The Descent of Ideas: The History of Intellectual History (review)

Donald Kelley's lucid and ambitious study outlines the disciplinary roots of intellectual history as an academic discipline. This carefully researched book is more than a standard historiography. Kelley goes beyond exploring the theory and practice of intellectual history and traces the early ancestry of the history of ideas. While intellectual history emerged as a discrete field of study during the eighteenth century, Kelley tracks the history of ideas back to the ancient Greeks. According to Kelley, "The tap root of intellectual history, especially in the earlier form of the 'history of ideas,' is the history of philosophy" (4). Specifically, Kelley places the origins of contemporary intellectual history in eclecticism, a school of philosophy developed by nineteenth-century French scholar Victor Cousin.

Kelly's major argument concerns the scholarly trajectory of intellectual history as a field of study; that is, he argues that ideas have "descended" (hence the title) from the metaphysical realm of pure ideas articulated by Plato to the human contexts and texts emphasized by poststructuralists. Under the influence of Nietzsche, historians have turned their attention to words, discourse, and texts instead of studying ideas that float in an ether of abstract thought. In sum, for intellectual historians, ideas have descended into the medium of language and texts. Kelley asserts that the way scholars study ideas has changed over time, and he supports this argument by looking at several areas of interdisciplinarity: there are separate chapters on the history of science, literature, the social sciences, and philosophy.

The rivalry between ideas and language lies at the heart of Kelley's thesis. The so-called idealists argue that ideas precede language, while those in the cultural studies camp assert that there is no thought outside of language itself. While both philosophers and intellectual historians take ideas as their common currency, they look at this topic from very different perspectives. Kelley writes, "Philosophers take ideas as mental phenomena that are adequately represented and communicated in the philosopher's oral or written discourse. For historians, however, ideas are in the first place social and cultural constructions, and the product of a complex process of inference, judgment and criticism on the part of the scholar" (106).

Kelly is a seasoned scholar. He is the executive editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas and the James Westfall Thompson Professor of History at Rutgers University, and this experience shows. He deftly addresses questions of historical epistemology and ontology. For example, scholars have moved from rethinking past thoughts, as directed by R. G. Collingwood, to examining historical texts, reader responses, and cultural constructions, as suggested by the work of Michel Foucault, Thomas Kuhn, Clifford Geertz, and others. This shift implies a changing notion of how much of the past is knowable. Kelley writes, "[I]ntellectual historians must be resigned to carry on their work in a world which is accessible only in its cultural—written or material—manifestations, a world in which ideas descend from the heights of philosophical reflection to the heuristic and interpretative level of intellectual and cultural history" (8).

Another advantage to Kelley's approach is the conceptual clarity it offers both historians and philosophers. Kelley is very good at delineating the differences between intellectual history and the history of philosophy. He also explains how intellectual and cultural history function as complementary forms of historical inquiry.

While Kelley offers a sophisticated analysis of postmodernism and what these ideas have to offer the discipline of history, he fails to account for why these ideas have so much sway over intellectual historians. Kelley points to the "linguistic turn" as the motor that propelled ideas down from the realm of abstraction to a concern for historical texts and contexts, but he fails to explain why this change was adopted. One of Kelley's strengths is his nimble account of contemporary philosophy, and he convincingly links...