Of Scandals and Supplements: Relating Intellectual and Cultural History

Abstract

This chapter traces thematic convergences and methodological divergences in significant works of intellectual and cultural history over the past three decades. Rather than imagining the fields as simply overlapping or as parts of a larger whole, this essay explores how their conjunction entails mutually posed questions about “culture” as a concept, methods of reading, the aims of contextualization, and the politics of ideas and social practices. It arrives at an understanding of this relationship between intellectual and cultural history as “supplementary” and hence as mutually critical. In so doing, it questions the autonomy and internal coherence of “intellectual history” even as it underscores the field’s ongoing critical and methodological significance in the discipline and beyond it.