Needs and Opportunities in American Social and Intellectual History

Abstract

UNDER THE obligations of short time and brief space, we may risk beginning with a paradox. I believe that one major need, and an equal opportunity for American historiography, is for some practitioners in social and intellectual history to disregard much concern with that field as a field. For some, not changing their more central interests one bit, there will be more profitable concerns to undertake. For present purposes we may think of American social and intellectual history as though the field were double, its two parts contiguous and continuous, and in many places connected by paths of scholarly crosscutting. Such an assumption is sufficiently justified by teaching and writing habits within the guild during the last couple of decades. Doubtless it is a philosophically sound assumption, too: without a broad history of society, there is little meaning in the history of ideas, and vice versa. The assumption becomes unphilosophical only when a twist is added, as does occur, by workers both inside the field and out. The unhappy twist is the thought that there is something exclusive about the connection between social and intellectual history, that there is no like continuity between these two and other fields of history. Fortunately workers in intellectual history and political history are rapidly taking notice of the connections between their fields, much more plainly than the case once was.