One of the very first things you will learn in History at undergraduate level is that there are many different sub-disciplines within the discipline of analysing History, and you will at some point need to focus and zoom in to certain topics in order to have a better argument. Therefore I will explain to you the different categories of historiography in multiple posts.
In this post, I will be focusing on Intellectual History. So what actually is intellectual history, what are some key historians associated with this field, and what are some criticisms?
Definition:
- A range of approaches to the study of the articulation of ideas in the past
- Intellectual history – thought and the movement of thought
- History of ideas – the formal, systematic development of particular tradition or philosophy
- Social history of ideas – the diffusion of those ideas
Key Historians:
Jakob Burckhardt:
- Argued for the emergence of individualism
- A period in which humankind escaped from the religious attitudes and corporate mentality of the ‘middle ages’
- Sprung from the Italian city states
- Seeking to define the Renaissance mind
History of Ideas:
- C.H. Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century
- Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art
- Journal of the History of Ideas, founded 1940 by Arthur Lovejoy
- History of Ideas News Letter begun in 1954 by Rosalie Colie and Samuel Mintz
Annales approach:
- Total history, rather than concern with surface events
- Deep forces and long term social change
- Lots of statistics and counting
Annaliste critique of intellectual history:
- Didn’t distinguish between idea and the text in which it was written
- Tended to assume creation was an individual enterprise
- Explained similarities in terms of borrowing
- Focus should instead be on mentality and context, approached via quantitative methodology
Social historical critique of intellectual history:
- Opposed to the elitism implied in the exercise of intellectual history
- Rejected claim that ‘great’ writers were representative of their time
- Focus should instead be how ideas operate through a society