A Companion to Intellectual History E-Book
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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Blackwell Companions to World History
- Sprache: Englisch
A Companion to Intellectual History provides an in-depth survey of the practice of intellectual history as a discipline.
- Forty newly-commissioned chapters showcase leading global research with broad coverage of every aspect of intellectual history as it is currently practiced
- Presents an in-depth survey of recent research and practice of intellectual history
- Written in a clear and accessible manner, designed for an international audience
- Surveys the various methodologies that have arisen and the main historiographical debates that concern intellectual historians
- Pays special attention to contemporary controversies, providing readers with the most current overview of the field
- Demonstrates the ways in which intellectual historians have contributed to the history of science and medicine, literary studies, art history and the history of political thought
Named Outstanding Academic Title of 2016 by Choice Magazine, a publication of the American Library Association
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Seitenzahl: 1214
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Part One: Approaches to Intellectual History
Chapter One: The Identity of Intellectual History
Introduction
The practice of intellectual history
‘Read like a critic’
Intellectual history and the history of disciplines
Conclusion
References
Chapter Two: Intellectual History and Historismus in Post-War England
Introduction: The history of political thought and the history of historiography
Friedrich Meinecke and
Historismus
Historismus
: from historical method to history of historiography
Conclusion:
Historismus
and émigré scholarship
References
Further reading
Chapter Three: Intellectual History in the Modern University
Introduction
The Sussex
anomaly
John Burrow as an intellectual historian
Burrow and the working intellectual historian
Conclusion
References
Further reading
Chapter Four: Intellectual History and Poststructuralism
Introduction
What is poststructuralism?
Jacques Derrida
Deconstruction and social history
New anxieties
Reaffirming history
References
Chapter Five: Intellectual History as Begriffsgeschichte
Introduction
Koselleck and the origins of GG
The content of GG
Conclusion
References
Chapter Six: Intellectual History and History of the Book
Introduction
Philology and the history of ideas
Roger Chartier and linguistic history
Grafton, Jardine, Waszink and Lipsius
References
Further reading
Chapter Seven: Michel Foucault and the Genealogy of Power and Knowledge
Introduction
Beginnings: From Nietzsche to the birth of archaeology
The archaeology of the human sciences
From archaeology to genealogy
References
Chapter Eight: Quentin Skinner and the Relevance of Intellectual History
Introduction
Defining linguistic contextualism
Giving substance to the method
Intellectual history and present politics
References
Chapter Nine: J. G. A. Pocock as an Intellectual Historian
Language and discourse
The rise and fall of paradigms
The nature of history
Situating Pocock
References
Part Two: The Discipline of Intellectual History
Chapter Ten: Intellectual History and the History of Philosophy
Introduction
The history of philosophy
Offshoots from history of philosophy: history of science and history of ideas
Intellectual history
Intellectual history and the history of philosophy:
Philosophy in History
(1984)
The context of the ‘Introduction’ in the
Philosophy in History
(1984)
The current relationship between intellectual history and history of philosophy
References
Chapter Eleven: Intellectual History and the History of Political Thought
The history of political thought and present politics
Unspoken assumptions
Conditions of possibility
The global turn
References
Chapter Twelve: Intellectual History and the History of Science
The new historical consciousness
Science and history in the nineteenth century
The history of science as an academic discipline
Decline and redefinition
Kuhn and the history of paradigms
References
Chapter Thirteen: Intellectual History and the History of Economics
Introduction
Naming the parts, mapping the territory
Basic predicament
Self-sufficiency and present-mindedness
Survival and growth
Disjunction or conjunction?
References
Further reading
Chapter Fourteen: Art History and Intellectual History
The nature of art history
Organising, collecting and intellectualisation: art history before 1900
Kunstwollen
and iconology: art history in the early twentieth century
Portraiture studies as theology and natural science: physiognomics and identity
Portraiture studies as history and philosophy: phenomenology and likeness
Portraiture studies as psychology and sociology: the ‘facial society’
Conclusions
References
Chapter Fifteen: Intellectual History and Global History
Westernism and Confucianism
Diversification
Connection
Comparison
Global concepts
Conclusion
References
Chapter Sixteen: Intellectual History and Legal History
Introduction
More modern narratives
The English problem
The allure of the
Ius Commune
European legal history more generally
Transnational and global legal history
Some general comments by way of conclusion
References
Chapter Seventeen: The Idea of Secularisation in Intellectual History
Secularisation and the Church
Löwith’s
Meaning in History
Hans Blumenberg’s rejoinder
Questioning Blumenberg
Secularisation and the secular: beyond genealogy?
References
Further reading
Part Three: The Practice of Intellectual History
Chapter Eighteen: Liberty and Law
Ancients and moderns
Hobbes, Locke and license
Rousseau and tyranny
New tyrannies, new despotisms
References
Chapter Nineteen: Education and Manners
Introduction
Virtue, politeness and liberty
Education, civility and progress
Conclusion
References
Further reading
Chapter Twenty: Republics and Monarchies
Introduction: freedom and modernity
Venice and the United Provinces: trade republics
France and Britain: commercial monarchies
Conclusion: modern politics and ‘the problem of the republics’
References
Further readinig
Chapter Twenty-One: Barbarism and Civilisation
Beginning with the Greeks
The meaning of ‘civilisation’
Commerce and civility
John Brown and noble savages
The example of Russia
The changing meaning of civilisation
Civilisation and the state
References
Chapter Twenty-Two: Religion Natural and Revealed
Introduction
Natural religion
Revealed religion: history and the Bible
Philosophy of religion
Postmodern and post-secular
References
Chapter Twenty-Three: Citizenship and Culture
Introduction: family resemblances
Norms and facts
A secular concept
The two cities
Conclusion
References
Further Reading
Chapter Twenty-Four: Democracy and Representation
Introduction
The ancient legacy
Britain between Tradition and Radical Thought
America and the birth of representative government
France from the Old Regime to the Revolution
Conclusion
References
Further reading
Chapter Twenty-Five: Religion and Enlightenment
Introduction
Religious origins?
Hobbes and Spinoza
Jansenists and Augustinians
Universal values
Enlightenment and individual faith
References
Chapter Twenty-Six: Art and Aesthetics
Antiquity and modernity
Between
poïesis
and
aisthēsis
Art before art history
The invention of the sensational subject
Interiority, exteriority and connoisseurship
The avant-garde and the art of shock
Acknowledgement
References
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Natural Law: Law, Rights and Duties
Introduction
The ancient world
The Middle Ages
Grotius to Kant
Modern times
References
Chapter Twenty-Eigth: Wars and Empires
Defining empire
Imperialism and international relations
Republics and empires
Economy and war
References
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Reason and Scepticism
Introduction
Ancient scepticism
Renaissance revival and the early modern ‘sceptical crisis’
Secularisation, fideism, and the new science: sceptical reactions to scepticism
Scepticism in the Enlightenment
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 26
Figure 26.1
Belvedere Torso
. Museo Pio-Clementino, Rome.
Figure 26.2 John Boyne,
A meeting of connoisseurs,
1807.
Guide
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BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO HISTORY
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A COMPANION TO INTELLECTUAL HISTORY
Edited by
Richard WhatmoreandBrian Young
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Dedication
For Donald Winch and the late John W. Burrow, the best of companions to intellectual history.
Notes on Contributors
Manuela Albertone is Professor of Early Modern History in the Department of Historical Studies, University of Turin, Italy and Chercheur associé, Institut d’Histoire de la Révolution française, Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne. Her work focuses on eighteenth-century French and American history, and the relationship between politics and economics. She is a Physiocracy specialist and is particularly interested in the economic origins of political representation. She is the author of numerous books and articles, the most recent of which is National Identity and the Agrarian Republic. The Transatlantic Commerce of Ideas between America and France (1750–1830) (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). She co-edited with Antonino De Francesco, Rethinking the Atlantic World. Europe and America in the Age of Democratic Revolutions (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Edward Baring is Assistant Professor in Modern European Intellectual History at Drew University. He is the author of The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), which won the Morris D. Forkosch Prize for Best Book in Intellectual History, and editor with Peter E. Gordon of The Trace of God: Derrida and Religion (New York: Fordham, 2014). He is currently working on a Europe-wide history of phenomenology in the first half of the twentieth century.
David Burchell is Senior Lecturer in Humanities at the University of Western Sydney and has written on early modern political thought and the histories of ethics, citizenship and religious toleration. He is also a regular contributor to current social and political debates in the national and international media.
John W. Cairns is Professor of Civil Law and Director of the Centre for Legal History in the University of Edinburgh. His research interests lie in legal education and the legal profession (particularly in Enlightenment Scotland), eighteenth-century slavery and the legal history of Louisiana. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Leo Catana is Associate Professor in the Division of Philosophy, the Department of Media, Cognition and Communication at the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of The Historiographical Concept ‘System of Philosophy’: Its Origin, Nature, Influence and Legitimacy (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008) and The Concept of Contraction in Giordano Bruno’s Philosophy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005) and has written widely about Platonism, neo-Platonism, and the history and nature of the discipline of philosophy.
John F. M. Clark is lecturer and director of the Institute for Environmental History at the University of St Andrews, where he teaches and researches on history of science, medicine and environment within the School of History. He is the author of Bugs and the Victorians (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009) and co-editor (with John Scanlan) of Aesthetic Fatigue: Modernity and the Language of Waste (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013).
Stefan Collini is Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature in the Faculty of English at Cambridge University. He has published widely on modern intellectual history, including Public Moralists (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), Matthew Arnold: a Critical Portrait (1994), English Pasts: Essays in History and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), and What Are Universities For? (London: Penguin, 2012). He is also a frequent contributor to The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, and other publications.
Cesare Cuttica is Lecturer in British History, DEPA, Université Paris 8-Vincennes. He is the author of Sir Robert Filmer (1588–1653) and the Patriotic Monarch: Patriarchalism in Seventeenth-Century Political Thought (Manchester University Press, 2012). He edited with Glenn Burgess, Monarchism and Absolutism in Early Modern Europe (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), and with Gaby Mahlberg, Patriarchal Moments (London: Bloomsbury, in press). He is currently working on the idea of anti-democracy in early modern England as well as on the thought and methodology of various British intellectual historians.
Michael Drolet teaches the History of Political Thought and Political Theory at Worcester College, University of Oxford. He is a specialist of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century French thought. He is author of Tocqueville, Democracy and Social Reform (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and The Postmodernism Reader: Foundational Texts (London: Routledge, 2004). He is currently writing an intellectual biography of the French political economist and statesman Michel Chevalier (1806–1879).
Ioannis D. Evrigenis is Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Department of Classics at Tufts University, where he also directs the Bodin Project. He is the author of Fear of Enemies and Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), which received the 2009 Delba Winthrop Award for Excellence in Political Science, and of Images of Anarchy: The Rhetoric and Science in Hobbes's State of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), as well as co-editor of Herder's Another Philosophy of History and Selected Political Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2004).
Peter E. Gordon is Amabel B. James Professor of History at Harvard University and Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Philosophy. He is the author of numerous works, including Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (California: California University Press, 2003), and Adorno and Existence (forthcoming); he has also served as co-editor for several volumes, including The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), and The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought (forthcoming).
Knud Haakonssen is Professor of Intellectual History at the University of St Andrews and Fellow of the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural & Social Studies, University of Erfurt. Books include The Science of a Legislator (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981), Natural Law and Moral Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Enlightenment and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). He is also General editor of The Edinburgh Edition of Thomas Reid (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995–) and Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002–)
Duncan Kelly is Reader in Political Thought in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. He has published widely on modern political thought and intellectual history, and his books include The State of the Political: Conceptions of Politics and the State in the Thought of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Franz Neumann (Oxford: The British Academy, 2003), and The Propriety of Liberty: Persons, Passions and Judgement in Modern Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). He is a co-editor of Modern Intellectual History, and a regular reviewer for the Financial Times, the Times Literary Supplement and other publications.
Katharina Lorenz is Associate Professor in Classical Studies at the University of Nottingham. She has written widely on Roman and Greek art, and on classical historiography. She is the author of Bilder machen Räume. Mythenbilder in pompeianischen Häusern (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008) and Mythological Images and their Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in press). She is the director of the Nottingham Digital Humanities Centre.
Deborah Madden is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Brighton. She has published widely on the relationship between dissenting religion, medicine and Enlightenment culture, as well as dissenting education in the eighteenth century. She is currently writing a book on Victorian cultures of life writing.
Sarah Mortimer is Student and Tutor in Modern History, Christ Church Oxford and University Lecturer in History. She is the author of Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) and has edited, with John Robertson, The Intellectual Consequences of Religious Heterodoxy in Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2012)
Sophus A. Reinert is Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Business, Government, and the International Economy Unit at Harvard Business School. He is the author of numerous articles, case studies and edited volumes, as well as of Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
Andrew Sartori is Professor of History at New York University. He is the author of Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014) and Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). He is also co-editor of Global Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013) and the Companion to Global Historical Thought (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), and an editor of the journal, Critical Historical Studies.
Michael J. Seidler is Professor of Philosophy and University Distinguished Professor at Western Kentucky University. Beside essays on German natural law and other early modern topics, he has edited and/or translated several works by Samuel Pufendorf, including An Introduction to the History of the Principal Kingdoms and States of Europe (Indianapolis, 2013) and The Political Writings of Samuel Pufendorf (Oxford, 1994). In 2014–15, Visiting Fellow at the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural & Social Studies, University of Erfurt.
Kenneth Sheppard is an Affiliate Professor in the Department of History at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. He is the author of Anti-Atheism in Early Modern England 1580–1720 (Leiden: Brill, 2015).
Jacob Soll is Professor of History at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Publishing The Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), The Information Master: Jean-Baptise Colbert’s State Information System (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005) and The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations (New York: Basic Books, 2014). He is a regulator contributor to the New York Times, The Boston Globe, The New Republic, Politico and Slate.com.
Mark Somos is Visiting Scholar at Harvard University's Department of Government, and Senior Visiting Research Fellow at Sussex Law School. Before returning to Harvard, Mark was a Leverhulme Fellow at the Sussex Centre for Intellectual History, and a Rechtskulturen Fellow sponsored by the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin at Humboldt University Law School. Mark has taught at Harvard, Sussex and Tufts universities. His works appeared in edited volumes and the Journal of the History of International Law, Grotiana, Storia del pensiero politico, and the History of European Ideas. His first book was Secularisation and the Leiden Circle (Leiden: Brill, 2011).
Michael Sonenscher is a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge and the author of Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) and Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
Koen Stapelbroek is an Academy of Finland Senior Research Fellow at the University of Helsinki and Associate Professor at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge (2004), and has published Love, Self-Deceit and Money: Commerce and Morality in the Early Neapolitan Enlightenment (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008) and a range of articles and edited volumes on European eighteenth-century political thought. He is currently completing a monograph on European perceptions on Dutch political economic reform debates.
Keith Tribe is an independent scholar and the author of Strategies of Economic Order: German Economic Discourse, 1750–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995/2007) and The Economy of the Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). His translation of Reinhart Koselleck's Vergangene Zukunft was republished by Columbia University Press (New York) in 2004. He has written widely about the history of economic and political ideas from the eighteenth century to the present, and now works as a professional translator.
Norman Vance is Emeritus Professor of English and Intellectual History at the University of Sussex. He is the author of The Victorians and Ancient Rome (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), The sinews of the spirit: the ideal of Christian manliness in Victorian literature and religious thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Bible and Novel: Narrative Authority and the Death of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), has coedited The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 1790–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) with Jennifer Wallace, and has written widely on the history of literature, the classical legacy and Irish intellectual history.
Francesco Ventrella is lecturer in art history at the University of Sussex and specialises in the history of art writing, historiography and modern visual cultures. He has published on art historiography and the history of connoisseurship, and is the co-organiser, with Meaghan Clarke, of the research forum Women and the Culture of Connoisseurship (Sussex, 2015). For his Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship he is completing a monograph titled Connoisseurial Intimacies: Sexuality, Physiological Aesthetics and the Making of Modern Artwriting. He also works on feminist and queer interventions in art history. He is the co-editor, with Giovanna Zapperi, of the volume The Legacy of Carla Lonzi: Art and Feminism in Postwar Italy (London: IB Tauris, forthcoming).
Donald Winch is Emeritus Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Sussex and Honorary Professor at St Andrews University. He has written extensively on the history of political economy from Smith to Keynes with special emphasis on the connections between theory, policy and public debate. He collaborated with John Burrow and Stefan Collini to write That Noble Science of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and in more recent years has completed a connected pair of volumes in the Cambridge University Press, Ideas in Context series, on Riches and Poverty (l996) and Wealth and Life (2009), that deal with the intellectual history of political economy in Britain from 1750 to 1914.
Richard Whatmore is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Republicanism and the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), Against War and Empire: Geneva, Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012) and has edited volumes including Economy, Polity and Society and History, Religion and Culture. Essays on British Intellectual History (both Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). He is director of the St Andrews Institute of Intellectual History.
Brian Young is University Lecturer and Charles Stuart Student and Tutor in Modern History at Christ Church, Oxford. He is the author of Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1998) and The Victorian Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). He co-edited with Stefan Collini and Richard Whatmore, History, Religion, and Culture and Economy, Politics, and Society: British intellectual history, 1750–1950 (2 vols, Cambridge, 2000), and with Richard Whatmore, Palgrave Advances in Intellectual History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). With Karen O’Brien, he is editing The Cambridge Companion to Edward Gibbon (forthcoming). He has written widely on British intellectual, religious, and cultural history, and is completing a study of relations between Christians and unbelievers in eighteenth-century England.
Introduction
Brian Young
Intellectual history has, since the 1960s, become one of the success stories of the historical profession, in the Anglophone world especially but also across Europe. It is now hard to find a subject that has not been examined from an intellectual history perspective. There are intellectual histories of cannibalism and (other kinds of consumption,) of science and technology, of emotions and senses, of human and animal bodies, and of hymns. One of the reasons for the success is undoubtedly the interdisciplinary nature of the subject. Intellectual historians can be found not only in history departments in universities but in departments of politics, international relations, English, language and linguistics, Classics, Divinity, economics, philosophy, sociology, business and management, public administration, mathematics and all of the natural sciences. Many of the old points of attack directed against intellectual historians – of being antiquarians and elitists, of being irrelevant to the world, and of being ignorant of social structures, class struggles and power relations are more rarely voiced today. Part of the reason is the sheer diversity of intellectual history, but it is also because of the ability of intellectual historians to defend both the patch and the tribe through their labours. Intellectual historians are not so often to be found playing what Donald Winch memorably termed ‘away matches’, when giving talks in front of an audience that is likely to be sceptical and, in some cases, hostile.
At the same time every intellectual historian will have experienced students or colleagues who continue to ask, ‘What is intellectual history?’ The history of intellectual history in recent decades helps to provide an answer. Intellectual history is necessarily pluralist in its ambitions, and also in terms of the approach and methods of study chosen by its many practitioners in achieving those ambitions: a subject that takes as its subject matter the history of thought cannot afford to be anything other than pluralistic. As a natural consequence of such an observation, it is equally clear that intellectual history cannot be triumphalist in terms of its relationships at any given time with other elements of the discipline of History. Its fortunes have often been better in America than in Britain, and have been infinitely better in Germany than they have largely and intermittently been in France; this is for a number of reasons, all of which constitute, individually and collectively, territory for intellectual historians to explore and to explain. There are institutional as well as intellectual explanations for the optimism many American students of intellectual history currently express, just as there are for the more cautious attitudes common among students of the subject in Great Britain and elsewhere in Europe. Not least among the institutional aspects of its varied fortunes is the fact that intellectual history is a mode of historical thinking that is rarely taught outside universities; it does not enjoy the expansive (and expensive) resources of the history of art or visual culture more generally understood, and it would be difficult to imagine a museum dedicated to intellectual history in the way that students of economic or cultural history can enviably expand on their horizons through such everyday and open-ended modes of communication.
The occasional foray by intellectual historians onto radio broadcasts dedicated to some aspect or other of the subject of intellectual history broadly construed is no substitute for the daily outreach that naturally flows from being instrumentally involved in a series of experiences that can readily be communicated through museums or similar modes of reflection for a wider public. Masters of television as a medium have occasionally managed to discuss the world of ideas, as can be appreciated from viewing two landmark series made by the BBC in its glory days, Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation (1969) and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man (1973), but even here it is notable how dependent on the visual both were. Clark’s specific episode on the Enlightenment, ‘The Smile of Reason,’ is a triumph of such exploration, but it was notably more abstract and somehow less stimulating than most of the other instalments of Civilisation. Bronowski’s series necessarily pioneered a history of visual and material culture since it displayed not only the natural world explored by natural science, but also the various and varied instruments with which that infinite world has been imaginatively and creatively explored over the centuries. When Bronowski discussed his hero William Blake, the worlds of art and nature were memorably enmeshed in the imagination of an erudite and humane historian of science.
Mention of Clark and Bronowski reminds one again of how rich the field of intellectual history is, as the history of art and the history of science are naturally fertile fields of exploration for the intellectual historian. Clark’s programme had its critics, and inevitably its alleged elitism was the charge most often repeated, but unusually this led to a positive resolution, in that the Marxist art critic, John Berger, was commissioned by the BBC to produce his own riposte to the old-fashioned style of art history he associated with Clark. Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972) has become a classic of television history in a way that its creator cannot possibly have imagined; it offers a challenge to the history told by Clark, who had admirably and very correctly insisted on the subtitle ‘A Personal View’ for his original – contra Berger, in all senses of the word – series. Among the many things Berger’s treatment of his subject achieved was to popularise and articulate a marxisant approach to art history that was then beginning to make its steady way to prominence in academic practice in the field at the very moment when his programmes were causing a stir nationally. Historians of art and material culture have always been more open to ideas than many Marxist historians in other fields of historical research (it was evident in the work of Anthony Blunt long before his exposure as a Soviet agent), and intellectual history has unfortunately long been subject to essentially trivial but institutionally significant slights made by some Marxist critics. There is a paradox at work here, of course, in that Marx himself was a student of intellectual history, and his own works have been productively studied by intellectual historians, both negatively and positively. Leszek Kolakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism (1978) is a major contribution to the serious study of Marxism as a theoretical enterprise and as a mode of practice; it is both critical and appreciative, the work of an erstwhile advocate turned exquisitely patient historian. Marxist philosophers, such as the late Gerry Cohen, have always been aware of the possibilities of a positive relationship between Marxism and intellectual history – consider his Lectures on the History of Moral and Political Philosophy, posthumously published in 2013, which can profitably be compared with John Rawls’ Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, posthumously published in 2007 – but, for some reason, Marxist historians have tended to be altogether less imaginative. There have been influential Marxist intellectual historians, from Marx himself to Christopher Hill and C.B. Macpherson, but otherwise many intellectual historians are all too aware of what the late J.W. Burrow – the much-missed colleague in Intellectual History at the University of Sussex of the editors of this Companion to Intellectual History – had characterised as the ‘what about the workers?’ criticism levelled by Left-aligned historians impatient with what they routinely caricature as ‘elitism.’
Indeed, ‘What about the workers?’ To patronise the past is a cardinal sin in the historical profession, and it is one frequently committed by the self-proclaimed champions of those once all-too-conventionally forgotten by history. And effectively to separate the pursuit of intellectual history from the experience and activity of the working classes is deeply and offensively to patronise them. Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001) beautifully demonstrates just how interested in the life of the mind many working men and women actually were; and how they read Gibbon, for example, is at least as important as how, to cite a deservedly classic article by Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, the sixteenth-century humanist Gabriel Harvey had read his Livy. ‘Organic intellectuals’ read as well as speak and write. As one of the editors can personally attest, a Hull fisherman and his ten-year-old son watched and enjoyed together many episodes of The Ascent of Man when they were first broadcast by the BBC. Consciously class-orientated history-writing needs to be much more sensitive and altogether less inflexible than it frequently manages to be.
Intellectual history expands the horizons of history; it does not contract them by immediately and illiberally condemning other practices and approaches to the many mansions that constitute the heavenly cities of those fortunate enough to be able to pursue the study not only of human experience, but of the history of human reflection on that experience. Intellectual history imaginatively pursued has much to offer such emerging subjects as the history of the emotions (already long studied by many of its practitioners as a history of what had used to be called ‘the passions’), global history, and the history of material culture. Above all, intellectual historians have been amongst the most prominent in inviting historians to be consciously reflexive with regard to their own practice and activity, and accordingly the study of historiography has been one of the most enticing and intellectually arresting aspects of the subject, especially as practiced by English-language historians. And here the work of J.W. Burrow has been particularly influential, as has that of J. G. A. Pocock, itself influenced by that of Herbert Butterfield, himself a critical student of Friedrich Meinecke, who had learned to think deeply about historiography by reading the work of Jacob Burkhardt.
Nor are the conversations initiated and developed among historians by the study of intellectual history simply undertaken within the discipline of history. Rather more than many other historians, intellectual historians, by necessity, are familiar with the territory explored by colleagues in other disciplines, from the study of the literature and philosophy of the ancient world, to that of modernity, from Platonism to Neoplatonism, from the direct experience of Hellenism to the call for its revival made by Nietzsche. Again, Marxist scholars have shown a concern with these fields congruent with that displayed by students of intellectual history: the work on English literature and its contexts that led to Raymond Williams’ pioneering and inspirational Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1958), has been explored more recently in a significantly different but complementary manner by Stefan Collini. To reverse the order, the studies of Bernard Williams of philosophy and its history – and he, along with Hugh Lloyd-Jones (from a somewhat different political perspective), was unusual in being able to comment expertly both on classical drama and Nietzsche’s provocative evocation of its values – complement those made by the extraordinarily erudite Marxist student of intellectual life, Perry Anderson. But Anderson’s work also reveals why intellectual history is so often distant from critical Marxism. In his 1968 essay ‘Components of the National Culture,’ Anderson lamented the fact that British scholars preferred a liberal humanist conception of their various activities than did many of their continental colleagues, who were more typically concerned with perfecting the social sciences in a manner that led directly from study of the world to its transformation, the familiar Marxist exhortation. Liberalism will always provoke discontent. As Isaiah Berlin constantly reminded his readers, pluralism is a peculiarly agonistic series of experiences.
Pluralism as the origin and outcome of intellectual history is of the essence of this companion to intellectual history. And that is precisely what this expansive and ideally provocative series of essays is designed to be, a companion, not a dictator. There can be no definitive guide to so incomparably wide a study as the field constituted by intellectual history, a series of histories of human experience, and human reflections on experience. Hobbes explicitly and consistently rejected history as a means of exploring the political domain comprised by his Leviathan and its companion volumes; in doing so, he restricted the possibilities not only for individual liberty, but for liberation from his ‘artificial man’, his ‘mortal god.’ History provides an antidote to all those philosophies that seek to contain and direct human experience. So construed, intellectual history provides a fertile source for the pursuit of the liberty that thought can provide in a world that seems to be increasingly inimical to the active pursuit of the life of the mind. It is to the plural possibilities this occasions that this Companion to Intellectual History is primarily dedicated.
The chapters that follow are intended as a guide to the field both in terms of the method of intellectual history and in terms of its practice. Chapters consider the history and philosophy of intellectual history, developments in intellectual history in particular subject areas and in relation to particular national and broader histories, and show the ways intellectual historians have contributed to more established disciplinary enquiries. A much wider field still, of course, could have been covered.
Part OneApproaches to Intellectual History
Chapter OneThe Identity of Intellectual History
Stefan Collini
Introduction
Intellectual history has no identity. But then, nor does social history or cultural history or any of the other subdivisions of history – at least, not if ‘identity’ 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 ‘intellectual historians’ overlaps or is continuous with – and is at the margins scarcely distinguishable from – forms of scholarship that sail under flags as different as ‘history of science,’ ‘history of art,’ ‘history of political thought,’ 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 Pragmatism’s 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. Jourdain’s 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 ‘intellectual history’ 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 ‘mattered.’ From this point of view, the relative autonomy and (not quite the same thing) respectability now enjoyed by intellectual history – and exemplified by the existence of this Companion – 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. Collingwood’s Idealist conception of human action to see the sense in which one might want to say that ‘all history is the history of thought’ (Collingwood, 1946). Indeed, any notion of anachronism – one of the defining notions of historicity itself – 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 ‘the first intellectual historian;’ 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 ‘historian.’
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 Stephen’s The History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols (1876) and J.T. Merz’s The History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century, 4 vols (1896–1912): the first was by a writer primarily known as a literary critic and biographer, the second by an author described as ‘an industrial chemist and philosopher.’
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 ‘the history of ideas’ (understood as the story of ‘unit-ideas’ 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 ‘background’ for something else – 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 ‘Nature’ in the Thought of the Period (1940). From the 1960s and 1970s onwards, ‘background’ tended to be replaced by ‘context,’ a term that came to be brandished as though it had the power of a magic spell: claiming to place ideas ‘in their historical context’ became the professionally approved way of asserting one’s 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 ‘early-modern’ period (circa 1450 – 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 – often in unstable compounds with elements of political theory, moral philosophy and political history – 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 ‘global intellectual history:’ 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 ‘American exceptionalism’ 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, 1939–53), 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 mentalités of entire communities (Dosse, 2003). In both these traditions, the term ‘intellectual history’ has retained a somewhat alien flavour, while various native enterprises from Geistesgeschichte and L’Histoire de philosophie to, more recently, Begriffsgeschichte and L’Histoire 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 ‘intellectual history’ 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 ‘progress’, but merely noting major changes in the setting and mood within which work is now undertaken, and hence in what it feels like to be an intellectual historian in 2014 in contrast to, say, 1974 or 1964. In any case, there are countervailing trends at work which should constrain any triumphalist note in this account. One is that developments growing primarily out of literary theory, and sometimes summarised as ‘the linguistic turn,’ have meant that all kinds of opportunist uses of texts from the past, primarily fuelled by ideological or deconstructive purposes, have increasingly presented themselves under the title ‘intellectual history’ even though they are not part of any sustained attempt to recover and understand the intellectual life of the past in its knotty, irreducible pastness. The potential for misperception and misidentification in practical matters such as appointments and reviews has increased correspondingly: literary scholars sometimes use ‘intellectual history’ as an honorific denoting an interest in theory or politics, while philosophers occasionally employ it as a derogated label for any interest in past thinkers that is not strictly philosophical. Another constraining development is institutional. For all the good work that is being done in intellectual history in Britain and America at present, there is still a paucity of established posts in the field. Very often, again especially in Britain, a scholar initially appointed to teach some other area (and themselves sometimes coming from a background in quite another discipline) makes a mark in the field and adopts ‘intellectual history’ as part of the description of their chair or other senior appointment, only for their post to revert to its original disciplinary allegiance upon their departure or retirement. There are very few institutions where one can properly speak of a succession or a continuing graduate programme.
Nonetheless, the enhanced sense of legitimacy and shared values consequent upon the flourishing of intellectual history in the last couple of decades is itself an enabling condition for further good work. This healthy state is perhaps particularly evidenced by the cluster of journals that now serve the field. Intellectual History Review is the most recent, launched in April 2007, but it joins Modern Intellectual History, launched in April 2004, History of European Ideas, re-founded on new lines in 1995, and the Journal of the History of Ideas, which is more venerable but which has also recently undergone a welcome reshaping of its identity. (I should declare an interest here, since I am, or have been, on the Editorial or Advisory Boards of these last three journals.) Of course, good work in intellectual history is also published in a variety of other journals; I single out the above quartet simply because their simultaneous flourishing is a new phenomenon, and because they provide places for intellectual historians to publish without having to adapt to the protocols or expectations of scholars working in other disciplines or subdisciplines.
All this means that we can say, in a manner at once more confident and more relaxed than might once have been possible, that in the present, ‘intellectual history’ is a label applied to a wide range of enquiries dealing with the articulation of ideas in the past. At its core has been the close study of written expressions of thought, especially those crafted at a fairly sophisticated or reflective level. A constitutive part of such study is the attempt to recover the assumptions and contexts which contributed to the fullness of meaning that such writings potentially possessed for their original publics. All these phrases raise more questions than they answer but, for my present purposes, they are as far as it seems necessary to go by way of general description.
