Intellectuals are people who work with ideas to make a living. They create ideas. They compare ideas. They revise ideas. Sometimes they discard their ideas and replace them with better, or just different, ones. When they are confident enough— or when other concerns compel them to do so— intellectuals cast their ideas in the form of a text and publish it. Whenever they enter a space of attention, their ideas, their texts and their gestures are framed by their peers, audiences and critics according to a complex web of distinctions. The originality of their theses, the soundness of their method, the flow of their texts from premise to conclusions, the aesthetics of their prose, the quality of their performance— everything is dissected and ranked vis à vis other ideas, methods, styles and performances. As a consequence, hierarchies arise, consolidate and then crumble.

Far from being a distortion of the “free circulation of ideas,” this play of distinctions occupies the center of the field of cultural production, and extends from ideas and texts to their authors. When they first meet, intellectuals invariably exchange a series of standard questions— Where did you get your PhD? Who was your mentor? Where do you teach? Going to any conferences this summer? Read any good books lately?— each question employed as a tool to decipher others on the spot, to estimate their social and intellectual capital, to situate them within the hierarchy of a field, a genre, a discipline. The truth is, as much as they like to be listened to, and assessed, as creative, original individuals— “Listen to me! Listen to me!”— intellectuals routinely come in batches, in kins, in tribes. Their standing and reputation are thus signaled by their pedigrees, the company they keep and the ideas they refuse as much as those they embrace.

It is the nature of the cultural object I am presenting to require such a lecture on the sociology of ideas and intellectuals. Besides being an introduction for students or a critical survey of the work of a distinguished scholar, a “Companion to” is also a sign of recognition within the play of distinctions in the field of cultural production.