The Thoughtlessness of Intellectual History Today

On the absence of rigor in contemporary intellectual histories

A grand title, and I’ll do my best to live up to it over a series of entries here. Also a harsh title. I don’t apologize for its severity, but my strictures are not directed at persons, only at the field. To make that clear, I would like to set out a couple of commitments and a few caveats before I move into the first of my arguments.

First commitment: when analyzing those deficiencies which I find to be common across the subdiscipline of intellectual history, I will use specific examples drawn from the works of tenured historians at prominent universities. I will not make airy generalizations that are meant to be decoded by the reader, or that encourage the reader to supply their own examples of the fault I am critiquing.

Second commitment: I will historicize these problems as best as I can, and that means that factors such as the gender and race of the figures whose texts I choose for critique are germane, as is the timing of when they attended graduate school and launched their academic careers.

First caveat: age is a sensitive topic right now in the academy. There are not very many historians who are senior in age but who occupy contingent positions; on the other hand, junior historians who possess the institutional security of the tenure track are a minority, and the more junior you are, the more likely you are to be a contingent academic. This amounts to a class system, but it also intersects with a history of demographic and cultural changes in the academy that means that the more senior a scholar is, the more likely they are to be white and male. As in the wider world, it can be difficult to disentangle class, race, and gender, but judging by some of the reactions I received to an AHR article I wrote about the career of the intellectual historian Jackson Lears and his classic No Place of Grace, I feel the need to state explicitly that the criterion I use for selecting examples of problems in intellectual history is prominence—which is a factor of seniority and institutional location—and not race or gender. I am not picking on senior white male scholars for being senior or white or male.

Second caveat: that does not mean that race and gender can be dismissed from the consideration of what the principal problems of intellectual history are. I believe that the field’s homogeneity has kept its research agendas, its methods, and its knowledge base restricted or narrow, but I have found that this belief can be misinterpreted as carrying a moral implication. I am certainly prepared to defend the claim that homogeneity creates intellectual deficiencies or lacks; I do not intend to moralize.

Third caveat: at first blush, some of my critiques may appear captious. Please read on: I do have (what I intend to be) a more substantive point to make.

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With that out of the way, let’s begin with James Kloppenberg’s Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought (2016), certainly one of the most eagerly anticipated works in intellectual history of the past decade, widely reviewed, and respectfully received. Kloppenberg occupies one of the most prestigious positions of any intellectual historian in the US, the Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University.

The title: “Toward” and “struggle”—two of the broader lines of my critique can be found here. First, intellectual history has become casually and unreflectively teleological; second, intellectual historians pay little attention to the structure of the books they write.

Teleology is a giant subject that I will save for another time, so let’s focus on the latter issue.

By “structure” I mean the shape of a book as it develops from the beginning to the end. In practice, intellectual histories tend to be subdivided like literary criticism monographs, with an introduction or theoretical chapter followed by a series of three or four exegetical chapters, each one of which is devoted to one author or possibly two. These books are not very imaginatively constructed, but they are derivative in another way as well. Intellectual historians often gesture in their titles and in the transitions between chapters toward an arc that unifies or emplots the case-study chapters. There is more to be said about the factitious unity that intellectual historians assume for their subjects,¹ but today I’ll stick to titles.

Kloppenberg’s title tells us that the book’s contents coalesce into a single drama—a struggle. Does this word give us a sharp sense of the nature of the book’s action, though? It sounds impressively conflictual, but its bellicosity distracts us from noticing that “struggles” don’t just hang out in the historical ether. The only element we are told is what the struggle is for—it is for self-government or toward democracy. But who is doing the struggling? And who or what makes their attempt to achieve self-government into a struggle—who or what stands in opposition?²

And just how should we read the preposition in the phrase “in European and American Thought?” Is “in” telling us where the struggle takes place? If so, what kind of location is “European and American thought?” And how do people struggle “in” thought? A person may struggle to understand an idea, or they may struggle to accept or to reject an idea if they are under some compulsion to do so, but the implication in those locutions is that the struggle goes on in a single mind, not in some collective arena called “thought.”

The point that I’m making is that “struggle” is not a very apt word for intellectual history, that when intellectual historians reach for it or a similar word, they do so for its affect—basically, for a cheap thrill—not because it clarifies or illuminates what goes on between the pages of the book. The question, though, is why?

The prevalence in intellectual history titles of words like “struggle” has, I think, a specific source: the swagger of social history in the 1960s and 1970s. Intellectual historians more than anyone else envied that impudent freshness and sought to emulate it. And one of the reasons that social history felt so fresh was because words like “struggle” signaled a massive change in the way histories were structured. This change was something of a paradox: as social history moved further away from narrative history, it tended to have a more pronounced plot structure.

This is not as paradoxical as it seems, however. Biographies, for example, are often and correctly thought of as narrative histories, but they seldom have a plot, unless the biographer arbitrarily selects a section of the subject’s whole life in order to dramatize a single line of development. We think of a biography as unified by the natural beginning and end of a person’s life, not by the aesthetic unity of a single action or movement—rise and fall, transformation, confrontation, misrecognition and reunion, courtship, etc.—that we expect from a (conventional) drama or fiction.

Social history had two basic plots, although because social historians wanted to be scientific they tended to use a word like “process” instead of “plot.” At any rate, a social history was either “the making of” something or “the struggle for” something.

In both cases, social histories stood out from the more amorphous structures of political and military histories, which typically were organized around events that had a beginning and an end (a king’s reign or president’s tenure, a campaign, a war), but which were dynamically muddled. Maybe there was a single moment that could be called a “turning point,” but more likely the narrative was closer to a chronicle than to a plot.

Intellectual history was considerably closer to that paradigm than it was to the boldly singular dynamic of social history. Titles like “Main Currents of” or “The Age of” or “The Image of” exemplified this diffuseness—the intellectual historian was unlikely to think of their monograph as a retelling of a single change or process.

But that was precisely how social historians wanted to understand the scholarship they were producing. E. P. Thompson’s classic The Making of the English Working Class is a piebald assortment of events, personalities, and texts, but rather than a chronicle, it gives the illusion that it is a single story, with everything coalescing into the titular process. In a sense, the book is a Bildungsroman, only no longer of an individual.

Bildung and “Making” are both, it is important to emphasize, processes that don’t necessarily have endpoints, and one of the ways that social historians hid the plottedness of their histories (perhaps even from themselves) is the way they tend to hang in resolution or open out into a new stage of development rather than conclusively end. The word “struggle” is like this, too; there is nothing in “struggle” that indicates a completed action, as a struggle could simply be suspended or continue indefinitely.³ Yet it is singular, and that is crucial—everything covered by the book is gathered into it neatly, centripetally.

Intellectual history has broadly stuck to the two plots that social histories popularized. It has added perhaps one other plot, which we can find in the title of Daniel Rodgers’s Atlantic Crossings (2000), although the idea of transatlantic communities of thought formed on top of the physical translocations of intellectuals and/or their texts was already implicit in Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993). But where Gilroy and others in Africana studies have used the figure of diaspora as the unifying structure of their books, Rodgers simply adapted social history’s “unfinished movement” pattern typified by “making” and “struggle.”

To substantiate my point, let’s take a look at the titles of Merle Curti Award-winning books. The award itself validates my argument to some extent, as it began around the peak of intellectual historians' envy of social history, and it just so happens to cover both subdisciplines.⁴ Titles often mirror each other, with the same or very similar syntactical patterns—note the abundance of gerunds and present participles⁵:

• “Inventing/reinventing” (three instances);

• “making/remaking” (eight instances, three of which are from books that are unambiguously intellectual history, while four others have a good claim to being both social and intellectual

• “Building,” “thinking,” “searching,” “protecting,” “reckoning,” “shaping,” “scraping,” “passing,” “calling,” “transcending,” “re-reading,” “conflicting,” and, of course, “founding”—each occurring once

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with titles that have gerunds in them (even though Thompson himself apologized for a “clumsy title”), but what is wrong is how frozen in time it reveals intellectual history to be. The imagination of intellectual historians remains broadly circumscribed by social history’s achievements—from more than forty years ago, one might add.

The political meaning of the social history plot was obvious—“pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” By imagining every struggle as suspended in time, by envisioning the working class always in the making/remaking, social historians lived up to Gramsci’s slogan at a time when the window for radical change seemed to be closing. Intellectually, social historians knew that their subjects had lost at least most of the battles one could write about; voluntaristically, however, the struggle was not over.

My point is not to find fault with that political mood, only to ask if intellectual historians realize that they are so often adopting it. Intellectual historians’ aversion to theorizing their own work in a truly rigorous manner is going to be the major theme of this series. I hope you find it interesting.

1. As a preview, my argument is that intellectual historians frequently don’t bother proving the existence of unifying concepts like “tradition” or “discourse” but instead merely stipulate that it exists. It is rarely so self-evident that all the people discussed in a book were conscious of having something in common, and intellectual historians have become incredibly cavalier about lassoing disparate figures together for reasons that have more to do with personal taste than any genuine commonality. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with such arbitrariness, but please don’t use “tradition” as a catchall to justify your choices.

2. Intellectual historians have mostly been evading the question of how to think about the ontology of ideas. Do ideas have some autonomy from the people who articulate them? If so, do they have their own agency—can they make something happen or bring about some kind of change? What kind of evidence would we need to demonstrate the autonomous agency of ideas, and is it possible to falsify the claim that an idea is the cause of something? These questions will be the subject of a future entry.

3. On the other hand, the keyword of cultural histories—subversion—does suggest a completed action, as does deconstruction (ironically).

4. The OAH has listed award-winning books separately as either intellectual or social history since 2012; before that, it occasionally labeled award-winners as one or the other but most often left the category unmarked, which was particularly handy for books that made significant contributions to both subdisciplines.

5. Sometimes the brevity of the title makes the function of an -ing word ambiguous.