ABSTRACT
Migration from one discipline to another is sometime facilitated by migration from one country to another. An entire phalanx of European sociologists and political scientists became well-known comparativists on the other side of the Atlantic. An innovator’s major contributions come in a side interest, not in their formal discipline. Imperialist scholars see their discipline, or some method or theory within their discipline, as primary, and they invade the territory of other fields armed with the tools of their own. Perhaps the best measure of acceptance is when a scholar from one discipline is named president of the professional association of another. One sign of the arbitrariness of disciplinary boundaries is the existence of varying forms of organization from one country to another. Migration is not a necessary prerequisite for collective innovation at the border of disciplines. There are privileged locales in intellectual history, such as Periclean Athens, Renaissance Florence, and pre-revolutionary Paris.
