intellectual history

intellectual history, branch of history that deals with the historical propagation and dissemination of ideas. Intellectual history is closely related to the history of ideas, a branch of history that treats ideas as objects of formal analysis. Like the history of ideas, intellectual history considers the formally articulated ideas of scholarly and literary figures, but it also encompasses the sentiments of ordinary people—even popular delusions come within the ambit of intellectual history. In this respect intellectual history intersects with psychohistory (the study of history using psychological or psychoanalytic methods) and the cultural history of mentalités, or popular attitudes and unconscious preconceptions.

“All history,” as the English philosopher R.G. Collingwood (1889–1943) said, “is the history of thought.” One traditional view of history, now discarded, is that it is virtually synonymous with the history of ideas—history is composed of human actions; human actions have to be explained by intentions; and intentions cannot be formed without ideas. On a grander scale, the doctrines of Christianity were the core of providential universal histories in the West (histories that conceived the broad course of human events as determined by divine will), which persisted until the 18th century, since the acceptance—or rejection—of Christian ideas was considered Western history’s master plot. When the providential argument in its simpler medieval form lost credibility, it was reformulated by the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), with his conception of the tropes appropriate to the different ages of humanity, and by the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831), whose “objective” idealism identified the development of Spirit, or the Idea, as the motor of history. In the techniques of historical investigation too, the history of ideas was the source for the hermeneutical skills required for reading complex texts. The interpretation of ancient laws and religious doctrines was the workshop in which were forged the tools that were subsequently used in all historical work.

It was not until the speculative schemes that identified the development of ideas with the historical process were generally discredited, and its hermeneutic techniques thoroughly naturalized elsewhere, that intellectual history became a specialty—the first specialized field to supplement the traditional historical specialties of political, diplomatic, and military history. It emerged slightly earlier than social history, and for a time the two were allies in a joint struggle to gain acceptance. The incompatibility—indeed, antagonism—between the two emerged only later.

Confusion can arise because history of ideas and intellectual history are sometimes treated as synonyms. As noted above, the former is properly the name of a field of study in which ideas themselves are the central subject. The most sophisticated approach to the history of ideas was formulated by the American philosopher Arthur Lovejoy (1873–1962), who focused on what he called “unit ideas,” such as the notion of a Great Chain of Being extending from God through the angels to humans down to the least-complicated life-forms. Lovejoy traced this idea from its classical roots through the 19th century in both philosophical and literary elaborations. Philosophical or theological doctrines (e.g., Plato’s theory of Forms, or Manichaeism, a dualist religious movement founded in Persia) lend themselves best to the unit-idea mode of study. One difficulty with the history of unit ideas, however, is that it is often difficult to establish the identity of an idea through time. The term natural law, for example, meant quite different things to Stoic philosophers, to the English philosophers Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and John Locke (1632–1704), and to the prosecutors of Nazi war criminals at the Nürnberg trials (1945–46); the meaning of the same words can change radically. This drives the historian to the Oxford English Dictionary or its equivalents for other languages to get a first take on the history of meaning changes. This step, however, must be supplemented by extensive reading in the contemporary literature, not only to see what semiotic load the words bear but also to see what controversies or contrary positions might have been in the mind of the writer.

The phrase intellectual history did not come into common usage until after World War II. It seems to owe its first currency to The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (1953), by the American historian Perry Miller (1905–63), who required it for his approach to the complex of religious, political, and social ideas and attitudes in Massachusetts in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Perhaps because their area of study is not well defined, intellectual historians have been unusually reflective about the methods appropriate to their work. One methodological controversy was initiated in the 1960s by the British historian Quentin Skinner. Skinner questioned the conventional approach in political philosophy of identifying certain “eternal” questions (such as “Why does anyone have an obligation to obey the state?”) and then arraying various political texts according to the answers they give. This procedure, he argued, led to invalid historical conclusions, since the eternal questions were the constructions of modern political philosophers and reflected modern concerns. Taking his cue from the ordinary language philosophy of J.L. Austin (1911–60) and other postwar Oxford philosophers, Skinner contended that the task for the historian of political thought was to discover what effect the writer of a text intended it to have.

Skinner’s best example was Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690), which for generations had been paired with Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan as one of two versions of a social contract theory. Skinner and his colleague John Dunn started from the obvious but often ignored fact that there was a first treatise by Locke that refuted the theory of the divine right of kings, or the idea that political power devolves from the power that God gave to Adam. Absurd as this idea seems to contemporary philosophers, it nevertheless commanded widespread assent in 17th-century Britain. Similarly, a great deal of controversial writing was then done by clergymen, and Locke (as is evident from his many quotations of the Anglican theologian Richard Hooker [1554–1600]), participated actively in this discourse. On the other hand, there is very little evidence that Locke was responding to Hobbes.

In no branch of history was the challenge of late-20th-century postmodernism and deconstruction felt more keenly than in the history of ideas. In that branch of history the goal has been to interpret past texts; the intentions of the author, as revealed in those texts, sets limits to possible interpretations even where they do not mandate a single one. Deconstructionists such as the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), however, asserted that the intentions of the author can never be known and would be irrelevant even if they could be. All that an interpreter has, according to this view, is the text—thus, the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1926–84), drawing upon the work of French literary critic Roland Barthes (1915–80), declared the “death” of the author. No single meaning can be assigned to the text, because what it does not say may be more significant than what it does. Even what it does say cannot be reduced to a stable meaning, because of the intrinsic opacity and slipperiness of language. (Most words in ordinary usage have several different definitions; there is no way to use them so as to totally exclude all traces of the other meanings. Puns, of which Derrida was fond, illustrate these “surplus” meanings.)

The subversiveness of such views for the traditional practice of the history of ideas is obvious. Derrida’s advocates presented his ideas as liberating and as allowing critics to exercise the same creativity as imaginative writers. The apparent concession to total relativism, however, eventually seemed too high, not least because it rendered the deconstructionist position vulnerable to the paradox of relativism (if the deconstructionist is right that there are no stable meanings, then there is no stable meaning to the assertion that there are no stable meanings, in which case the deconstructionist position cannot even be formulated). The deconstructionist position is not absurd, however, nor can it be refuted simply by observing that few historians have accepted it.