Contextualising historians’ pursuits in intellectual biography: A method in transition

When the philosopher, political theorist and historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin died in 1997, J. G. A. (John) Pocock told an audience he was talking to that evening that 'A great tree has fallen'. 2 Pocock's British audience was unlikely to have known the analogous Aotearoa New Zealand Māori proverb 'a mighty tōtara tree has fallen'/'Kua hinga te tōtara i Te Waonui-a-Tāne', which literally means: 'The tōtara tree has fallen in the great forest of Tāne.'The saying signalled the death of someone with great mana or standing.It is a simple analogy, easily understood, that signals Pocock's early years spent in New Zealand; he would have known about the death of people of mana being likened to great trees falling in the forest.For him, Berlin was arguably the leading intellectual of his generation.Berlin's first book in 1939 was an intellectual biography, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment.It was no cradle-to-grave account of a life but an exploration of Marx's ideas, the intellectual environment out of which they emerged, and, in turn, their power and influence.It was about the genealogy of ideas and Marx's originality.3 Although looking at antecedents, it concentrated on how Marx added value to his intellectual inheritance.In turn, Pocock has been considered one of 'the greatest intellectual historians of his generation'.4 Pocock wrote a six-volume account of Edward Gibbon's ideas and environment, or intellectual ecology, analysing his work on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire within the historical and intellectual contexts of the eighteenth century.5 Pocock was 'not concerned with biography in the usual way'.6 For instance, he did not cite all the previous scholarship on Gibbon's life, including the latter's 'ego-histoire' or intellectual autobiography, Memoirs (1796), which takes as its theme 'minds of men' and the development of his own mind, in particular.Gibbon's Memoirs is an 'embodied account' of his childhood, which catalogues the 'history of my bodily 1 I thank Sophie Scott Brown and Thomas Ashby for their comments on an earlier draft.