May 7, 2008
Scott McLemee interviews Neil Gross
In this week's "Intellectual Affairs" column, Scott McLemee interviews Neil Gross, author of the forthcoming book Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher (Chicago). McLemee describes the book as not exactly a biography, but rather "a study of how institutional forces shape an intellectual’s sense of personal identity, and vice versa." A Q-and-A follows, which begins:
Q: You identify your work on Richard Rorty not as a biography, or even as a work of intellectual history, but rather as an empirical case study in “the new sociology of ideas.” What is that? What tools does a sociologist bring to the job that an intellectual historian wouldn’t?
A: Sociology is a diverse field, but if I had to offer a generalization, I’d say that most sociologists these days aim to identify the often hidden social mechanisms, or cascading causal processes, that help to explain interesting, important, or counterintuitive outcomes or events in the social world. How and why do some movements for social change succeed in realizing their goals when others fail to get off the ground? Why isn’t there more social mobility? What exactly is the connection between neighborhood poverty and crime? Few sociologists think anymore that universal, law-like answers to such questions can be found, but they do think it possible to isolate the role played by more or less general mechanisms.
Sociologists of ideas are interested in identifying the hidden social processes that can help explain the content of intellectuals’ ideas and account for patterns in the dissemination of those ideas. My book attempts to make a theoretical contribution to this subfield. I challenge the approaches taken by two of the leading figures in the area — Pierre Bourdieu and Randall Collins — and propose a new approach. I think that the best sociological theory, however, has strong empirical grounding, so I decided to develop my theoretical contribution and illustrate its value by deeply immersing myself in an empirical case: the development of the main lines of Richard Rorty’s philosophy....
To read the rest, click here.