Randall Collins Quotes

Randall Collins is an American sociologist who has been influential in both his teaching and writing. He has taught in many notable universities around the world and his academic works have been translated into various languages. Collins is currently Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a leading contemporary social theorist whose areas of expertise include the macro-historical sociology of political and economic change; micro-sociology, including face-to-face interaction; and the sociology of intellectuals and social conflict. He is considered to be one of the leading non-Marxist conflict theorists in the United States, and served as the president of the American Sociological Association from 2010 to 2011.

✵ 1941

Randall Collins: 7 quotes 0 likes

Famous Randall Collins Quotes

“The key intellectual event is a lecture or a formal debate, a period of time when one individual holds the floor to deliver a sustained argument on a particular topic. This is different from the give-and-take of sociable conversations, which typically cannot reach any complex or abstract level because the focus shifts too often. Intellectuals giving their attention for half an hour or more to one viewpoint, developed as a unified stream of discourse, are thereby elevating the topic into a larger, more encompassing sacred object than the little fragmentary tokens of ordinary sociable ties.”

Randall Collins

Source: The Sociology of Philosophies (1998), p. 26

“Thinking would not be possible at all if we were not social; we would have no words, no abstract ideas, and no energy for anything outside of immediate sensuality.”

Randall Collins

Source: The Sociology of Philosophies (1998), p. 7

“What we call structure is a shorthand way of describing repetitive patterns, encounters that people keep coming back to, a recycling of rituals. This larger structure has the feel of externality; it seems thing-like, compulsory, resistant to change. This sense of constraint arises in part because the major institutions as repetitive networks are based on their distinctive interaction rituals, which have generated emotional commitments to their identifying symbols. It is characteristic of these intensely produced membership symbols that people reify them, treat them as things, as “sacred objects” in Durkheim’s sense. Organizations, states, as well as positions and roles within them, are sacred objects in just this sense: reified patterns of real-life interaction, cognitively raised above the level of the merely enacted, and treated as if they were self-subsistent entities to which individuals must conform. This symbolic social structuring of the world extends even to physical objects by making them into property appropriated under the sanction of social groups.”

Randall Collins

Source: The Sociology of Philosophies (1998), pp. 28-29

“There is no thinking except as aftermath or preparation of communication.”

Randall Collins

Source: The Sociology of Philosophies (1998), p. 2

“Intellectual life hinges on face-to-face situations because interaction rituals can take place only on this level. Intellectual sacred objects can be created and sustained only if there are ceremonial gatherings to worship them. This is what lectures, conferences, discussions, and debates do: they gather the intellectual community, focus members’ attention on a common object uniquely their own, and build up distinctive emotions around those objects.”

Randall Collins

Source: The Sociology of Philosophies (1998), p. 26

““Truth” is the reigning sacred object of the scholarly community, as “art” is for literary/artistic communities; these are simultaneously their highest cognitive and moral categories, the locus of highest value, by which all else is judged.”

Randall Collins

Source: The Sociology of Philosophies (1998), p. 19

“Individuals who participate in interaction rituals are filled with emotional energy, in proportion to the intensity of the interaction. Durkheim called this energy “moral force,” the flow of enthusiasm that allows individuals in the throes of ritual participation to carry out heroic acts of fervor or self-sacrifice. I would emphasize another result of group-generated emotional energy: it charges up individuals like an electric battery, giving them a corresponding degree of enthusiasm toward ritually created symbolic goals when they are out of the presence of the group. Much of what we consider individual personality consists of the extent to which persons carry the energy of intense interaction rituals; at the high end, such persons are charismatic; a little less intensely, they are forceful leaders and the stars of sociability; modest charges of emotional energy make passive individuals; and those whose interaction ritual participation is meager and unsuccessful are withdrawn and depressed.”

Randall Collins

Source: The Sociology of Philosophies (1998), p. 23

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