Why intellectual history needs to be rethought
Intellectual historians have a fatal tendency to leap at any chance to explain. It is in our nature: perhaps dubious of our own originality, we find the derivative drudgery of unrolling and re-embroidering the skeins of others’ intellectual tapestries somehow fulfilling. And lately, explanations have been in high demand.
Some of this has to do with trends internal to the humanities: a post-pomo willingness to go big with our narratives, to ask fundamental questions, or at least to couch our inquiries in ambitiously broad terms. Thick description is out, thin elucidation is in.
But the political climate has cooperated, furnishing endless opportunities for someone who can string together a convincing genealogy, a discursive analysis that shows that the unbelievable things people are saying and doing today have quite straightforward roots in equally unbelievable things people have said and done in the past. Barack Obama preached the Faulknerian adage that ‘the past is never dead, it’s not even past,’ and “Make America Great Again” (and a host of other right-wing movements worldwide) made it flesh. Readers are simultaneously reassured and paralyzed by the knowledge that we are not, properly speaking, seeing a “resurgence” of white nationalism but merely an exposure of its continuing prevalence. Or perhaps readers are reassured because they are paralyzed: if this has been so long a problem, our feeling of helplessness is justified—it is the correct response to an intractably chronic condition.
Regardless, the role intellectual historians can play in such a moment is alluring—so alluring, in fact, that troops of other writers have taken up an identity as quondam intellectual historians, deputized by the exigencies of the present. This may have been good for intellectual history in some senses, but urgency has its price, and so does the stretching of the term “intellectual history” to describe almost any historical account that foregrounds people using words to achieve their desired political, economic, or cultural ends.
Intellectual history is very good at certain kinds of explanations, but it has its limits: there are times when it is more useful than other historical modes, and times when it may cloud the picture or direct our attention uselessly to empty and ephemeral (if memorable) rhetorical grandstanding.
That principle—that intellectual history is a tool, but not an explanation—is the one I hope to expand upon in subsequent installments of this newsletter. I think that there has lately been all too little serious consideration of what ideas actually do in society, what functions intellectuals actually perform, and and how—or when—we can justifiably say that intellectuals cause historical changes using their ideas. Are ideas causal phenomena, and if so, how are they wielded? What makes them capable of producing change, and are there certain circumstances where they can and other circumstances where they cannot be causes?
I hope that I am a good enough writer to make the letters to come worth your while, offering points of engagement and disagreement as well as tolerably novel answers to some of the questions just raised. There will be no system; most content will be responses to essays or books by other intellectual historians, theorists, historiographers, et al. I make no apology for the nicheness of this series. I think its substance is important and it is something which makes me feel both effervescently intrigued as well as soberly concerned. I hope I can provide some of both those affective registers in what is to come.