Global possibilities in intellectual history: a note on practice

Intellectual history, and especially the branch sometimes identified as the Cambridge school, continues to be criticized for not being sufficiently global in outlook. This article does not defend intellectual history. Rather, it underscores the extent to which the well-known intellectual historian John Pocock has opened specific avenues for the study of past intellectual matters in distinctly non-Western contexts. The article suggests that these openings spring directly from basic features of Pocock’s general and well-known conception of intellectual history. Pocock’s work beyond the West amounts not simply to incidental sallies but is the formulation and application of an overall strategy that readily encompasses a globalizing agenda of widening the empirical basis as required by a given subject.