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37-466: As a field of intellectual enquiry, the history of ideas emerged from the European disciplines of Kulturgeschichte (Cultural History) and Geistesgeschichte (Intellectual History) from which historians might develop a global intellectual history that shows the parallels and the interrelations in the history of critical thinking in every society. Likewise, the history of reading , and the history of

74-622: A particular phenomenon relates to matters of ideology , nationality , ethnicity , social class , and/or gender . The term was coined by Richard Hoggart in 1964 when he founded the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies . It has since become strongly associated with Stuart Hall , who succeeded Hoggart as Director. The BBC has produced and broadcast a number of educational television programmes on different aspects of human cultural history: in 1969 Civilisation , in 1973 The Ascent of Man , in 1985 The Triumph of

111-460: A spirit close to that with which Lovejoy pursued the history of ideas. The first chapter of Lovejoy's book The Great Chain of Being (1936) lays out a general overview of what he intended to be the programme and scope of the study of the history of ideas. In the History of Ideas, Lovejoy used the unit-idea (concept) as the basic unit of historical analysis. The unit-idea is the building block of

148-1024: A staff writer. In 1988 he was appointed a Distinguished Professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York , and in 1990 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship . He left CUNY to accept a post in the English Department at Harvard University in 2003. He has also taught at Columbia, Queens College , the University of Virginia School of Law . He published his first book, Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context , in 1987. His second book, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (2001), includes detailed biographical material on Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. , William James , Charles Sanders Peirce , and John Dewey , and documents their roles in

185-409: Is a means for reproducing a historically valid interpretation of a philosophical argument, by implementation of a context in which to study ideas and philosophical movements. Michel Foucault rejected narrative , the historian's traditional mode of communication, because of what he believed to be the shallow treatment of facts, figures, and people in a long period, rather than deep research that shows

222-462: Is often characterized as replacing the allegedly dominant, allegedly Marxist , "social interpretation" which locates the causes of the Revolution in class dynamics. The revisionist approach has tended to put more emphasis on " political culture ". Reading ideas of political culture through Habermas' conception of the public sphere, historians of the Revolution in the past few decades have looked at

259-746: The Internet (culture of capitalism ). Its modern approaches come from art history , Annales , Marxist school, microhistory and new cultural history. Common theoretical touchstones for recent cultural history have included: Jürgen Habermas 's formulation of the public sphere in The Structural Transformation of the Bourgeois Public Sphere ; Clifford Geertz 's notion of ' thick description ' (expounded in The Interpretation of Cultures ); and

296-513: The history of economic thought . In continental Europe, the pertinent example of intellectual history is Begriffsgeschichte (History of Concepts, 2010), by Reinhart Koselleck . In Britain the history of political thought has been a particular focus since the late 1960s, and is especially associated with historians at Cambridge , such as John Dunn and Quentin Skinner , who studied European political thought in historical context, emphasizing

333-404: The history of philosophy and cultural history as practiced since the times of Voltaire (1694–1778) and Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897). The scholarly efforts of the eighteenth century can be traced to The Advancement of Learning (1605), Francis Bacon 's call for what he termed "a literary history". In economics, John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) was both a historian of economic thought, and

370-475: The social , cultural , and political milieu of or relating to the arts and manners that a group favors. Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) helped found cultural history as a discipline. Cultural history studies and interprets the record of human societies by denoting the various distinctive ways of living built up by a group of people under consideration. Cultural history involves the aggregate of past cultural activity, such as ceremony , class in practices, and

407-663: The 'revisionist' approach retains the idea of the French Revolution as a watershed in the history of (so-called) modernity and that the problematic notion of modernity has itself attracted scant attention. Cultural studies is an academic discipline popular among a diverse group of scholars. It combines political economy , geography , sociology , social theory , literary theory , film/video studies , cultural anthropology , philosophy , and art history / criticism to study cultural phenomena in various societies. Cultural studies researchers often concentrate on how

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444-670: The Atlantic Ocean, e.g. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (2001), by Louis Menand and The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–50 (1973), by Martin Jay . The historian Arthur O. Lovejoy (1873–1962) coined the phrase history of ideas and initiated its systematic study in the early decades of the 20th century. Johns Hopkins University

481-593: The French movements of histoire des mentalités (Philippe Poirrier, 2004) and the so-called new history, and in the U.S. it is closely associated with the field of American studies . As originally conceived and practiced in the 19th century by Burckhardt, in relation to the Italian Renaissance , cultural history was oriented to the study of a particular historical period in its entirety, with regard not only to its painting, sculpture, and architecture, but to

518-543: The History of Ideas, the praxis of Intellectual History studies and deals with ideas in broad historical contexts. That unlike historians of ideas and philosophers ( History of Philosophy ), intellectual historians, "tend to be more relaxed about crossing the boundary between philosophical texts and non-philosophical contexts . . . [Intellectual historians regard] the distinction between 'philosophy' and 'non-philosophy' as something that is, itself, historically conditioned, rather than eternally fixed." Therefore, intellectual history

555-502: The Lee Simpkins Family professorship of Arts and Sciences. His principal field of academic interest is 19th and 20th century American cultural history. He teaches literary theory and postwar cultural history at both the graduate and undergraduate level. At Harvard he helped co-found a freshman course with content in literature and philosophy, Humanities 10: An Introductory Humanities Colloquium. He also served as co-chair on

592-723: The West and in 2012 Andrew Marr's History of the World . Louis Menand Louis Menand ( / ˈ l uː i m ə ˈ n ɑː n d / ; born January 21, 1952) is an American critic, essayist, and professor who wrote the Pulitzer-winning book The Metaphysical Club (2001), an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th- and early 20th-century America. Menand was born in Syracuse , New York, and raised around Boston , Massachusetts. His mother, Catherine (Shults) Menand,

629-477: The anthology Global Intellectual History . In 2016, the Routledge journal Global Intellectual History (ed. Richard Whatmore ) was established. J. G. A. Pocock and John Dunn are among those who recently have argued for a more global approach to intellectual history in contrast to Eurocentrism . Kulturgeschichte Cultural history records and interprets past events involving human beings through

666-408: The basic idea from a work of philosophy and from a philosophical movement, with the investigative principles of the methodology being: (1) assumptions, (2) dialectical motives, (3) metaphysical pathos, and (4) philosophical semantics . The principles of methodology define the overarching philosophical movement in which the historian can find the unit-idea, which then is studied throughout the history of

703-425: The book , about the material aspects of book production (design, manufacture, distribution) developed from the history of ideas. The concerns of intellectual history are the intelligentsia and the critical study of the ideas expressed in the texts produced by intellectuals; therein the difference between intellectual history from other forms of cultural history that study visual and non-verbal forms of evidence. In

740-511: The development of the philosophy of pragmatism . It received the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for History , the 2002 Francis Parkman Prize , and The Heartland Prize for Non-Fiction. In 2002 Menand published American Studies , a collection of essays on prominent figures in American culture. He is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard. In 2018 he was appointed for a 5-year term to

777-511: The doctorate in History and Culture at Drew University is one of few graduate programs specializing in intellectual history, in the American and European contexts. Despite the pre-eminence of early modern intellectual historians (those studying the age from the Renaissance to the Age of Enlightenment ), the intellectual history of the modern period also has been very productive on both shores of

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814-1060: The economic basis underpinning society, and to the social institutions of its daily life. Echoes of Burkhardt's approach in the 20th century can be seen in Johan Huizinga 's The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919). Most often the focus is on phenomena shared by non-elite groups in a society, such as: carnival , festival , and public rituals ; performance traditions of tale , epic , and other verbal forms; cultural evolutions in human relations (ideas, sciences, arts, techniques); and cultural expressions of social movements such as nationalism . Cultural history also examines main historical concepts as power , ideology , class , culture , cultural identity , attitude , race , perception and new historical methods as narration of body. Many studies consider adaptations of traditional culture to mass media (television, radio, newspapers, magazines, posters, etc.), from print to film and, now, to

851-645: The emergence and development of concepts such as the State and Freedom . Skinner is known for provocative, methodological essays that give prominence to the practice of intellectual history. In the United States, intellectual history encompass different forms of intellectual production, not just the history of political ideas, and includes fields such as the history of historical thought, associated with Anthony Grafton (Princeton University) and J.G.A. Pocock (Johns Hopkins University). Formally established in 2010,

888-538: The historical actors of the period under study. The philosopher Andreas Dorschel said that Skinner's restrictive approach to ideas, through verbal language, and notes that ideas can materialize in non-linguistic media and genres, such as music and architecture. The historian Dag Herbjørnsrud said that "the Skinner perspective is in danger of shutting the door to comparative philosophy, and the search for common problems and solutions across borders and time." The historian Peter Gordon said that unlike Lovejoy's practise of

925-412: The history of ideas; though relatively stable in itself, the unit-idea combines with other unit-ideas into new patterns of meaning in the context of different historical eras. Lovejoy said that the historian of ideas is tasked with identifying unit-ideas and with describing their historical emergence and development into new conceptual forms and combinations. The methodology of the unit-idea means to extract

962-543: The idea of memory as a cultural-historical category, as discussed in Paul Connerton 's How Societies Remember . The area where new-style cultural history is often pointed to as being almost a paradigm is the " revisionist " history of the French Revolution , dated somewhere since François Furet 's massively influential 1978 essay Interpreting the French Revolution . The "revisionist interpretation"

999-504: The interaction with locales. It combines the approaches of anthropology and history to examine popular cultural traditions and cultural interpretations of historical experience. Many current cultural historians claim it to be a new approach, but cultural history was already referred to by nineteenth-century historians, notably the Swiss scholar of Renaissance history Jacob Burckhardt . Cultural history overlaps in its approaches with

1036-470: The interconnections among the facts, figures, and people of a specific period of history. Foucault said that historians should reveal historical descriptions through the use of different perspectives of the "archaeology of knowledge", whose historical method for writing history is in four ideas. First, the archaeology of knowledge defines the period of history through philosophy, by way of the discourses among thought , representation , and themes. Second, that

1073-467: The notion of discontinuity has an important role in the disciplines of history. Third, that discourse does not seek to grasp the moment in history, wherein the social and the persons under study are inverted into each other. Fourth, that Truth is not the purpose of history, but the discourse contained in history. In the 21st century, the field of global intellectual history has received increased attention. In 2013, Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori published

1110-536: The paradigmatic nature of the new history of the French Revolution. Colin Jones, for example, is no stranger to cultural history, Habermas , or Marxism, and has persistently argued that the Marxist interpretation is not dead, but can be revivified; after all, Habermas' logic was heavily indebted to a Marxist understanding. Meanwhile, Rebecca Spang has also recently argued that for all its emphasis on difference and newness,

1147-529: The particular idea. The British historian Quentin Skinner criticized Lovejoy's unit-idea methodology as a "reification of doctrines" that has negative consequences. That the historian of ideas must be sensitive to the cultural context of the texts and ideas under analysis. Skinner's historical method is based upon the theory of speech acts, proposed by J.L. Austin . In turn, scholars criticized Skinner's historical method because of his inclination to reify social structures and sociological constructs in place of

Intellectual history - Misplaced Pages Continue

1184-410: The production of knowledge, the concept of the intellectual as a political citizen of public society dates from the 19th century, and identifies a man or a woman who is professionally engaged with critical thinking that is applicable to improving society. Nonetheless, anyone who explored his or her thoughts on paper can be the subject of an intellectual history. Intellectual history developed from

1221-441: The role and position of cultural themes such as gender , ritual , and ideology in the context of pre-revolutionary French political culture. Historians who might be grouped under this umbrella are Roger Chartier , Robert Darnton , Patrice Higonnet , Lynn Hunt , Keith Baker, Joan Landes, Mona Ozouf, and Sarah Maza . Of course, these scholars all pursue fairly diverse interests, and perhaps too much emphasis has been placed on

1258-540: The subject of study by historians of economic thought, because of the significance of the Keynesian revolution . The contemporary understanding of intellectual history emerged in the immediate postwar period of the 1940s, in its earlier incarnation as "the history of ideas" under the leadership of Arthur Lovejoy , the founder of the Journal of the History of Ideas . Since that time, Lovejoy's formulation of "unit-ideas"

1295-617: Was a "fertile cradle" to Lovejoy's history of ideas; he worked there as a professor of history, from 1910 to 1939, and for decades he presided over the regular meetings of the History of Ideas Club . Another outgrowth of his work is the Journal of the History of Ideas . Aside from his students and colleagues engaged in related projects (such as René Wellek and Leo Spitzer , with whom Lovejoy engaged in extended debates), scholars such as Isaiah Berlin , Michel Foucault , Christopher Hill , J. G. A. Pocock , and others have continued to work in

1332-1213: Was a historian who wrote a biography of Samuel Adams . His father, Louis Menand III, taught political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . His grandfather and great-grandfather owned the Louis Menand House , located in Menands , New York, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985. The village of Menands is named after his great-grandfather, a 19th-century horticulturist. A 1973 graduate of Pomona College , Menand attended Harvard Law School for one year (1973–1974) before he left to earn Master of Arts (1975) and PhD (1980) degrees in English from Columbia University . He thereafter taught at Princeton University and held staff positions at The New York Review of Books (contributing editor 1994–2001) and The New Republic (associate editor 1986–1987). He has contributed to The New Yorker since 1991 and remains

1369-401: Was developed in different and divergent intellectual directions, such as contextualism, historically sensitive accounts of intellectual activity in the corresponding historical period, which investigative shift is reflected in the replacement of the term "history of ideas" with the term "intellectual history". Intellectual history is multidisciplinary and includes the history of philosophy and

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