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In a pathbreaking essay appearing in the Journal of Modern History in 1971, Robert Darnton sketched out a new approach to the historical study of the Enlightenment. For him, it was not enough to “scale the peaks” of eighteenthcentury philosophy, as the followers of Ernst Cassirer and Arthur O. Lovejoy were doing in their pursuit of new patterns of intellectual coherence.1 Nor was it sufficient to inventory book collections according to social class, as the followers of Daniel Mornet were doing in France. Instead, Darnton called for examining how texts were produced, how they circulated, and how contemporaries responded to them. The “social history of ideas,” as he saw it, called for analyzing the dynamic interaction between texts and social contexts, without reducing one to the other.2 It sought to recover the “lived experience of literature,” he later explained, by “follow[ing] thought through the entire fabric of society.”3 This approach, he believed, would open up new perspectives on the Enlightenment, showing how ideas figured concretely in the great social and political transformations of eighteenth-century France. Over the past four decades, the social history of ideas has exploded into a veritable subdiscipline. Its influence, which now extends beyond the field of eighteenth-century France, owes much to its theoretical and methodological openness. The “ad hoc combinations of Cassirer and Mornet” that Darnton initially envisaged in 1971 have been expanded on and refined.4 Much interdisciplinary cross-fertilization has taken place. He himself has incorporated the critical perspectives of several pioneering scholars in other fields, such as D. F. McKenzie (the sociology of texts), Pierre Bourdieu (sociological fields of cultural production), Erving Goffman (frame analysis), and Clifford Geertz (ethnographic “thick description”). Yet, in drawing on theory, Darnton has always remained attentive to disciplinary boundaries, to what the historian’s craft specifically entails. While theory can point historians toward new sets of sources and help them formulate new questions, it can also, when applied heavy-handedly, run roughshod over historical specificities. In the final analysis , Darnton draws on cultural theories much like eighteenth-century peasants P R E FA C E A N D A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S Charles Walton drew on the tropes, jokes, and symbols available to them in folktales, which he so memorably studied: they are “good to think with.”5 Darnton has developed a distinctive approach to the study of cultural history . Like other “revisionist” historians of eighteenth-century France in the 1960s and 1970s, he rejected the Marxist tendency to view culture as determined by socioeconomic structures. For him, culture itself was constitutive of social and political life. But he parted ways with historians who limited culture to thought and language (i.e., “discourse”). Grasping the historical signi ficance of cultural meanings, he believed, requires analyzing linguistic forces (epistemologies, ideas, opinions, attitudes, symbols, narrative frames) and extralinguistic ones (interests, social conditions, institutions, materiality, circumstances ). It involves uncovering the relationships among all these factors without imposing an all-embracing scheme of interpretation. As Roger Chartier remarks below, Darnton’s approach has been artisanal rather than systematic. The treatment of texts and social contexts as distinct but dynamically interrelated phenomena runs through nearly all of Darnton’s work.When historians began taking linguistic and semiotic turns in the 1980s—turns he contributed to—he nevertheless continued incorporating social factors into his analysis. In The Great Cat Massacre, arguably his boldest foray into semiotics, he treated eighteenth-century culture not as a coherent semiotic whole, but rather as clusters of meaning inflected by nonlinguistic forces, especially social conditions . In teasing out cosmologies from the symbols and tropes of peasant tales, he related those “worldviews” to the facts of rural life in France and Germany : hunger, violence, and social hierarchy. (Still, it is important to note that he did not reduce those cosmologies to socioeconomic conditions; indeed, the different ways that French and German peasants recounted the same tales suggest that cultural frames have a certain degree of autonomy.) Similarly, when Parisian journeymen in the rue Saint-Séverin laughed themselves silly executing the cat of their master’s wife in the 1730s, they gave vent to rising social resentments permeating eighteenth-century print shops, expressing them in a carnival-like idiom of inversion that was becoming increasingly repulsive to bourgeois masters such as theirs. Even at his most semiotic, then, Darnton never lost sight of the...

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