Excerpted from The New Yorker December 2, 2002 Malcolm Gladwell’s review of “ The Sociology of Philosophies” by Randall Collins and “The Lunar Men” by Jenny Uglow “ We are inclined to think that genuine innovators are loners, that they do not need the social reinforcement that the rest of us crave. But that’s not how it works, whether it’s television comedy or, for that matter, the more exalted realms of art and politics and ideas. In his book “The Sociology of Philosophies,” Randall Collins finds in all of known history only three major thinkers who appeared on the scene by themselves: the first century Taoist metaphysician Wang Ch’ung, the fourteenth-century Zen mystic Bassui Tokusho, and the fourteenth-century Arabic philosopher Ibn Khaldun. Everyone else who mattered was part of a movement, a school, a band of followers and disciples and mentors and rivals and friends who saw each other all the time and had long arguments over coffee.” “Freud may have been the founder of psychoanalysis, but it really began to take shape in 1902, when Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Stekel, Max Kahane, and Rudolf Reitler would gather in Freud’s waiting room on Wednesdays, to eat strudel and talk about the unconscious. The neo-Confucian movement of the Sung dynasty in China revolved around the brothers Ch’eng Hao and Ch’eng I, their teacher Chou Tun-I, their father’s cousin Chang Tsai, and of course their neighbors Shao Yung.  Pisarro and Degas enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts at the same time, then Pisarro met Monet and. Later, Cezanne at the Academie Suisse, Manet met Degas at the Louvre, Monet befriended Renoir at Charles Gleyre’s studio, and Renoir, in turn, met Pisarro and Cezanne and soon enough everyone was hanging out at the Café Guerbois on the Rue des Batignolles. Collin’s point is not that innovation attracts groups but that innovation is found in groups: that it tends to arise out of social interaction-conversation, validation, the intimacy of the look in your listener’s eye that tells you you’re onto something.” “Darwin, in a lovely phrase, called it “philosophical laughing”, which was his way of saying that those who depart from cultural or intellectual consensus need people to walk beside them and laugh with them to give them confidence. But there’s more to it than that. One of the peculiar features of group dynamics is that clusters of people will come to decisions that are far more extreme than any individual member would have come to on his own.”  “This quality turns out to be tremendously productive, because, after all, losing sight of what you truly believed when the meeting began is one way of defining innovation. Uglow’s book reveals how simplistic our view of groups really is. We divide them into cults or clubs, and dismiss the former for their insularity and the latter for their banality. The cult is the place where, cut off from your peers, you become crazy. The club is the place where, surrounded by your peers, you become boring. Yet if you can combine the best of those two states-the right kind of insularity with the right kind of homogeneity-you create an environment both safe enough and stimulating enough to make great thoughts possible.