The Trap of Intellectual Success. Robert N. Bellah, the American Civil Religion Debate, and the Sociology of Knowledge

Current sociology of knowledge tends to take for granted Robert K. Merton\u2019s theory of cumulative advantage: successful ideas bring recognition to their authors, successful authors have their ideas recognized more easily than unknown ones. The paper argues that this theory should be revised via the introduction of the differential between the status of an idea and that of its creator: when an idea is more important than its creator, the latter becomes identified with the former, and this will hinder recognition of the intellectual\u2019s new ideas as they differ from old ones in their content and/or style. Robert N. Bellah\u2019s performance during the \u201ccivil religion debate\u201d of the 1970s is reconstructed as an example of how this mechanism may work. Implications for further research are considered in the conclusive section