Ideas Still Have Consequences

Today the study of ideas figures prominently not only in history departments but also across the humanities. Scholars have recovered from the misplaced populism that once trashed great books as if doing so were inherently progressive and shed a reflexive anxiety about analyzing ideas and where they come from.

At the same time, in the broader culture, the end of the Cold War and the continuing gridlock of political debate have left many people depressed about our depleted intellectual capital. The absence of big claims and serious exchange has created a scenario in which politicians bicker while the public tweets.

The field of intellectual history, like certain kinds of political theory and philosophy, is poised to help fill that void.

Viewed in hindsight, it seems ironic that beginning in the late 1960s, “ideas” should have become a term of opprobrium in Western universities, and that historians should have seen fit to dismiss their study as antiquated, if not reactionary. But just a generation ago, the spectacular rise of social history and other trends brought with it a disdain for the ideas and politics of elites—at a time when, more broadly, society was becoming wary of intellectuals.

The history of ideas also came under attack from those who, by any measure, could be described as intellectuals and elites themselves. Students at Princeton University’s famously analytical philosophy department allegedly hung a banner in the halls that declared, “Just say No to the History of Ideas.” On the Continent, Michel Foucault mounted a direct attack on the histoire des idées in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, in which he declared categorically that “I cannot be satisfied until I have cut myself off from ‘the history of ideas.’ "

The renaissance of intellectual history today augurs a return to a time when Americans took arguments, and not merely interests, seriously as cultural and political forces. It affords a glimpse of what a renewed confidence in the power of ideas to move minds—and the power of minds to grasp ideas across disciplinary frontiers—might do for a world in which economic necessity seems to compel all to bow before them.

But it also poses challenges to the field, which risks becoming the victim of its own success. Surprisingly for scholars who pride themselves on intellectual self-awareness, their star has risen along with an apparent decline in self-reflection. Introspection—and the theoretical contest that often comes with it—was once compulsory in the field, if arguably taken to excess. Its absence today risks devolution into a celebration of eclecticism in which everyone cultivates an individual garden, and which ignores the hard challenges and big questions of internal debates.

Understanding the renaissance of intellectual history sheds lights on the broader currents that have buffeted intellectual life over the past generation.

“A malaise is spreading among intellectual historians,” Robert Darnton reported in an oft-cited essay first published in 1980. “Twenty years ago, they saw their discipline as the queen of the historical sciences. Today she seems humbled.” Darnton conceded that the dethronement was neither sudden nor complete. Nor was it ever strictly true that intellectual history had ascended to the regal stature he implied. But the essay captured well how the prestige once enjoyed by intellectual historians had been called into question.

Social history, often linked to quantitative approaches that promised a way to discuss wide swaths of humanity, accused intellectual history, frequently with good reason, of losing itself in flights of idealist abstraction, underestimating the importance of material factors in shaping the human past, and ignoring the plight of ordinary people.

Before long, however, the vogue for social history had entered its own period of self-examination and “crisis,” as even some of its most able practitioners began to feel that relentless quantification slighted the meaningful dimension of even the humblest people’s lives. While the French tradition of the histoire des mentalités had long sought to illuminate the mental habits of ordinary people, the “new cultural history” that surged in the 1980s aimed to interpret meaning through a novel recourse to anthropological and other theories that understood “culture” as a pervasive semiotic web. The consequences for traditional intellectual history were similar to those of the previous assault by social history.

At roughly the same moment, intellectual historians themselves began to insist on the centrality of theories that precluded any obvious role for their own discipline in the rise of cultural history. In response to the “crisis” in intellectual history precipitated by the rise of social history, the historians Dominick LaCapra and Steven L. Kaplan organized a major conference at Cornell University in 1980. The resulting volume, Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives, made no claim to comprehensiveness yet did serve as a barometer of change. Should intellectual history take a linguistic turn, and, if so, in what direction? What were the ways available to theorize meaning and language? Might the tools and critical perspectives opened up by poststructuralist literary theory offer intellectual historians a new methodology for the reading of texts?

The newfound complexity that followed from such questions suggested that historians of the past had carried out their work on the basis of rather simple-minded understandings of meaning and textuality. Increased attention to Western Marxism, poststructuralism, and psychoanalysis, meanwhile challenged practitioners to probe the theoretical underpinnings and implications of their work.

The ensuing debates were invigorating. But they sometimes bred arcane and internecine discussion, tending to further marginalize intellectual historians from other branches of the discipline, whose members did not always share the same sense of urgency regarding theoretical articulation and reflection. “One begins to wonder,” John Toews wrote in a review essay, “if it is possible to avoid the pitfalls of [defective] theory at all without ceasing to ‘do’ history and restricting oneself to thinking about it.” The pioneering self-scrutiny of intellectual historians became forbidding.

Today the scholarly horizon looks altogether different. The so-called cultural turn has been renounced by some of its most influential partisans, with leading scholars such as Lynn Hunt inclined to rethink the original project or at least move beyond it. In the meantime, intellectual history has become popular again. The appointment of chairs at some of the country’s leading universities, the revitalization of older publications like the Journal of the History of Ideas and the founding of new journals like Modern Intellectual History, and the establishment of groups like the Society for U.S. Intellectual Historians along with renewed interest and excitement among students, publishers, and readers, all attest to a sense that something has changed.

Is this change simply an illustration of the fickleness of scholarly taste or a successful adaptation to the academic marketplace? As the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu once argued, academics have long felt the same imperative to novelty as artists and entrepreneurs. With the creation of the modern disciplines in the sciences and humanities in the 19th century, the demands of originality and progress require constant innovation in the mind as well as the market.

Yet a number of cohesive tendencies in the field suggest that the resurgence of intellectual history may be more than just the latest fashion trend, and that it has the potential for broad impact in academe.

Consider intellectual history’s role as a field that crosses disciplinaryfrontiers, bringing together work in the humanities and social sciences that is too often conducted in isolation. Intellectual historians are embracing that role with relish, and there are encouraging signs that their efforts are welcome. For example, the traditional allergy to history in philosophy, so clearly proclaimed by those Princeton students, is on the wane. Today the history of philosophy is no longer treated as mere “background” or a set of wrong answers to mistaken problems.

A “newer” historicism in literature departments (newer, that is, than the so-called New Historicism of the 1980s and 90s) is inclined to show how creative works were connected to the intellectual setting of their time, and not simply see them as products of the circulation of cultural meaning or formations of power. Indeed, in a less divisive atmosphere across the humanities, scholars are trying to overcome tired dichotomies—intellectual history versus social or cultural history, high versus low, science versus the arts.

The willingness to scale outward, beyond the immediate confines of time (the longue durée) and space (international or even global sweep), has the potential to extend work across different kinds of frontiers. In contexts that span centuries as well as oceans, intellectual historians are experimenting with how to write “big” histories of “big” ideas, charting the pivotal moments when ideas changed or were remade in foreign lands.

A reinvigorated interest in intellectual biography is also proving a source of cohesive vitality, with historians seeking to connect ideas in new ways to the psychology, lived experiences, and self-fashioning of those who think them.

The field welcomes, too, an unapologetic interest in the study of ideas for their own sake. Whether an understanding of civil war or the banner idea of human rights, it is clear that concepts structure our political experience. While steering clear of an antiquated idealism that often treats ideas as magical forces that can somehow act on their own, intellectual historians today aim to understand the grinding of the intellectual optics through which we see the world.

Indeed, there is a healthy and self-conscious desire to treat the past not as a world unto itself, but as a place of revelation and response to questions that concern us in the here and now. The willingness of intellectual historians to flirt with what has long been regarded as the cardinal sin of presentism reflects the weight of an uncomfortable question that presses on all who work in the humanities today: What is the value of what we do?

Despite these commonalities marking the resurgence and wider resonance of the field, the absence of strife and introspection may prove to be a curse as much as a blessing. Basking in a kind of mutual admiration with other parts of the discipline, and with one another, intellectual historians seem content simply to get along.

The situation is comfortable. But it risks refusing to acknowledge that some approaches may not be compatible. Intellectual historians still need to consider whether the history of ideas qua ideas remains at odds with the social history of culture, which seeks to embed those ideas in broader social practices. And they need to confront whether the turn inward, toward the subjective lives of intellectuals, can be reconciled with the wider social forces that shape them.

In our own field of European intellectual history, the move to push our studies beyond the boundaries of the nation, and indeed beyond Europe itself, represents a fertile means to maintain the relevance of what might otherwise seem a parochial discipline in a global age. Still, how much does it really tell us about how to practice intellectual history in those vast spaces it opens up? Does conducting history only on a broad scale privilege those ideas and institutions capable of surviving passages over long distances?

For the time being, intellectual historians seem reluctant to fight about such matters. Yet it matters that we do so—the methodological and theoretical clarity of our field is at stake. If intellectual history is going to continue to flourish, it must have solid legs to stand on.

Beyond academe, the need for clear input from intellectual historians is equally pressing. Intellectual history, after all, trades in the currency of ideological memory: It reminds us where we have been, what we have discarded (perhaps mistakenly) and why, and how practical circumstances can both unleash and constrain our imaginations. We can all remember a time in which big ideological claims drove history and offered the grist for passionate debates. Yet it is as if with “the end of history,” we left behind the enjoyment and stimulation—often the necessity—of thinking big in order to take even the smallest next steps.

Consider the fate of education in the winter of our financial discontent. As those of us in the humanities are well aware, parents have responded to economic woes by telling their children to study something “useful” in college—as if broad exploration of our purposes in life were not useful. The situation calls to mind John Maynard Keynes’s maxim that “the world is ruled by little else” than “the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong.”

The mantra of our own harried times is economic necessity, utility, and “interest,” which from the standpoint of parents worried about their children’s future makes perfect sense. But an intellectual historian might respond by asking how and why it occurred that people could be seen as having the “interests” in the first place, apart from what classical philosophers once defined as the pursuit of the “good life.”

Intellectual historians have also wondered—and bitterly disagreed—about when and how “the economy” came to be seen as a distinct domain of public discourse and social practice. It was only in the middle of the 20th century, some have argued, that people perceived the economy as something that government had to study and manage.

At stake in this inquiry is understanding how defining the social world and (much more narrowly) its “economy” affects the real lives of millions of people. Knowing the history of ideas, it turns out, has its uses, and it is in our “interest” to know this history. Keynes very likely would have agreed. “I am sure,” he wrote, “that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.”

Keynes himself hoped that economics would provide a way for humanity to solve its boring problems of subsistence in order to turn its attention to more interesting ones, which poetry, art, philosophy—the stuff of the history of ideas—are pre-eminently prepared to tackle.

Intellectual history has reasserted itself in academe. It’s time to communicate the field’s fund of learning more broadly, and to do the hard work to ensure that its messages will be heard.

Darrin M. McMahon is a professor of history at Florida State University, and Samuel Moyn is a professor of history at Columbia University. They 
are the editors of Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, just published by Oxford University Press.