The Worlds of American Intellectual History is an ambitious collection of essays that makes expansive claims for its field. In his introduction to the book, which he coedited along with Joel Isaac, Michael O'Brien, and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, James Kloppenburg lauds the diversity of contemporary intellectual history, and stresses that American intellectual historians have always studied “ideas in a wide range of national and cultural contexts” (6). “Intellectual history has long been, and should remain, commons rather than a fenced-off reserve,” he writes. “It is and should be a place where borders are porous, different voices are heard, various perspectives are offered, and ideas are understood to move freely in many directions” (2). Likewise, contributors to the book such Daniel Rodgers portray American intellectual history as an open-minded and dynamic field that tracks “ever more complex patterns of change and motion.” “If there ever was a time when the subject matter of intellectual history could be taken to be stable ideas and intellectual traditions,” he maintains, “that day is long past. Motion is the central motif in intellectual history now. Ideas jump the tracks of the intellectual disciplines that spawn them” (307).

However, I question whether the content of the book lives up to these claims, which seem more aspirational than anything else. American intellectual history has been described as embattled as recently as 2011, when Jennifer Schuessler, a reporter for the New York Times, chronicled a meeting of the Society for United States Intellectual History (S-USIH) with an article that described the field as “a discipline long considered, if not quite boring, then certainly musty, elitist and out of touch. While intellectual historians like Richard Hofstadter and Perry Miller once dominated the profession,” she explained, “they were swept aside in the 1960s by the rise of social and then cultural history, which regarded talk of ‘the American mind’ as code for ‘the mind of white, male Americans who happened to write books.’” Led by “a new breed of young intellectual historian,” the S-USIH, Schuessler's article reported, aimed to revitalize the field by paying more attention to race, class and gender, and addressing a broader audience.Footnote ¹ While Kloppenberg and Rodgers's broad claims about the diversity of intellectual history seem to suggest that the field has met these goals, the book's content suggests otherwise.

Composed of seventeen essays, The Worlds of American Intellectual History seems to present a still rather tradition-bound field. While many of the individual essays are first-rate, most focus on topics and thinkers that would not seem out of place in collections published several decades ago. For example, Duncan Kelley's “Nationalism and Cosmopolitan Humanity in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Political Science” addresses a highly specialized set of questions about the development of American political science, making a case for “the inter-national and statist foundations upon which the modern American science was built,” that will be largely incomprehensible to anyone unversed in previous accounts of the field's genealogy (128). Similarly disciplinary in scope is Samuel Moyn's essay, “The Political Origins of Global Justice.” Despite its expansive title, Moyn's piece is narrowly focussed on what he admits is “a small and peripheral domain” of the discourse about global justice that took shape in the wake of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration on Human Rights of 1948, namely its afterlife in the field of “philosophy, which saw the rise of debates concerning ‘Global Justice’ within Anglophone political thought” (134).

Moyn's essay is largely about John Rawls, and considerations of Rawls and other “first-order” white male thinkers predominate throughout the book. Indeed, only four of the book's essays discuss female thinkers at any length. Sophia Rosenfeld's “On Lying: Writing Philosophical History after the Enlightenment and after Arendt” centers around Arendt. Leslie Butler's “The ‘Woman Question’ in the Age of Mass Democracy: From Movement History to Problem History” argues that Alexis de Tocqueville's discussion of American gender relations in Democracy in America played an “agenda-setting role” in Anglo-American thought about the “the relationship between democracy and the woman question,” and therefore makes fewer references to woman thinkers than one might expect. But it does put Tocqueville in debate with Harriet Martineau, who “saw only regress” in American gender relations, whereas Tocqueville “glimpsed democratic progress toward greater equality between the sexes” (47). Margaret Abruzzo's “The Sins of Slaves and the Slaves of Sin: Toward a History of Moral Agency” contains a brief analysis of the sins and moral agency of the slaves as discussed by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Harriet Jacobs. And finally, Nico Slate's essay “‘We People of Color’: Colored Cosmopolitanism and the Borders of Race” traces a twentieth-century history of colored cosmopolitanism that leaves its imprint on Third World feminism.

Meanwhile, thinkers of color receive even less attention than women in this book. They receive prolonged attention only in Slate's essay – although Jonathan Holloway's essay “Curating the Black Atlantic” does take up the question of how black sociologist Paul Gilroy's conception of a “black Atlantic” has influenced the presentation of black figures and interpretations of the past staged by (largely unnamed) curators in American, Caribbean and British museums.

While Holloway is innovative in “thinking about museum curators as intellectual historians,” most of the other contributors who engage nontraditional intellectual-history sources seem almost apologetic in doing so (78). Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's “The Longing for Wisdom in Twentieth-Century U.S. Thought” is a case in point. Her essay is a study of American conceptualizations of wisdom as documented in a mid-century magazine called Wisdom. Published in Beverly Hills between 1956 and 1964, Wisdom alternated between two subtitles: “The Magazine of Knowledge for All Americans” and the “Magazine of Knowledge for Lifetime Learning and Education.” However, despite its obvious relevance to intellectual history, Ratner-Rosenhagen is uneasy using a general-interest magazine “as a source for the history of American thought.” Doing so, she notes, “demands a rather uncomfortable reckoning with selection criteria more easily hidden or ignored in studies of disciplinary or formal thought.” In particular, she worries about being seen as engaging in “a kind of intellectual slumming that seeks to justify intellectual history by prioritizing ‘popular’ forms of intellectual exchange (such as self-help books and comic books)” (185).

In the end, Ratner-Rosenhagen manages to set such doubts aside, producing an essay that offers an engaging account of American popular thought about wisdom, while also documenting the “hunger and yearning” for spiritual and moral guidance expressed by many of Wisdom's readers. But her hesitation about using a popular magazine as a source raises questions about the extent to which various largely unstated selection criteria still continue to shape the field of American intellectual history. Moreover, these questions are thrown into high relief by James Kloppenberg's brief discussion of Ratner-Rosenhagen's essay in the book's introduction, which praises her for “showing how directing attention to popular conceptions of wisdom and to the practices sustaining its quest can broaden the field … without abandoning intellectual historians’ traditional commitment to the study of professional thinkers” (10, my italics).

Such a commitment seems to run directly contrary to Kloppenberg's claim (also in the introduction) that intellectual history is “a commons rather than a fenced-off reserve,” but it does go a long way toward explaining the overwhelming emphasis on professional thinkers in this selection of essays. Indeed, the boundaries of the field as seen in this book are perhaps best sketched in Sarah Igo's essay “Toward a Free-Range Intellectual History,” which ultimately challenges them. In opening her essay, which focusses on modern ideas about privacy, Igo, like Ratner-Rosenhagen, feels compelled to defend her use of sources “at some remove from the traditional precincts of intellectual history.” Writing about broad concepts such as privacy – or normality or the free market – she explains, “may require not just different kinds of sources than more tightly-contained entities like post-structuralism, the Gini co-efficient, or the Ashcan school but a different sensibility altogether regarding authorship and intellectual authority” (324).

To fully understand modern ideas about privacy, Igo contends, scholars need to go beyond analyzing legal discussions concerning “the right to privacy,” to analyze the transformation in everyday notions of privacy ushered in by new technology such as postcards, X-rays, telegraphs, telephones, and cameras, all of which made intimate information and communications more accessible to strangers. An eminently “flexible cultural construct,” the idea of privacy “crisscrosses the domains of law, technology, the state, medicine, architecture and literature,” as well “gossip, media [and] mores,” and demands that the historian follow suit. However, such an approach, according to Igo, requires nothing short of an “unfencing of intellectual history,” which tends to focus on ideas associated with “specific disciplinary or expert communities” rather than the thinking that “goes on out in the open fields” (327).

Igo's essay may signal a change on the horizon, as do other recent developments in the field of intellectual history such as the establishment of the African American Intellectual History Society in 2014, and the ongoing development of a Digital Atlas of Native American Intellectual Traditions designed to connect the “the intellectual histories of America's indigenous peoples, across time and across territories.”Footnote ² There are “worlds” in American intellectual history, but they are not fully represented in this book.

As the late Michael O'Brien explains in this volume dedicated to his memory, The Worlds of American Intellectual History arose as an effort to take stock of US intellectual history in a way that had not been done since the 1977 Wingspread conference. At Wingspread, a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Wisconsin, intellectual historians considered a crisis in their subdiscipline. Their field had thrived in the early post-World War II years but was now under threat from the dramatic rise of social history. Wingspread participants asserted the value of studying ideas and the elites who formulated them. Yet most also incorporated insights from social history that rendered untenable the notion that intellectuals articulated a homogeneous “American Mind.” As Angus Burgin writes in his contribution to Worlds, the Wingspread historians thus “reconcile[d] themselves to the bounded nature of their analyses” (348). The hallmarks of the intellectual history they advocated were “an emphasis on communities of discourse, a close attention to social and cultural contexts, an inclusive approach to texts and subjects, and a suspicion of grand narratives” (355). That approach has dominated US intellectual history ever since. The conference helped create a sense of community among specialists in the field, leading to the creation of the Intellectual History Newsletter (which has since evolved into the journal Modern Intellectual History). Several of the Wingspread historians – Thomas Bender, David Hall, David Hollinger, Thomas Haskell, Dorothy Ross – became leaders in the field and trained a new generation of scholars.

The volume that the Wingspread conference produced, New Directions in American Intellectual History (1979), had a coherent project that The Worlds of American Intellectual History lacks. Contributors to Worlds struggle to formulate a clear rationale for why a new moment of self-awareness is needed among US intellectual historians. Unlike at Wingspread, where there was a pressing need to reformulate the aims of the field, most of the seventeen essays in Worlds suggest that there is no need for new directions. If at Wingspread intellectual history got an overhaul, all it receives here is a tune-up. Indeed, Worlds provides example after example that American intellectual history is thriving. Most of the individual essays are excellent, and Worlds serves as a superb demonstration of what the field has to offer. But the volume is unfortunately less than the sum of its parts because it adds little to our understanding of the methods, structure, and content of American intellectual history.

The basic methods of intellectual history seem relatively unchanged from the time of Wingspread. The central goal, as James Kloppenberg comments in his introduction, is “to understand the complex, dialectical relation between ideas of all sorts and the dynamics of history” (7). I am not persuaded by Burgin's argument that the field is beginning to undertake more ambitious work beyond the study of particular “communities of discourse” as described by David Hollinger at Wingspread. Hollinger's phrase recognized that those who formulate ideas are specific social actors addressing common questions, not tribunes of a monolithic “American Mind.” But there was nothing inherently narrow about the concept. In fact, Hollinger deploys it in Worlds to show how intellectuals have debated the supernatural aspects of Christianity. He thereby makes a highly ambitious and compelling argument that the US is not some great exception to the “secularization” that has occurred in other Western societies.

Daniel Rodgers's essay advocates a “social history of ideas in motion” that traces how “ideas jump the tracks of the academic disciplines that spawn them” to have wider social resonances (307). It is beautifully written and convincing, but explains what Rodgers has done throughout his career rather than advance any new agenda. By focussing on providing exemplary essays and confining methodological discussions mainly to three essays in Part V of the book, the editors of Worlds concede that there is not much need for theoretical debate today. As O'Brien comments, “Our authors seem content to assume what once was contentious” (369).

The only significant methodological debate in Worlds is between those like Sarah Igo who advocate “free-range intellectual history” and those like Joel Isaac who want to maintain a tighter focus on “first-order” thinkers. Igo contends that “intellectual constructions rarely emerge straightforwardly from the places or people we expect … and our best chance of grasping them is through an expansive vision of our field” (330). Isaac worries that too often “the knotty technical content and normative standing of philosophical arguments gives way to the assessment of philosophical texts as engines of cultural politics” (202). There is a real difference here for how one conceives of intellectual history's audience and purpose. For Igo, the audience is fellow historians and the purpose is to show how ideas have contributed to major historical developments. For Isaac, the audience is philosophers and social theorists who need a good dose of historicism and the purpose is “making normative claims that appropriate the fruits of historical inquiry” (220). However, Worlds gives the clear impression that both these kinds of intellectual history can easily coexist and that indeed the field is better off for such diversity.

Worlds offers too narrow an understanding of the structure of the field today. This is despite James Kloppenberg's introduction that celebrates the “richness” and “diversity” of a field that is a “commons rather than a fenced-off reserve.” However, the selection of contributors belies this inclusive conception. While New Directions in Intellectual History is best known as the “Wingspread volume,” Worlds might come to be known as the “Cambridge volume” for the preponderance of scholars associated with either Cambridge University or its sister university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Eleven of the nineteen contributors are either faculty or former doctoral students at one of these two institutions. Every single one of these contributors is worthy of inclusion. But a wider selection of scholars would have led to a more diverse representation of the field and produced livelier debate.

It is particularly striking that no contributors are leaders of the Society for US Intellectual History (S-USIH) or the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS). The emergence of the S-USIH, first as a blog in 2007, then as a fully fledged organization in 2011, has been the most significant development in the subdiscipline in the past decade. It has energized and publicized US intellectual history. There is a major disconnect in the subfield between the contributors to Worlds (scholars with plum positions at elite universities) and those who are central in running the subfield's central institution (who teach at less prestigious institutions and are often graduate students and non-tenure-track faculty). Any serious effort to understand the structure of the field of intellectual history today would have to grapple with this fact, but it is one boundary that the contributors to Worlds do not question.

I am also uncertain whether the “commons” is the right metaphor for the subfield, and not only because the prevalence of livestock-grazing analogies in this volume is jarring (Igo compares “free-range intellectual history” to the conditions needed for unfenced pigs to flourish). The “commons” suggests that intellectual history is the place where scholars of different kinds come together. But it is more accurate that those trained in intellectual history possess skills that allow them to make special contributions to history and related fields. If defined as a method, then intellectual history is perhaps less a commons than a specialized agricultural college.

Moreover, when a volume evinces so much celebration of border crossing, it's likely that the boundaries no longer matter. Worlds assumes too easily that intellectual history as a subfield exists much the same as it did at Wingspread, only that it is a more secure position today. But actually the historical field itself has shifted significantly. It is less divided by methods than it was a few decades ago when differences between intellectual, social, cultural, and political history structured the field. The most recent subfields to emerge, such as “transnational history” and “the history of capitalism,” synthesize all these earlier methods and the discipline is more defined than ever by chronological divisions and subject matter. I suspect that one of the reasons that the volume slights race and ethnicity is because until recently most of the scholars who study their intellectual history have thought of themselves mainly as scholars of race and ethnicity – not as intellectual historians. But the formation of the AAIHS in 2014 shows that a new generation of scholars of African American history are claiming the label of “intellectual history,” expanding the boundaries of the field.

An inherent ambiguity of the term “intellectual history” is that it can refer to either a method or a content: the study of intellectuals. But one of the remarkable features of Worlds is that it evacuates the concept of “intellectual.” To be sure, Worlds contributors debate which thinkers we should study: “first-order thinkers” or ephemeral ones whose ideas illuminate the culture of the time. But particularly neglected in Worlds are those who were originally designated by the term “intellectual”: people well versed in making sophisticated arguments, but who deliberately sought a wider impact by addressing audiences beyond their areas of specialized expertise on pressing issues of their day. The index to Worlds contains thirty-six references to abstract philosopher John Rawls, but only one to Jane Addams and C. Wright Mills, and none to James Baldwin and Betty Friedan.

The essays in Worlds are consistently excellent and its very publication has sparked dialogue among intellectual historians. There is considerable virtue to its embrace of methodological pluralism. But Worlds lacks the stakes evident in the Wingspread volume. Intellectual historians have every reason to feel good about the state of their field today. But they should not be complacent about the state of intellectual discourse in our society and the institutions we need to sustain it.