Rethinking History 5:3 (2001), pp.

383–395

· ARTICLES·

Intellectual History vs. the Social History of

Intellectuals

Daniel Wickberg
University of Texas at Dallas, USA

With the prominence of the ‘new cultural history’ in the last 15 years, much
of what had once been called intellectual history has passed into the sphere
of cultural history; intellectual historians now do silent battle with the old
‘new social history’ establishment for proprietary claim to the methods, sub-
stance and insights of cultural history, and job and course descriptions join
intellectual and cultural history as frequently as they do social and cultural
history. If cultural history today stands as the great middle ground, where
intellectual and social historians can meet, and if not agree, then at least dis-
guise their differences under a common rubric, it is equally true that the lack
of distinct boundaries between intellectual, cultural and social histories has
led to a serious erosion of the distinctive approach to the past that intellec-
tual history offers. Intellectual history, once generally recognized as a distinct
and autonomous sphere of practice, has in the past thirty years lost its dis-
tinctiveness in becoming part of the mainstream of general historical practice
(Bouwsma 1980; Bender 1997). The blurring of genres characteristic of recent
academic thought has made some methods and approaches associated with
intellectual history broadly inuential under the rubric of ‘culture.’ As with
any success, however, there has been a price to pay. Others have been con-
cerned with the erosion of the distinctive features of social history – and par-
ticularly its materialist version – as culture and language have come to
dominate historians’ attention (Palmer 1990). That is not my concern here.
Rather, I am troubled by what has been happening to intellectual history.
Intellectual history, as it is practised today, covers a broad spectrum of
approaches to the past: discourse studies in the wake of the ‘linguistic turn’,
close textual analysis, intellectual biography, history of books and reading,
institutional histories of science and academic disciplines, the history of some-
thing called ‘intellectual life’, histories of ideologies and of political thought
and language, to name but a few. Still, within this diversity can be found two
broad schools of historical practice. What we are talking about when we talk
about ‘intellectual history’ is either the history of thought, its manifestations
and instantiations on the one hand, or the social history of intellectuals on
the other. The former is what I would properly designate as intellectual

Rethinking History ISSN 1364-2529 print/ISSN 1470-1154 online © 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/13642520110078505
384 Daniel Wickberg

history; the latter is a subspecies of social history and, as such, possesses both
the advantages and limitations of social history. This division is often more a
matter of emphasis than of absolute distinction – most works of intellectual
history fall more or less on one side of the divide. Nevertheless, the distinc-
tion is a real one. Under the history of thought, we might include those works
that focus on the history of ideas, language, texts, ideology, meaning and
cultural representation. Under the social history of intellectuals, we Žnd in-
tellectual biography, histories of institutions (universities, salons, reading
groups, professional organizations), publishing, authorship and reading –
what is summed up as the history of intellectual life. On the one side, the
history of texts, on the other, the history of books. On the one side ideology
understood, in Geertz’s terms, as a ‘cultural system’, on the other, ideology
understood as an expression of the social interests of speciŽc persons and
classes. Whereas the historian of thought is interested in written texts for the
patterns of meaning they reveal, the social historian is interested in them as
registers of experience. Where the historian of thought looks at texts, ideas,
cultural representations in relationship to other texts, ideas and cultural rep-
resentations, the social historian of intellectuals looks at them in relationship
to social institutions, concrete experiences and immediate ‘contexts’. One is
concerned with ideas, the other with persons.
This distinction often goes unrecognized, largely because it has been over-
shadowed by other historiographical issues. Much of the recent discussion of
intellectual history as a practice has focused on post-structuralism, post-
modernism and the linguistic turn, and certainly history written within the
framework of these intellectual outlooks initially appears to fall entirely on
the side of what I am calling the history of thought. The capacity of language
to construct reality, rather than reect it, the death of the author and the inde-
terminacy of meaning all undermine the notion of an anterior social reality
or ‘context’ into which ideas must be placed. To the extent to which post-
structuralist concerns are taken seriously rather than being grafted onto a set
of unquestioned social categories as they frequently are, they directly chal-
lenge what I am calling the social history of intellectuals. However, post-
modernist history is more talked about than practised. In fact, the practice of
postmodern history in its extreme form seems largely to be a critical practice
of talking about the genre of history, rather than about the object – the past
– on which historians have traditionally lavished their attention (Berkhofer
1995; Harlan 1997). With noted prominent exceptions, most historians,
including intellectual historians, have not taken the linguistic turn, or taken
it only partially (a kind of linguistic ‘swerve’ perhaps). Despite the fact that
post-structuralism is at the centre of much historiographical debate, it hardly
represents the central practice of intellectual historians. Those who do
embrace post-structuralism surprisingly Žnd that they share an orientation
 Intellectual History vs. Social History of Intellectuals 385

with some more traditional intellectual historians in their opposition to social

or material explanations for the phenomena they study. The intellectual
history/social history of intellectuals distinction does not follow the old intel-
lectual history/new intellectual history division, but is obscured by it.
I want to suggest that postmodernist history and what we might call high
modernist history of thought – represented by, say, Foucault’s discursive
approach on the one hand, and the history of ideas approach associated with
Lovejoy and the Johns Hopkins History of Ideas Club in the 1920s and 1930s
on the other – are not so much at odds as some have suggested (Poster 1982).
The real problem for intellectual historiography of the past quarter century
has been the ambiguity of the term ‘intellectual’ – pointing on the one hand
to a distinctive social class charged with the business of thinking (what Lasch
(1965) called ‘the intellectual as a social type’), and on the other to a class of
phenomena – products of mind, the content of thought, ideational ‘stuff’ –
that is not tied to any speciŽc class of persons. What I would like to do here
is to sketch the sources of the conict between these two understandings of
intellectual history, suggest the ways in which intellectual and social history
differ from one another, and give some indication of what intellectual history
can and should and has learned from social history, and where it has gone
wrong in its attempts to accommodate social history perspectives.
The emergence of the social history of intellectuals was a product of the
quite self-conscious crisis of intellectual history of the 1970s. Intellectual
history had represented the avant-garde, the cutting edge of the profession in
American history of the 1940s and 1950s. The centrality of ‘mind’ and
‘thought’ to what was regarded as the most advanced work of historical
scholarship – as opposed to the rather pedestrian political history of ‘inter-
ests’ and ‘institutions’ – was characteristic of the mid-century high water
mark of intellectual history. In the 1960s, intellectual history’s status and
prominence in the Želd came under attack from two directions. On the one
hand, the notion of an American or modern ‘mind’ was associated with what
John Higham called the ‘consensus school’ of American history. Driven by
the emerging political conicts of the 1960s, a critique of the notion of a
single monolithic American ‘culture’ or ‘mind’ became the vehicle for estab-
lishing a new mode of historical writing based on social and political (if not
intellectual) conict (Higham 1970). At the same time the new social history
of the 1960s and 1970s aimed to show that not only was conict central to
history, but that the reality of history lay in the social and economic experi-
ence of ordinary, rather than elite, groups. Jesse Lemisch’s injunction to write
history ‘from the bottom up’ often carried with it another agenda – to write
history from the neck down (Lemisch 1968). Ideas and thought, in this formu-
lation, were not the reality of the groups previously excluded from historical
study – the farmers and peasants, the artisans and working classes, the poor,
386 Daniel Wickberg

blacks, women. The notion that guided much of the early new social history
of the 1960s and 1970s was that social reality was fundamentally material
and behavioural in nature, that ideas didn’t really count for anything – other
than concealing or revealing some underlying ‘real’ interest. The new social
history sought to study the reality of ordinary people, which it classiŽed as
distinctly non-intellectual. Heavily inuenced by the Annales school, its
watchwords were demography, geography and economy, rather than mind,
psychology and culture. In fact, much of the social history of that era rep-
resented an uneasy accommodation between a new left political agenda –
which aimed to ‘humanize’ the previously ‘inarticulate’ – on the one hand,
and a commitment to using the methods of positivistic social science, includ-
ing quantiŽcation, statistical analysis, and behavioural modelling. The rigors
of ‘hard science’ – with its behaviourist, materialist and positivist outlook –
essentially drove a stake into the heart of intellectual history. Intellectual
history was denounced for being both unrepresentative and irrelevant, and
the baton of the cutting edge in historical scholarship was passed to the
students of social mobility, community structure and working-class life, and
from them to the cliometricians.
By the mid-1970s, intellectual history faced a crisis. Either intellectual his-
torians could continue doing what they had always done and as a conse-
quence become increasingly irrelevant, or they could adapt to the hegemony
of social history within the profession and assume a much diminished rank,
but one still relevant to the larger concerns of the profession. Many of them
chose the latter course. Some of the most inuential intellectual historians of
the past quarter century developed a programme for making intellectual
history workable on a much reduced basis, but one that was acceptable by
the prevailing dogmas of social history. Thought was saved as an object of
historical analysis by making it subordinate to the social context – the uni-
versity, the professional organization, the network of scientists, publishers or
readers, the ecclesiastical synod – in which it was held to take place. The result
was to turn intellectual history into a form of social history. As Lawrence
Veysey said, in his attempt to defend intellectual history ‘on a proper, if some-
what reduced, basis’, ‘The history of men and women, I would argue, is social
history before it is anything else’. What Veysey called ‘the social aggregate’
had, then, a kind of analytical priority. All history, according to Veysey, could
be reduced to the proposition: ‘I’ve got a causal explanation for change or
failure to change in a social aggregate!’ (Veysey 1979: 24, 8, 10). The social
aggregate – whether theologians, university professors, art critics or ‘politi-
cal intellectuals’ – was the true object of historical study.
The initial impetus for writing intellectual history as a form of social
history came from those who studied the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, the period in which the modern intellectual as a social type was
 Intellectual History vs. Social History of Intellectuals 387

born. Socially conscious of their own roles as intellectuals within universities,

especially after the social upheaval on campuses in the 1960s, these historians
sought a usable past, a way to understand themselves and their own social
role. They found it in both the growth of the university and professional
forms of intellectual inquiry, on the one hand, and in the development of
radical and bohemian ‘oppositional’ intellectuals on the other. They then uni-
versalized the professional organization, the intellectual and the university to
all periods of history, as the generic model of what intellectual history ought
to study. In terms of the practice of historians, the social history of intellec-
tuals became the silent but governing form in an age of much ballyhooed post-
modernism.
Up until now, I have been describing a shift in the understanding of intel-
lectual history, and, as is apparent, I do not care much for it. I have not really
said why yet, so let me try to do so in a general way. If intellectual history is
understood as a form of social history, if history is primarily social history,
and secondarily everything else, then thought is imagined as a function or
instrument of an anterior reality. There is a rather old tradition of casually
referring to ideas as opposed to social ‘reality’; implicit in this notion is that
ideas are not real, or at least not in the same way as society is. One need not
accept an idealist metaphysics to be somewhat sceptical of the notion that
society and social relations have a kind of primary existence prior to the con-
ceptual world that on any reasonable account makes social relations possible.
What ends up happening with a position that gives priority to social history
is that ideas come to be seen as tools, weapons, instruments to achieve goals
that are deŽned by interests or social position that exist in some pre-concep-
tual or pre-intellectual way. Let me clarify this by showing how precisely
social history differs from the history of thought.
Two of the key animating concepts that deŽned social history perspectives
in the 1970s and 1980s when the new social history was at its high water
mark, were the notions of ‘agency’ and ‘experience’. These, in fact, were the
very things that social history sought to recuperate. In the rhetoric of social
history, history had been written ‘from the top down’ – it had stressed only
the agency of elites and had pictured workers, blacks, women and others as
victims caught up in the changes initiated by others. One of the missions of
social history was to restore agency to previously excluded groups. Social
history created a choice of polar opposites as models of personhood: people
were either ‘passive victims’ (which was the wrong way to regard them) or
‘active agents’ (which was the correct way). Agency was never deŽned in
explicit terms, but it functioned in social history rhetoric as a kind of Žrst
cause on the one hand, explaining social action, and as a moral imperative
on the other (Lasch-Quinn 1997). The notion was that the social historian
was rescuing past peoples from, in E. P. Thompson’s famous words, ‘the
388 Daniel Wickberg

enormous condescension of posterity’ by restoring to them their moral status

as authors of their own actions (Thompson 1964: 12).
Since the 1980s, the driving energy behind the new social history has dis-
sipated, largely because of the success of the enterprise. The oppositional
rhetoric of social history can occasionally still be heard, but the critique of
elitism and the failure to understand the experience of ‘ordinary people’
sounds hollow coming from middle-aged tenured professors at Princeton and
Yale. Sometimes social historians Žnd themselves making common cause in
rearguard actions with ‘traditional’ historians (Himmelfarb 1989; Appleby et
al. 1994; Windschuttle 1996; Fox-Genovese and Lasch-Quinn 1999) against
the new barbarians at the gate – the deconstructionists, textualists and Fou-
cauldian poststructuralists. Often they have become cultural historians,
following Gutman’s appropriated notion that society is to be understood as
an ‘arena’ and culture as a ‘resource’ (Gutman 1977: 16–17). The newer
breed of socio-cultural historians concern themselves with ‘socially con-
structed’ categories such as ‘whiteness’ or ‘gender’ while at the same time
maintaining a commitment to the priority of material reality and an unprob-
lematic sphere of social experience. ‘Race’ or ‘gender’ is socially constructed,
for instance, but against a backdrop where everything else is a given social
‘reality’ (Roediger 1991; Brown 1996; Gilmore 1996; Hale 1998). The whole
point of social constructionism, it frequently seems, is to show how categories
are not natural but ‘produced’ by the agency of social actors (Hacking 1999).
In other words, as much as social history has moved beyond some of its earlier
and cruder materialist positions, and has engaged both language and culture,
it retains the key notion of social agency as its driving force.
Where the social historian is concerned with recuperating agency, the his-
torian of thought is concerned with recuperating meaning, and it seems to me
that these two goals are frequently at odds with one another. The concept of
agency implies, as I have suggested, that people should be understood as the
authors of their own actions, even if, in Marx’s much-quoted dictum, not
‘under circumstances chosen by themselves.’ (Palmer 1990: 54–5) It indicates
a faith in the universal ability to see interests and to act in accordance with
those interests, and those interests are to be deŽned in objective terms –
persons, from this point of view, seek autonomy and power; they seek to be
self-governing. Thought and meaning cannot structure and precede motives,
but must be subordinate to them. The whole notion that cultural meaning is
‘contested’ or ‘negotiated’ that we frequently hear as cultural studies
approaches become more common among historians is based on the idea that
interests and goals can be deŽned prior to thought, and that thought is a
means to achieve those goals or express those interests. If the historian of
thought looks to situate the meaning of ideas or texts in relationship to
broader intellectual contexts – other ideas and texts – the idea of agency
 Intellectual History vs. Social History of Intellectuals 389

insists that the meaning is not to be found in those other ideas and texts, but
in the needs of those ideas fulŽlled for those who held them. Meaning, from
the social history standpoint, must be instrumental.
David Hollinger, one of the most prominent spokespersons for what I am
calling the social history of intellectuals, provides a good example of the
reconceptualization of meaning as instrumental in the wake of the social his-
torical critique of intellectual history. In his 1979 essay, ‘Historians and the
Discourse of Intellectuals’, he laid out an agenda for intellectual history that
has had broad inuence in the Želd. Hollinger’s essay is at some pains to sep-
arate his conception of ‘discourse’ from that associated with Foucault, and it
is precisely because of the issue of agency. According to Hollinger, Foucault

altogether eschews reference to ‘questions.’ These imply a measure of agency

and coherence on the part of participants in discourse that is not implied by the
mere existence of objective rules according to which utterances . . . are con-
structed. . . . In his effort to drain effective volition from artifacts of intellect,
particularly texts and oeuvre, Foucault attributes to discourse itself a vivid pos-
itivity, a truly primal existence in contrast to the almost phantasmic being
allowed to books, careers, genres, traditions, and other presences commonly felt
to be concretely visible in discourse.

Similarly, Hollinger is hostile to Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being, and the

entire history of ideas approach it represents, (which he refers to as ‘thin
description’), because Lovejoy ‘frankly eschews the desire to understand ideas
as they variously function.’ (Hollinger 1979: 59, 48) To understand ideas in
terms of agency is, in Hollinger’s view, to understand how ideas function, how
they serve interests, how they are instruments to achieve ends deŽned prior
to and outside of them. Neither Lovejoy nor Foucault is interested in the uses
ideas perform for those who hold them. By removing agency from analytical
consideration, according to Hollinger, Foucault and Lovejoy have made
‘phantasm’ into ‘reality’ and ‘reality’ into ‘phantasm’. Reality, to the his-
torians of intellectuals, is a world of social networks, books, careers and indi-
viduals’ own self-undertandings – a world of ‘common sense’. ‘Phantasm’ is
a world of ideas, undirected thinking, free-oating concepts. The inuence of
Kuhnian sociology of science and the revival of pragmatism among intellec-
tual historians should be unmistakable.
What is wrong with this notion of meaning as instrument, idea as tool? If
one is interested in certain kinds of narrow questions in which persons desig-
nated ‘intellectuals’ explicitly disagree and argue with one another, probably
nothing. Such a conception may tell us more about historians who favour it,
however, than it does about those whom they study. It certainly is agreeable
to historians who wish to imagine that they are in complete control of their
own thinking, who see themselves as intellectuals and the thinkers of the past
390 Daniel Wickberg

in their own image. Those of us who think that one of the ‘lessons’ history
teaches is the limits and partiality of our own consciousness and the determi-
nation of our minds by forces beyond our control, may be inclined to differ.
If one is interested in what makes past intellectual agreements and disagree-
ments possible, there is everything wrong with such an approach. Agency,
after all, is an idea as well, with its own history, as are the conceptions of
personhood that underlie it. To assume that agency and personhood are non-
intellectual qualities that help us to understand intellectual ones is to deliber-
ately put a whole sector of phenomena in a category of non-historical, as well
as to embrace a traditional material/intellectual dualism. What both Foucault
and Lovejoy ask us to do is to look beyond surface agreements and dis-
agreements to the common assumptions that structure the possibility of
agreement and disagreement; they ask us to abandon the analytical distinc-
tion between human nature and history by insisting on the historicity of con-
ceptions of nature and the human.
The second key concept that anchored much social history in its prime was
the idea of experience. One need not accept the withering critique of ‘experi-
ence’ as an interpretive concept or a primary category of analysis that Joan
Scott (1991) has made to see why it is a problematic concept from the point
of view of the historian of thought. If the social historian seeks to recover the
experience of past actors through the use of primary texts, the historian of
thought is inclined to see those very same primary documents as the expres-
sion of thought; what organizes and gives shape to a text – any text, includ-
ing census records, political and legal documents, personal memoirs – is not
the experience that it purports to describe, but the imaginative or conceptual
sensibility that frames it. The difference between social and intellectual history,
in this view, is not that they study different objects, but that they study the
same objects (at least potentially), but in different ways and with different
ends. From the point of view of the intellectual historian, the social historian
looks through or past the fundamental historical aspect of the document – the
way it organizes and conceives of reality. I am not saying that social historians
are uncritical of the primary sources they use, but the point of their criticism
is to strip off bias or unreliability in order to get at the truth about the objects
represented, that is, to get at experience. The intellectual historian, on the other
hand, thinks the terms of representation are the very substance of history; the
intellectual historian thinks that if one strips away bias, point of view, con-
ceptual categories, mode of organization of a text, that there is nothing left to
study. From the point of view of the history of thought, experience of past
actors is inaccessible. The patterns of mind that shaped documents, on the
other hand, are relatively more accessible. Social history, then, seems to put
experience in the driver’s seat, and to see mind as simply a reection of experi-
ence. To the extent that intellectual history is a subclass of social history, it
 Intellectual History vs. Social History of Intellectuals 391

puts itself in the position of having to say that some documents can tell us
about social facts and experience, while other documents can tell us about
what those having those social experiences thought. But there is no ground
but an arbitrary one to distinguish between those two kinds of documents.
Even a radical textualist critic of socio-cultural history such as Dominick
LaCapra (1982, 1992) seems to believe that we can distinguish between what
he calls ‘complex’ texts and other presumably less complex or non-complex
texts in terms of their relationship to a social context. It is unclear why this
should be so, since every artefact, in so far as it has meaning, has a complex
organization that makes sense only in relation to human minds. Why should
a census tract – with its conceptualization of something called ‘populations’,
its categories that divide those populations into meaningful social and geo-
graphical entities, and the normative importance it implicitly attaches to
something called ‘quantiŽcation’ – be seen as a better source for telling us
about some primary reality of which it is simply as passive record, than the
writings designated ‘philosophy’? What distinguishes the ontological status
of a railroad timetable from that of a novel? One is not a social history docu-
ment, and the other an intellectual history document. Both texts record or
constitute a pattern of mental organization; neither gives us an unmediated
set of facts about the objects to which they refer.
One of the effects of the history of intellectuals has been precisely to limit
the kinds of documents that have been seen as appropriate to the study of
intellectual history. Even those historians who conceive of intellectuals in the
broadest sense – as, say, those persons concerned with ideas – circumscribe
the kinds of documents that are deemed proper to the discipline of intellec-
tual history. The social identity of the thinker has determined the relevance
of the document. If consciousness is the characteristic feature of human
beings that separates them from other entities, why should the history of
thought be concerned only with the thinking of a particular group of human
beings? This would be akin to social historians suggesting that only social
elites should be the proper subject of social history. Not every document, of
course, is concerned with the making of an argument, the defence of a pos-
ition or the answering of a question; those are the concerns of intellectuals.
However, every historical document of whatever form instantiates ideas; it
could not exist if it had no meaning or thought content. It seems to me that
the response to critics who have accused intellectual history of ‘elitism’ should
not be to defend intellectual history as a form of social history, but to insist
that all people think. All history must ultimately be the history of ideas
because all historical documents are meaningful only in relation to human
minds. What distinguishes intellectual history from social history is not the
documents or people it studies, but the way in which it conceives of the docu-
ments it uses to reconstruct the mental worlds of the past.
392 Daniel Wickberg

Lest I leave the impression that the inuence of social history on intellec-
tual history has been an entirely negative one, which is not my intention, let
me indicate the ways in which some of the orientations that have character-
ized social history have pushed the history of thought in positive directions.
One of the consequences of social historical thought was to foreground the
ordinary, the commonplace, the quotidian; social history has in large part
been responsible for moving historical study away from the event, the public
action of public Žgures, and toward an understanding of the everyday pat-
terns of life. Those patterns are conceived of as not outside of history, but
central to it. The histories of childhood, the family, sexuality, the body,
odours, gestures, emotions and manners have created a revolution in his-
torical studies. They have defamiliarized and historicized the commonplace
and have led us to see the subject matter of history as both intimate and
ubiquitous. They have also pointed to the fact that this province of everyday
life is a realm of mental and ideational entities, rather than material behav-
iours and practices. The differences in the range of the commonplace of
people in the past are indicative of alien mental universes, not simply differ-
ent practices. In fact, differences in practice only become signiŽcant when
contemporaries see or imagine a difference, that is, when such differences
become conceptual. Instead of turning their backs upon the mundane and
commonplace, intellectual historians would do well to enter the doors social
history has inadvertently opened for them. We may then begin to hear that
various social categories are ‘intellectually constructed’ rather than ‘socially
constructed’.
Social historians also have challenged the hierarchical assumptions that
had been built into much of what had passed for historical study – the notion
that an elite of public actors were the proper subject of historical studies, and
that those ‘lower down’ the rung were ‘outside’ of history. Intellectual his-
torians have to some extent, but not nearly enough by any means, learned
from this. If the history of thought is to be successful, it must abandon once
and for all the notion that a Žxed body of texts and thinkers– a canon – is its
proper subject matter, and must seek thought wherever it can Žnd it – which
is everywhere. It should be concerned less with formal systems of thought or
philosophies, or the oeuvres of particular thinkers, as isolated entities or as
the things to be explained. Formal philosophy provides sources for thought
that are no better and no worse, no more important and no less important
than any other sources. Every document is a source for intellectual history. I
am not saying that historians of thought should stop reading William James,
for instance, but rather that we should stop characterizing late nineteenth-
century thought in terms of James and a few other canonical thinkers. James
should be read in concert with hack journalism of the 1890s, joke books from
that era, estate inventories and accounting records, without an a priori notion
 Intellectual History vs. Social History of Intellectuals 393

that one of these texts is more important or signiŽcant than the others. All
are important sources for understanding the thought of the late nineteenth
century. We should be less interested in reconstructing or explaining the
thought of James as the goal of intellectual history, and more in seeing the
texts designated ‘James’ as moments of instantiation of ideas to be found else-
where. The focus should not be on intellectuals, nor on ‘important’ texts, but
on ideas. Even Foucault, for all his apparent radicalism, keeps a canonical
frame of reference – we should give it up entirely. Thought is to be found
everywhere; ideas are the environment in which people live. There is no
reason to assume the analytical priority of the social over the intellectual, the
material over the ideational, and a good many reasons to assume the oppo-
site. As intellectual historians, we ought to turn away from the social history
of intellectuals. We ought to abandon our sentimental attachment to intel-
lectuals, whether as ‘role models’ of critical social activity or as professional
problem solvers or as authors of texts we happen to Žnd interesting; that
attachment stands in the way of a clear understanding of the role of thought
in history. Instead, taking an appropriate lesson from social history, we should
turn toward what we might call the ideational history of the social, an
examination of the conceptual underpinnings of the social order. We should
take the documents and subject matter of the social historian and subject it
to the methods and insights of the historian of thought.
What is at stake here is an opportunity to rethink some of the fundamental
assumptions of historical practice. Historians are contextualizers; what often
seems to distinguish historians from other humanists is their relentless quest
to Žnd contexts for persons, events, and texts. In fact, historians sometimes
lean to the view that everything is context. The central texts of art historians,
literary scholars, philosophers and others are ‘decentred’ in historical narra-
tives, simply occasions for talking about something else outside of the text.
This is, I think, all for the good. Historians, so conventional and conserva-
tive in some respects, are ahead of other humanists simply by the absence of
a central text in their narratives. The art historian, for instance, even when
speaking about the production of ideology or cultural categories, is ultimately
trying to explain what is going on within a particular text – say, a painting.
The historian has never been bound by an obligation to a central kind of text;
he or she tries to explain something called ‘the past’ rather than a particular
object. The real question for historians is what kinds of contexts are the most
meaningful for understanding the past. Conventionally, history has assumed
a dualism of social or material reality and ideas, and has proffered narratives
in which social or economic change produces anxiety and reaction in the
realm of culture and ideas. Various ‘complex’ versions of this narrative have
been developed in order to avoid ‘reductionism’, but ultimately ideas are
explained as products of social contexts. An approach that puts the history
394 Daniel Wickberg

of ideas back at the centre – that insists that the way to understand ideas is
to see them in the context of other ideas – represents not an inversion of this
traditional dualism, but a rejection of it. Ideas are not tools, nor pale reec-
tions of something else, nor smokescreens to hide interests; they are the stuff
of human reality itself. It is time that the history of thought – history from
the mind out – claims its place at the centre of the humanistic disciplines. All
history, after all, must be the history of thought before it is anything else.

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