 229-252.
27. Later taken up by Derek Parfit, "PersonalIdentity,"Philosophical Review 80
(1971):3-37.

700
28. WilliamKnealeand MarthaKneale, TheDevelopmentof Logic(Oxford:Clarendon

Press, 1984).
29. For examplethe chaptersheadingsof John Sallis'sSpacings- of Reasonand Imag-
ination (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1987): "unnelings -"; "Hover-
ings -"; "Enroutings -"; "Tremorings -"; "Ending(s) -." Instead of the conven-
tional "Preface"he has an "Occlusion,"which begins:"Spacing- reiteratedlapse,
almost without limit; slippage into the open, spreadingtruth even into untruth,
separatingit from itself in a way that would once have been called separationas
such, the advent of crisis, a crisis of truth,of reason.It is also the conditionfor a
preface,the lodgingof the preface,"(pageix).
30. Basil Bernstein, Class, Codes, and Control(London:Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1971-5); PierreBourdieu,Distinction.A Social Critiqueof the Judgementof Taste
(Cambridge:HarvardUniversityPress, 1979/1984); RandallCollins, Theoretical
Sociology,(SanDiego:Harcourt,Brace,Jovanovich,1988), 208-225.
31. This has involved an upheavalin academicliteraturedepartmentsthemselves.At
mid-century,American (and British) literaturedepartmentswere dominated by
New Criticismand similartechnical approachesthat divorced the study of liter-
ature rathersharplyfrom its content (cf. Gerald Graff, ProfessingLiterature:An
InstitutionalHistory,Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1987). This was an
inwardlylooking professionalism,that divided academicsfrom the social attitudes
of practicingwriters themselves (and which apparentlydrove former literature
studentslike Kerouac,Ginsberg,and others - all from Columbia- into dropping
out as "the Beat generation").New Criticismwas somethinglike the professional
equivalent of analytic philosophy: both made their topics into encapsulated
academic specialties, of interest to no one but other academic specialists. The
"literarytheory"that has swept literaturedepartmentssince the 1970s, on the
contrary,breaks down barriers;it aggressivelytakes the whole world of "texts"as
its subject,and thus spills over into philosophy,anthropology,politics - wherever
it can makeinroads.
32. Cf. Lamont,"Howto Become a DominantFrenchPhilosopher."
33. For instance,Saul Kripke,a leading practitionerof modal logic, wrote his major
philosophicalstatement(Namingand Necessity,1972/1980) in a deliberatelyloose
and literary style, to underline the point that philosophers "should maintain a
properscepticismof attemptseasily to settle linguisticor other empiricalquestions
by quick a priori formal considerations"(quoted in John Passmore, Recent
Philosophers,1985, 58). I thinkthe very fact that the formalside of analytic/posi-
tivism has had to wrestle with these conundrumshas been part of the internal
forces moving toward the stylistic "freakiness"discussed above in relation to
externallydrivenchangesin the structureof intellectualfields.
34. Some of the ramificationsof this havebeen also shapedthe Continentalcamps.For
instance,it is this foundationalcrisis in mathematicsthat set off Husserl- initially
a mathematician- on his search for the phenomenologicalmethod to overcome
the "crisisof Europeanman."See EdmundHusserl, Phenomenologyand the Crisis
of Philosophy(New York:Harper,1911-1936/1965); The Crisisof the European
Sciencesand Transcendental Phenomenology,(posthumous)(Evanston,Ill.:North-
westernUniversityPress, 1954/1970).
35. Michael Dummett, Truthand Other Enigmas (Cambridge:Harvard University
Press, 1978).
36. Kuhn'sfamousbook was writtenat the solicitationof CharlesMorris,the Chicago
pragmatistand disciplineof George HerbertMead,for the Encyclopediaof Unified

701
Science(see Thomas S. Kuhn, TheStructureof ScientificRevolutions,1962: x; also

Eugene Rochberg-Halton,Meaningand Modernity:Social Theoryin the Pragmatic
Attitude,1986 71-94). But this was the projectof Neurathand Carnap,the most
militantwing of the Vienna Circle;Kuhn'swas one of the few pieces of the Ency-
clopediaever published.Its main success was thus to seal the final underminingof
the originallogicalpositivistprogram.
37. WillardV. Quine, 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism,"PhilosophicalReview60: (1951)
20-43.
38. Rorty, Philosophyand the Mirrorof Nature;see also, within sociology, Stephan
Fuchs, "TheSocial Organizationof ScientificKnowledge,"Sociological Theory4
(1986): 126-142.
39. WillardV. O. Quine, "On the reason for indeterminacyof translation,"Journalof
Philosophy67 (1969): 179-83.
40. On the generalityof these structuresin science, see Derek de Solla Price, Little
Science,Big Science,and Beyond(Chicago:Universityof ChicagoPress, 1986).
41. Theoriesand TheoryGroups.
42. AlasdairMaclntyre,After Virtue(Notre Dame, Indiana:Universityof Notre Dame
Press, 1984), 23.
43. ErvingGoffman,FrameAnalysis(New York:Harperand Row, 1974), and Forms
of Talk (Philadelphia:Universityof PennsylvaniaPress, 1981). A work similarly
rich in philosophical implicationsis David Sudnow, Talk'sBody. A Meditation
betweenTwoKeyboards,(New York:Knopf, 1979). See also Anne Rawls,"Interac-
tion as a Resource for EpistemologicalCritique,"Sociological Theory2 (1984):
222-252, and "The InteractionOrder Sui Generis: Goffman'sContributionto
SocialTheory,"SociologicalTheory5 (1987): 136-149, for an explicituse of Goff-
manvis-a-visphilosophicalarguments.
44. SimilarlyDavid Bloor, in his Wittgenstein:A Social Theoryof Knowledge(New
York: Columbia University Press, 1983) argues that Wittgenstein'slater philos-
ophy is congruentwith an essentiallyDurkheimian,i.e. social, conceptionof mind.
Bloor's interpretationof Wittgensteinhas been controversial,because it goes
againstthe grainof the Wittgensteinianschool in philosophy;that school prefersto
rest with a purelycriticalWittgenstein,who disproves any constructivetheory of
languageor humanaction,and falls back on ordinarylife as the logical primitiveof
any philosophicalargument.Yet Durkheimiansociology, applied to everydaylife
by Goffman,transformsthis primitivegroundsinto a subjectfor explanation.
45. HumanAgencyand Language,189.
46. As I have proposedin "Towarda Neo-MeadianTheoryof Mind."
47. See George Herbert Mead, The Philosophy of the Act (Chicago:University of
ChicagoPress, 1938), especially357-442.
48. Hans Joas, G. H. Mead. A ContemporaryRe-examinationof His Thought(Cam-
bridge,Mass.:M.I.T.Press, 1985).
49. Harold Garfinkel,Studiesin Ethnomethodology(EnglewoodCliffs, NJ.: Prentice-
Hall, 1967); HaroldGarfinkel,MichaelLynch,and Eric Livingston,"TheWorkof
Discovering Science Construed from Materials from the Optically Discovered
Pulsar,"Philosophy of the Social Sciences 11 (1971): 131-138; Emanuel A.
Schegloff, "Between Macro and Micro: Contexts and Other Connections,"in
JeffreyC. Alexander,editor, TheMicro-MacroConnection(Berkeley:Universityof
CaliforniaPress, 1978).
50. See also ChristopherPrendergast,"Alfred Schutz and the Austrian school of
Economics."AmericanJournalof Sociology92 (1986): 1-26.

702
51. MichaelCarrithers,Steven Collins,and StevenLukes, editors, The Categoryof the

Person(Cambridgeand New York:CambridgeUniversityPress, 1985); Norbert
Wiley, 'The Sacred Self: Durkheim'sAnomaly,"paper presented at the Annual
Meetingof the AmericanSociologicalAssociation,New York, 1986.
52. David Preston, ConstructingTrans-cultural Reality:the Social Organizationof Zen
Practice(New York:CambridgeUniversityPress, 1988).
53. Sal Restivo (personalcommunication)suggests that this line of argumentcan go
even farther:"You[Collins]seem to fall into the same sort of trap that people like
Rortyfall into. Everythingyou say spells the end of philosophy,but somehowphi-
losophygets savedin the end. Once Durkheimentersthe picture,what'sleft of 'ulti-
mate questions'?Doesn't the sociologyof religionrevealthat philosophy'sconcern
with 'ultimatequestions'(like religion's)is a strategyand a sham - and that it is
sociology and anthropologyultimatelythat realisticallyaddress 'ultimateques-
tions'?It seems to me that sociologizingphilosophyFEARLESSLYdestroys phi-
losophy. So in this view sociologizingphilosophy can't lead to a 'philosophy'of
sociology,but only a sociologyof sotiology. 'Philosophywithoutmirrors'(Rorty)is
sociology/ anthropology;'philosophywith a hammer'(Nietzsche) is sociology/
anthropology.In a very real sense, sociologizingphilosophyis like tryingto sociol-
ogize religion - either sociology has to dilute its explanatorypower, or philos-
ophy/religionhas to evaporateas an intellectualstrategy.The death of philosophy
is anotherstep in the Death of God process."For a more extensiveargument,see
Sal Restivo, "The End of Epistemology,"Departmentof Science and Technology
OccasionalPapers1 (1984), RenssalaerPolytechnicInstitute,Troy N.Y.


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For a Sociological Philosophy

Author(s): Randall Collins

This content downloaded from 192.236.36.29 on Fri, 13 Sep 2013 22:40:32 PM

Philosophyin the late twentiethcenturyappearsto be in a time of tran-

It is my contention that we sociologists can and should play a role in

For all that recent epistemologists tend to accept that knowledge is

Theory and Society 17: 669- 702, 1988

This content downloaded from 192.236.36.29 on Fri, 13 Sep 2013 22:40:32 PM

at least demonstrable nature of knowledge in general. The social

The point cuts in the other directionas well. I am arguingfor a socio-

This content downloaded from 192.236.36.29 on Fri, 13 Sep 2013 22:40:32 PM

losophy.To pursuethis purelyon the level of "sociologyof ", of

It is possible deliberatelyto combine all these modes: the sociological

In whatfollows,I firstsketchout the movementof intellectualcampsin

This content downloaded from 192.236.36.29 on Fri, 13 Sep 2013 22:40:32 PM

parent that typical processes found elsewhere in the sociology of sci-

Perhapsthe most visible sign of our times is the breakingdown of the

The onset of the Anglo-American versus Continental split goes back to

This content downloaded from 192.236.36.29 on Fri, 13 Sep 2013 22:40:32 PM

influence lasted through the Idealist metaphysics of Samuel Alexander

To define the Continent as the land of metaphysics and Britain as the

Moore and Russell were forging a militantly anti-metaphysical, proto-

This content downloaded from 192.236.36.29 on Fri, 13 Sep 2013 22:40:32 PM

one of how much concession was to be made to religious philosophy in

This content downloaded from 192.236.36.29 on Fri, 13 Sep 2013 22:40:32 PM

intense philosophicaldevelopmentstook place, as the group struggled

The most extreme anti-metaphysicalmovementthus reached its peak

Anti-extremismbecame the political order of the day. The fact that

This content downloaded from 192.236.36.29 on Fri, 13 Sep 2013 22:40:32 PM

This content downloaded from 192.236.36.29 on Fri, 13 Sep 2013 22:40:32 PM

External forces of the 1960s: student politics and the counter-

These were external conditions, insofar as they set a surrounding

To state the hypothesis briefly: the 1960s political and Counterculture

This content downloaded from 192.236.36.29 on Fri, 13 Sep 2013 22:40:32 PM

training. I believe it was this atmosphere of the sinecure society that

The situation in Europe was somewhat different. It was not a case of

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dent movement and its Counterculture/psychedelic ideology became

The social significance of intellectual styles

The prevailing tone of mid-century analytic philosophy was technical

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As a sign of the times, therehas been a stylisticupheaval.Not a revolu-

I, too, seek an unreadablebook: urgentthoughtsto grapplewith in agitation

Elsewhere he gets downrightspacy, invokingin the midst of a meta-

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Thus, the literary,even flippant,style of the new leadersis nevertheless

Styles and social identities

It is temptingto regardstylisticmattersas trivial,the merest surfaceof

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gook. The same from the other side: anti-positivists/anti-analyticals

It is not surprising, then, that terminology and the broader aspects of

Reorganization of recent intellectual communities

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social class,30rangingfrom the more concrete and context-dependent

All camps of philosophersdeal with high levels of abstractionand self-

The subject merits full-scale treatment,but let me float a sociological

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In this light we can understand the relationship between Continental,

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especially French, philosophy and the Anglophone academic world. In

Perhaps because the intellectual-academic pursuits in France are so

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the sixties the ideal to emulate was that of physics or mathematics,