Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts

Over the last decade, intellectual historians have increasingly felt that their field is undergoing a crisis significant enough to reopen the question of the field's nature and objectives. Whatever its presumed causes (for example, the rapid rise of social history), one beneficial effect of a sense of crisis is the pressure it places upon practitioners of a field to be more articulate about what they are doing and why they are doing it. In response to this pressure, I shall attempt to define and to defend in relatively theoretical terms the approach to the field (more specifically, to modern European intellectual history) that I have come to find most fruitful. In setting forth this approach, I shall stylize arguments to bring into prominence a number of controversial issues. In so doing, I shall at times be forced not to practice what I preach, for I shall selectively treat the texts of other historians or theorists in order to highlight problematic positions as well as possible directions for inquiry. In the course of its own history in this country, intellectual history has often patterned itself on other approaches to history, taking a framework of significant questions from somewhere else to orient and to organize its research. The desire to adapt to modes of inquiry immediately intelligible to some important set of historians, if not to all other historians, has characterized perspectives on the field that are frequently seen as competing or opposed options: the internal or intrinsic history of (exemplified in the works of A. 0. Lovejoy); the extrinsic or contextual view of intellectual history (exemplified in the works of Merle Curti); and the attempted synthesis of internal and external perspectives that has most often taken the form of a narrative of men and ideas (for example, in the works of Crane Brinton or H. S. Hughes). The problems generated by these options have become increasingly evident, and I shall return to some of them. They are exacerbated by the tendency of intellectual history either to become narrowly professional and even antiquarian by applying the internal method to increasingly