Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow has a 1989 book ("Communities of Discourse: Ideology and Social Structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and European Socialism") that looks at these intellectual innovations as products of outsider discursive communities with access to new resources independent of existing elites. I think it is a fairly canonical source within the subfields of sociology that study this sort of thing (cultural sociology, organizational sociology, etc) and broadly consonant with the Randall Collins book mentioned by Roy (The Sociology of Philosophies). Adam Lutzker