The history of ideas: Precept and practice, 1950-2000 and beyond

Journal of the History of Ideas

Volumn 67, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 1-32

  Grafton, Anthony ^a  

^a PRINCETON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 31644437941     PISSN: 00225037     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jhi.2006.0006     Document Type: Review

References (132)

1. Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy (New York: Knopf, 1954), 1. In what follows, citations are only exemplary: to be exhaustive would be impossible.
2. Cf. the autobiographical account of Henry May, Coming to Terms: A Study in Memory and History (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1987), 307: "When I came to Berkeley [in 1950] intellectual history was a satisfyingly radical cause. The wise old men of the historical profession, at Berkeley and elsewhere, tended to dismiss it as impossibly vague and subjective. During the fifties, however, the vogue changed, and my kind of history became, for a short and heady few years, the rising fashion. To my surprise and slight discomfort, during my first decade at Berkeley I found myself, in writing, teaching, and university affairs, increasingly a part of the winning side."
3. In those halcyon days George Boas could publish his The History of Ideas: An Introduction (New York: Scribner, 1969), with Scribner's, a trade press. Remarkably, a spectacularly self-aware academic comedy with a serious purpose,
4. Robert Merton's On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript (New York: Scribner, 1965), was dedicated to the field. This book first appeared with a foreword by the best-selling historian Catherine Drinker Bowen. It was reprinted in 1985 with an afterword by Denis Donoghue, and again in 1993 with a foreword by Umberto Eco and a preface and postface by the author.
5. Robert Darnton, "Intellectual and Cultural History," The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States, ed. Michael Kammen (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980), 327-28.
6. Darnton had in mind work like that of Frank Manuel, whose Newtonian scholarship moved in the 1960s from a style of biography based on textual analysis-a form of scholarship to be discussed below-to one that applied a more controversial psychoanalytic approach: cf. Isaac Newton, Historian (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963)
7. with A Portrait of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968; repr. Washington, D.C., 1979).
8. In later studies like The Changing of the Gods (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1983)
9. and The Broken Staff: Judaism Through Christian Eyes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992),
10. Manuel returned to the history of ideas in a more traditional vein, as he did in his study of The Religion of Isaac Newton (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1974).
11. The Religion of Isaac Newton Ibid., 338-39.
12. The Religion of Isaac Newton Ibid., 346.
13. Peter Burke, 'What is Cultural History? (Oxford: Polity, 2004), chaps. 3-4.
14. Arnaldo Momigliano, "A Piedmontese View of the History of Ideas," Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 6.
15. Daniel J. Wilson, Arthur O. Lovejoy and the Quest for Intelligibility (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), chap. 5.
16. Arthur Lovejoy, "On the Discrimination of Romanticisms," Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 39 (1924): 229-53,
17. reprinted in his Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1948), 228-53. Here Lovejoy makes clear how attention to what he saw as "simpler, diversely combinable, intellectual and emotional components" (253) of a sweeping term for a period style in thought and art like Romanticism could lead to great gains in conceptual clarity.
18. Arthur Lovejoy, "The Historiography of Ideas," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 78 (1928), reprinted in his Essays, 1-13.
19. Wilson, 187-89.
20. Leo Spitzer, "Geistesgeschichte vs. History of Ideas as Applied to Hitlerism," JHI 5 (1944): 191-203 at 203.
21. Arthur Lovejoy, "Reply to Professor Spitzer," JHI ibid., 204-19.
22. Rosalie Colie, " 'Method' and the History of Scientific Ideas," History of Ideas News Letter 4 (1958): 75-79;
23. Crane Brinton, Harcourt Brown, Francis Johnson, F.E.L. Priestley, Victor Harris, and David Hawkins, " ' "Method and the History of Scientific Ideas': Comment and Discussion," History of Ideas News Letter ibid., 5 (1959): 27-36;
24. "The Editor's Column: Miss Colie Replies," History of Ideas News Letter ibid., 5 (1959): 50, 67-68.
25. Gilbert Allardyce, "The Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course," American Historical Review 87 (1982): 695-725.
26. For some very different cases in point, see the comments of Carl Schorske in Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 20;
27. Richard McCormick in Michael Birkner, McCormick of Rutgers: Scholar, Teacher, Public Historian (Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 2001), 47;
28. and William McNeil in "The Pursuit of Truth: A Historian's Memoir (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 2005).
29. Donald R. Kelley, The Descent of Ideas: The History of Intellectual History (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).
30. th Century Germany," Teaching New Histories of Philosophy, ed. J.B. Schneewind (Princeton: Center for Human Values, Princeton University, 2004), 275-95.
31. Momigliano, 1.
32. J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into its Origin and Growth (New York: Macmillan, 1932).
33. See esp. Hans Baron's studies, collected in In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism: Essays on the Transition from Medieval to Modern Thought, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988),
34. and cf. Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflection, ed. James Hankins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
35. See for part of this story William McGuire, Bollingen: An Adventure in Collecting the Past (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982).
36. Harper Torchbooks provided inexpensive editions of Lovejoy's Great Chain of Being and vital works on the history of ideas by Cassirer, Curtius, Garin, Rossi, and others. Beacon did the same for the works of Perry Miller.
37. See esp. Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1939);
38. Samuel Eliot Morison, The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935);
39. Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936);
40. The Puritan Pronaos: Studies in the Intellectual Life of New England in the Seventeenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1936).
41. The great work that Miller and Morison inspired was of course Walter Ong, SJ, Ramus, Method and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958).
42. On Miller's practice see David Hollinger, "Perry Miller and Philosophical History," In the American Province: Essays in the History and Historiography of Ideas (Bloomington, Ind., 1985), 152-66.
43. See Norman Fiering, Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1981).
44. Cf. Wilson.
45. Cf. the discussion in Schorske, Thinking with History, 228.
46. For a useful contemporary account of the transformation of academic philosophy in Britain and its impact on America, see Ved Mehta, Fly and the Fly-Bottle (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962).
47. The fullest account is now Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003).
48. Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860-1930 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977).
49. See esp. the pioneering works of David Hollinger, Morris R. Cohen and the Scientific Ideal (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1975)
50. and John Toews, Hegelianism: The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980),
51. and the Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles Schmitt, Eckhart Kessler, and Quentin Skinner, with Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
52. See e.g. John Monfasani, George of Trebizond: A Biography and a Study of his Rhetoric and Logic (Leiden: Brill, 1976);
53. James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1990);
54. Christopher Celenza, The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin's Legacy (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).
55. See e.g. Geoffrey Lloyd, Magic, Reason and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979);
56. Science, Folklore, and Ideology: Studies in the Life Sciences in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983);
57. The Revolutions of Wisdom: Studies in the Claims and Practice of Ancient Greek Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
58. See the studies collected in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy: from the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Disintegration of Scholasticism, ed. Norman Kretzmann, A.J.P. Kenny, Jan Pinborg, with Eleonore Stump (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
59. See e.g. Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986);
60. Michael Frede, Essays in Ancient Philosophy (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1987);
61. John Cooper, Reason and Emotion: Essays on Ancient Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999);
62. The Cambridge History of Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Daniel Garber, Michael Ayers, with the assistance of Roger Ariew and Alan Gabbey, 2 vols.(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
63. See the essays collected in Teaching New Histories of Philosophy.
64. George Huppert, "Divinatio et Eruditio: Thoughts on Foucault," History and Theory 13 (1974): 191-207;
65. Ian Maclean, "Foucault's Renaissance Episteme Reassessed: An Aristotelian Counterblast," JHI 59 (1998): 149-66.
66. For a particularly lucid effort to clarify relations between Foucault's work and more conventional intellectual histories see David Hollinger, "Historians and the Discourse of Intellectuals," In the American Province, 130-51.
67. Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987; repr. with a new afterword, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001);
68. Stuart Clark, Thinking With Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
69. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988);
70. Caroline Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991);
71. Bynum. The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995);
72. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990);
73. Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York: Zone Books, 2003);
74. as well as Maud Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995);
75. Bernadette Brooten, Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996);
76. Elizabeth Clark, Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), and many more.
77. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
78. Cf. now Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition Through Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)
79. and Eve Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain and the Mastery of the Sudan (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2003).
80. Cf. also François Hartog's Le miroir d'Hérodote (Paris: Gallimard, 1980).
81. For some striking cases in point see Gadi Algazi, "Food for Thought: Hieronymus Wolf grapples with the Scholarly Habitus," Egodocuments in History: Autobiographical Writing in its Social Context since the Middle Ages, ed. Rudolf Dekker (Hilversum: Verloren, 2002), 21-44;
82. "Scholars In Households: Refiguring The Learned Habitus, 1480-1550," Science in Context 16 (2003): 9-42.
83. Cf. e.g. Ann Blair, The Theater of Nature; Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997),
84. and Caroline Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910 (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
85. William Bouwsma, "From History of Ideas to History of Meaning," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 12 (1981): 279-91,
86. reprinted in Bouwsma, A Usable Past: Essays in European Cultural History (Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford: University of California Press, 1990), 336-47.
87. See e.g. Josef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982)
88. and Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).
89. J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975; repr. with a new afterword, Princeton 2003).
90. See also Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
91. See e.g. Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
92. Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origin of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982);
93. The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987);
94. Laurence Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics and the Politics of Spirit, 1770-1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
95. See most recently Eric Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
96. The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences, ed. Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
97. See Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics, ed. James Tully (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).
98. Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).
99. See the pioneering article by Richard Goldthwaite, "The Florentine Palace as Domestic Architecture," American Historical Review 77 (1972): 977-1012,
100. and Carl Schorske's influential Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1979).
101. See e.g. The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed. Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985; repr. London, 2001);
102. Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1994);
103. Suzanne Marchand, Down From Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996);
104. Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
105. See the pioneering work of Steven Shapin and Simon Shaffer, Leviathan and the AirPump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985);
106. Peter Dear, Discipline & Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995);
107. and the studies collected in Biographies of Scientific Objects, ed. Lorraine Daston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000),
108. and Things that Talk: Object Lessons from An and Science, ed. Lorraine Daston (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004).
109. See e.g. James Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993);
110. J.M. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
111. Daniel Sherman, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
112. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, tr. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980);
113. see now Andrea Del Col, Domenico Scandella Known as Menocchio: His Trials Before the Inquisition (1583-1599), tr. John and Anne Tedeschi (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1996).
114. See e.g. three recent and influential approaches to the European Republic of Letters in the decades leading up to and just after 1700: Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680-1750 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995);
115. Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001);
116. Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002).
117. See the provocative presentation by Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000),
118. and more generally H.J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001).
119. See the important works of Daniel Woolf, Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
120. and The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture, 1500-1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003);
121. and for more recent periods Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1996)
122. and Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001).
123. See e.g. Shane Butler, The Hand of Cicero (New York: Routledge, 2002);
124. Lawrence Rainey, The Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998).
125. See e.g. Marcia Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400-1400 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997);
126. William Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance, ca. 1550-1640 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000);
127. John Burrow, The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848-1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000);
128. and see above all the New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Maryanne Cline Horowitz, 6 vols. (New York: Scribner's, 2005).
129. Cf. Theory's Empire: an Anthology of Dissent, ed. Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
130. E.g. Andrzej Walicki, Philosophy and Romantic Nationalism: The Case of Poland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982),
131. and Leszek Kolakowski, Chrétiens sans église: la conscience religeuse et le lien confessionnel au XVlle siècle, tr. Anna Posner (Paris, 1969).
132. Warm thanks to Warren Breckman and Suzanne Marchand for comments on earlier drafts.