Intellectual history

Intellectual history refers to the historiography of ideas and thinkers. This history cannot be considered without the knowledge of the humans who created, discussed, wrote about, and in other ways were concerned with ideas. Intellectual history as practiced by historians is parallel to the history of philosophy as done by philosophers, and is more akin to the history of ideas. Its central premise is that ideas do not develop in isolation from the people who create and use them, and that one must study ideas not as abstract propositions but in terms of the culture, lives, and historical contexts that produced them.^[1]

Intellectual history aims to understand ideas from the past by understanding them in context. The term "context" in the preceding sentence is ambiguous: it can be political, cultural, intellectual, and social. One can read a text both in terms of a chronological context (for example, as a contribution to a discipline or tradition as it extended over time) or in terms of a contemporary intellectual moment (for example, as participating in a debate particular to a certain time and place). Both of these acts of contextualization are typical of what intellectual historians do, nor are they exclusive. Generally speaking, intellectual historians seek to place concepts and texts from the past in multiple contexts.

It is important to realize that intellectual history is not just the history of intellectuals. It studies ideas as they are expressed in texts, and as such is different from other forms of cultural history which deal also with visual and other non-verbal forms of evidence. Any written trace from the past can be the object of intellectual history. The concept of the "intellectual" is relatively recent, and suggests someone professionally concerned with thought. Instead, anyone who has put pen to paper to explore his or her thoughts can be the object of intellectual history. A famous example of an intellectual history of a non-canonical thinker is Carlo Ginzburg's study of a 16th-century Italian miller, Menocchio, in his seminal work The Cheese and the Worms.

Although the field emerged from European disciplines of Kulturgeschichte and Geistesgeschichte, the historical study of ideas has engaged not only western intellectual traditions but others as well, including those in other parts of the world. Increasingly, historians are calling for a Global intellectual history that will show the parallels and interrelations in the history of thought of all human societies. Another important trend has been the history of the book and of reading, which has drawn attention to the material aspects of how books were designed, produced, distributed, and read.

Intellectual historiography[edit]

Intellectual history as a self-conscious discipline is a relatively recent phenomenon. It has precedents, however, in the history of philosophy, the history of ideas, and in cultural history as practiced since Burckhardt or indeed since Voltaire. The history of the human mind, as it was called in the eighteenth century, was of great concern to scholars and philosophers, and their efforts can in part be traced to Francis Bacon’s call for what he termed a literary history in his The Advancement of Learning. In economics, John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) was both a historian of economic thought himself,^[2] and the subject of study by historians of economic thought because of the significance of the Keynesian revolution.^[3] However, the discipline of intellectual history as it is now understood emerged only in the immediate postwar period, in its earlier incarnation as "the history of ideas" under the leadership of Arthur Lovejoy, the founder of the Journal of the History of Ideas. Since that time, Lovejoy's formulation of "unit-ideas" has been discredited and replaced by more nuanced and more historically sensitive accounts of intellectual activity, and this shift is reflected in the replacement of the phrase history of ideas by intellectual history.^[4]

Intellectual history includes the history of thought in many disciplines, such as the history of philosophy, and the history of economic thought. Analytical concepts - such as the nature of paradigms and the causes of paradigm shifts - have been borrowed from the study of other disciplines, exemplified by the use of the ideas of Thomas Kuhn about The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to explain revolutions in thought in economics and other disciplines.^[5]

In Britain the history of political thought has been a particular focus since the late 1960s and is associated especially with historians at Cambridge, such as John Dunn and Quentin Skinner. They studied European political thought in its historical context, emphasizing the emergence and development of such concepts as the state and freedom. Skinner in particular is renowned for his provocative methodological essays, which were and are widely read by philosophers and practitioners of other humanistic disciplines, and did much to give prominence to the practice of intellectual history.^[6]

In the United States, intellectual history is understood more broadly to encompass many different forms of intellectual output, not just the history of political ideas, and it includes such fields as the history of historical thought, associated especially with Anthony Grafton of Princeton University and J.G.A. Pocock of Johns Hopkins University. Formalized in 2010, the History and Culture Ph.D. at Drew University is one of a few graduate programs in the US currently specializing in intellectual history, both in its American and European contexts. Despite the prominence of early modern intellectual historians (those studying the age from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment), the intellectual history of the modern period has also been the locus of intense and creative output on both sides of the Atlantic. Prominent examples of such work include Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club and Martin Jay's The Dialectical Imagination.

In continental Europe, equivalents of intellectual history can be found. An example is Reinhart Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte (history of concepts), though there are methodological differences between the work of Koselleck and his followers and the work of Anglo-American intellectual historians.

Prominent individuals[edit]

References[edit]

^ Anthony Grafton, "The history of ideas: Precept and practice, 1950-2000 and beyond." Journal of the History of Ideas 67#1 (2006): 1-32. online
^ E.g. John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Biography, Macmillan, 1933.
^ E.g. Peter Clarke (historian), The Keynesian Revolution in the Making, 1924-1936, 1988. Donald Markwell, John Maynard Keynes and International Relations: Economic Paths to War and Peace, Oxford University Press, 2006.
^ Melvin Richter, "Begriffsgeschichte and the History of Ideas." Journal of the History of Ideas (1987): 247-263. in JSTOR
^ E.g. Ghanshyam Mehta, The structure of the Keynesian Revolution, 1977.
^ Melvin Richter, "Reconstructing the history of political languages: Pocock, Skinner, and the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe." History and Theory (1990): 38-70. online