Intellectual History: Why Is It Valuable?

Written by Tom Welsh

Intellectual history, also known as the history of ideas, has risen since the 1950s from marginal obscurity within the Anglophone historical profession to widespread acceptance: university teaching in the discipline has exploded, and increasing numbers of academics primarily identify as intellectual historians. This piece, however, concerns not this upsurge in popularity but a different question: what are some of the key benefits of an intellectual-historical approach to understanding ideas?

One central strength is intellectual history’s capacity to destroy prevalent myths surrounding canons, ideologies, and thinkers. Whilst it may be easy to uncritically assume that our intellectual traditions – be they ideologies or literary canons – have always existed in today’s form, intellectual history punctures that view. These traditions have histories themselves: texts are received, translated, and canonised long after they were originally written. These processes affect not only interpretation but also how prevalent ideas and thinkers were in different periods – frequently to surprising effect. Indeed, we hardly recognise many of the staple thinkers on Victorian syllabi for political thought, such as Bluntschli; and they thought Locke – a staple of the post-1945 canon – not worth studying. Similarly, the ideologies which structure our political discourse today were mostly products of the nineteenth century, ordinarily having emerged for particular political purposes: Burke, who had been a Whig and not a Tory MP, was only presented as a ‘conservative’ from the 1880s. Indeed, these myths are often so dominant in our own day that proof of their inaccuracy is initially difficult to accept: contrary to the received narrative, Bentham, for instance, was not the first to ground ethics in utility; many eighteenth-century thinkers, religious and secular, had done so before him. If the past really is a foreign place, we cannot assume that its ideas are identical to our own.

Intellectual history also takes seriously the fact that past thinkers were people, and hence that they had friends, occupations, and quirks which often shaped their thought. To be properly understood, thinkers must be taken on their own terms; we should avoid lumbering them with assumptions and ideas that belong to us and not them. There are two editions in the A Very Short Introduction series on Hume: the original by an analytic philosopher; the revision by an intellectual historian. The latter clarifies far more about the man, his life, and his thought, because it gives due attention to the works Hume actually spent most of his life writing, whilst avoiding presenting him as a forerunner to a twentieth-century movement – logical positivism – which he necessarily knew nothing about. For the philosophically-inclined, it is a profound problem that the history of philosophy – in the analytic tradition – tends to isolate and reify ideas, often to misleading effect. Biographical and historical information, such as who a thinker had conversed with or read or which major events were occurring at the time, is frequently vital to properly understand a text, and yet it is not ordinarily contained within it: repeated re-readings will not suffice. History enables better – that is, more accurate – philosophical understanding.

Equally, intellectual history is less condescending towards ideas which we may today deem unimportant or untrue: it simply does not follow from the fact that an idea is untenable today that it is of no interest. Intellectual history has often unfairly been accused of having elitist preoccupations, but it does not always focus on the likes of Aristotle or Hobbes, Boyle or Newton, Smith or Marx. There is more to intellectual history than the traditional histories of philosophy, of science, or of economic, political, or social thought; more to intellectual history, that is, than histories of our other disciplines. All people in all time periods have held ideas governing how they perceive their lives and the world around them: so long as documentary evidence exists, intellectual histories may be written of any set of ideas held by any set of people. The efflorescence of scholarship since the 1970s on early-modern magic and witchcraft, and the ideas sustaining belief in both, represents just one example of intellectual history’s engagement with aspects of past thought which would be ignored by philosophers and scientists alike. It may well be that these beliefs were mistaken, but intellectual history demonstrates that they were not solely sustained by ignorance; ideas from texts outlining theories of witchcraft permeated early-modern European societies. Contemporaries therefore held internally-coherent reasons to believe that magic and witches existed, however implausible this proposition may now seem to us in light of modern science. Ideas need not be true, nor do they need to have ancestral links to our own views, to possess rich intrinsic interest; and yet few scholars, except intellectual historians, have any reason to engage with those that do not.

Go Further:

Books:

Richard Whatmore, ‘What is Intellectual History?’

Articles:

Peter E. Gordon, ‘What is Intellectual History? A frankly partisan introductionto a frequently misunderstood field