Introduction
Intellectual history has no identity. But then, nor does social history or cultural history or any of the other subdivisions of history â at least, not if âidentityâ is taken to indicate exclusive possession of a set of distinctive practices or a clearly delimited territory. What is done by those who are, for some purposes, regarded as âintellectual historiansâ overlaps or is continuous with â and is at the margins scarcely distinguishable from â forms of scholarship that sail under flags as different as âhistory of science,â âhistory of art,â âhistory of political thought,â and any number of others. As the metaphor of sailing under a flag suggests, these forms of identification can be useful for certain kinds of classifying and policing purposes, but all such flags are in a sense flags of convenience. Most often, instead of (to change the metaphor) seeking a quasi-Linnaean classification, with each species, defined by its unique characteristics, taking its place in a systematic taxonomy, we do better to ask a version of Pragmatismâs question: what purposes does the use of such a label serve? In what contexts does it matter and why? There are scholars who find themselves in a variant of M. Jourdainâs position and realise that they have been doing intellectual history all along without calling it by that name. That usually suggests they have been exceptionally fortunate in their professional or institutional lives, allowed to pursue their idiosyncratic interests without penalty. But more often, when scholars reach out for the label âintellectual historyâ and use it in self-description, they do so in an attempt to establish the legitimacy of their interests, sometimes in the face of various kinds of hostility, scepticism or neglect. That was certainly the case during, roughly, the first three-quarters of the twentieth century when the dominance of the historical profession by political and, to a lesser extent, economic history could appear to make an interest in the intellectual life of the past seem an amateur or antiquarian activity, not based on the rigorous exploitation of archives and not dealing with those forces in society that âmattered.â From this point of view, the relative autonomy and (not quite the same thing) respectability now enjoyed by intellectual history â and exemplified by the existence of this Companion â is an achievement of the past generation or so.
Of course, it would not be difficult to show, given a little frisky conceptual footwork, either that there is no such thing as intellectual history or that all history is intellectual history. One could, for example, argue that history can only be a series of accounts of the doings of human beings and the only evidence we ever have of thinking is the trace left by action, which is all that historians ever have studied or can study: res gestae. Conversely, one would not need to subscribe to R.G. Collingwoodâs Idealist conception of human action to see the sense in which one might want to say that âall history is the history of thoughtâ (Collingwood, 1946). Indeed, any notion of anachronism â one of the defining notions of historicity itself â implies a kind of brute intellectual-historical sense, an awareness that past minds might have had different assumptions and expectations according to their time and place. Seen thus, all historians cannot but be versions of M. Jourdain, doing a primitive kind of intellectual history without knowing it. By the same token, it would not be manifestly false, though it would be wilfully irritating, to describe Herodotus as âthe first intellectual historian;â perhaps a marginally more credible, but still tiresome, case could be made for Plutarch. But in such instances the label seems to lose any useful specificity; it merely functions as a near synonym for âhistorian.â
If we are seeking some kind of genealogy, a more plausible case might be made for beginning with the late-seventeenth-century argument about the respective merits of the Ancients and the Moderns and moving on to figures from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as Vico and Voltaire, where a self-conscious interest in charting phases or stages of human thought and sensibility prompted various departures from the canons of Classical and medieval historiography (for a general overview of these developments, see Kelley, 2002). But such enquiries tended to be animated by larger philosophical or polemical purposes, and before the nineteenth century, it is not easy to identify anything like a separate branch of historical enquiry devoted to recovering episodes in the history of human thought. Even then, and indeed into the early decades of the twentieth century, such enquiries were often undertaken by those who might be primarily identified as philosophers or critics rather than historians. For example, two works widely cited as early instances of what came to be labelled intellectual history were Leslie Stephenâs The History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols (1876) and J.T. Merzâs The History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century, 4 vols (1896â1912): the first was by a writer primarily known as a literary critic and biographer, the second by an author described as âan industrial chemist and philosopher.â
In Britain, this pattern continued deep into the twentieth century. Four of the figures who did most, albeit in quite different ways, to encourage a thickly textured interest in the intellectual life of the past were Aby Warburg, Isaiah Berlin, Arnaldo Momigliano and Herbert Butterfield: the first was primarily an art historian, the second a lapsed philosopher, the third a Classicist, the fourth a historian of European diplomacy. It is also significant that three of these four were immigrants to Britain from continental Europe; the broader Germanic inheritance of tracing the expressions of Geist was a significant predisposing factor in developing their respective scholarly interests. In imported form, this inheritance was also influential in the United States, where A.O. Lovejoy, another strayed philosopher, elaborated one of the first methodological programmes for studying what he called âthe history of ideasâ (understood as the story of âunit-ideasâ which combined and re-combined across time, as in his celebrated The Great Chain of Being: a Study of the History of an Idea (Lovejoy, 1936)).
Despite the intrinsic interest of these various bodies of work, it remained true that in the middle of the twentieth century intellectual history was frequently treated as the âbackgroundâ for something else â by implication, something more important, more deserving of occupying the foreground. The widely used books by Basil Willey, a literary scholar, made a virtue of this function, as The Seventeenth-Century Background: Studies in the Thought of the Age in Relation to Poetry and Religion (1934) was followed by The Eighteenth-Century Background: Studies on the Idea of âNatureâ in the Thought of the Period (1940). From the 1960s and 1970s onwards, âbackgroundâ tended to be replaced by âcontext,â a term that came to be brandished as though it had the power of a magic spell: claiming to place ideas âin their historical contextâ became the professionally approved way of asserting oneâs scholarly seriousness. The two more specialised areas in which such contextualising work had greatest impact in the years from the 1960s to the 1980s were the history of science and the history of political thought; in both cases, especially the latter, there was a concentration on the long âearly-modernâ period (circa 1450 â circa 1800). It was work in these areas that generated the methodological programmes associated above all with the names of Thomas Kuhn, J.G.A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner, each of whom was taken to have provided a theoretically grounded template or paradigm of far-reaching applicability. For contingent historical reasons, the history of political thought was the form in which intellectual history â often in unstable compounds with elements of political theory, moral philosophy and political history â achieved a certain level of scholarly and institutional recognition in the USA and, especially, Britain in the first two or three decades after 1945 (see Collini, 2001). On a broader front, work on the borders of fields such as cultural history and literary theory subsequently prompted a greater plurality of approaches and a more expansive sense of the available modes of writing, while the impress of other political or theoretical formations, such as psychoanalysis and feminism, extended the reach and style of intellectual history in other ways, especially for the modern period. The most recent turn has been, inevitably, to embrace âglobal intellectual history:â this involves an admirable avoidance of parochialism and a strenuous effort to undertake comparative studies, though in practice it can be hard to avoid superficial or tin-eared characterisations.
This brief characterisation necessarily condenses and simplifies a complex story, and several caveats must be entered. To begin with, these remarks primarily refer to what has come to be identified as intellectual history in the world of Anglo-American scholarship, particularly (in view of the provenance of this Companion) its British variants. A fuller account would need to discriminate more carefully among the various traditions which have tended to dominate at different periods, especially in the United States where versions of the history of ideas or intellectual history tended to enjoy greater recognition, and to be located more securely within History departments, than was the case in Britain until very recently. For example, a preoccupation with âAmerican exceptionalismâ generated major studies of the distinctiveness of intellectual life in that country, from Charles Beard and Vernon Parrington early in the twentieth century, through Perry Miller's The New England Mind (2 vols, 1939â53), to the work of a distinguished group of recent scholars including Thomas Bender, David Hollinger, James Kloppenburg, Bruce Kuklick, Daniel Rodgers and Dorothy Ross (for an early conspectus of this group, see Conkin and Higham, 1979). European intellectual history has also tended to be cultivated with more confidence, and perhaps with more methodological self-consciousness, in the United States than in Britain, from the work of earlier figures such as Jacques Barzun and H. Stuart Hughes, through that of Peter Gay and William J. Bouwsma to more recent scholars such as Martin Jay and Anthony Grafton (for an overview, see Grafton, 2006; for contributions from a mainly Foucauldian or deconstructive perspective, see LaCapra and Kaplan, 1982; and for a more recent, and more quizzical, survey, see McMahon and Moyn, 2014).
A focus on other national cultures would produce a still more varied picture. The traditional centrality of philosophy and the aesthetic in German thought, for example, continued to inflect scholarly engagement with past intellectual life throughout the twentieth century, just as in France the field tended to be divided between the formalist studies by historians of philosophy and the more anthropological enquiries by social or cultural historians attempting to reconstruct the mentalitĂ©s of entire communities (Dosse, 2003). In both these traditions, the term âintellectual historyâ has retained a somewhat alien flavour, while various native enterprises from Geistesgeschichte and LâHistoire de philosophie to, more recently, Begriffsgeschichte and LâHistoire du champ intellectuel have divided up the terrain in different ways. These and other national traditions are all covered in more detail elsewhere in this volume; this chapter will concentrate on issues raised by work done in the English-speaking world.
A generation or more ago, those seeking to describe, and usually to vindicate, the distinctiveness of intellectual history largely felt themselves to be on the defensive, but there has been a notable increase in collective self-confidence in the last two or three decades. Elaborate exercises in definition and self-justification seem much less called for now. Labels are only labels, but the term âintellectual historyâ has become commonplace, part of the furniture of institutional life, regularly appearing in the titles of books, journals, appointments and so on. I am not here offering a sunny narrative of disciplinary âprogressâ, but merely noting major changes in the setting and mood within which work is now ...
