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ENTHUSIASTIC READING: RETHINKING CONTEXTUALIZATION IN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2015

EDWARD BARING
EDWARD BARING*
Affiliation:
History Department, Drew University E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

In the past ten years, contextual approaches to intellectual history have been dislodged from their dominant position in the discipline. In the 2013 volume Rethinking European Intellectual History, edited by Samuel Moyn and Darrin McMahon, a number of the contributors challenged the previous generation's emphasis on context, whether social, political, or linguistic, arguing that it constrained the scope of intellectual history and unnecessarily foreclosed the possibility of critical engagement: if we could only understand ideas by embedding them in foreign contexts, how could they be meaningful today? Instead, many historians have come to embrace what had earlier been derided as a form of “idealism”: an emphasis on the autonomy of ideas and their internal structure. Paying attention to this structure has allowed historians to treat ideas less as historical artifacts and thus offer them as living resources for thinking through problems in the present.

Type
Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , April 2017 , pp. 257 - 268
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

1 McMahon, Darrin M. and Moyn, Samuel, “Introduction,” in McMahon, and Moyn, , eds., Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (Oxford, 2013), 3–12, at 7 Google Scholar. On the long history of this debate see Kelley, Donald, The Descent of Ideas: The History of Intellectual History (London, 2002)Google Scholar.

2 Kant, Immanuel, Opus Postumum, trans. Eckart Förster and Michael Rosen (Cambridge, 1993), 231 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 See Levinas, Emanuel, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology, trans. André Orianne (Evanston, IL, 1973)Google Scholar; and Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie (London, 1962)Google Scholar.

4 Husserl, Edmund, Ideas, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York, 2010), 150–53Google Scholar.

5 Skinner, Quentin, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory, 8 (1969), 3–53, at 4, 22 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Ibid., 7.