Intellectual History

Intellectual history refers to the historiography of ideas and thinkers. This history cannot be considered without the knowledge of the humans who created, discussed, wrote about, and in other ways were concerned with ideas. Intellectual history as practiced by historians is parallel to the history of philosophy as done by philosophers, and is more akin to the history of ideas. Its central premise is that ideas do not develop in isolation from the people who create and use them, and that one must study ideas not as abstract propositions but in terms of the culture, lives, and historical contex Intellectual history refers to the historiography of ideas and thinkers. This history cannot be considered without the knowledge of the humans who created, discussed, wrote about, and in other ways were concerned with ideas. Intellectual history as practiced by historians is parallel to the history of philosophy as done by philosophers, and is more akin to the history of ideas. Its central premise is that ideas do not develop in isolation from the people who create and use them, and that one must study ideas not as abstract propositions but in terms of the culture, lives, and historical contexts that produced them. (Grafton 2006)

Intellectual history aims to understand ideas from the past by understanding them in context. The term "context" in the preceding sentence is ambiguous: it can be political, cultural, intellectual, and social. One can read a text both in terms of a chronological context (for example, as a contribution to a discipline or tradition as it extended over time) or in terms of a contemporary intellectual moment (for example, as participating in a debate particular to a certain time and place). Both of these acts of contextualization are typical of what intellectual historians do, nor are they exclusive. Generally speaking, intellectual historians seek to place concepts and texts from the past in multiple contexts.

It is important to realize that intellectual history is not just the history of intellectuals. It studies ideas as they are expressed in texts, and as such is different from other forms of cultural history which deal also with visual and other non-verbal forms of evidence. Any written trace from the past can be the object of intellectual history. The concept of the "intellectual" is relatively recent, and suggests someone professionally concerned with thought. Instead, anyone who has put pen to paper to explore his or her thoughts can be the object of intellectual history. A famous example of an intellectual history of a non-canonical thinker is Carlo Ginzburg's study of a 16th-century Italian miller, Menocchio, in his seminal work The Cheese and the Worms.

Although the field emerged from European disciplines of Kulturgeschichte and Geistesgeschichte, the historical study of ideas has engaged not only western intellectual traditions but others as well, including those in other parts of the world. Increasingly, historians are calling for a Global intellectual history that will show the parallels and interrelations in the history of thought of all human societies. Another important trend has been the history of the book and of reading, which has drawn attention to the material aspects of how books were designed, produced, distributed, and read. ...more

Intellectual History Books

Socialism Is Dead! Long Live Socialism!: The Marx Code—Socialism with a Human Face: A New World Order

The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea

The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism

The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750

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Lists

The 1970s in the United States (nonfiction)

241 books — 33 voters

The Declaration of Independence and the United States Constit... by Founding Fathers

The Federalist Papers & Anti-Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton

The Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson

The American Revolution by Gordon S. Wood

American Founding Texts (nonfiction)

53 books — 6 voters

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A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn

U.S. History Reading List

470 books — 174 voters

Baptized in Blood by Charles Reagan Wilson

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Christians and the American Civil War, 1861-1865 (nonfiction)

48 books — 4 voters

Націоналізм, сексуальність, орієнталізм by Соломія Павличко

Паралельний світ. Дослідження з історії уявлень та ідей в Укр... by Наталя Яковенко

Ukrainian intellectual history - Українська інтелектуальна історія

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The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton

White American Youth by Christian Picciolini

Understanding Fascism Reading List (nonfiction)

216 books — 48 voters

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Quotes Tagged “Intellectual History”

“ We are like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants; thanks to them, we see farther than they. Busying ourselves with the treatises written by the ancients, we take their choice thoughts, buried by age and human neglect, and we raise them, as it were from death to renewed life." -Peter of Blois (d. 1212). ...more ”
― Carter Lindberg, The European Reformations

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“ Conceptual historians of various stripes asked after the origins of ideas, but they sought them by tracing the changing meanings of words across different socio-historical contexts. My concern, by contrast, is with the practical origins of ideas: with the ways in which the ideas we live by can be shown to be rooted in practical needs and concerns generated by certain facts about us and our situation. ”
― Matthieu Queloz, The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering

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Why Is There a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics?

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Groups Tagged "Intellectual History"

Early Modern History, 16th-18th Century

This is a group for all those with an interest in Early Modern history (roughly from 1500-1800, …more

49 members, last active 4 years ago

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