Revitalizing Intellectual History in our Era of Global Studies

Abstract

Global Intellectual History, edited by Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori. New York, Columbia University Press, 2013. vi, 342 pp. $35.00 US (cloth). Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, edited by Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn. Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2014. xi, 305 pp. $99.00 US (cloth), $35.00 US (paper). Intellectual history has long been a distinctive sub-discipline that connects historical studies with other intellectual traditions and scholarly disciplines. In contrast to materialist philosophies and most national historical narratives, intellectual history stresses the complex influence of ideas in all human experiences and the transnational diffusion of all important knowledge, texts, and critical theories. These two valuable new books that Samuel Moyn has co-edited with Andrew Sartori and Darrin M. McMahon reaffirm the interdisciplinary, transnational traditions of intellectual history and convey the field's current expansion into global frameworks as well as its recent evolution beyond earlier cycles of intense self-reflection. Moyn, Sartori, and McMahon want intellectual historians to think critically about diverse approaches to the history of ideas and ideological conflicts, thereby sustaining lively debates among themselves and finding new methods to explain past or present cultures. Most intellectual historians now seem to view cultural historians as scholarly allies who have helped to push historical research toward more careful analysis of the ways in which ideas and languages are deeply entangled with all cultural practices and social actions. Intellectual historians tend to write about elite thinkers or high cultures, whereas the cultural historians focus more on the beliefs and symbolic practices of non-elite social groups. Yet the contextual methods of both intellectual and cultural history emphasize that ideas simultaneously shape and express social and cultural identities in every human society. Although they developed different methodological manifestos during the 1980s, intellectual and cultural historians share a common desire to understand the historical interactions between texts and contexts by drawing on theories or methods in neighbouring disciplines such as philosophy, literary studies, and cultural anthropology. This distinctive interest in the dialectical exchanges between texts and diverse social-cultural contexts remains a key thematic concern as historians examine ideas in wider global contexts and argue against both philosophical Idealism (which removes ideas from social practices) and contextual reductionism (which limits the meaning of ideas to a single context or social reality). Intellectual history had lost historiographical influence to the expanding social history of the 1970s when the rising generation of that era began to draw on new literary and anthropological theories to revitalize the historical study of ideas and cultures. A turn led intellectual historians toward new analysis of the conflicting philosophical presuppositions and literary tropes that shape human knowledge and narratives, while the cultural historians were developing new descriptions of the symbols and rituals that construct social coherence and collective cultural identities. Intellectual historians in the more recent generational cohort generally agree that the late twentieth-century literary and cultural methods greatly enhanced the history of ideas, but they are now questioning the linguistic preoccupation with internal textual tensions and the anthropological search for symbolic cultural unities. The twenty-eight well-argued essays in these two volumes often challenge the Eurocentric frameworks of traditional intellectual history and extend earlier critiques of the field's cultural elitism. Ideas migrate around the world as often as people and commodities, so intellectual historians are trying to explain why and how ideas (like migrating persons) change after they arrive in new places. …