What Collins's The Sociology of Philosophies Says about Sociological Theory

In Collins's latest book, we see an attempt to apply his sociological theories to the history of philosophy. While Collins's macrosociology of knowledge provides important insights into the role of conflict in an intellectual field, his microsociology is more problematic. In particular, Collins's micro theory ignores the fundamental importance of social interpretations. This leads him to use a vague and unproductive notion of emotions. Nevertheless, we can usefully apply Collins's findings to sociological theory itself. As in philosophy, we see the same competitive appropriation and elaboration of accumulated intellectual capital and the same struggle over the limited resources necessary to intellectual production, especially over what Collins calls the intellectual attention space.