Intellectual history

Intellectual history (also the history of ideas) is the study of the history of human thought and of intellectuals, people who conceptualize, discuss, write about, and concern themselves with ideas. The investigative premise of intellectual history is that ideas do not develop in isolation from the thinkers who conceptualize and apply those ideas; thus the intellectual historian studies ideas in two contexts: (i) as abstract propositions for critical application; and (ii) in concrete terms of culture, life, and history.

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 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 the production of knowledge, the concept of the intellectual as a political citizen of public society dates back to the 19th century, referring to someone who is professionally engaged with critical thinking; if their work is of notable relevance to the general public or aims to improve society, such a person is sometimes called a public intellectual. Nonetheless, anyone who explored his or her thoughts on paper can be the subject of an intellectual history.

Intellectual history developed from 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 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" 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 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 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, 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 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 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.