Intellectual History and the History of Ideas

While discussing potential topic of my thesis today with my tutor, Darra Mulderry, an expert of American intellectual history in the post-war period, we briefly discussed the distinction between an intellectual history and the history of ideas. It seems like that a paper primarily concerned with the development of ideas in a certain individual or a school of thought should be considered history of ideas, whereas an intellectual history has a more sociological aspect to it as it focuses on the intellectuals and their works. Hence, an intellectual history would be one that attempts to examine different aspects of a thinker, whose thoughts--central as they are--serve as a key that guides to the character of the intellectual(s). Other factors, such as his biographical information, his self-perception of his role as an intellectual, are also important. Whereas the history of ideas is a genealogy of ideas, an intellectual idea would be a lineage of people who produce these ideas. Peter Gordon, in a article titled "What is Intellectual History", makes clear of this distinction:

Intellectual History and the History of Ideas
What is intellectual history? Broadly speaking, intellectual history is the study of
intellectuals, ideas, and intellectual patterns over time. Of course, that is a terrifically
large definition and it admits of a bewildering variety of approaches. One thing to note right off is the distinction between “intellectual history” and “the history of ideas.” This can be somewhat confusing, since the two terms are sometimes used interchangeably: “history of ideas” is a rather old-fashioned phrase, and not currently in vogue (though there is an excellent journal for intellectual historians published under the title, The Journal of the History of Ideas.) But if we are worried about precise definitions rather than popular usage, there is arguably a difference: The “history of ideas” is a discipline which looks at large-scale concepts as they appear and transform over the course of history. An historian of ideas will tend to organize the historical narrative around one major idea and will then follow the development or metamorphosis of that idea as it manifests itself in different contexts and times, rather as a musicologist might trace a theme and all of its variations throughout the length of a symphony. Perhaps the most classic example is the book by Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (originally given as the William James Lectures at Harvard University in 1933). This kind of exercise has many merits—for example, it permits us to recognize commonalities in thought despite vast dissimilarities in context, thereby calling attention to the way that humanity seems always preoccupied with certain seemingly “eternal” thoughts. But this advantage can also be a disadvantage. By insisting that the idea is recognizably the same thing despite all of its contextual variations, the history of ideas approach tends to encourage a kind of Platonist attitude about thoughts, as if they somehow preexisted their contexts and merely manifested themselves in various landscapes.

Intellectual history is different from the history of ideas. It resists the Platonist
expectation that an idea can be defined in the absence of the world, and it tends instead to regard ideas as historically conditioned features of the world which are best understood within some larger context, whether it be the context of social struggle and institutional change, intellectual biography (individual or collective), or some larger context of cultural or linguistic dispositions (now often called “discourses”). To be sure, sometimes the requisite context is simply the context of other, historically conditioned ideas— intellectual history does not necessarily require that concepts be studied within a larger, non-conceptual frame. Admittedly, this last point can be controversial: some intellectual historians do adopt a purely “internalist” approach, i.e., they set thoughts in relation to other thoughts, without reference to some setting outside them. This method is usually most revealing when the relations between ideas helps us to see a previously unacknowledged connection between different realms of intellectual inquiry, e.g., the relation between theological and scientific modes of explanation, or between metaphysical and political concepts of causality. But this method tends to reproduce the Platonism which beset the older-style history of ideas approach. Even today, many intellectual historians remain—stubbornly or covertly—internalist in their method. They may pay lip-service to contextualism, but they are chiefly interested in conceptual contexts only. But because internalist styles of argumentation have in recent decades fallen out of favor amongst historians and humanists more generally, those who write intellectual history in the internalist manner often look rather tweedy and traditionalist to their more “worldly” colleagues both within and beyond of the historical discipline. Indeed, intellectual historians who practice this sort of concept-contextualism will not infrequently meet with accusations of quietism, elitism, or political naiveté. Internalism is nonetheless defensible on methodological grounds, though it is important to acknowledge its risks and its limitations.