The following essays present six distinct but broadly compatible narratives of scholarship in United States intellectual history over the past half-century: postwar dominance, a season of despair, and then the field's rise, transformation, and expansion. The essays are a feast of erudition; any reader will come away from them with a list of “must-read” books. But there is much more here. These are rigorous and sophisticated explorations—at once historical and prescriptive—of a flourishing field. The writers span different generations, with authors representative of older, middling, and younger scholars. These appraisals are various yet they are unambiguously within the mainstream, tracking the current understandings of the somewhat fuzzy boundaries of the field. While additional writers might have further enriched the coverage, these writers together offer a fair representation of current practice in the field.

Committed, as we historians are, to a conversation with the past in the interest of better understanding the present and the possibilities of the future, the essays refer back to an earlier consideration of the field, the Wingspread Conference of 1977.Footnote ¹ Two of the contributors to this symposium (David Hall and David Hollinger) and I were participants in that conference and therefore officially represent the older generation. Moving forward the generational markers are less clear, but they extend to the category of recently tenured. Given the commonplace sociological assumption of intergenerational tensions in the arts and disciplinary communities, the substantial agreement on the contours of the field's history since World War II is striking and welcome.

With a greater or lesser emphasis the essays begin with the 1940s and 1950s, when American intellectual history emerged not only as a distinct field but also as a particularly highly regarded one. Intellectual historians carried the big themes of American history, and they presumed to speak for American history tout court. Intellectual historians were comfortable making reference to an all-encompassing “America,” and they used such phrasings as the “American mind” or American “myths” and “symbols.”Footnote ² This expansive and implicit (and sometimes explicit) consensus reading of American history was challenged by the rise of social history, which emphasized class, ethno-religious, gender, and racial differences. Social history focused on nonelite Americans, initially referred to as “the inarticulate,” which posed an obvious challenge to intellectual history. And these early social historians, often working with quantitative methods, emphasized behavior rather than thought.Footnote ³ By contrast, in the 1990s and beyond much of social history increasingly came to take subjective meaning seriously.Footnote ⁴ In a shift accelerated by the “linguistic turn,” social history became sociocultural or simply cultural history. Though there is some tension between “culture studies” and “intellectual history,” the “linguistic turn,” with its focus on language as a form of historical agency, was a positive force in the recovery from the despair of the 1970s to the more recent expansion and standing of the field of intellectual history in the United States.

At Wingspread in 1977 the participants had to either find a way out of the “American-mind” model or prepare the field for death. Many approaches were discussed, but two seemed later to bear fruit: one was to situate thinkers in their social or institutional context. The study of academic disciplines and the professions was one product of this approach.Footnote ⁵ The other, most clearly articulated by David Hollinger, was to follow the “discourse of intellectuals” in a “communicative context” that might be a disciplinary community, or a wider public commons.Footnote ⁶ Either of these approaches—and there was some overlap—would avoid generalizing beyond the specific groups associated with one's source base. Certainly the younger historians at Wingspread went on to eschew broad generalizations about “America”; they tended to restrict their generalizations to the community of discourse they studied.Footnote ⁷ The essays here show that attention to the social foundations of thinking and conversation in public has produced more complex, richer, and more embedded intellectual history than had been imagined at Wingspread.

In retrospect—in his essay here—David Hall notes another problem with the works of the major intellectual historians of the earlier period, such as those of Merle Curti, Henry May, and Sydney Ahlstrom, a problem not yet evident at Wingspread. Examining the work of his teachers’ generation—whose work he admired for their capacity to frame their stories large—he now faults them for grounding these narratives upon a teleological path toward “modernity” or American “maturity.” It is difficult to grasp how they could hold onto that faith in the wake of the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Perhaps their acceptance of the idea of American exceptionalism is a partial answer. But it is worth keeping in mind that many of that generation's leading historians were influenced by the neoorthodox theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, and that may have been important in enabling them to hope for good while fully aware of evil.Footnote ⁸ Such a presumption is harder to accept today; history does not seem to unfold that way.

Perhaps intellectual historians are now ready to think about the big frame again. Two of the essays here explicitly propose such themes. David Hollinger sees “accommodation” made by Protestant Christianity to the Enlightenment as the central theme, while Jeffrey Sklansky proposes capitalism—considered as a system of representation, a way of seeing, and a framework of trust—as the big theme that could frame the intellectual and cultural history of the United States.

Certainly Hollinger, who knows the subject well, is right to recognize the significant place of Protestant Christianity, including its suspicion of the Enlightenment by many believers. But I think his characterization of that accommodation is both too tightly bound and presumed to be too pervasive. A slight rephrasing of his position would easily win me over: a public and fairly complex conversation between religious and Enlightenment values and agendas with highly contingent outcomes. Sklansky's placement of capitalism as the major theme of American intellectual history captures the cultural aspects of Marx that were earlier picked up by Walter Benjamin and more recently Marshall Berman, though Sklansky does not cite them.Footnote ⁹ Closer to home, such an intellectual and cultural history might look like Daniel T. Rodgers's Age of Fracture (2011), James Livingston's Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940 (1994), or, perhaps more surprisingly, the stunning chapters on what I would call the ontological transformation of corn, wheat, and hogs by capital in William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1992). Sklansky may have something like these chapters in mind when he cites Lorraine Daston's notion of “historical epistemology.”

One of the virtues of both Hollinger's and Sklansky's core themes is that in their different ways they open out to cultural history as a fruitful partner of intellectual history. The terms of that emergent or potential partnership, mentioned in all the essays, are not yet clear. But the coming together, if it is to be, will be more complicated than the optimistic version articulated as early as 1981 by the historian of European intellectual history William Bouwsma. In “From the History of Ideas to History of Meaning” he argued that cultural and intellectual history had come to a common object of inquiry: the history of meaning in the sense of Clifford Geertz's famous image of the human as “an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.”Footnote ¹⁰ He rightly hailed Carl E. Schorske's brilliant Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1980) as an example of this melding of intellectual and cultural history. This example, with its focus on the arts and elite culture, makes clear the relevance of his point for European historiography. But it does not line up with cultural history as the field developed in the historiography of the United States, with its antielitism and its concern with identity, agency, and resistance. That said, there are some fine examples of a blending of intellectual and cultural history in American historiography: T. J. Jackson Lears's No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture (1994), which writes American cultural history in a European key, or Gail Bederman's creative deployment of Michel Foucault and the “linguistic turn” in her Manliness and “Civilization”: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (1995).

The most extended commentary on cultural history and its promise for work in intellectual history comes from David Hall and Joan Shelley Rubin. Already at Wingspread, Hall had introduced developments in European cultural history, and here he and Rubin, who have both been engaged with the history of the book and of reading, emphasize the substantial resources European cultural historians have to offer. This version of cultural history has transformed thinking about the material forms and social interactions that put ideas in motion and shape their reception. If Hall has much good to say about cultural history, he worries that the broad interest in cultural history is part of the discipline's movement away from the study of politics. And he also makes a distinction between the European practice of cultural history and the pattern of its development in the United States, which prompts concern about some recent directions in American studies. He draws a line at a recent and much-discussed book that is an extreme example (and perhaps intended to be extreme): A New Literary History of America (2009), edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors. Here, he fears, cultural history has become a sort of carnival of cultural expressions, making the public culture a free-for-all, without cohering elements or any need for them, and no expectation of cumulative knowledge.

A rigorous American cultural history as we encounter it in Rubin's essay focuses on the material form and institutional framing within which ideas and art take physical form, enter social life, and are distributed through cities, nations, and beyond. Her cultural history addresses patterns of reception or even appropriation. Readers, listeners, viewers make their own the cultural productions of those initially made by others. I think what she describes is very nearly akin to the point crisply made by James Kloppenberg: intellectual history in the future will be “embodied, embedded, and extended.” Intellectual history as practiced in the American field has always been highly attentive to context, and I think that whether we think of it in terms of its expansion into cultural history or in terms of Kloppenberg's aphorism, the field is on its way to becoming more so.

In this spirit Leslie Butler envisions in the future an “ecumenical” approach to methods and the domain of inquiry in intellectual history. For this idea she will find quick assent from Americanists; it seems inherent in our somewhat inchoate community of scholars. She also offers an important proposal about how we might identify the ideas of our principal concern. She suggests a move from the history of ideas to the “significance of ideas in history.” This proposal is of a piece with her observation that in recent scholarship there seems to be more attention given to ideas in public. If we follow this suggestion, we would examine those ideas that affect history and presumably those that do not, for each outcome would invite a historical explanation. Kloppenberg may have something similar in mind when he refers to a focus on ideas “as contested and active.” And this in turn bears a clear relation to Hollinger's support for thinking in terms of “argument” in public, a slightly higher standard than that offered by Butler or Kloppenberg, and narrower than some of Hollinger's other expressions on this point, probably because this essay is largely focused around the pedagogical challenge of producing a sequence of texts for undergraduate instruction. At Wingspread he offered a focal point at once open, specific, and active: “questions.”Footnote ¹¹ I think this is right—disciplinary discourse is driven by ever-evolving questions—and so is public discourse.

On this basis, I would prefer a fairly loose framing of the public play of ideas, something motivated by a pattern of concern but akin to a Rortyan process: the endless public “conversation” and its participants (with awareness of those who may be excluded from that conversation).Footnote ¹² Thus the individuals who would be the principal focus of intellectual historians would be those who think in public about matters of public concern. Such an approach is very much in the tradition of John Dewey's notion of a public and of intellect and politics as complementary quests for better and better common knowledge.Footnote ¹³ Admittedly, aspects of Dewey's notion of the public are dated. Yet it is worth noting that in an important recent essay on the political responsibility of intellect, Bruno Latour, whose recent work has turned increasingly to Dewey, puts concern, with its connotations of both importance and urgency, at the center of intellect in public life.Footnote ¹⁴

There are, as these essays reveal, several levels of analysis that come together with a focus on thought in public. The making and transformation of public culture may be the focal point, but how new ideas emerge in the minds of individuals and in public needs more probing than simply following the battle of words in texts. All thinking is situated; there is no view from nowhere as individuals and groups try to make sense of the world. That is the condition of being human; we would be loath to sacrifice our subjective presence for the sake of pure reason.Footnote ¹⁵ Perhaps the best guide to how we think new things about the world and about ourselves to offer to the conversation of humankind is from William James, in Pragmatism:

How does this process of changing opinion and ideas at the level of the private individual relate to the public culture? Let me suggest how it might work, using the public culture of a metropolis as the context.Footnote ¹⁷ Basically, the public culture of the metropolis is the product of a set of relations between the interior worlds of private life and the larger terrain of the public. One brings into the public space of the city feelings, ideas, interests, ideology, and identity. In contact with the plurality of the public square, whether that is a public place, a political assembly, an academic discipline, or the cultural apparatus, an individual has a communicative impact or there is an explanation why not. That communication may be immediately representational by presence—it may also be words or art. Conversely, the metropolitan experience of contact with pluralism and with the unfamiliar, whether ideas or experiences, constitutes the strain that, according to James, begins the process of rethinking. One can think of a crude example in the case of Irving Kristol, who often claims, referring to himself, that a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged. A richer example is the impact of New York City on Margaret Fuller and her impact on the city's literary lifeFootnote ¹⁸

No participant in a public conversation stands alone. They live and work in an institutional matrix that includes the larger cultural apparatus, professions and class position, political bodies, scholarly disciplines, ethno-religious institutions and traditions, and more. This leads the intellectual historian into social and cultural history. Other dimensions of cultural history as discussed by Hall and Rubin come into play here: transmission and reception. Especially in modern times, participants in the public conversation are often part of a particular discursive community, which could be defined by scientific or humanistic inquiry; or an artistic or reform movement; or a class, racial, or religious community, among others. But their ideas flow beyond those bounds to be part of a conversation in publics of multiple scales: local, national, and transnational or cosmopolitan. Outstanding examples of such scalar extension are Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (1998) by Daniel Rodgers; Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (1986) by James Kloppenberg; and Wai Chee Dimock's Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (2006). And in this, we must remember Rubin's important point that the local and transnational are one in the mind of the thinker or the audience. So transnational thinking can be extended to the ends of the earth, but it is still of the United States, simultaneously participating to varying degrees in multiple cultures.

Finally, with so much focus here on the intellect in public life and politics, we might ask, what is the relation of the intellectual historian to that public? Kloppenberg brings forward the notion of a “pragmatic hermeneutics,” a term he has previously applied to the work of Hollinger.Footnote ¹⁹ By this phrase he means to articulate the following goal: “understanding the past on its own terms, and equally important, interpreting its significance for the present.” With or without that terminology, it is clear that this group of intellectual historians seeks to do just that—and they have in their work so far done just that. Their disciplinary learning has illuminated the past, while at the same time it has been a contribution to the public culture of the present through their writing and lecturing, both in the classroom and beyond.