Is Intellectual History a Neglected Field of Study?

The sense that the discipline of history was marginalizing traditional fields like diplomatic, economic, military, constitutional, and intellectual history—fields that critics charge focus far too much on elite decision makers—was a major concern of the founders of the Historical Society. As the Society enters its second decade, it is appropriate to revisit this matter, especially when the status of traditional historical fields is still debated, most recently in the pages of the New York Times (Patricia Cohen, "Great Caesar's Ghost! Are Traditional History Courses Vanishing?" June 10, 2009).

Historically Speaking has received a generous grant from the Earhart Foundation to publish a series of forums examining the state of four traditional fields that some believe are being neglected in today's academy. Intellectual history is the focus of our first forum. We asked Daniel Wickberg, a cogent observer of historiographical trends, to write the lead essay. Three distinguished intellectual historians—David Hollinger, Sarah Igo, and Wilfred McClay—respond, followed by Wickberg's rejoinder.

Nearly thirty years ago a wave of self-critical reflections on the state of intellectual history swept the discipline. The sense that the field, once the progressive cutting edge of historical scholarship in the mid-20th century, had been pushed to the margins, its methods and claims found wanting by the new social history of the 1960s and 1970s, was pervasive. In a series of diagnostic and critical articles and books, prominent intellectual historians declared the old intellectual history dead and—defying their presumed professional dispositions to keep an eye on the past rather than the future—prepared to serve as midwives for the "new" intellectual history.¹ The "old" intellectual history was denounced as elitist, unrepresentative, given to making sweeping generalizations on the basis of limited evidence, and concerned with phenomena largely irrelevant to the "real" substance of history: material conditions, economic interests, the social relations of everyday life. Looking at history "from the bottom up," in Jesse Lemisch's famous formulation, the affairs of the mind seemed far away from those of the social body, and those of the social body had taken on a central significance for the mainstream of historical scholarship. If intellectual history was to remain a viable concern, it was held, it would have to respond to the epistemological, conceptual, and moral concerns of the new social history. There would be no more talk of "the New England Mind," "Main Currents" in American thought, or Arthur Lovejoy's history of ideas. Social history was king; tribute would be paid.

In the following decades, intellectual historians sought either to reinvigorate intellectual history as a theoretically sophisticated field with its own limited claims or to make it ancillary to the concerns of the profession at large by bringing its methods to bear on problems and issues developed by other historians. The two major developments in theoretically informed historiography during these years we designate by the terms "the linguistic turn" and "the cultural turn." The first challenged the materialist basis of much social history by insisting that the very categories of social reality were constituted in language rather than independently of it. The idea that language is not a transparent medium but a dense system of signification based on internal conventions brought the power of minds to order experience back as an object of historical scholarship. Whether historians were concerned with political languages—following such leaders in the field as Quentin Skinner and J.G.A. Pocock—or with social categories such as race, gender, class, and sexual identity, the key innovation was to compel many historians to move from a reading of sources as registers of independent facts to a reading of texts as ordered systems of meanings created by historical actors. The linguistic turn brought intellectual historians, and their methods of textual, contextual, and intertextual analysis, to bear on a wide variety of historical objects that had not traditionally been the purview of intellectual history. The linguistic turn sensitized historians of all stripes to the constitutive power of language; the intellectual historian's skills in reading texts, analyzing arguments, and contextualizing ideas had a kind of renewed value...