The History of Ideas in America: An Essay in Redefinition

Abstract

EVEN the most cursory examination of recent historical writing will reveal that intellectual history has become a full-fledged branch of American scholarship. Students of American life and institutions have taken its virtues for granted, much as earlier scholars took for granted the virtues of diplomatic, political, and social history, and they have explored both the main currents of American thought and a number of the particular ideas or intellectual configurations which have characterized that thought. Their undertaking has also acquired a rudimentary critical apparatus. Thanks to such writers as John Higham and Roy H. Pearce, R. W. B. Lewis and John W. Ward, scholars have begun to acknowledge the assumptions that underlie any attempt to examine American ideas in their historic setting. Nor have they stopped with making their methodological assumptions more explicit. Recognizing that a discipline is defined at least as much by the questions it does not seek to answer as by those it does, they have also begun to consider what the historical examination of ideas cannot accomplish. In short, American intellectual history flourishes both as a scholarly commitment and as a self-conscious scholarly enterprise, and we need no longer either justify its existence or apologize for its naivete. Nevertheless, the discipline confronts an almost intolerable intellectual dilemma, which its practitioners have been unable to resolve satisfactorily. That dilemma originates in a distinction between internal and external approaches to ideas: between the historical examination of ideas as ideas apart from questions of their social origin or their social influence, and the pursuit of ideas in their relationships to events. Pursuing internal intellectual history, scholars have also tended to lay primary emphasis on major philosophical concepts, on literary and philosophical techniques of analysis, on the study of ideas for their own sake. Pursuing external intellec-