Disciplines in the Making (review)
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Lloyd’s topics are three fields that grew out of the old Philosophical Faculty of European universities (philosophy, mathematics, science), the three higher Faculties training professional practitioners (medicine, law, theology), plus two lay subjects lately and partially incorporated (history and art). For each, we get a comparison of ancient Greece and China; and for some, further comparisons among parts of the world, both tribal and literate. The author worries the questions of whether European fields exist elsewhere (they do); whether they are similar in content and method (no); and if specialized elites are good or bad (both). Sociologically (from my specialty viewpoint), the author overstates the incoherence of a field because it contains many disagreements; but what holds a field together is generally position-taking on an evolving set of arguments within an intergenerational network. The learned specialist author plays nonspecialist, rather heroically for the contemporary age, and produces a pleasant survey — most richly in his home fields. [End Page 194]
Randall Collins, president-elect of the American Sociological Association, is the Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. His many books include Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory; Macrohistory: Essays in Sociology of the Long Run; and The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, which received the ASA prize for best book and the Ludwig Fleck Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science.
