Randall Collins is an American sociologist, and writer. Collins has not only penned several works about sociology and its history, but he is also responsible for a novel about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective character, Sherlock Holmes. He has taught sociology at the University of Pennsylvania for many years.
Background
Randall Collins was born on July 29, 1941, in Knoxville, Tennessee, the United States. Dr. Collins grew up in a slew of different cities and countries, his father being a diplomat (and possible spy) with the US State Department during the Cold War. They lived in Germany immediately following World War II, and later in Moscow, among other places such as Uruguay. Though he was born in Tennessee to a Southern family, he does not consider any of these places his “home.”
Education
Collins attended a New England Preparatory School. Collins received a prestigious education at Harvard University, in 1959-1963. He subsequently earned a Master of Arts degree in the discipline from Stanford University (1964) before completing a Master of Arts degree and a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley (1969).
Career
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' first position in academia was at his alma mater, the University of California Berkeley followed by many other universities including the University of Wisconsin-Madison, followed by the University of California - San Diego, the University of Virginia, and then the University of California-Riverside, finally arriving at his current position at the University of Pennsylvania.
Collins is currently an 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 has devoted much of his career and research to study society, how is it created and destroyed through the emotional behaviors of human beings.
He took intermittent breaks from academia, as a novelist, and as a freelance scholar. He has also been a visiting professor at Chicago, Harvard, and Cambridge, as well as various schools in Europe, Japan, and China. Collins has published almost one hundred articles since finishing his undergraduate education. He has also written and contributed to several books with a range of topics such as the discovery of society to the sociology of marriage and family life.
In The Discovery of Sociology, Collins and Michael Makowsky provide readers not only with an introduction to “general social theory,” according to Jerry Gaston in the American Journal of Sociology, but “present social theory of their own.” Major sociologists discussed include the Count de Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, and Max Weber. In the epilogue, the authors, in Gaston’s words “begin to develop a sociology of sociology that could itself lead to interesting research.” The critic went on to explain that "The Discovery of Society takes the position that sociological theory must ‘advance toward a comprehensive and powerful explanatory theory of social behavior and institutions.’”
Conflict Sociology makes the case that if sociology is to become an explanatory science, it must concentrate on stratification and organizational theory. The volume discusses various categories of stratification and organization, including conflict between individuals of different ages and sexes, economic status, and ideologies. As Norbert Wiley in Contemporary Sociology asserted, the book “argues that conflict is the central social process and that sociology finds its most powerful explanations on this premise.” A Choice reviewer proclaimed Conflict Sociology “highly recommended,” while Lewis Coser in the New Republic labeled it “ambitious.”
Somewhat early in his academic career, Collins published The Case of the Philosopher’s Ring by Dr. John H. Watson, Unearthed by Randall Collins. In the novel, Sherlock Holmes is summoned by philosopher Bertrand Russell to Cambridge University, where he also meets such luminaries as author Virginia Woolf, Indian mathematician Ramanujan, founder of theosophy Annie Besant, and economist John Maynard Keynes. Russell asks Holmes to visit Cambridge because the mind of another promising philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, is at risk. The bedeviled of Wittgenstein turns out to be noted Satanist Aleister Crowley. Critics were mixed in their opinions of Collins’s sole fiction effort; a Kirkus Reviews writer felt that The Case of the Philosopher’s Ring was only fun reading for graduate students “deeply enough into theosophy or the philosophy of math to extract a few academic giggles.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer, however, hailed it as “a sprightly tale of good and evil.” A. J. Ayer in the Times Literary Supplement lamented the novel’s anachronisms, but these are anachronisms admitted to by the author in a preface.
At around the same time The Case of the Philosopher's Ring saw print, Collins’s The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification was published. Christopher J. Hurn in Contemporary Sociology described this latter work as “a critical, indeed scathing, analysis of the model of a post-industrial, knowledge-based, increasingly meritocratic society portrayed by Daniel Bell, Clark Kerr, and most conventional textbooks in sociology.” James E. Katz in Social Science and Modern Society further explained that in The Credential Society, “Collins has attempted to integrate ideas from studies of education, mobility, professionalism, social power, and stratification to formulate his own theory of social and cultural control.” Katz went on to proclaim the volume “a flawed but challenging book which undoubtedly will provoke a reaction from students of the educational system,” while Hurn concluded it to be “a virtual gold mine of ideas and fruitful orienting concepts which should keep many of us busy for years to come.”
In Sociology Since Midcentury: Essays in Theory Cumulation, Collins collected a number of essays and articles he had published previously in academic journals. He also, however, includes some new work on the ideas of other philosophers as well as what a Choice reviewer described as “credential systems.” As that critic reported, topics in the volume “range from the geopolitics of revolution... to schooling in capitalist America.” Sociology Since Midcentury prompted Karol Edward Soltan in Ethics to declare Collins “one of the more intelligent and iconoclastic of the sociologists of the younger generation.” He further advised that “for someone who wants to get a general sense of recent work in sociology, this book is a good start.” Similarly, Mark Granovetter, discussing Sociology Since Midcentury in the American Journal of Sociology, offered this praise for the author: “Among those intrepid few sociologists who seriously attempt to integrate micro and macro levels of sociological theory, Randall Collins is one of the most versatile.”
In Max Weber: A Skeleton Key, “Collins considers the entire corpus of Weber’s work with an aim to giving the student a comprehensive overview,” according to Cyril Levitt in Contemporary Sociology. He also examines the sociologist’s theories in light of his biography. Levitt went on to assess the volume as “interesting reading and highly informative.” Paul Bullen in Ethics recommended it as “ideal for an introductory course on Weber,” but with the caution that “its proper role is as an aperitif to be taken before Weber, not as a substitute for reading him.” In his other volume about Weber, Weberian Sociological Theory, Collins argues that Weber’s work in sociology is at present as influential as that of famed socialist theorist Karl Marx. Toby E. Huff in the American Journal of Sociology lauded it as “a welcome addition to the secondary literature on Weber,” while Gerd Schroeter in Contemporary Sociology advised: “Those who liked Conflict Sociology will find many of the same themes - the importance of stratification, organization, property, and politics - applied to a range of interesting dimensions of social life.”
Perhaps one of Collins’s most ambitious books in 1998’s The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. In it, Collins “attacks myths of the origin and spread of ideas about knowledge and the world,” in the words of Leslie Armour, critiquing the work in the Library Journal. According to A. C. Grayling in the New York Times Book Review, the author “ventures nothing less than an analysis of the genealogy of philosophies in all the world’s traditions from antiquity to the present.” Grayling went on to explain that “this thesis is that intellectual activity occurs in groups and networks, formed by master-pupil chains and contemporary rivalries.” Though dealing with such weighty intellectual matter, Armour applauded the hook’s lack of “jargon” and the way “it reaches out to the ordinary reader.”
Views
Collins is a social scientist who views theory as essential to understanding the world. He has devoted much of his career and research to study society, how is it created and destroyed through the emotional behaviors of human beings. Collins believes that the simplest explanation for radical behavior and actions is emotion.
Collins argues sex, smoking, and social stratification and much else in our social lives are driven by a common force: interaction rituals. Collins has also argued that violent confrontation goes against human physiological hardwiring.
Quotations:
"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."
“'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 the highest value, by which all else is judged."
"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."
“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.”
“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.”
“The outsider sees details as meaningless or doesn’t see the details at all. That is what makes most of us outsiders.”
“Language is no deus ex machina to account for philosophy.”
Membership
Collins served as the president of the American Sociological Association from 2010 to 2011.