Response to Daniel Wickberg

As a warmadmirer of Daniel Wickberg's subtle and imaginativework, particularly his fine book The Senses of Humor, I naturally expected that his essay on the state and future of intellectual history would be very good. Those expectations have been more than met by the essay before us. Nothing I have read on this subject in recent years can match it for insight, balance, and nuance, accomplished with easygoing and winning concision. It helps, too, that his outlook is not entirely unhopeful and his prescription is not a gruesome round of do-or-die chemotherapy. Wickberg does not deny the existence of many problems, and there is nothing complacent about his account of the prospects for the subdiscipline, which is particularly grim for young scholars just coming out onto the job market. But neither is he willing to resort to alarmism, exaggeration, special pleading, or overblown exhortation to make the case for intellectual history's rightful and enduring place in the house of historical inquiry. He makes the case for what is, rather than preaching of what ought to be.

But in attempting to define the problem with greater clarity, he points us toward a conundrum: intellectual history seems to be both everywhere and nowhere. Everywhere, because its diffuse influence is so widely in evidence, particularly in the appropriation of its insights and methods in the practices of historians and other scholars who most emphatically do not regard themselves as intellectual historians, and do not think that what they are "doing" is intellectual history. But nowhere, too, in that intellectual history as a freestanding subdisciplinary niche, a subject area with its own distinct identity, rather than a set of tools that can be put to use in a wide variety of more concrete inquiries, has regained little of its former eminence, and in fact by some measures appears weaker than ever. It is hard to be enthusiastic about the subdiscipline's prospects when one sees an ever-shrinking number of tenure-track positions in the academy that are defined primarily as intellectual history posts. No responsible graduate advisor will take on students specializing in intellectual history without apprising them of these facts, and offering just the kind of strategic advice (i.e., be sure to yoke their interest in intellectual history to a less exotic line of inquiry) that Wickberg offers here.

In short, the subdiscipline might seem to be flourishing and dying at one and the same time. It seems to be flourishing as a practice woven into the larger fabric of an increasingly self-conscious discipline. It seems to be dying as an independent and self-justified field of inquiry, complete with its own clear and compelling raison d'être.

Of course that last standard is a high one that few subdisciplines can meet. The essentially bureaucratic categories that we use to organize knowledge are pragmatic rather than ontological in character, and no subdiscipline can retain much meaning if it is divorced from the whole web of disparate approaches to things. But intellectual history is particularly vulnerable to this difficulty. Left to its own subdisciplinary devices, it tends toward the esoteric and toward the invention of neologisms and arcane vocabularies that make distinctions and discriminations that are not available in ordinary language. There is much to admire in such refinements, but one has to face the fact that they are also the chief source of the subdiscipline's perceived irrelevance. Intellectual history periodically needs to be brought down to earth, and challenged once again to prove its usefulness in untangling and clarifying concrete problems in other subdisciplines and larger and broader contexts. This also means that calling into question intellectual history's subdisciplinary status may be a good thing for intellectual history, even if it is very hard on intellectual historians. (For an example of a field that has arguably suffered from its "distinctive cohesion as a subfield," one might consider the history of science.)

Wickberg poses the fundamental question: Do historians believe that the study of intellectuals, philosophers, and social and political thinkers, of formal systems of thought, is essential to understanding the past? This large...