Walking in the footsteps of Eric Hobsbawm: Space and place in intellectual biography

Where do a thinker's ideas come from?This simple question has long defined the field of intellectual history.Answering it usually involves consideration of a person's published output, as well as their unpublished written work, lectures, interviews, correspondence, notebooks, manuscripts and marginal comments.In some cases, this list of materials extends to include a discussion of educational institutions and, where relevant, a person's involvement in politics.By contrast, a person's psychological universe-the spaces they inhabit or move through, the sensory and emotional universe around them or their familial environment-is usually relegated to the status of biographical embellishment.Intellectual historians will sometimes discuss the house in which a person was born or the impact of a divorce, but these are rarely the driving force behind an analysis of a person's ideas.Some of this reticence has to do with a laudable desire on the part of intellectual historians to distance themselves from traditional biographical tropes.Narrative biographies, journalistic 'profiles' and screen biopics often emphasise a person's inner world.This can trivialise ideas and decisions, making them dependent on a particular interpersonal relationship or some aspect of a person's psychological makeup.Intellectual historians, most of whom care deeply about the structure and coherence of a person's ideas, want to take seriously their inner logic.For this, they need to separate the life of the mind from everyday life.Even the influential Cambridge School of political thought, which has provided much of the impetus for Anglo-American intellectual history's emphasis on 'texts in context', takes as its basic assumption that ideas are forged in dialogue with other ideas.The 'context' refers to an intellectual or political context.But, as we know, ideas do not develop solely in relation to other ideas.They do so in relation to cultural, social or psychological contexts as well.Some intellectual historians have begun to take these seriously, for instance, in the recent attempt to produce a comprehensive, multi-volume 'cultural history of ideas'. 1 The problem with this is that the impact of a cultural context is hard to measure in general terms, without falling back on an ideational framework in which certain groups of thinkers 1