Is Intellectual History a Neglected Field of Study?

Daniel Wickberg

Historically Speaking, Volume 10, Number 4, September 2009, pp. 14-17 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/hsp.0.0051

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THE CURRENT STATE OF INTELLECTUAL HISTORY: A FORUM

THE SENSE THAT THE DISCIPLINE OF HISTORY WAS MARginalizing traditional fields like diplomatic, economic, military, constitutional, and intellectual historyfields 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 Caesars 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 todays 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 historiansDavid Hollinger, Sarah Igo, and Wilfred McClayrespond, followed by Wickbergs rejoinder.

IS INTELLECTUAL HISTORY A NEGLECTED FIELD OF STUDY?

Daniel Wickberg

early 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 anddefying their presumed professional dispositions to keep an eye on the past rather than the futureprepared to serve as midwives for the new intellectual history. 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 Lemischs 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 Lovejoys 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
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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

The claim that we are all cultural historians now is surely wrong, but it speaks to the ubiquity of the approaches associated with culture, and to the blurring of the lines that once separated intellectual, political, social, military, and economic history from one another.
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 languagesfollowing such leaders in the field as Quentin Skinner and J.G.A. Pocockor 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 historians skills in reading texts, analyzing arguments, and contextualizing ideas had a kind of renewed value in historiography, even if they were deployed only occasionally in the pursuit of intellectual history proper. The cultural turn also challenged the materialist and commonsense understandings of human motivation that had dominated much mainstream historical writing in the 1960s and 1970s. As social historians became aware of the limited understanding that came with measuring material wealth, identifying interests, and looking at demographic, economic, and geographical forces, they turned to the methods of symbolic anthropology and the developing field of cultural studies to address issues of social conflict and power as they were expressed in the arena of beliefs and collective representations. Intellectual historians, well aware of which side their bread was buttered on, began to refer to their field as intellectual and cultural history. The traditional concerns of intellectual historiansthought, articulated values, and beliefsgave them a claim on culture. Yet this claim subtly elided the difference between the highly formalized systems of thought and ideas studied by intellectual historians and the more amorphous body of popular beliefs and values that fell under the rubric of culture. The new cultural historyannounced in the well-known volume of that name edited by Lynn Huntillustrated the convergence of socio-cultural historians rebelling against the narrowness of social history and intellectual-cultural historians rejecting the perceived irrelevance of a history of intellectuals. The notion of culture as a lens through which to view the various human phe2 3

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nomena studied by historians is now broadly diffused throughout the discipline. Now even such traditional subfields as foreign policy history and political history have taken the cultural turn. The claim that we are all cultural historians now is surely wrong, but it speaks to the ubiquity of the approaches associated with culture, and to the blurring of the lines that once separated intellectual, political, social, military, and economic history from one another. What the transformations wrought by both the linguistic and cultural turns point to is just how much the methods, approaches, and theoretical concerns that have characterized intellectual history have become central to mainstream historical practice. A generation ago, intellectual history was in crisis. Today there is evidence everywhere that intellectual history speaks to the dominant historiography of our day; its insights and methods have become part of the common coin of the most significant work currently being done. And yet there is a lingering sense that intellectual history as intellectual history is a field safely ignored by most historians, that the old arguments for its dismissal still retain life, that intellectual historians sit on the margin of the history department where more mainstream historians are free to characterize them as not quite historians. So the contemporary condition of intellectual history is somewhat paradoxical. It has succeeded in making its concerns, its subject matter, its methods, and its conceptual underpinnings central to at least the most sophisticated practitioners of the dominant sociocultural history. But it appears to have done so at the expense of making its own claims and identity less important. Do most historians today believe that the study of intellectuals, philosophers, social and political thinkersof formal, developed systems of thoughtis essential to understanding the past? Or are they more inclined to regard intellectual history as a peculiar, arcane, sometimes incomprehensible field of study that seems to share more with disciplines such as philosophy and literature than with the practices of historians? I am inclined to say the latter (with all due recognition that putting it this way may create a false polarity). Part of this general disregard for intellectual history, one suspects, stems from what we might call the anti-intellectualism of the intellectuals. Some socio-cultural historians insist that intellectuals are and always have beenunimportant. Historical importance, in this way of thinking, is defined by numbers, popular sentiment, and application to ordinary experience. I recall a recent conversation with a senior distinguished historian who, upon finding out that I was an intellectual historian, told me in no uncertain terms that intellectuals and their ideas were irrelevant to social movements, hence to history, that the intellectuals always got it wrong and were out of touch with popular sentiment. What was surprising about this was the bluntness of the communication; the sentiment itself is encountered regularly, but in a gentler and more circumspect form. If some intellectual historians can justly be accused of over-identifying with their objects of study, with granting significance to thinking in history because they think
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about history, some social historians can equally be found guilty of compensating for their own elite status by insisting that ideas and thinkers are not important to history at all. All of this, of course, is anecdotal. It is more what one hears from colleagues and in casual conversation than in the published work of historians. But, as the social historians taught us, what gets said in informal and casual ways is often more significant than what appears as published discourse. The question of the neglect of intellectual history, then, is a complicated and paradoxical one. On the negative side, there is a wealth of evidence that

An 1847 daguerreotype of Horace Bushnell, from Theodore Thornton Munger, Horace Bushnell, Preacher and Theologian (Boston, 1899).

intellectual history lacks the institutional and disciplinary importance of other subfields. One measure, for instance, is what gets taught in basic courses such as the U.S. history survey. It is scarcely possible to do a systematic examination of the content of such courses, but there are some general guidelines one tends to see at work in the way the survey is shaped. One cannot imagine, for instance, the first half of the U.S. survey overlooking the central issues of Enlightenment thought, republican ideology, or the rise of immediatist abolitionism, central issues in intellectual history. But one can easily see the teacher of the survey omitting the influence of Scottish philosophy in the American college, the rise of American science and medicine in the early republic, and the intellectual strains of post-Calvinist theology, all areas of fairly recent concern to intellectual historians. In the U.S. survey Frederick Douglass is everywhere; Horace Bushnell, virtually nowhere. In the second half of the U.S. survey the situation is worse. Most teachers of the survey would be under no obligation to examine the rise of the university, the development of social science, the significance of philosophical pragmatism, or the battle between liberal Protestantism and neo-orthodox theology. Some generalizations about Darwinism and religion, pointing perhaps to the Scopes Trial, would suffice. My point here is not that nobody who teaches the sur-

vey addresses the importance of pragmatism or talks about Peirce, James, or Dewey. Surely some do. Rather, it appears to be consistent with the goals of the survey not to mention pragmatism, or to do so only in passing. In other words, most of the central questions, subject matter, and themes of U.S. intellectual history are regarded as optional for the U.S. survey. In the version of history that gets passed down at the most basic level of the university curriculum, ideas and intellectualsand the understanding of them developed by intellectual historiansare inessential. A second measure might be in hiring practices and available positions for students trained in intellectual history. The job market is, and has been, bad all over, and special pleading that one field is worse than another often seems based on an unfounded assumption that jobs are plentiful in some other field. Nevertheless, there are very few positions that are explicitly defined as intellectual history jobs. In American intellectual and cultural history, the field I am most familiar with, in any given year we might expect between one and three advertised tenuretrack positions nationally. This does not mean that intellectual historians dont get jobs, but they tend to get them in positions defined by some other category in which they fit: e.g., gender history, or antebellum history. What it frequently means is that the candidate whose research specialty is in AfricanAmerican intellectual history, for example, is competing with other candidates in African-American history, and probably less so with other candidates in intellectual history more generally. Again, the positive and negative are mixed here. It is certainly my impression that students of African-American intellectual history such as Jonathan Holloway and Nikhil Singh have been fairly successful in shaping the development of African-American history as a whole, and that intellectual historians are getting jobs in this field. But as intellectual history is subordinated or mainstreamed into other subfields, it has lost its distinctive cohesion as a subfield itself. It is very hard to get hired today as an intellectual historian, rather than, say, as a Progressive-era historian or a southern historian or an environmental historian. Intellectual historians are getting hired, but the sense, in a hard job market, is that one must be something else first and an intellectual historian second. It is a rare department that declares an explicit need for a position in intellectual history, but in the practice of hiring, departments seem happy to have candidates who can offer strengths in intellectual history. This does not bode well for a strong sense of intellectual history at the institutional level. Third, the intellectual historian, while providing valuable service to the history department is often not always!perceived to be on the margins of the department, her courses requiring an extradisciplinary set of skills and methods. For one thing, intellectual historians are often historiographers and critical and self-reflective students of historical practice in a way their colleagues are not. In many departments, the intellectual historian teaches the dreaded historiography or history and theory course, while her colleagues teach the nuts-and-bolts meth6 7

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ods courses. This division of labor encapsulates the problematic relationship of intellectual history to history at large. There remains among historians a certain anti-theoretical animus, a reluctance to think philosophically about the conditions of historical knowledge and the relationship of the forms of writing to the objects of knowledge. The old commonsense realism and empiricism of the craft tradition die hard. Intellectual historians, on the other hand, tend to be very comfortable with reading texts, analyzing philosophical arguments, and situating theoretical perspectives within broader intellectual traditions. That is, intellectual historians have a tendency to think about history as something more than a disciplinary practice. Rather, they imagine history to be a way of thinking about the past, about larger questions of epistemology, textuality, and cultural imagination. Much mainstream historiographical thought tends to bracket these larger epistemological and philosophical questions. While these conditions seem to point to a declining influence and significance of intellectual history as an autonomous area of study, the last decade has seen a weight of counter-indicators, supplying strong evidence for a revitalized intellectual history. In the area of periodical publication, for instance, the creation of Modern Intellectual History, a peer-reviewed journal published by Cambridge University Press and addressing a broad range of issues uniting intellectual historians of Europe, Asia, and the Americas, represents a real advance over its predecessor, the Intellectual History Newsletter. The latter was an important venue for intellectual historians, but lacked the visibility, scholarly significance, and status of the newer journal; the pleasures of its typescript newsletter quality are offset by the professionalism of Modern Intellectual History. The Journal of the History of Ideas, now under the editorship of Anthony Grafton, has shown a renewed vigor, moving away from the very specialized and sometimes arcane studies that had come to characterize it in recent decades and toward a greater concern with theoretically informed essays and engagement with problems that appeal to a broader audience of intellectual and cultural historians, including historians of science. The very idea of a history of ideas, long moribund, seems set for a renewal, if on grounds other than the famous unit ideas associated with Arthur O. Lovejoy. On the downside, journals that once served as an outlet for intellectual history, such as American Quarterly, rarely publish in the field anymore. Perhaps more significantly, a younger group of U.S. intellectual historians, consisting of recent Ph.D.s and graduate students, has initiated a blog in U.S. history (http://us-intellectual-history.blogspot.com/). The same group has put together an annual conference in U.S. intellectual history. The first meeting was, by all reports, very successful, and the second meeting will likely have occurred by the time this appears in print. For many years, U.S. intellectual historians have lacked a professional organization for their endeavors; an annual
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conference at which to meet and develop a sense of the discipline and to identify colleagues working in related areas; and a journal devoted specifically to the needs of this subgroup. Recent efforts suggest that we are well on our way in these areas. That the initiative for these moves has been taken by younger historians is significant; it suggests that the field has a strong future. And while it is probably too soon to tell, the digital revolution seems to promise an expanding future and renewal for intellectual historians. Such digitized collections as Eighteenth-Century Books and Early American Imprints, among others, allow a new level of access, and provide new tools like full-text searching that permit systematic tracing of ideas through multiple texts. Talk of new tools for text

The cliometric dream of yesterday now lies abandoned, destroyed by the quantitative unreliability of historical data and the triviality of results it generated.
mining and computer-generated sentiment analysis, of which historians might be justly skeptical, appearif properly used and guided by the historians questions and methodsas potential avenues for approaching problems of intellectual history. A generation ago the use of computers, dubbed cliometrics, seemed to be pushing historians in a direction of increased quantification and away from the purposes of intellectual historians. The cliometric dream of yesterday now lies abandoned, destroyed by the quantitative unreliability of historical data and the triviality of results it generated. Today, computers potentially offer new ways of understanding signification and meaning. Whether such a digital history of texts, thought, and ideas will take its place next to cliometrics as one of historiographys dead ends remains to be seen. Probably most important for the renewed visibility of intellectual history in the last decade is one of the most conventional measures of success: the prominence of award-winning books that can properly be designated as works of intellectual history. And here, the message would seem unequivocal. Since Louis Menands Pulitzer-winning The Metaphysical Club was published in 2001, and received an enthusiastic reception both inside and outside of the academy, American intellectual history has certainly been riding a wave of high visibility. George Marsdens Jonathan Edwards: A Life (2003); Michael OBriens massive two-volume study of antebellum Southern intellectual life, Conjectures of Order (2004); Robert Richardsons William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2006): all are recent winners of the Bancroft Prize, the single most significant award for works of American history. Other recent works of intellectual history that have received widespread attention outside of the narrow confines of their specialized fields include Eugene Genovese and
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Elizabeth Fox-Genoveses The Mind of the Master Class (2005), Howard Bricks Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (2006), Mark Nolls The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (2006), and Sarah Igos The Averaged American (2007). In important areas of recent historiography, such as the bodies of literature that focus on cultural memory and transnationalism, works of intellectual history have played a significant and often leading role. And a significant body of work continues to be published in the New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History series at the Johns Hopkins University Press. In terms of the prominence of published works, one would be hard pressed to declare intellectual history to be a neglected field. In fact, by the record of publication, one would imagine it to be one of the most creative areas of new research. And yet it would be difficult for any serious observer to conclude that intellectual history stands at the center of the discipline. Perhaps the paradoxical condition of intellectual history today lies in the increasing specialization and expansion of the academic enterprise in our own time. In this sense, intellectual history is no more marginal or neglected than any other field; the discipline of history is, more and more, a flourishing pluralistic field without a strong center or mainstream. The suspicion of grand narratives that has pervaded the discipline since the 1970s, the development of subfields with strong, distinct identities, the new structure of communication that allows scholars constant contact with those of like interest, but requires them less and less to communicate to the profession at large: all are conditions of contemporary historical scholarship. On the other hand, the interdisciplinary impulsewhich is peculiarly suited to intellectual historypushes historians to communicate outside the discipline of history. Intellectual historians often find themselves in dialogue with those at the margins of other disciplines: the philosophers who are less interested in analytical philosophy and more interested in the history of philosophy; the political scientists who study the history of political theory; the self-reflexive anthropologists; the sociologists of ideas and intellectuals; the literary scholars of discourse. In such a scholarly world, it is perhaps difficult to think of fields as neglected or as central, as marginal or essential. In this world, those intellectual historians who have a strong sense of disciplinary identity as historiansand I think that is most of ushave found ways to communicate our peculiar vision of what constitutes history to our colleagues both within the discipline of history and without. Sometimes, I think, they listen.
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Daniel Wickberg, associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Dallas, has published essays in the American Historical Review, the Journal of American History, and Critical Inquiry. He is the author of The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America (Cornell University Press, 1998).

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tory: Past, Present, and Future (University of Chicago Press, 2008). Paul K. Conkin and John Higham, eds., New Directions in American Intellectual History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); Robert Darnton, Intellectual and Cultural History, in Michael G. Kammen , ed., The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States (Cornell University Press, 1980), 327-349; William Bouwsma, From History of Ideas to History of Meaning, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 12 (1981): 279-291; and Dominick LaCapra and Steven L. Kaplan, eds., Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives (Cornell University Press, 1981).
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James T. Kloppenberg, Intellectual History, Democracy, and the Culture of Irony, in Melvyn Stokes, ed., The State of U.S. History (Berg, 2002), 199-222; Thomas Bender, Intellectual and Cultural History, in Eric Foner, ed., The New American History, rev. ed. (Temple University Press, 1997).
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Anthony Grafton, The History of Ideas: Precept and Practice, 1950-2000 and Beyond, Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2006): 1-32. http://chnm.gmu.edu/text-mining/; Daniel J. Cohen, From Babel to Knowledge: Data Mining Large Digital Collections, DLib Magazine 12 (March 2006): 6-19, reprinted at http://chnm.gmu.edu/resources/essays/; and Bo Pang and Lillian Lee, Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis (Now Publishers, 2008).

For some sense of the range of U.S. survey syllabi, see the Center for History and New Media at George Mason Universitys syllabus finder: http://chnm.gmu.edu/syllabusfinder/syllabi/
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John E. Toewes, Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience, American Historical Review 92 (1987): 879-907.
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Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (University of California Press, 1989).

Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (University of California Press, 1999); James W. Cook, Lawrence B. Glickman, and Michael OMalley, eds., The Cultural Turn in U.S. His4

The field of African-American intellectual history is, in fact, thriving. For some recent examples of important works see Ross Posnock, Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Harvard University Press, 1998); Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas About White People, 1830-1925 (Oxford University Press, 2000); Jonathan Scott Holloway, Confronting the Veil: Abraham Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919-1941 (University of North Carolina Press, 2001); and Nikhil Pal Singh, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2004).
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On cultural memory, see Jay Winter, The Memory Boom in Contemporary Historical Studies, Raritan 21 (2001): 52-66. A good recent example is David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard University Press, 2002). Much of the work in this vein has been inspired by Holocaust Studies, including the journal History & Memory. On intellectual history that points in a transnational direction, see James Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (Oxford University Press, 1986); Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Harvard University Press, 1998); and Leslie Butler, Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform (University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
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THINKING IS AS AMERICAN AS APPLE PIE

David A. Hollinger

aniel Wickbergs basic point that F. Mays The Enlightenment in America (1976). intellectual history has been But the emergence of cultural history as a largely integrated into mainseparate, yet allied field, has led to a sharpstream U.S. history is eminently sound, and ened division of labor according to which can serve as a caution against making too intellectual history has come to refer to a much of the issue of whether the field is somewhat narrower range of topics than it neglected. Intellectual history, social history, once did, focusing more on the history of and cultural history have all been put foractual argumentation by people who were ward in successive historiographical moequipped by education and training and ments, the proponents of each often temperament to take the lead in making arclaiming to have new insights to which oldgumentsthe so-called elites. A book fashioned political history was blind. Each like Susan Nances How the Arabian Nights of these forgivable conceits has left a valuInspired the American Dream, 1790-1935 able residue in the range and depth of the (2009) might have been routinely classified professions engagement with specific sets as intellectual history if published in the of issues, including the ways in which polit1960s, but today it is more likely to be clasical history itself is carried out. Wickbergs sified as cultural history. essay, while alluding to developments in the During this historiographical transforprofession beyond the field of U.S. history, mation some historians, often in the name is largely focused on the study of U.S. hisof social history, did devalue the study of tory, as my own comments will be. philosophy, theology, and social theory on With regard to the issue of neglect, the grounds that the ideas of elites were of the percentage of departments offering little significance. But as the history of incourses labeled intellectual history has tellectuals has come to be recognized as declined from about 80% in 1975 to about simply one of the disciplines many sub60% in 2005, but in the meantime the perfields, rather than a proxy for the study of centage of departments offering courses laall Americans, this resistance is diminishJames Madison, from Letters and Other Writings of James Madison, Vol. I, 1769beled cultural history has increased from ing. Attention is again being paid to the his1793 (Philadelphia, 1865). about 40% to about 60%. This juxtapository of the use of evidence and reasoning tion, based on a study commissioned by the in public discourse. Thinking, rather than American Historical Association (reported some esoteric activity limited to European history, so that works such as Henry Nash Smiths in the New York Times, June 10, 2009) is worth noting worthies, is indeed as American as apple pie. The Virgin Land (1950) and William R. Taylors Cavalier and study of popular attitudes and general political ideas given the fuzzy borders between intellectual and culYankee (1961) were counted as intellectual history held by large population groups is of course a vital tural history. Studies of the collective mentalities of alongside histories of argumentation, such as Perry part of U.S. history, but so, too, are the refinements of publics were once loosely characterized as intellectual Millers New England Mind (1939 and 1953) and Henry
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