Historically Speaking

As I read Daniel Wickberg's thoughtful essay, it was difficult to keep from nodding my head in agreement as he ticked off the present characteristics of my chosen field. The landscape certainly looks familiar. Yes, intellectual history has lost its old pride of place in the larger discipline; yes, the job openings for intellectual historians are alarmingly few and far between; yes, many, especially "internalist," intellectual histories are neglected by our peers; and yes, the very category of intellectual history has become in the last several decades less important—even, I suspect, for many of its practitioners.

And yet, my prognosis for the field's health is sunnier than his, for at least three reasons. First, it seems to me that influence, something intellectual historians have in abundance these days, is far more important than the autonomy of our subdiscipline. Second, the state of intellectual history echoes that of many other fields, stemming from what seems to me a largely beneficent reorientation in historical scholarship around topics rather than schools. And third, most of the weaknesses Wickberg identifies in the field of intellectual history are less intellectual than social or structural, and not at all beyond the power of practitioners themselves to remedy. There are other reasons, too, ones that Wickberg's essay nicely points out, including the fact that there are ample audiences, both general and scholarly, for works of intellectual history, as well as excellent histories being written.

I should from the outset reveal myself as one of those culprits who calls herself an intellectual and cultural historian, although not simply because I know which side my bread is buttered on. Instead, somewhere along the line in graduate school I found the assumed boundaries of intellectual history somewhat limiting; my own research confounded some historians' definitions of what was properly in that domain.

Whether this was a problem with the field or my own early conception of it I'm still not sure, but what I really wanted to do was put the overt, worked-out ideas of specific individuals in conversation with the movements of culture and the common sense of ordinary people. In other words, I was interested in the extent to which formal intellectual production had infiltrated American culture, and in how cultural conventions helped to shape self-conscious intellectuals. In particular, taking seriously the intellectual frameworks laypeople formed and acted upon required an engagement with cultural history and, it seemed, an add-on identity as a cultural historian. (Cultural history in turn seemed insufficiently attentive to the force of ideas and beliefs at work in everyday life, but that's an argument for another day.)

That's all to say that I have never been a classic intellectual historian or a purist about the field and in fact have found some of the most compelling recent books in U.S. intellectual history also—and perhaps even primarily—to be works of policy, diplomatic, immigration, or African-American history: Alice O'Connor's Poverty Knowledge (2001), Elizabeth Borgwardt's A New Deal for the World (2005), Mae Ngai's Impossible Subjects (2004), and Nikhil Singh's Black is a Country (2004). Does it matter that their authors may not consider these books first and foremost intellectual history? I don't think so. What counts is that each engages thoroughly and creatively with how ideas matter (here I realize that I treat intellectual history and the history of ideas as more equivalent than some might).

Moreover, it is not at all clear to me that this sort of genre blurring makes intellectual history, as Wickberg says, "ancillary to the concerns of the profession at large." Indeed, it suggests less a diluting of intellectual history's identity than a hard-won recognition of the power of ideas to transform diverse arenas of American life—an insight lost in the social history battles of the 1960s and 1970s and whose return we should applaud. As Thomas Bender wrote in 1997, "a field that in the 1970s feared being swept aside by social history now finds itself insinuated into nearly every corner of the discipline."¹ This sort of mixing...