Randall Collins > Quotes

“It is not literally true that a picture is worth a thousand words. Most people will not see what is in a picture, or will see it through the most readily available visual cliches. It takes training and an analytical vocabulary to talk about what is in a picture, and to know what to look for. A picture is worth a thousand words only for those who already have internalized an adequate vocabulary.”
― Randall Collins, Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory

“The reality for those in the successful inner circle is simply “the mundanity of excellence”: a smoothly applied routine of using finely tuned resources with the confidence that one knows how to make them pay off. To those in the outer tiers, even those in the second competitive rank, there seems to be some mysterious quality that the successful possess, and this sense of difference generates a barrier of anxiety which makes it all the more impassable.”
― Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies

“The outsider sees details as meaningless, or doesn’t see the details at all. That is what makes most of us outsiders.”
― Randall Collins, Napoleon Never Slept: How Great Leaders Leverage Emotional Energy

“There is a naive conception of social history that is extremely popular. People with different viewpoints give it different slants, but the basic story is much the same. The leading character is called Technology, or sometimes Science; very sophisticated storytellers have twin leads called Science and Technology. They are the active agents in the drama. In some versions, they are the heroes; in others, the villains. In all, they are endowed with overwhelming power. There are some other characters, too. One of them is called Modern Society, who is more or less the dutiful wife, following where Technology leads her. In some accounts she drags her feet; in others she eggs him on. But it does not make very much difference one way or the other because they are married, for better or for worse. There is one other character, a kind of stepchild called the Individual. His job is to fit into the family as best he can. This requires him to be diligent and skillful. Since the family is changing, getting more scientific, technological, and complex all the time, this can be a hard job.”
― Randall Collins, The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification

“(Jobs sardonically said that the charity world was a good place for Bill Gates, since he didn’t have anything really creative to do with his time.)”
― Randall Collins, Napoleon Never Slept: How Great Leaders Leverage Emotional Energy

“Where there exists competition for membership in egalitarian rituals, some individuals dominate attention because of their relatively higher CC and EE, while others are less attended to because they lack these resources.”
― Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies

“language is no deus ex machina to account for philosophy.”
― Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies

“Of all the current social theories, the rational/utilitarian tradition, in its modern incarnation, is most finely tuned to a way of making social policies work. The conflict tradition, with its tradition of conflicting movements and revolutionary upheavals, has a tendency to focus on the evils that exist, and the conditions that will bring about an uprising against them. Where conflict theory is weak is in explaining what will happen after the revolution, or after a successful movement has won some power. Its attitude tends to be: put the oppressed peoples in charge and everything will be great. At this point conflict theory stops being realistic. In their own ways, the other lines of social theory also tend to be vague about social theory. The Durkheimian tradition, with its emphasis on the conditions that produce solidarity and its ideals, doesn’t see people as very capable of generating specific social results; its victories are symbolic and emotional rather than practical. The micro-interaction theories, with their emphasis on the shifting cognitive interpretations of social reality, are also not very good at specific social policies. They assume either that somehow a social belief will be created that people find satisfactory, or that people live in their own little worlds of cognitive reality-construction, like separate bubbles in a stream. The modern rational/utilitarians, for all their faults, nevertheless are no the forefront in attempting to apply sociological insights to propose policies that have a realistic chance of succeeding.
That is not to say that the theoretical basis of rational/utilitarian theory is necessarily adequate yet to this task. We have seen a consistent problem in the utilitarian tradition, on the level of how to motivate people for collective action. Can the appeal to interests alone motivate people to adopt great reforms, whether this appeal is embodies in the legal codes advocated by Bentham, in Adam Smith’s freedom of the market, or in schemes for new rules of the social game such as those proposed by Rawls, Buchanan, or Coleman? There is an element of pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps in these proposals, as long as one starts from the isolated individual concerned for his or her own interests. As an alternative, we may still need to draw on the conflict theory, which suggests that people fight for their interests rather blindly, solving one problem but creating new ones. The other alternative is the Durkheimian tradition of social solidarity, which explains precisely the emotional links among people that rational/utilitarian theory leaves out.”
― Randall Collins, Four Sociological Traditions

“Eminent thinkers are energy stars.”
― Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains

“Roman armies could move faster than the Gauls, especially over long distances, because of two advantages: superior engineering and better discipline. The Romans were not stopped by natural obstacles, because their engineers could quickly improvise a bridge across a river. The Gauls were taken by surprise because they regarded high mountain passes as impassable during winter, but Caesar’s soldiers, who were more like construction workers than soldiers, worked in teams to clear away deep snow. Gauls liked fighting but they thought the dirty work of building roads and fortifications was beneath their dignity as warriors. Romans did everything they were asked because their troops were highly disciplined. Roman soldiers knew that the faster they did these routine tasks, the more surely they would win, even against armies much bigger than themselves.”
― Randall Collins, Napoleon Never Slept: How Great Leaders Leverage Emotional Energy

“the most eminent intellectuals are those whose papers end up being cited the most; their ideas are “parents” to the greatest number of “offspring.” Their ideas make it possible for other people to make their own statements.”
― Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies

“The identities that we call intellectual personalities, great thinkers if they are energized by the creative moment of dominant nodes of attention, lesser thinkers or indeed no one of note if they are not so energized, are not fixed. It is precisely because the social structure of intellectual attention is fluidly emergent that we cannot reify individuals, heroizing the agent as if each one were a fixed point of will power and conscious insight who enters the fray but is no more than dusted by it at the edge of one’s psychic skin.”
― Randall Collins