Modern World-System in the Longue Duree by Immanuel Wallerstein

Author:Immanuel Wallerstein [Wallerstein, Immanuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781594510366
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2004-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

PART II

Structures of Knowledge and Constructed Knowledge in the Modern World

8

Commonality and Divergence of World Intellectual Structures in the Second Millennium CE

Randall Collins

Let us begin with a snapshot of the world intellectual situation at the turn of the first millennium, roughly in the centuries between 1000 and 1200 CE: In the Sung Dynasty, China is in its great period of intellectual efflorescence. Philosophy is led by the neo-Confucian movement and the most sophisticated of the Chinese metaphysicians, including Ch’eng-I, Ch’eng-Hao, and Chu Hsi—names that ought to be better known in the Western world, since they are as important as Aquinas, Leibniz, and Spinoza (whom they somewhat resemble). These are comprehensive, all-around thinkers, coordinating cosmology with moral imperatives and doctrines of government and naturalistic observation. Sung thinkers are the high points of what we would call natural science. There is also a movement of mathematicians, separate from the neo-Confucians, which creates a higher algebra using methods parallel to (but technically different from) those developed four centuries later by European mathematicians. These innovations are promoted by a shift in the institutional base for intellectual life. The examination system for selecting government officials is now being institutionalized on a large scale. This fosters debate over the content of the curriculum, opens up new careers for teachers preparing students for the exams, and, due to an overflow of intellectual contention, even promotes dissident schools that oppose the exams entirely. Institutional struggle fosters creative factions of opposing intellectual programs while getting maximal exposure by holding them together around a collective focus of attention.

The Chinese case illustrates my method, which I describe more fully in The Sociology of Philosophies (Collins 1998). I examine the networks of leading intellectuals (several hundred, in the case of China), looking for ways in which they constitute one another as factional chains across the generations. The famous individual names always appear in clusters, and, indeed, the intellectual productivity of each is a focal point constituted by the alliances and oppositions of collective movements, sharpened and glorified to epitomize a larger field of ongoing debate. Networks are useful, too, in charting long-distance transmission of intellectual action: In China, during the Sung dynasty, Japanese sojourners picked up the network connections that they transmitted back to Japan, which was the beginning of the major lineages of Japanese philosophy. In this case, these were largely Buddhist networks, the faction which had become displaced in China by the neo-Confucian upheaval, but which found continuation in a new institutional niche as monasteries became viable economic bases in Japan. Such patterns of sojourning enable us to map cultural dependence quite precisely. For this period, Japan was an importer of Chinese intellectual life. These links were broken in following centuries, and Japan became intellectually creative in its own right.

The method—charting the outstanding names and the lesser names that surround them, examining their network patterns, rivalries, and their material bases—gives us a sociological snapshot of intellectual communities and of their transformative conditions. For India, from roughly 1000–1200 CE, there were

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