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IN THE ENVIRONMENT OF IDEAS: ARTHUR LOVEJOY AND THE HISTORY OF IDEAS AS A FORM OF CULTURAL HISTORY*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 June 2014

DANIEL WICKBERG
DANIEL WICKBERG*
Affiliation:
School of Arts and Humanities, University of Texas, Dallas E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

The last fifteen years have seen a number of attempts to imagine what lies “beyond” the linguistic and cultural turns of recent decades in historiography. The impulse is derived, one suspects, from the need for academic cultures to declare current established practice “dead” in favor of some new departure. We have had thirty years of discourse study, cultural analysis of texts and meaning, attention to the constitutive power of language, and suspicion of reading texts as unmediated referential documents. It seems inevitable that voices would arise declaring the attention to culture and language exhausted, asking us to turn away from language and culture and plant our feet on some firmer ground. Academic disciplinary cultures, try as they might to abandon modernist commitments to a belief in progress in which today's know-how trumps yesterday's ignorance, can't seem to transcend their nineteenth-century origins. We know, or think we do, that the humanities are not the bearers of progress in knowledge, that we are no wiser than our forebears, that the holy grail remains as far out of reach as it ever was. And yet we act as if we can expose the shortcomings of our intellectual ancestors and in doing so inaugurate a new and better understanding of the realm in which human beings act and create meaning. Hence a new generation, having decided that it has either absorbed the lessons of the cultural and linguistic turns or realized what a constraining dead end such a turn represents, advocates a departure for more fertile ground.

Type
Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , August 2014 , pp. 439 - 464
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

A much earlier and briefer version of some of the ideas in this paper was presented at the US Intellectual History conference in New York in 2010. My thanks to James Kloppenberg and the members of the audience for their comments, and to Tim Lacy for reading a draft of that paper. Lilian Calles Barger, Lora Burnett, and Charles Hatfield provided useful comments and criticism on a more recent draft, and Darrin McMahon shared an essay of his own in advance of its publication. Thanks also to the anonymous referees for the journal, and especially Charles Capper for valuable comments and editorial advice.

References

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15 Mink, “Change and Causality in the History of Ideas,” 10–11.

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20 Lovejoy, “The Historiography of Ideas,” (1938) Essays in the History of Ideas, 6.

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26 Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, 7, original emphasis.

27 David Hollinger, “Historians and the Discourse of Intellectuals,” in Higham and Conkin, New Directions in American Intellectual History, 42–63.

28 Lovejoy, “Reflections on the History of Ideas,” 22–3.

29 Lovejoy, Reflections on Human Nature (Baltimore, 1961), 68–9.

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31 Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, 189–91, 269–83, 243, 236.

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39 Lovejoy, “Reflections on the History of Ideas,” 15–16. See also “The Historiography of Ideas,” where Lovejoy identifies “literary history” as one of twelve provinces of study in the modern university in which some facet of the history of thought and ideas is undertaken, and seeks to remedy this fragmentation by bringing the disparate study of ideas under one umbrella. For an effective critique of Lovejoy's limited applicability to literary criticism and its ends, which identifies the real strengths and weaknesses of the history-of-ideas approach, see Crane, R. S., “Philosophy, Literature, and the History of Ideas,” Modern Philology, 52/2 (Nov. 1954), 73–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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46 Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, 99–143, 227–41.