Riccardo Bavaj: Intellectual History

Intellectual History
by Riccardo Bavaj
There is no single answer to the question: What is intellectual history?1 Commenting in the mid-1980s on two recent volumes dedicated to the sub-discipline\'s methods and perspectives,2 John Pocock wryly remarked: \"I recommend reading them, but after doing so myself, I am persuaded that whatever \'intellectual history\' is, and whatever \'the history of ideas\' may be, I am not engaged in doing either of them.\"3 In the United States, in many respects the heartland of intellectual history, the scholarly community has grappled with the ambiguous relationship of \"intellectual history\" to \"the history
of ideas\" for almost a century. The term \"intellectual history\", coined by James Harvey Robinson at the beginning of the twentieth century, was adopted by a variety of scholars who, mostly focussed on a well-defined period of time, either favoured a functionalist conception of ideas as epiphenomenal or preferred a more autonomous yet still contextualist understanding of historical thought.4 Arthur O. Lovejoy, who cofounded the History of Ideas Club in 1923, advanced the alternative approach, setting out to trace the meanings of essentially unchanging, molecule-like \"unit-ideas\" from ancient to modern times without any sustained contextualization.5
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