Abstract
The labels of all the various branches of history are flags of convenience not names of essences, and the real question concerns the distinctiveness and validity of their claims to occupy a separate room in Clio’s spacious house. For intellectual history most certainly is a part of history, part of the attempt to understand past human experience.
The distillation of the ‘spirit of the age’? The history of abstract conceptions of intellectuals? The history of philosophy? Or the philosophy of history? The history of political ideas? What is intellectual history?
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Further Reading
Berlin, I., Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (London, 1979);
Boucher, D., Texts and Contexts: Revisionist Methods for Studying the History of Ideas (Dordrecht, 1985);
Burrow, J. W., A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historiography and the English Past (Cambridge, 1981);
Burrow, J. W., Collini, S. and Winch, D., That Noble Science of Politics: a study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge, 1984);
Condred, C., The Status and Appraisal of Classical Texts (Princeton, 1985);
Foucault, M., The Archaeology of Knowledge (London, 1972);
Gay, P., The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (two vols) (New York, 1966, 1970);
Gilbert, F., Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and Historiography in Sixteenth-Century Florence (Princeton, 1965);
Gunn, J. A., Beyond Liberty and Property: the Process of Self-Recognition in Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Kingston and Montreal, 1983);
Higham, J., Writing American History (Bloomington, Indiana, 1970);
King, P. (ed.), The History of Ideas (Beckenham, 1983);
Kuhn, T. S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962);
La Capra, D. and Kaplan, S. L. (eds), Modern European Intellectual History (Cornell, 1982);
Lovejoy, A. O., The Great Chain of Being: the History of an Idea (Cambridge, Mass., 1936);
Skinner, Q., Studies in Early Modern Intellectual History (Cambridge, forthcoming);
Thomas, K., Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971), Man and the Natural World (London, 1983);
Wallace, J. M., Destiny his Choice: the Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, 1986).
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© 1988 Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Collini, S., Skinner, Q., Hollinger, D.A., Pocock, J.G.A., Hunter, M. (1988). What is Intellectual History … ?. In: Gardiner, J. (eds) What is History Today … ?. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19161-1_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19161-1_10
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
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