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.Footnote ² 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.

The problem is that the turn to culture and language was driven by epistemological concerns; the assumption has been that meaning and its constitution through linguistic and cultural processes are all over the entire object of historical study. Under such conditions, it would be strange to think that we can put the genie of meaning back in the bottle, and somehow get “beyond” language and culture. The most recent attempts to historicize the linguistic and cultural turns are aimed at emancipating historians from a dead end by characterizing the linguistic turn as “parochial” and limited, a “foreclosure” of possibility, safely contained in the past, rather than a general epistemological and cultural condition. The critique launched by Gabrielle Spiegel simply asserts a space of trauma and event outside language as the cause of the turn to language, and the one initiated by Judith Surkis takes place from entirely within a mode of analysis that can only be characterized as linguistic. The options appear to be an assertion that there simply is a pre-linguistic “reality” which we can know and identify, on the one hand, or on the other hand that the linguistic turn was never really as totalizing as its promoters and critics have suggested, so that we can learn from it as we move past and beyond it. The irony of Surkis's argument is that it is an attempt to constrain the implications of the linguistic turn by demonstrating that the very term “linguistic turn” was a linguistic constraint. It uses the methods of linguistic approaches against the very object that it purports to see from the outside.Footnote ³

We can certainly take a transnational turn, or bring the state back in, or see capitalism as an extensive set of forms that are more than merely economic—all of which historians have done. But what we can't do, except through an act of deliberate and willful ignorance, is to get past culture or beyond language. As Lionel Trilling wrote over a half century ago, the impulse to get beyond culture is itself a signal feature of cultural modernism.Footnote ⁴ That some historians think it is possible to turn back the clock, to simply affirm the “reality” of history independent of language or the structure of social action independent of culture is a sign of the incompleteness of the linguistic turn even among those historians who have claimed to take it most seriously. Both the cultural and linguistic turns do not take us down a dead-end road from which we must exit lest the possibility of history itself is nullified; rather, they are the very conditions under which any future historical research and writing is possible.

While we may not be able to get “beyond” these revolutionary developments, we can go back and reevaluate them and their implications, especially for those approaches to forms of historical scholarship that preceded them. Among European intellectual historians who were the most forceful proponents of a linguistic turn in the late 1970s and early 1980s—people like Dominic LaCapra, Mark Poster, and Hayden White—the need to differentiate the new intellectual history from the old often led them to castigate these previous forms as founded on conceptions that were fundamentally at odds with understandings of the power of culture and language to constitute reality. In William Bouwsma's well-known essay from that period, the old “history of ideas” was set in opposition to the new “history of meaning.” Among Americanists—as in the Wingspread volume on New Directions in American Intellectual History—the invocation of Clifford Geertz, Thomas Kuhn, and Quentin Skinner was set against the “old” intellectual history of Vernon Parrington, Perry Miller, Merle Curti, Henry Steele Commager, and others. The point was to stress “the new” as a fundamental departure or break from “the old.” The old intellectual history—once the cutting edge of historical scholarship in the mid-twentieth century—was routinely dismissed as bounded by outworn and epistemologically inadequate conceptions of abstract “Mind,” or dualisms of “ideas” versus “reality”; it was overly “reductionist,” full of unearned generalizations, or theoretically naive. It had nothing to teach the new linguistically and culturally informed approaches to text and meaning.Footnote ⁵

The new intellectual history defined between 1965 and 1985 has now become the established voice of intellectual historiography, particularly on the Americanist side. A recent forum in Modern Intellectual History, for instance, takes up the narrower vision of intellectual history developed at Wingspread, in which discourse is defined by intention, and ideas are understood as tools or instruments. No one is any longer debating the merits of approaches associated with Skinner, J. G. A. Pocock, Geertz and Kuhn; rather, such approaches have become internalized as part of the prevailing ethos of the community of practitioners. One of the participants in the Modern Intellectual History forum could even title her essay “From the History of Ideas to Ideas in History,” with a nod to Bouwsma's well-known essay of the early 1980s and with a focus on integrating intellectual history into history writ large. The crisis of the late 1970s and early 1980s has created a set of approaches confident that they have overcome the negative features of intellectual history at the mid-century. The story of the transition from the “old” intellectual history to the “new” has become an oft-told tale, one by which current practitioners continue to convince themselves that they are on the right side of history.Footnote ⁶

One of the disparaged forms of the era of the late 1970s was the approach associated with Arthur Lovejoy and the history of ideas, an approach that in the 1950s and early 1960s had still represented the pinnacle of interdisciplinary sophistication in the humanities.Footnote ⁷ According to Mark Poster, for instance, in his 1981 brief for a Foucauldian archaeology, the Lovejoy approach involved a “search for shifting configurations of eternal ideas as expressed by the most refined philosophical minds,” and was part of an established consensus about intellectual history that emphasized four traits: the unity of the Western intellectual tradition, its continuity through evolution, its commitment to values of freedom and reason, and its preference for the internal coherence and noncontradiction of thought. These orientations and commitments, according to Poster, were challenged by the revolutionary departure of Foucault from each and every one. Lovejoy appeared as the antithesis of Foucault in these accounts, committed to “eternal ideas”; an unbroken and coherent Western tradition; “refined philosophical minds”; the mind at work in an embrace of transhistorical reason, independent of language, power, and contradiction.Footnote ⁸ If Foucault, Derrida, Geertz, Kuhn, Rorty and others pointed the way to a new intellectual history of epistemes, discourses, systems of meaning, discontinuous paradigms, and radical contingencies, it seemed obvious to their proponents that the supposedly naive approaches associated with Lovejoy and his ilk had none of these features, and should be relegated to the dustbin of history.

Representing the entering wedge in the reinterpretation of the history of political thought in the 1960s and 1970s, the followers of Skinner and Pocock rejected the focus on the history of ideas for a new concern with language, argumentation, discourse, and incommensurability of historical ideas. Skinner explicitly criticized Lovejoy's approach as committing the great historical sin of abstracting from concrete conditions: “the main doubt about this method,” said Skinner, “has been that, in focusing on ideas rather than their uses in argument, it has seemed insensitive to the strongly contrasting ways in which a given concept can be put to work by different writers in different periods.” In structuralist terms, Lovejoy was all langue and no parole, concerned with overarching forms and common meanings, and not with the specific textual or speech act and its concrete consequences. Elsewhere Skinner defended his rejection of the history of ideas: “there can be no histories of concepts; there can only be histories of their uses in argument.” Skinner's Wittgensteinian perspective—shared with some varieties of pragmatism—that ideas are tools, rejected the notion that historical meaning has sources broader than the specific argumentative context.Footnote ⁹ The history of argument and discourse was a replacement for the history of ideas, which was being ushered off-stage.

Now, as historians purport to look beyond the cultural and linguistic turns, we face a moment of historiographical reevaluation. Four decades after the turn away from the Lovejoy approach, it makes sense to look back and see the history of ideas in a new light, one less driven by the need to mark the future off from the past or to create a caricatured old history unlike the new in all its particulars. I want to suggest, in fact, that even in our linguistically and culturally informed era the history of ideas as an approach to the past has something important to offer us.

A number of historians have begun to emphasize the limitations of a historical practice that prefers the concrete detailing of a chronologically and geographically specific site of intellectual production to the big picture of ideas as they change across the span of centuries. David Armitage, for instance, while distancing himself from what he calls “Lovejoy's creaking metaphors of ‘unit-ideas’ as chemical elements,” has asserted a return of “long-range intellectual history,” as evidenced in recent and forthcoming works by distinguished historians such as Martin Jay on “experience,” Jerrold Siegel on “the self,” Darrin McMahon on “happiness” and “genius,” Sophia Rosenfeld on “common sense,” and James Kloppenberg on “democracy.”Footnote ¹⁰ McMahon has argued that Lovejoy's critics—whom he identifies with two approaches: the contextualism of Skinner and the social history of ideas of Robert Darnton—both mischaracterized his thought as they sought to bury it, and unknowingly took up elements of his thought and approach in their own practice. Identifying much of the same recent body of work that Armitage has cited, McMahon is not afraid to link the renewed interest in long-range intellectual history of specific ideas to the return of something like Lovejoy's project.Footnote ¹¹ Among intellectual historians, the idea that we might gain something by looking at forests rather than concentrating all our attention on individual trees is very much at the center of discussion, whether Lovejoy and his particular methods are embraced or castigated.

Instead of imagining, as Armitage does, that Lovejoy's approach has been discredited and is dead and buried, I want to suggest that the history of ideas offers us an approach that is entirely consistent with the assumption that culture and language, as symbol systems, are bounded, contingent, contradictory, historically relative, and semantically pluralistic—in other words, it doesn't pretend to take us “beyond” the cultural and linguistic turns, nor to return us to a simpler era before the turmoil wrought by “theory”. But it does give us greater clarity about how ideas resemble and differ from one another historically and the ways in which broader ideational contexts, rather than immediate motive, text or context, shape historical meanings. We might understand the history of ideas as a form of cultural history—concerned with the ways in which ideas themselves are the substance of cultures. Ideas can be understood as cultural entities that shape and define the modes of perception, knowing, and being within human communities. Instead of thinking of ideas as discrete objects entertained and utilized by individual thinkers, the Lovejoy approach pushes us to think of ideas as forming cultural environments in which particular texts and cultural expressions take place. A careful reading of Lovejoy, his critics, and the historiographical milieu of the mid-twentieth century reveals a Lovejoy different from the widely received view. In order to evaluate the Lovejoy approach, it makes sense to pay attention to what Lovejoy actually did, to read his theoretical and methodological writings in light of his practice and his response to critics.

Arthur Lovejoy has generated relatively little attention as an object of intellectual history. This essay does not attempt to remedy that oversight, nor to trace the parameters of his career in philosophy, intellectual history, and academic politics. If I err in portraying Lovejoy's thought as unchanging and static over a career that spanned more than fifty years, it is because my aims are less to portray the evolution and development of Lovejoy's thought and more to recover some of the general unifying aspect of his outlook that might serve us well today. Lovejoy was trained as a philosopher, and published widely in both philosophy and the history of ideas. As a professor at Johns Hopkins University from 1910 to 1939, he was the founder of the History of Ideas Club in 1923, and, after his retirement from Hopkins, of the Journal of the History of Ideas in 1940. He published widely from the first decade of the twentieth century until his death in 1962, and is probably best known for his essays on a variety of features of eighteenth-century European thought, as well as for The Great Chain of Being (1936). Although Lovejoy was the figure most associated with the history of ideas, others such as George Boas and Philip Wiener played pivotal roles in defining the field and the journal during Lovejoy's lifetime. Lovejoy is widely recognized as the chief theorist and practitioner of this school.Footnote ¹²

Lovejoy, and the entire history-of-ideas approach, became associated with a single concept in the discourse that came to reject the old intellectual history: the concept, most famously articulated in the opening chapter of The Great Chain of Being—of “unit-ideas.” For Lovejoy's critics, a selective reading of this theoretical statement, rather than an attention to the way in which this statement oriented and made sense of the practice of the history of ideas, came to define the “Lovejoy approach.” Lovejoy compared the history of ideas to analytic chemistry; it was easy to read Lovejoy as saying that the unit-idea was, like the elemental atom of chemistry, somehow a naturally given and irreducible form that could be combined with other atoms to form molecules, but that retained its consistent and universal shape and meaning throughout history. From this misconception of Lovejoy's thought about ideas in history as involving the analysis of indivisible and unchanging elements or units came a kind of caricature of the history of ideas—a vision of eternal Platonic forms, in which the historian's task is to push aside the messy particularity of intellectual expression at any given time or place, and find the underlying essence of the unit-idea. As Louis Mink, one of Lovejoy's philosophical critics, put it, “Lovejoy's doctrine of elements characterizes ideas in such a way that (like physical constants or the number 2) they cannot have a history at all, that is, undergo development and change.”Footnote ¹³

This image of the history of ideas pictured it as a radically decontextualizing discipline, concerned with wrenching ideas out of the environment in which they were found in order to erase historical difference. The postmodern critique of Lovejoy echoed a mid-century critique, when the history of ideas was at the pinnacle of its academic prestige. That critique came from a school of thought that contemporary historians have repudiated with even more intensity than they have the history of ideas: the school of Geistesgeschichte, which, following Dilthey, Weber, and Cassirer, sought to identify the unified cultural wholes of particular historical periods. The purveyors of the idea of the zeitgeist, like numerous historicists before and after them, argued for a form of cultural specificity and holism that they imagined was at odds with the analytical method of Lovejoy. In a well-known debate between Lovejoy and Leo Spitzer in 1944, Spitzer argued that the history of ideas abstracts ideas from their specific cultural, “spiritual,” and emotive context, and in doing so fails to understand the cultural whole, since the part takes its meaning only from the system of ideas of a particular historical moment; there can be no identity of ideas over a period of time, only a local meaning. In this debate, Spitzer was on the side of a notion of culture that was totalistic and homogenizing. Lovejoy, on the other hand, was on the side of a pluralistic understanding of culture, a notion that ideas can form historical environments beset by internal contradictions derived from the logic of ideas inherited from the past. Lovejoy argued that there was no contradiction between thinking in terms of specifically formed cultural wholes and analyzing their idea components; that one needn't choose between cultural holism and analytical historicism.Footnote ¹⁴ And, as even Louis Mink admitted, the critique of Lovejoy for his atomism

The tendency of critics to take a theoretical statement out of the actual context of Lovejoy's textual practice has led many to think of him as an “intellectual atomist,” overlooking the fact that even his most famous work was the study of a “complex” of ideas in a plurality of expressive forms.Footnote ¹⁶

Lovejoy's contemporary critics, like those advocates for a new intellectual history in the 1970s and 1980s, largely had him wrong. He was far more interested in the plurality of meaning, the surprising diversity of ideas with common and divergent features, the way in which the presence of an idea reshaped the meaning of its neighbors. He was a historicist and pluralist first and foremost. For instance, in his famous essay on “‘Nature’ as Aesthetic Norm,” he discriminated between eighteen separate and distinct meanings of the term “nature,” as it was used in reference to aesthetics in the eighteenth century. And in his much-discussed 1923 essay “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms,” he argues that “the word ‘romantic’ has come to mean so many things that, by itself, it means nothing. It has ceased to perform the function of a verbal sign.” Sounding very much like a contemporary critic of abstract categories, he asserted that “we should learn to use the word ‘Romanticism’ in the plural.”Footnote ¹⁷ When Pocock recently argued that we should move from thinking about the Enlightenment to understanding multiple Enlightenments, echoing a position that Henry May had articulated in practice thirty years earlier, one could only imagine Lovejoy nodding in agreement.Footnote ¹⁸ Lovejoy was neither a radical nominalist nor a Platonic universalist; for him, the question how much remained consistent in an idea was a historical question. The answer to that question might vary from instance to instance. That stance rendered his overall view and approach pluralist and open to varieties of contingency.

The key to understanding Lovejoy's concept of “unit-ideas” is to realize that he was not making an ontological statement about the existence of distinct atomic elements, but was providing historians with an analytical method, a way to examine bodies of thought in order to identify both similarities and differences over time and between texts, a way to examine the contradictions and opposing outcomes produced by the tensions involved in what he called idea complexes. Like some post-structuralists who sought to undermine the alleged coherence and integrity of texts or bodies of thought, to show how they produced their own disavowals or contradictions, Lovejoy was interested in how patterns of thought held together contradictory elements that analysis could unveil. If one thinks of the “unit-idea” as the analytical breakdown of the apparent coherency of the idea complex, rather than as an ontological element, one has a better sense of what Lovejoy was up to.

The reason Lovejoy sometimes appears as a nominalist critic of general categories such as Romanticism and Nature, and other times as a builder of complexes with centuries-long histories such as the Great Chain of Being, is that in both cases he did not imagine ideas to have a consistent uniformity. Rather, he believed, as a philosopher and a historian, in the temporal particularity of a world of change, a world where nothing is fixed and permanent. That world of change was incompatible with the method that Lovejoy's critics attributed to him. In fact, Lovejoy's most important work, The Great Chain of Being, makes no sense as an example of a history founded on a static and permanent set of ideas manifest in a variety of representations; its subject matter is precisely that attempt to imagine the world in terms of a fixed hierarchy, and Lovejoy's historical conclusion is that such an attempt ended in failure:

Lovejoy's conclusion here, as elsewhere, was that a fixed order of unchanging ideas and forms—what his critics imagined “unit-ideas” to be—was incompatible with a historical and temporal understanding of the world.

Lovejoy, in fact, was more noted for his discrimination between ideas that appeared similar than for his conflation of similar ideas as having a common core or essential meaning. He utilized the notion of a “unit-idea” as an analytical tool for making discriminations and revealing conceptual diversity, rather than as a foundation that defined the purpose or goal of study. Trained as a philosopher, Lovejoy was, after all, also a historian, with all the historian's interest in the particularity of the moment; his larger point was simply that the distinguishing features of that particularity could not be known and identified without a broad comparative framework in which to see the absence and presence of elements also found elsewhere. In a sense this was a fundamental recognition that meaning was both dependent on local context—that it was “local knowledge,” in Geertz's phrase—and explicable and identifiable by the analyst only through a recognition of difference from ideas in other times and places. As Lovejoy wrote in 1938, “the more you press in towards the heart of a narrowly bounded historical problem, the more likely you are to encounter in the problem itself a pressure which drives you outward beyond those bounds.”Footnote ²⁰ The history of ideas was committed to this navigation between the local meaning, with all its particularity and incommensurability with universalistic orientations, and the broad swath of historical development that created and fixed meanings that could be in play in different ways at different moments.

One of the reasons why the history of ideas appeared incommensurable with the linguistic turn was not only its supposed “universalism” but also its method of seeing meaning as something that could be broken down into constituent parts. For those who followed structuralist conceptions of language, meaning was generated through opposition, and was entirely dependent upon the structure of the whole. Saussure's doctrine of the “arbitrariness of the sign” meant not only that the relationship between word and concept was a matter of mutable convention, but that signs—the union of words and ideas—had no essential connection to the world or any fixed meaning at all. The meaning of a word was defined by what it was not. A term like “nature,” for instance, took its meaning in a discourse by its opposition to, say, “culture,” or “spirit” or “the supernatural.” Words had no essential unchanging meaning. The doctrine of “unit-ideas,” on the other hand, seemed to suggest that there were core units of meaning that could be added to each other, that meaning was cumulative rather than contingent and defined by a pattern of relations. Note that the holism of post-structuralism, though, was not new; its critique was similar to that leveled by advocates of Geistesgeschichte at the mid-century. Both, of course, had older roots in Hegelian philosophy. But in an age of anti-essentialism, Lovejoy and his method appeared hopelessly wedded to a kind of retrograde metaphysics, both atomistic and essentialist.

This criticism takes statements Lovejoy made and abstracts them from the broader practice of the history of ideas. Nowhere does he suggest that ideas can be found in a realm independent of history and particular textual expression. In his historical work Lovejoy was far more concerned with the way in which intellectual contexts and relations shaped meaning than with abstracting unit-ideas from texts.Footnote ²¹ The entire force of his historical oeuvre, from his early essays in the 1910s to The Great Chain of Being and his posthumously published Reflections on Human Nature, went in precisely the opposite direction from the abstraction others purported to find in his writing. Rather than abstracting ideas from historical circumstances, he was demonstrating the variety of meanings and logics arising out of the historical relationships of ideas with one another. In Lovejoy, ideas are not only the picture, but also the frame; Lovejoy solved the text/context conundrum by making ideas the context in which texts were written and received. For Lovejoy, the particular context in which an idea found expression shaped—if not determined—its meaning.

Unlike those historians of political language who followed Skinner, Lovejoy was willing to see meanings from different intellectual sources making their way from one era to the next or skipping in and around discursive formations. He emphasized how an inherited body of ideas both shapes new ways of thinking and is shaped by them, and he did so without subscribing to the idea that there are core or essential ideas that have a fixed meaning. Pragmatically, meaning is shaped by the relations of current discourse, but also by residual meanings from previous patterns of thought. The notion that we must choose between a version of intellectual history in which ideas either have a continuous history or are entirely the product of historical rupture and incommensurable paradigms seems now like a false choice.

The historicism and suspicion of universal essential meanings is everywhere in Lovejoy's writing, and is central to the analytical method he developed. The history of ideas and discursive approaches are very much the same in this regard. Both reject the primacy of authors and their motives as explanatory frameworks for understanding meaning in history. That is, both textual history and history of ideas start from the assumption that the best way to understand ideas as historical entities is to assume that they have a power independent of the limited motives or agency of those who have utilized them. Both the history of ideas and structuralist-influenced discursive approaches look for relations between ideas or texts rather than relations between the purposes and goals of historical actors and the words and ideas they use to express those goals—they both reject the standard historiographical dualism of reality versus ideas.

The rejection of this dualism might seem surprising for those who know only Lovejoy's philosophical writings. Lovejoy was a critic of what he called “the revolt against dualism” in philosophy; he associated that revolt with James's radical empiricism, Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy, Bertrand Russell's neutral monism, and other twentieth-century philosophical schools.Footnote ²² The question of the relationship between Lovejoy's work as a philosopher and the doctrines he subscribed to—sometimes referred to as “critical realism,” sometimes as “objective temporalism”—is a difficult one, which I can only address in a cursory manner here. As a philosopher, Lovejoy was probably best known for his critical analysis of doctrines he rejected, including pragmatism, anti-dualism, and all manners of philosophical idealism, rather than as the leader of a distinctive school of epistemology or metaphysics. This stance as critic suited the analytical style he brought to both philosophy and the history of ideas. He was expert at pulling apart the underlying assumptions and logics of the thought of others, of revealing the inner contradictions of bodies of thought that presented themselves as cogent and integrated. He is not remembered as much for his own philosophical work. Increasingly, for him, philosophical questions would be answered historically.

His critical realism was based on a “descriptive epistemology,” meaning that he started from describing the commonsense assumptions that people generally held about the differences between their ideas and a reality independent of their minds, and proceeded to demonstrate that philosophers who theoretically rejected such a dualistic conception of ideas and reality actually could not do without it, and returned to it as an assumption. It is relatively easy to see how this almost ethnographic approach to philosophy might inform a historical stance. The underlying continuity in both his philosophical and historical concerns was with questions of what others thought, but framed in terms of temporality, flux, contingency, evolution, and change. His interest in the historical development of the idea of evolution, for instance, is of a piece with his own philosophical perspective on emergence, novelty, and change. It also echoes his conclusion in The Great Chain of Being that the attempt to fix a timeless pattern of an ordered universe defined by plenitude and continuity fell apart in its attempt to accommodate consciousness of change—that there are no fixed and eternal ideas. We might see that substantive conclusion as indicative of the author's historicist imagination as it moved from philosophy to history.Footnote ²³

Lovejoy was one of a group of distinguished mid-twentieth-century Anglo-American figures who bridged the gap between philosophy and history: Michael Oakeshott, R.G. Collingwood, Isaiah Berlin, Morton White, and Maurice Mandelbaum, among others. Although there were critical differences between these thinkers, they represent a moment in the mid-century when philosophy and history were engaged in a dialogue, whether among the historians who were reading Collingwood's Idea of History as a counter to the push for history as a nomothetic social science, among the political philosophers of liberalism imagining with Berlin the historical legacy of positive and negative liberty, or among the intellectual historians who grappled with White's analysis of the underlying logic of Progressive Era social thought. What these philosopher/historians shared was a sense of the historicity of ideas, a notion that philosophical problems had to be conjoined in a profound way with historical consciousness.Footnote ²⁴

Collingwood, like Lovejoy, believed that history was a form of self-knowledge of the human mind; such a position led Collingwood to the conclusion that history had supplanted philosophy as the basis of knowledge of mind. Lovejoy did not share Collingwood's idea of intellectual reenactment as the core of the historical method, nor his idealism. Lovejoy always imagined that the historian was situated in such a way as to know more than the historical actors being examined; his method involved analysis and distance rather than reenactment. But he did share with Collingwood the sense that understanding the diversity of human thinking in a wide contextual way was a solution to the abstract aridity and limitations of philosophy, that it was possible “to investigate the history, and thereby, it may be hoped, to understand better the nature, of the workings of the human mind.” The turn from philosophy to history—at a moment when philosophy was insulating itself from the broader stream of humanistic scholarship by adopting a narrow technical and ahistorical definition of its methods and goals—suggests the ways in which the historicist and pluralist frame of modern thought shaped Lovejoy's distinctive practice as a historian.Footnote ²⁵

For Lovejoy, ideas were not instruments of some other “real” interests or expressions of underlying material forces or psychological needs, but were a cultural environment in which thinking took place. This stance marks him off from some of the main lines of Progressive and neo-Progressive historiography that dominated the discipline of history for much of the twentieth century. Lovejoy, even at the height of his influence, tended to be caught between critics on one side who accused him of ignoring the material and social context of ideas and who claimed he was insufficiently historical in his approach as a consequence, and those on the other side, like the analytical philosophers, New Humanists and New Critics, who saw him as insufficiently committed to transhistorical standards of evaluation—whether scientific or aesthetic.

Lovejoy's method assumed that the writers and thinkers who instantiated ideas were not fully aware of the meanings and content those ideas carried with them. “There are,” he wrote in The Great Chain of Being,

This tacit knowledge, these unquestioned assumptions, sound very much like Geertz's idea of common sense as a cultural system, or the overdetermined meaning of texts that derive their power from linguistic patterns that are determined prior to individual thought.

What they don't sound like is the focus on ideas as tools or instruments that we find in the varieties of intellectual history associated with Skinner or, among Americanists, with David Hollinger.Footnote ²⁷ The question of meaning as intention and use, which comes out of mid-century philosophy of language, and finds its best-known expression in philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, was taken up by historians concerned with locating meaning within bounded speech communities, which might be imagined in a fairly broad way—as narrow as an academic discipline, or as broad as a nationally defined public. The historian, from this point of view, was concerned with understanding the intended meanings of a writer within a particular contemporaneous community of readers. The notion that ideas might contain meanings of which the speaker was unaware, that the writer might as much be used by ideas as he or she used those ideas, appeared to these historians to put the cart before the horse. Lovejoy, on the other hand, always argued that an idea “is after all not only a potent but a stubborn thing; it commonly has its own ‘particular go,’” compelling conclusions and directions unanticipated by those who admitted that idea to their minds:Footnote ²⁸

The idea that ideas might have a logic of their own, that their users are in some sense coerced into positions and conclusions that they are themselves not aware of, pushes hard against the idea that ideas are tools used in arguments to reach intended ends, even if those are the ends of communities of speakers. It is not that both things cannot be true; it is that the object of analysis that intellectual historians treat is different if one goes in search of the uses ideas make of persons rather than the uses persons make of ideas. When all you have is a hammer, as the saying goes, everything looks like a nail.

And perhaps the nail named “ideas” convinced some readers that Lovejoy was concerned only with “the most refined philosophical minds”: while it is true that Lovejoy was concerned with philosophical ideas as “the locus of initial manifestation in writing of the greater number of the more fundamental and pervasive ideas, and especially of the controlling preconceptions, which manifest themselves in other regions of intellectual history,” throughout his research he was less concerned with canonical thinkers than with these more widely held patterns of thought, found in a variety of genres and modes of writing, mostly of a non-canonical nature. Lovejoy was explicit about this: the history of ideas, he said, “is especially concerned with the manifestations of specific unit-ideas in the collective thought of large groups of persons, not merely in the doctrines or opinions of a small number of profound thinkers or eminent writers.”Footnote ³⁰ In fact, the history of ideas rejected entirely a method that defined subject matter as worthy of study or understanding because of its aesthetic merit or transhistorical intellectual appeal. Instead of isolating ideas in particular texts, Lovejoy sought to locate ideas in the dense fabric of historical relations, in the ways in which disparate and obscure forms of thinking were related to one another through either common conceptions or shaping influences. Lovejoy's method was what a later generation might identify as profoundly anti-elitist in that it did not begin with an assumption that some texts were to be privileged above others as objects of historical inquiry. It is in this sense that Lovejoy was truly a cultural historian—an analyst of collectively held patterns of belief and meaning and their historical relations.

From the point of view of some forms of cultural studies, concerned with popular forms and subaltern texts, the texts and sources Lovejoy actually used do originate in the literate and educated population of the eras he studied, and were “elite” texts in this sense; the concept of “popular culture” was alien to him. But he regularly set the canonical texts and authors of a “high” intellectual history next to minor authors, popularizations, and apparently unrelated genres of writing. In The Great Chain of Being, for instance, in the space of two pages he moves from a discussion of the writings of Locke, Addison, and Bolingbroke—canonical authors all—to the obscure unpublished writings of Sir William Petty, a book of essays by a “Lady Chudleigh,” a poem by the editor of the Gentlemen's Magazine, John Hawkesworth, and the writings of the philosophical popularizer Johann Heinrich Samuel Formey. His purpose in doing so is not to contextualize the canonical authors, but to show the way in which a set of ideas appeared in a wide variety of texts; for this purpose Locke is no more important than Lady Chudleigh. Elsewhere he cites the French priest abbé Pluche's popularization of astronomy next to the English poet Henry Brooke and the botanist John Ray. The American show business promoter P. T. Barnum himself makes an appearance with his famous displays of “missing links.” Instances of this kind can be multiplied. The point is that in terms of an understanding of intellectual history defined by “great texts,” Lovejoy represented an alternative dedicated to understanding the broad commonplace of intellectual presupposition.Footnote ³¹

There is some irony in the fact that postmodern critics like Poster should fault Lovejoy for an approach that they imagined was wedded to a canonical “great books, great thinkers” method. Lovejoy's contemporaries had no such illusions and repeatedly criticized him for failing to consider the intellectual and aesthetic merits of the texts he treated. The history of ideas had little in common, for instance, with the Great Ideas movement associated with Mortimer Adler.Footnote ³² Lovejoy argued that judgments of intellectual and aesthetic merit and value, while relevant for other disciplines such as literary criticism, had little, if any, place in historical understanding, and choosing texts to study for their transhistorical value imposed nonhistorical criteria in such a way as to undermine historical understanding. “Historical analysis and moral or aesthetic evaluation,” said Lovejoy in 1949, “are distinct processes; they should not be mixed; and the first, which demands (what is difficult) a high degree of cool detachment from the analyst's personal enthusiasms and moral or aesthetic ideals, should be in each case patiently completed before the second is attempted.”Footnote ³³ One might read this stance, as at least one contemporary did, as dissolving the conflict between evaluative criticism and the nonevaluative history of ideas: historicize first, evaluate second.Footnote ³⁴ This would be a mistake. The history of ideas had goals and purposes other than criticism; its starting point was to imagine the broadest sphere of ideas in a variety of texts, and its end was to understand the diversity and range of the human mind in all of its particular instances. By eliminating texts that were deemed unworthy by the analyst's aesthetic and moral standards, mid-century criticism could never fulfill the goals of the culturally pluralistic and historicist imagination that undergirded the history of ideas.

Nor did the literary criticism of that era desire those ends. Lovejoy's approach was at odds with the prominent schools of literary criticism in the era that saw the rise and fall of the history of ideas: the students of Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmore More and the New Humanism; the New Criticism of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and others, which found its institutional homes at the Sewanee Review and the Kenyon Review from the 1940s through the 1960s; and the strains of Marxist and Progressive criticism that became popular in the 1930s. The New Humanists, who were influential from the turn of the century through the 1930s, thoroughly rejected modernist thought and values, which Babbitt and his students identified with Rousseau and Romanticism; theirs was a school of moral criticism, which looked to the evaluation of texts and intellectual movements in terms of an anti-modernist ethic. Less concerned with “pure” aesthetics or a notion of an autonomous literature than were the New Critics, they engaged in a broader form of cultural criticism. But they also rejected the historical relativism they saw as indicative of a modernist cultural ethic and its degradation of standards; the history of ideas—in the eyes of Babbitt's students—ended up embracing modernist relativism by failing to foreground the task of ethical evaluation.Footnote ³⁵ If Lovejoy submerged Rousseau's thinking into an environment of eighteenth-century ideas, for instance, he ended up explaining his thought contextually rather than condemning it for its Romantic excess.Footnote ³⁶

If the New Humanists rejected Lovejoy for his modernist and historicist impartiality, the New Critics had no such compunctions. They were as modernist as Lovejoy, but their species of modernism, unlike his, sought to elevate a realm of the aesthetic above and beyond history. This body of philosophically informed criticism shared a great deal with the Lovejoy approach, even as the two approaches led to strikingly different conclusions. For instance, both Ransom and Lovejoy believed that humanistic scholarship required a more rigorous, philosophically informed foundation than that found in the general biographical and historical approaches prevalent in English departments, and both wanted to sever the study of texts from materialist and Marxist approaches that had become popular in the 1930s. Both Lovejoy and the New Critics rejected what Wimsatt and Beardsley called “the intentional fallacy”—the notion that meaning might be defined by authorial intent.Footnote ³⁷ And both the history of ideas and the New Criticism embraced a rigorous close reading of texts in terms of inner contradictions and tensions. But here the similarity ended.

New Criticism was committed to the notion that the literary object was a distinct and particular kind of object, its meaning defined by its structure, form, and particular individuated content; it sought to abstract the literary and aesthetic from history, from any kind of contextual understanding that would make it dependent upon external factors. Its ultimate goal was to understand the poem, story, or novel as an aesthetic object; aesthetic evaluation was central to its purpose. It was to be a “pure” criticism, liberated from history, biography, cultural analysis, etc. The notion of the autonomy of the literary text was central to its method of close reading, and a rejection of all varieties of “reductionism” to its metaphysical commitments.Footnote ³⁸

The history of ideas, on the other hand, forcefully rejected the idea of the autonomy of literature in favor of an interdisciplinary vision in which literary texts were simply one source, and not a privileged one at that, for understanding patterns of thought. Such a move required a rejection of the centrality of aesthetic judgment and hierarchical conceptions of value. Lovejoy's introductory essay to the first volume of the Journal of the History of Ideas is, in fact, a critique of the principal orientations of Ransom, Tate, I. A. Richards and others associated with what would come to be called the New Criticism:

Note that Lovejoy does not reject the notion that literary criticism and aesthetic evaluation might be valuable activities in their own terms. His analytical and pluralistic perspective is evident here as well as in his substantive histories; the historical approach to ideas does not preclude other questions and values, but defines its object in such a way as to answer certain kinds of question that cannot be answered by foregrounding questions of aesthetic value. Lovejoy's goals are thoroughly historical: literary texts, like all other texts created by human beings, are “an indispensable body of documents for the study of man,” and as such, cannot be separated from other texts in which ideas are instantiated. Far from being a proponent of a realm of “great books,” defined by transhistorical criteria of philosophical and aesthetic merit, Lovejoy suggests that the historian takes all comers as having equal value for the purposes of understanding the history of thought.

This position puts him at odds not only with modernist critics, but also with a wide variety of intellectual historians, including many of those associated with the radical challenges of post-structuralist thought. LaCapra, for instance, committed his variety of intellectual history to an antireductionism in which “the so-called ‘great’ texts of the Western tradition” were the proper objects of study, and close attention to their internal complexity rather than the reductive focus on “context” was to be the antidote to his version of what Cleanth Brooks called “the heresy of paraphrase”: synoptic content analysis. His new version of intellectual history sounded like the echo of New Criticism dressed up with references to Foucault, Derrida, and Bakhtin. The proper objects of study were “complex” texts—Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, and Joyce were among his examples—which could be identified as belonging to a great tradition; the implication was that drawing the line between great and complex texts, on the one hand, and not-so-great and simple texts, on the other, was a fairly straightforward exercise, a beginning point for historical analysis. But the question of complexity and “greatness” is begged; Lovejoy, on the other hand, started from the assumption that all ideas are more complex than the writers and thinkers who rely on them know, and that complexity is not to be understood by abstracting great texts, on the basis of implicit criteria or already established reputation, from the stream of thought in which they were created. For Lovejoy, the commonplace texts of an era are as important as the “great” texts for understanding the thought of that period.Footnote ⁴⁰

It should be noted that New Critics and advocates of Geistesgeschichte such as Spitzer and Cassirer, despite their many differences, had in common a distrust of the kind of analytical perspective that Lovejoy favored. Both schools of thought embraced species of holism. The New Critics imagined the literary work—the poem in particular—as an aesthetic whole, and rejected any attempt to see the meaning of its parts as related to extrinsic meanings. The poem, like the zeitgeist for Spitzer, was not to be subdivided, its parts scattered to sources and historical antecendents far in time and place. The cultural historians, less concerned with the question of aesthetic value and rejecting entirely the New Critical idea of the ontological particularity of the text, saw the cultural system, the sensibility of a particular era, as possessing a particularity and a holistic meaning. Both schools, therefore, criticized the analytical method of the history of ideas for its attempt to bring extrinsic understandings to bear on the holistic object of understanding, even as they were at odds with one another in their appreciation of historicism and historical understanding. The comparison of the work of art as an aesthetic whole to the idea of culture as an integrated pattern of meaning was a common one in mid-century thought; one finds it perhaps most explicitly stated in Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture. Insofar as literary criticism and cultural history or anthropology had different aims, they came to different conclusions about questions of value—the cultural relativism of historicists and anthropologists was completely at odds with the aesthetic modernism of New Critics. But they shared a commitment to unity, integration, and internal coherence that one does not find in Lovejoy and the history-of-ideas tradition.Footnote ⁴¹

The other principal approach to the interpretation of texts one finds during the mid-century is that associated with Marxism and Progressivism. These schools, identified most strongly with Granville Hicks in literary criticism and Vernon Parrington in intellectual history, were at their peak of influence in the 1930s, and were being eclipsed in the late 1940s and the 1950s, in part due to the Cold War climate of that era, but also because mid-century modernists like Lionel Trilling and Richard Hofstadter found them conceptually thin, reductionist, and inadequate to the complex motives that underlay textual expression.Footnote ⁴² The materialist assumptions of Marxists and Progressives pushed them toward a reading of texts as expressions of—or responses to—what they took to be underlying economic, social and political interests and/or forces. In fact, for those who followed Parrington and Hicks, Lovejoy's treatment of ideas was not historical at all, because the real agency of history lay outside of thought. Parrington, for instance, catalogued all of American literary expression in terms of its adequacy to “reality,” understood as rooted in economic class interest. And while the Marxists were most explicit in advocating for a form of economic determinism, in which texts were to be understood as reflections of an extratextual and material “history,” the view that “ideas” and “history” occupied two distinct spheres was a widespread one.

The assumption that “history” was something external to texts, that ideas needed to be put “into” history because they were not properly historical themselves, underlay a substantial body of criticism of the history of ideas. The philosophical naturalist John Herman Randall Jr, for instance, said of The Great Chain of Being, “This is of course not history at all, but a mere chronicle; and Professor Lovejoy seems, in fact, to exclude on principle all history from the ‘history of ideas”. What Randall meant by “all history” was the presumably determinative forces of economic, political, and social events and forces.Footnote ⁴³ Another critic was explicit in rejecting Lovejoy for his doctrine of

A later generation would declare that there is nothing outside the text; Lovejoy, like some post-structuralists, thought of the world of texts as a dense world of intertextual references. He argued for a method that allowed for complex analysis of thought independent of forms of material or psychological reductionism.

What naturalist, Progressive, Marxist, pragmatist and other critics accused Lovejoy of was, in some measure, true. But they missed the most important aspect of his thinking: that he conceived of ideas as historical contexts, and that the history of ideas sought to reconstruct the environment of thinking. Ideas, for Lovejoy, were fundamentally historical. They didn't need to be put “into” history, defined as a set of external economic, political, and social contexts, because history was already in them; they were the very substance of history itself. Their variety of expression, their internal contradictions, their contingency, their coercive force on human minds, their combination with other ideas in unstable forms: this historicity was only apparent by looking at ideas in the broad and critical way recommended by Lovejoy. Ideas, for Lovejoy, were the substance of human cultures. Far from being a radically decontextualist form of study, the history of ideas reframed the question of context by making ideas contexts for any form of thinking by historical actors. Rejecting the text/context dualism of materialist forms of historical thought, Lovejoy argued for a world in which ideas constituted a cultural reality, rather than reflecting an economic one.

One of the most persistent criticisms that many advocates for a “new” intellectual history in the 1970s and 1980s made of existing forms of intellectual history was that they remained wedded to a teleological, evolutionary and progressive view that emphasized continuity. In the wake of Kuhn's new vision of the history of science as governed by revolutions and incommensurable paradigms rather than progressive evolution, and the early Foucault's vision of intellectual rupture between epistemes, historians emphasized their own “rupture,” or discontinuity from their predecessors, by making discontinuity an article of faith of the new historiography. Historicists of many varieties from the late nineteenth century through mid-twentieth-century historians such as Herbert Butterfield in his famous Whig Interpretation of History (1931) had, of course, rejected the idea that history was to be understood as the unfolding of an incipient seed of an idea toward a preordained end. When Poster and others looked at the prevailing forms of intellectual history as emphasizing continuity, progress, and telos, they were borrowing from an already richly established body of historicist thought developed by modernist thinkers.

Lovejoy was committed to a vision of historical continuity. But the critique, with regard to the history of ideas, was right only in part—it conflated the idea of intellectual continuity with the idea of evolution and the idea of progress, each of which had different implications and metaphysical commitments. Lovejoy was a proponent of evolutionary understanding in the sense of anti-teleological Darwinian evolution.Footnote ⁴⁵ But there was nothing in his approach like a commitment to a transcendent rationality, progress, and an evolutionary model that involved the working out of ideas, à la Hegel or Marx. He sometimes spoke of oscillation of ideas, but he subscribed to no systematic metaphysics of History, no sense that History had a particular direction, that later developments were already present in earlier ones. Quite the opposite: no one could predict how an idea that began in one sphere would end up in another, with sometimes opposite implications from its origin. The question of the direction of ideas was an empirical one, one to be divined not by looking for the Hegelian logic of history, but by studying the texts that took up and instantiated those ideas. Meaning in Lovejoy was contingent, the product of historical accident and circumstance and the diverse potential of ideas themselves, not the unfolding of reason or the working out of Providence. Lovejoy's discussion of the incorporation of scientific changes in astronomy and biology in the early modern era in The Great Chain of Being, for instance, is a model of how new ideas appear out of the context of a body of thought and are both pressed upon by that body of thought, and point that thought in new directions.Footnote ⁴⁶

The ideas of discontinuity and rupture that informed late twentieth-century intellectual historiography now themselves appear to have something of the residue of the metaphysical over them; every time we hear that discontinuity between one era and the next is a matter of necessity, we are in the realm of the metaphysical, as absolute as any older commitment to transcendent Reason. If we can't assume continuity of ideas, it is equally true that we ought not to assume discontinuity. What Lovejoy and his mid-century contemporaries suggested is that we need not choose between continuity and change, that all good history involves both. The world is neither born new at particular moments, nor is it an enduring and unchanging substratum upon which ephemeral phenomena are mere appearances. Continuity in Lovejoy is a matter of contingency. We needn't assume from the start that there is nothing in an idea from one era that makes its way into that of another, that meaning isn't shaped as much by the residue of past ages as it is by the immediate speech community. In fact, writing an intellectual history with no notion of continuity at all would probably be impossible.

Finally, I am not suggesting that we resurrect a version of the history of ideas that existed in the decades between 1920 and 1960 with all of its limitations as well as its benefits. As should be clear, despite Lovejoy's penchant for analytical clarity and rigorous discrimination, he too operated with unstated assumptions and contradictions. Rather, I am suggesting that we move away from the caricatures of that body of scholarship that allows us to say that we “know” it without having read it, with the assumptions that the history of ideas is committed to a rationalist, progressive, universalist, and evolutionary conception of a canonical Western tradition, that it is hostile to pluralism, diversity, an anthropological conception of culture, and a linguistic conception of meaning. In our post-dogmatic age, there is surely room for an updated history of ideas as a form of cultural history, a history that has learned as much from Lovejoy as from Foucault and Geertz.