15
From History of Ideas to History of Meaning

In the summer of 1980, the editors of the Annales, of Past and Present, and of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History jointly sponsored a conference at the Villa Serbelloni, the conference center of the Rockefeller Foundation, to discuss the directions historical research might and should take in the decade of the eighties. I was asked to prepare this essay for the conference as a position paper an the present condition and the probable future of intellectual history. I was chiefly concerned with what intellectual history could still be now that the idealism implicit in much history of ideas has been generally abandoned. Reprinted from The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 12 (1981), 279–291, with the permission of the editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History and the MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts , © by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History.

Intellectual history, until recently, was regarded with particular respect. It was probably the most interdisciplinary area of historical study and therefore seemed both unusually demanding and unusually prestigious. It was considered important. But during the last two decades, the impression has grown among historians that the kinds of material likely to be studied by intellectual historians are not very useful for telling us what we most need to know about the past.^[1]

As those of us who scrutinize the small number of job listings for our students have observed, intellectual history seems now to be considered less essential to the curriculum than other kinds of history. Fewer students care to be identified as intellectual historians, and the remaining practitioners of intellectual history are more and more uncertain about

their methods and purposes. And it is increasingly difficult to say what, at least in the abstract, intellectual history is about. For these reasons, as well as for others that will emerge later in this article, the question of the immediate future of intellectual history requires more radical treatment than may be appropriate for other dimensions of historiography.

The decline of intellectual history appears obvious, and probably irreversible. But despite a long identification with the problems and methods of intellectual history, I do not deplore this development. For although intellectual history has indeed declined as an isolated specialty, in another form it has never been more important. The resources of intellectual history, or of something related to and growing out of it, can be useful to historians precisely in the degree to which intellectual history is not treated separately but is generally assimilated by other kinds of historians. This is what has recently been happening. That intellectual history is now disappearing as one of the conventional specialties into which historians segregate themselves is a sign of the growing maturity of intellectual history, and of historiography more generally. We no longer need intellectual history because we have all become intellectual historians: some of us, no doubt, unintentionally, reluctantly, and without fully realizing what has happened. Since the explanation for this situation will itself require some exploitation of the resources of conventional intellectual history, it will also provide an example of the tasks that even an old-fashioned and specialized intellectual historian can continue to perform in any decade, notably for other historians: in this case the liberation—not always welcome—that can result from identifying and laying bare for inspection our own deepest assumptions about ourselves and the world. This useful service may suggest that the specialized techniques of intellectual historians are worth keeping alive.

Conventional intellectual history itself has a history that is instructive about its present predicament. Since this history is still largely unwritten, my observations about the origins and lineage of intellectual history will necessarily be somewhat speculative; but the word "intellectual" here holds some promise as a point of entry. This word is an adjective, based on a noun that refers to a faculty alleged—in a certain venerable tradition of thought which historians have never found very congenial—to reside in the human personality. This tradition is that of philosophical idealism, which, since its beginnings in classical antiquity, has depended on—and constantly reinforced—a characteristic anthropology that has had a major influence on the understanding of the human animal in the West.

According to this view, the human personality consists of a hierarchy of discrete faculties, among which intellect—more or less closely identified with reason—is highest. In the earlier stages of this tradition, the intellect was believed to constitute the divine element in man and so to distinguish him from the other animals; and a sense of the peculiar virtue and importance of the intellect and its works, although variously expressed, has always been a major element in this tradition. The association of the intellect with the brain gave the head ethical significance and converted it into a potent metaphor; the highest became best. And for two thousand years, in what was the main stream of Western thought, the erect stature of man was the visible sign of his distinction from and his superiority to nature. It raised him above the material earth and enabled him to contemplate the heavenly bodies, from which he first learned the eternal principles of order. As Plato himself had testified, this was the origin of philosophy, the noblest of human activities.^[2]

This remote background helps to explain both the special prestige once attached to intellectual history and the reasons for its recent decline. Intellectual history was perceived as the study of the working and the works of the human intellect through the centuries; and, since the intellect was the highest faculty in man, it followed that intellectual history was the highest type of history. As Hegel believed, it also could be seen as the source of such clues as we could have to the direction and meaning of all history. These ideas are still very much alive in the notion, which pervades much contemporary social and political speculation, that man, by taking thought, can add cubits to his stature: that is, that "intellectuals" can shape the world for the better. Furthermore, since society, in this tradition, was also conceived—following the general principle underlying all order—as a hierarchy, this line of thought also directed historical investigation toward the intellectual activity of elites. And such notions exerted a power over us, even just half a century ago, that was all the greater because we were unaware of them. A generation of academically precocious youths, too myopic or too light to be good in sports, found compensation in turning from physical activity to the higher concerns of the intellect. In this context intellectual history had obvious attractions.

But the marriage between an intellectuality that was focused on the progressively clearer grasp of the eternal, and history, which tended increasingly to view all things as mutable and even its own presuppositions as historical artifacts, was uncomfortable from the outset; and even in its purer forms intellectual history, although it was often hardly very historical, did not succeed in being philosophical.

Lovejoy's treatment of the history of ideas is an illuminating example. His detachment of his "unit ideas" from a larger context of changing human needs and conditions suggests the autonomy of intellect in the idealist tradition; but when he faced the question of the significance of such conceptions as the great chain of being, Lovejoy could only reduce them to mysterious psychological impulses, inexplicable cravings for simplicity or complexity which were themselves, variations on what he called "metaphysical pathos."^[3]

The satisfaction of dealing with the morphology of ideas at the highest level in courses entitled "intellectual history" was rarely sufficient for historians, and the teachers of such courses tended increasingly to analyze a conventional body of texts (the standard works of "great thinkers") with the tools of psychohistory or one or another approach to the sociology of knowledge. In the degree to which it was genuinely historical, intellectual history was thus undermining its own claims to special respect.

Meanwhile these developments internal to the profession were complemented by the more important changes taking place in the larger world that historians inhabited—changes that radically subverted the claims of intellect not only to receive privileged treatment but even to any discrete existence. It is hardly necessary to review the role of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud in disintegrating the intellectual conception of man, although of the three Freud may prove to have been the most radical in his impact on anthropology. For Freud associated man's upright posture explicitly with his fall from a condition of primordial bliss; he saw in the erect stature of the human animal the sign, perhaps even the prehistorical cause, of that schism in the personality which, perversely dividing humanitas into an honorable portion above the neck and a shameful region below the waist, produced not wisdom and order, but neurosis, conflict, and despair. At any rate we can hardly any longer define man as an intellectual animal. However we regard him, he is both less and more than this—and infinitely more interesting, which is the major explanation for the fact that an autonomous intellectual history is now likely to seem, like the discrete intellect of the old anthropology, at best an irrelevant abstraction from real life.

Nevertheless the materials with which intellectual historians have traditionally worked cannot be dismissed as without interest or value for students of the past. Rather they must now be understood in a new way, as expressive or adaptive behavior of a kind still identifiable as (probably) peculiar to the human animal, and also as a subset of a larger category of such human behavior, to which they now solicit our atten-

tion. This category consists of all efforts to discover or to impose meaning on our experience, although some sense of meaning is also both a condition and a product of experience. These efforts are not the work of the "intellect" or of any particular area of the personality. They are rather a function of the human organism as a whole; they are carried on both consciously and unconsciously; and they are presupposed by, and merge with, every more specific human activity, including the begetting of children and their upbringing within families. I cite these examples not in order to put such matters down, but to reinforce the general point that the concern with meaning, which I take to be the remnant chiefly worth saving from intellectual history, has been profitably appropriated for their own purposes even by historians of those dimensions of human experience farthest removed from the sublime concerns of intellectual history.

The amalgamation of concerns once primarily limited to so-called intellectual historians with other kinds of history by way of a (usually only implicit) concern with meaning is the most significant development of the recent past from the standpoint of my argument in this article. The works that have most interested those of us who have sometimes thought of ourselves as intellectual historians, and that also have made the greatest impact on historiography, are virtually impossible to classify in terms of our conventional categories, but they come into focus as studies in the construction of meaning. I would cite from my own field (not because it is unanimously admired or because all of its conclusions have been accepted, but because it stimulated a whole generation of Renaissance scholars in various directions and in this way transformed a major area of European historiography) Baron's The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance . The very title of this work lets us know that we cannot put it into one of our standard categories, and indeed that such classification would be useless for understanding it. It draws on the resources of both political and intellectual history, and it touches also on social and economic matters. But it is basically an extended account of a collective discovery of meaning in the destiny of the Florentine polis.^[4]

A similar point could be made of May's The Enlightenment in America ; although its title seems to classify it as intellectual history, it is also heavily concerned with political, social, and institutional analysis as it reveals how Americans, who must first be understood in their own complex setting, struggled to find meaning in a complex set of European ideas. Again we can only classify a work like Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change as an assessment of the impact of technology

on the construction of meaning in various aspects of European experience. This work also provides us with an instance of the increasing tendency of historians to substitute the word "cultural" in places where they might earlier have employed the word "intellectual." No doubt this is partly because "cultural" seems less restrictive than "intellectual," but it also is an expression of an at least obscure association of "culture" with meaning in a larger sense.^[5]

Thus, if I discern any trend in the work of historians who were once clearly (but have perhaps not recently been) identified with intellectual history, it is an increasing concern with the location, the description, and perhaps the explanation of what passes for meaning in a variety of historical situations. Once this is recognized, a good deal of what seems most vague (and perhaps therefore irritating) about intellectual history will come into focus.

It explains, for example, a tendency for intellectual historians to exploit artistic expression. From the standpoint of a strictly "intellectual" history, this presents a serious conceptual difficulty, for art and intellect are not obviously synonymous and, since Plato, have often been at odds. But the difficulty evaporates once we have recognized that the arts have always been a primary vehicle for the expression of meaning (or more recently, sometimes, meaninglessness).

Intellectual historians have long sensed (without perhaps fully understanding) their affinities with art historians like Erwin Panofsky. Baxandall's Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy is an unusually valuable study of the artistic creation of fundamental meanings by an art historian. The possibilities of collaboration between art historians and a more general kind of cultural historian are suggested by A Renaissance Likeness by Partridge and Starn, which explores a whole milieu by the intensive study of a single painting. Schorske's Fin-de Siècle Vienna combines an interest in artistic meaning with the use of psychoanalysis to penetrate to other levels of meaning, which again are hardly to be described as "intellectual."^[6]

In reporting on the past and future of intellectual history, I am (somewhat to my own surprise) describing the metamorphosis of an old and familiar, although never very satisfactorily developed, field of historical activity into something new and strange that is likely to be far more useful. In its new state, however, it can also be seen to assimilate various kinds of history, some of them clearly growing in interest, which are otherwise hard to classify. A distinguished example is Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic . How are we to classify this work in terms of our conventional categories? It is not exactly intellectual history,

if only because intellectual activity as a high thing was almost by definition confined to the upper classes. That Thomas's book deals with structures of popular belief is hardly sufficient to call it social history, although the identity of social history sometimes raises difficulties for me almost as serious as those created by intellectual history. But if we recognize this work as an example of a new historical genre that might be called, for want of a more elegant term, the history of meanings, we have placed it within its own family of works, the members of which—once we recognize that they belong together—can illuminate each other.^[7]

Immediately one thinks of further candidates for membership in this group: some of the essays of Davis; Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou ; Levine's Black Culture and Black Consciousness , with its eloquent use of folklore; or Jordan's White over Black which, whatever else it may be, is a report on the tragic results of one kind of assertion of meaning.^[8]

In the same way other major kinds of recent work, too often ignored in historiographical discussions because they do not fit our conventional categories, can be seen as subsets of the history of meanings, and therefore well worth serious attention. One of the most important of these clearly is religious history, which is concerned in the most direct and ultimate way with the exploration of meaning, and in its institutional dimension with structures for the preservation, cultivation, and transmission or meaning. Thomas's work belongs partly in this category, and a substantial proportion of the activity of historians of every period and part of the world is now devoted to religious phenomena. Again this remarkable circumstance is easy to overlook because of an inherited system for the classification of historical scholarship in which it has no place.

The titles of a few major works concerned with the period with which I am most familiar convey some sense of the difficulty of classifying them according to our usual labels: among them are books by Reeves, Ozment, Tentler, O'Malley, and Rothkrug.^[9]

Still other kinds of scholarship can be brought into focus in this way. One thinks immediately of the history of education, which has normally had as its primary purpose the transmission of meanings from one generation to the next; a recent example is Strauss's Luther's House of Learning . The history of historiography, and perhaps of other branches of learning, also assumes more general significance when it is understood to be centrally concerned with meaning; every work of historical composition is, after all, a bit of documentation of what passes for meaning in the community and period out of which it arises. Such studies as

White's Metahistory may be highly "intellectual" (a term that now seems to mean something like "difficult to read"); but the awkward intrusion of the word "imagination" in the title suggests that it is not very usefully called "intellectual history." A similar point can be made about Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment . But meaning can also be expressed through institutions: constitutions, for example, judicial systems, or even bureaucracies. Thus Brentano's Two Churches is a distinguished investigation of the construction of meaning as well as utility out of materials not usually associated with such activity.^[10]

The kind of history that I am describing is characterized not (like traditional intellectual history) by the sources that it utilizes but by the questions that it asks. By the same token, it does not exclude attention to the creation of meaning by elites; it leaves open the considerable possibility that this may be of the greatest interest. It may be objected, indeed, that this redefinition of intellectual history is far too broadly conceived: that, indeed, in an outburst of disciplinary imperialism from the most unexpected quarter, and by the most arbitrary redefinition of my assignment, I have claimed almost everything in historiography for my province. I hope that this is not the case; but I do see, in the conception of man as an animal who must create or discern meaning in everything that he does, the most promising resource that has yet presented itself for overcoming the consequences—so devastating for the historical understanding in the long run, no matter how convenient in the short—of our proliferating specialization. The only antidote for this tendency in historiography, now so widely deplored, is a shift in emphasis from raw historical experience (i.e., what happens to people) to what human beings have made out of that experience. Such a shift should remind us, too, that the creative interpretation of experience also shapes experience, which is only in the abstract independent of the meaning imposed upon it.

As to the future, it is my hope that tendencies already discernible—the decline of traditional intellectual history as an area of specialization, the exploitation of its resources instead by historians who do not care to identify their work as intellectual history, and an expanded concern with the meanings expressed by every kind of human activity in the past—will grow stronger, be more explicitly embraced, and develop the more deliberate strategies that are likely to emerge when scholarship becomes conscious of what it is doing. I have one or two suggestions about what this might mean, but first it seems to me that a caveat against reductionism is in order.

I have referred to the role of Darwin, Marx, and Freud in the de-

struction of a traditional model of man; we owe them a great deal for this and will continue to benefit in various ways from the insights that they have released. But we should not, by following them, correct one kind of mistake only to make another. It is unlikely to help us much simply to reverse the hierarchy, and to put matter in the place of mind, or biological in the place of intellectual experience. This would still be too traditional; the structural principle—the principle that organizes phenomena as sub (or infra ) and super —would remain the same. A more novel anthropology (which is at the same time very old, since it too has a history), an anthropology that is more wholesome (in the sense of integrated and therefore irreducible), is fundamental to the notion of man as a creator of meanings, a conception that can only engender a sense of the unpredictability of the human condition and therefore of mystery and awe, sensations as appropriate to the historical as to the poetic understanding.

History, as has often been observed, is parasitical; but as it changes, so does the host on which it feeds. Traditional intellectual history was chiefly nourished by traditional philosophy; but as intellectual history has been transformed, it has been turning to the arts. I expect this tendency to grow stronger and to expand from literary, and visual art into music and dance, and from elite to popular expression in all the arts.

But art as expressive and integrative behavior points finally to anthropology, now as an academic discipline, and especially to cultural anthropology, which is likely to be the fundamental external resource for the kind of study that is being born out of a dying intellectual history. This is so for several reasons. The anthropological model which generally (with some exceptions) informs anthropology as a discipline underlies the conception that I have outlined of man as a creator of meanings. This model largely rejects the conception of man as a hierarchy of discrete faculties. It accordingly rejects also the assignment of privileged status a priori to one or another area of human activity. Since it conceives of the human personality as a mysterious whole, it is opposed to all reductionism. And, of course, it is centrally concerned with the construction and symbolic expression of meaning in every dimension of human activity. In short it is useful to the historian precisely because it is the least specialized among the social sciences; this is why, increasingly, it insists on a kind of "thick description" that many historians are finding so congenial. Most anthropologists have been content so far with a kind of systematic and static description that is fundamentally ahistorical (although even this has been useful for the—almost equally static—

study of mentalitées by historians); and I have heard anthropologists confess that their discipline has not dealt very satisfactorily with problems of cultural change. But the recent work of some anthropologists, for example Sahlins, Bourdieu, and Bloch, has been increasingly historical. It may be that future work in anthropology will be even more useful for historians, and also that historians can be of some help to anthropologists.^[11]

A second and closely related discipline that will probably be necessary for the development of intellectual history is linguistics. For if man (to quote once again a much-quoted remark) is "an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun," he spins these webs primarily from—or with the help of—language. Through language man orders the chaos of data impinging on his sensorium from, in a singularly mysterious and problematic sense, "out there," organizing them into categories and so making them intelligible for himself, manageable, communicable, and therefore socially useful as well as essential to his private adaptation to the world. Indeed, as the humanists of the Renaissance maintained (the point was perhaps more profound than they could realize), language is the basis of society. The human and social world with which historians are all, in one way or another, concerned, might therefore be described as a vast rhetorical production; and rhetoric is also likely to become a major tool of the new intellectual history. For the operations that bring this human world into existence in consciousness and endow it with meaning are comparable to such basic rhetorical transactions as division and comparison, or metonymy and metaphor.^[12]

A few historians have pointed in this direction; but the connections between a language and the perceptions of reality peculiar to those who speak it, as well as the significance of linguistic change, although often recognized in the abstract, have not yet seriously engaged historians.^[13] Because of the basic role of language at once in perception, thought, and social existence, linguistics seems—in the most literal sense—of fundamental importance for historians, as indeed for other social scientists. Changes in language are likely to provide us with clues, of a kind previously lacking, to the human significance of various kinds of developments about which we have so far been able to form only the most unverifiable impressions. Here, indeed, might lie one of the possibilities, which may be rare in the kind of history with which I am concerned, for the application of quantitative methods.

I have noted that traditional intellectual history depended heavily on traditional philosophy, and, in conclusion, it is worth observing that traditional philosophy has been slowly dying, although with occasional

remissions, during the same period, at about the same speed, and for probably the same reasons as traditional intellectual history. But it has gradually been replaced by a quite different kind of wisdom than traditional philosophers were supposed to enunciate. It is thus possible that intellectual history, transformed in the manner that I have envisaged here, may also be able to renew its connections with philosophy, similarly transformed. Under new conditions, history and philosophy might once again have much to offer each other. Historians could help explain what has been happening to philosophy, and philosophers might help historians to scrutinize their own metahistorical assumptions. In this way one of the least historical among academic disciplines might at last join hands with one of the least philosophical. This is another possibility for the next decade.