Problems and Prospects for Intellectual History

Abstract

It seems rather paradoxical that an historian of classical scholarship should be expected to make a concluding contribution to the panel on future of cultural history. I am probably particularly unsuited to the task of historiographical prophecy as I stubbornly believe that theory should not be divorced from the content to which it is applied. And, as a newly enfranchised citizen of the scholarly polis, I cannot but take the auspices with the eyes of the neophyte. But perhaps'these very constraints on my powers of discernment will allow me to illuminate some issues particularly relevant to my generation and station. By outlining some general problems I have faced and then describing my attempts to solve them, I hope to open some discussion on the shape and scope of the field of intellectual history in the years to come. I would like to begin with a confession. Unlike many intellectual historians, I do not find the deconstructionist/neo-materialist debate on the external referentiality of texts particularly useful or interesting. We have profited from the deconstructionists' constant reminders that texts are not transparent reflections of the author's intention; but, as Hegel recognized, radical skepticism has its own ontological presuppositions, one of which is the complete dissociation of writers' lives from their texts. Establishing the process by which ideas become active forces, and conversely, by which events or structural factors effect changes in thought, has ever been the intellectual historian's nightmare, one from which I'm afraid we shall never fully awaken. But to take a Kantian turn (after the second critique), we know from self-observation that the world, whether in reality or in our representations of it, does impinge on us and we on it. To deny that it does so is as much a willful suspension of common