What is Intellectual History?

Richard Whatmore

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780745644936, 9780745644929
• eBook ISBN: 9780745690292
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

What is intellectual history? Those who practice intellectual history have described themselves as eavesdroppers upon the conversations of the past, explorers of alien ideological worlds, and translators between historic societies and our own, while their critics have often derided them as narrow-mindedly studying the ideas of dead white men. Some consider the discipline to be among the most important in the humanities and social sciences because it facilitates a better understanding of contemporary ideological programmes and facilitates their rational evaluation.

In this engaging and refreshing introduction to the field, Richard Whatmore begins by examining the historical development of intellectual history, before dissecting its various methodological debates. He presents various alternative ways in which we should think about intellectual history, as well as presenting his own very clear definition of the field. Drawing on a wide range of historical examples, Whatmore shows how ideas - philosophical, political, religious, scientific, artistic - originated in their historical context and how they were both shaped by, and helped to shape, the societies in which they originated. He ends by casting a critical eye over the current state of intellectual history, and a brief discussion of how it might develop in the future.

What is Intellectual History? will become an essential textbook for scholars and students of intellectual history, philosophy, politics, and the humanities.

1
The Identity of Intellectual History

How can we define intellectual history? At present, scholars who call themselves intellectual historians, or who express an interest in intellectual history, can be found working on the history of identity, time and space, empire and race, sex and gender, academic and popular science, the body and its functions, the history of attitudes to food, animals, the environment and the natural world, the movements of peoples and the transmission of ideas, the history of publishing and the history of objects, art history and the history of the book, in addition to the subjects traditionally associated with intellectual history, political theory and international relations. Some might say that it is so diverse that it cannot be defined. Others may say that it is a mistake to try to define a field to which one might be said to be contributing, on the grounds that it results in the creation of arbitrary boundaries. John Pocock, the person who many would say has contributed the most to intellectual history, by writing a series of pathbreaking books, responded to the question ‘Why were you intially drawn to intellectual history?’ with the answer: ‘I'm not sure that I ever was, since I had never heard of it at that time, and am not sure that I believe in it now.’¹

Numerous attempts have been made to define intellectual history. When seeking to define themselves, however, intellectual historians become like economists in their capacity for disagreement. Following this norm, I will reject the first definition of intellectual history, given by Robert Darnton, who has written that intellectual history encompasses:

[T]he history of ideas (the study of systematic thought usually in philosophical formulations), intellectual history proper (the study of informal thought, climates of opinion and literary movements), the social history of ideas (the study of ideologies and idea diffusion), and cultural history (the study of culture in the anthropological sense, including world-views and collective mentalités).²

Such a definition I find to be amorphous and vague; what, for example, is a philosophical formulation as opposed to a non-philosophical formulation? What is the difference between philosophical thought and informal thought? One of the purposes of Darnton's definition was to separate intellectual history from the social history of ideas as a form of cultural history.³ In practice, intellectual historians, following scholars such as Arnaldo Momigliano and Anthony Grafton, themselves inspired by the great traditions of philological research and its modern variant in the history of scholarship, always undertook all the labours that Darnton envisaged, without paying lip service to spurious distinctions between the social and cultural or the intellectual.⁴ John Burrow, the first person to hold a professorship in the subject in Britain, provided a better definition of intellectual history as the process of recovering ‘what people in the past meant by the things they said and what these things “meant” to them’.⁵ Burrow warned that it is often the case that ‘academic labels are better thought of as flags of convenience than as names of essences’; but his definition is the best we have, as are the metaphors that he employed of the intellectual historian as an eavesdropper upon the conversations of the past, as a translator between the cultures identifiable today and those of the past, and of an explorer studying worlds full of assumptions and beliefs alien to our own.⁶

That so many sets of activities can be included in intellectual history generates uncertainty about what research in the field entails. In consequence, some historians would go so far as to say that there is no such thing as a distinctive subject called intellectual history because almost all history involves ideas, usually in the form of the study of written texts from the past. This is a mistake. Historians cannot avoid ideas, but the systematic study of the content of these ideas and of their transmission, translation, diffusion and reception has created intellectual history as a subject. Intellectual history has acquired an identity as a separate branch of humanities and historical research since 1950.

What marks intellectual history out more than anything else is its interdisciplinary nature. Intellectual historians never respect disciplinary boundaries, except when they are the boundaries imposed by the people whose ideas they study. The reason is that ideas are never purely political, philosophical, economic or theological. Accordingly, practitioners of intellectual history can be found in departments of history, philosophy, government and politics, international relations, classics, divinity, English, foreign languages, economics, administration, sociology and anthropology. This has happened especially in universities across Europe and North America. It has been facilitated by the increasing abandonment of positivistic histories of particular disciplines that charted the rise and progress of their subject area. Most intellectual historians reject such histories as characterized by presentism, teleology and anachronism. One of the healthy consequences has been that intellectual historians work in a remarkable variety of fields of enquiry. They can find themselves working within the history of science, the history of the book, the movement and reception of ideas, and within transnational and global historical enquiries. Intellectual history used to be associated more than anything else with political thought in early modern Europe, but this is certainly no longer the case.

Despite its diversity, intellectual history continues to be associated in the popular imagination with scrutiny of the works of the great philosophers; the brilliant and controversial German historian Friedrich Meinecke once justified the study of such dead white males by stating that the study of past thought ought to be a process of moving from mountaintop to mountaintop. This was illustrated by the clash about morality by exponents and enemies of the politics of ‘reason-of-state’.⁷ Leslie Stephen, the founder of the Dictionary of National Biography and author of several works of intellectual history, justified the study of the best minds of the past using the metaphor of ‘how the torch was passed’.⁸ Stephen also thought his DNB was valuable in recording the thinking of ‘second-rate’ people, making it a better representation of the ‘history of opinion’. This approach had echoes, of course, of the great man theory of history that is often associated with Hegel. If historical change occurred through the actions of great men and great authors, this gave them licence to neglect the mass of the people and also the lesser lights of philosophy, the reason being that they were of little importance as historical agents. From the history of philosophy another justification came. Philosophers address perennial questions. Such questions are best studied by looking at the greatest books. The analytical breakdown, scrutiny and evaluation of the arguments of a great work are a vital heuristic enterprise. This approach continues to influence the study of the history of philosophy in the universities. Courses are organized around the study of the work of great philosophers from Plato to Rawls. The approach to the texts is often ahistorical in the sense that students are encouraged to engage critically with the work in question, which means evaluating the philosophers' arguments about justice, rights, morality and liberty, for example, with a view to seeing what they might contribute to the debates we are having about the same issues. The weak student can be led to do work of limited merit. On occasion I have come across attempts to enquire into what Adam Smith thought about race, class and gender, employing the modern meaning of such words; not very much, is the answer, and nothing at all that reveals anything intelligible about Smith's world or ours.⁹ The clever student emerges with a sense of having mastered the arguments of a philosopher, through the study of his major text or texts, and as able to identify the philosopher's relevance to our times, in part through the strengths and weaknesses identified in the historic philosopher's claims when they are applied to the present.

Intellectual historians can be seduced by this approach, but one of the arguments of this book is that such work is not intellectual history. To give an informative anecdote from John Burrow's autobiography Memories Migrating (2009), Burrow relates that he visited the ‘History of Ideas Unit’ run by the Marxist Eugene Kamenka at the Australian National University at Canberra in the 1980s. He presumed that he had found an intellectual home, but was shocked to discover that Kamenka himself was dismissive of Burrow's study of Walter Bagehot because such a minor figure could only have made a limited contribution to intellectual history. Burrow's counter argument was that those we consider major figures in the history of philosophy might have arrived at that status in an indirect fashion, and that the work we consider of the greatest significance today might not have been held in the same esteem in the past. In short, the fashions of today are themselves the product of accident and unintended consequence. This is one of the most important lessons that intellectual historical research imparts.

Endless examples might be given. One argument runs like this: Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract (1762) is today widely seen to be one of the foundational texts of modern democratic argument, the proof being that it inspired the age of democratic revolutions that culminated in the French Revolution from 1789: the French revolutionaries, everyone knows, venerated Rousseau. As such, it is right to include Rousseau and his great book in the list of canonical texts of modern political theory. He must be included in any course devoted to significant ideas and great philosophers. Once Rousseau is studied in the context of the ideas of his own time, however, a different picture emerges. Rousseau's Social Contract was the least successful of his books. By comparison with his novels, such as Emile, also published in 1762, it was little read. Part of the reason was that it was an unfinished work, an element of a larger project called ‘Political Institutions’ that Rousseau hoped would explain how small states could maintain themselves in a world dominated by large commercial monarchies. Rousseau's aspiration was not to see democratic government everywhere. In fact, he attacked democracy as a ‘government for gods rather than for men’.

Rousseau was convinced that aristocratic government was preferable to democracy, as long as the people had rights collectively to accept or to reject legislation proposed by governments. Exactly this was the case at Geneva, the city of Rousseau's birth, and with which he had a complicated relationship (this is an understatement). One has only to read several of the works published at Geneva describing the distinction between sovereignty and government before the publication of Social Contract for it to become clear that Rousseau derived some of his thinking from such sources. More importantly, it becomes evident that the major problem facing Rousseau, who loved the small states of Europe and believed them to be in crisis because of the overweening military power of large and increasingly imperial commercial monarchies, was that he was thinking about the small republics li...

Table of contents

• Cover
• What is History? series
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1: The Identity of Intellectual History
• 2: The History of Intellectual History
• 3: The Method of Intellectual History
• 4: The Practice of Intellectual History
• 5: The Relevance of Intellectual History
• 6: Intellectual History Present and Future
• Conclusion
• Further Reading
• Index
• End User License Agreement