review - defining the history of ideas

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Dening the History of Ideas

Jotham Parsons

The Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas . Ed. Philip P. Wiener. 5 vols. New York: Charles Scrib-ner’s Sons, 1973–1974. Available online at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/DicHist/dict.html.

New Dictionary of the History of Ideas . Ed. Maryanne Cline Ho-rowitz. 6 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2005.ISBN: 0–684–31377–4 (also in Gale virtual reference library).

It is often difcult to know how to review reference works, not only becauseof their inherent size and diversity, but because they usually make it veryhard to answer the question basic to the genre of the scholarly review, ‘‘howdoes this contribute to the literature?’’ When The Dictionary of the Historyof Ideas [DHI ], edited by Philip Wiener, appeared in 1973, however, re-viewers immediately recognized it as the clear culmination of an intellectualmovement with a distinguished history and a prominent place in the cultureof the day. 1 Now a successor to that volume has appeared, the New Dic-tionary of the History of Ideas [NDHI ], edited by Maryanne Cline Horo-witz, and in a sense that status as a successor again makes the question of itsplace in the scholarship on the history of ideas relatively clear. It amounts to

I would like to thank to Michael Carhart for his helpful comments on this essay.1 The original DHI was ably reviewed in this journal by F. E. L. Priestley, ‘‘Mapping theWorld of Ideas,’’ JHI 35 (1974): 527–37. I will make no effort to duplicate Priestley’scomprehensive coverage of the DHI , referring curious readers to his article.

Copyright by Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 68, Number 4 (October 2007)

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JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2007

this: was such a successor actually needed, and if so, why? And does theNDHI succeed in meeting whatever need there was? The short answer tothese questions is that the DHI clearly had become outdated in an impor-tant sense, due to profound changes in the way the history of ideas is prac-ticed and above all in the context in which it is practiced. To understandboth the considerable success of the NDHI in meeting the challenge andthe limits of that success, though, requires (or at least invites) a long detourinto the history of the idea of the history of ideas.

The obvious place to begin such a history is with Arthur O. Lovejoy,professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University for much of the rsttwo-thirds of the twentieth century and the man who coined the term ‘‘his-tory of ideas.’’ Lovejoy founded this journal, professedly on an ideal of ‘‘cooperation among [specialists] at all those points where their provincesoverlap, the establishment of more and better facilities for communication,mutual criticism and mutual aid.’’ 2 The history of ideas, according to thisvision, was to be a kind of forum for mutual consultation among scholarsof the human sciences. It was always intended as a kind of a hybrid crea-ture, situated not only among the human sciences but, like Lovejoy, speci-cally between history and philosophy. Like Lovejoy (born in Germany to

American parents and educated in the U.S.), it combined Anglo-Americanempiricism with German idealism, moving between consideration of theidea as the tool and creation of the thinker, and as a force in its own rightand with its own logic, or cunning. 3 It tended to take as its province thevery longue dure e, ideally running, like Lovejoy’s famous analysis of the‘‘Great Chain of Being,’’ from antiquity to relatively recent times. The his-tory of ideas never had a particularly strong institutional structure, and inparticular has never given rise (or, as far as I know, attempted to give rise)to a network of academic departments and institutes like those associatedwith, for example, area or identity studies. This has left it generally and

more or less deliberately exposed to constant modication based on thepriorities and presuppositions of more entrenched disciplinary traditions.Adding to the confusion are a variety of other approaches, domestic andforeign, to the study of mental states—intellectual history, history of philos-ophy, histoire des mentalite ´ s, Geistesgeschichte , Begriffsgeschichte , etc.—

2 Arthur O. Lovejoy, ‘‘Reections on the History of Ideas,’’ JHI 1 (1940): 6–7. This articleformed, effectively, the journal’s editorial manifesto.3 Probably the best short account of Lovejoy’s career is his colleague George Boas’s articleon him in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy , 8 vols., ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Mac-millan and The Free Press, 1967), s. v.

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Parsons ✦ Dening the History of Ideas

whose degree of overlap with the history of ideas (or each other) has alwaysbeen far from clear. 4 The result of all this is that the history of ideas hasalways been difcult to dene. Quite sensibly, if uncharacteristically forintellectuals, its practitioners have more often than not refrained fromtrying.

This sense of caution has not, however, prevented historians from try-ing to dene individual ideas (though not, for the most part, the ‘‘unitideas’’ dear to Lovejoy), as the existence of these two dictionaries attests.Such collections of denitions, however, are perforce historical documentsthemselves. The topics they cover and the methods they employ revealmuch about how the practitioners of a given era understood their task,while both the aims and the results of the editorial process shed light onwhat one might call the conditions of production that have applied to thehistory of ideas. And one thing that becomes apparent when comparing thelists of contributors in the new and the old dictionary is that, to put thematter bluntly, the history of ideas has rather come down in the world.Among the contributors to the NDHI there are many ne scholars of goodreputation, but, in contrast to the old DHI , there are really none who holdpositions at the very top of the academic hierarchy or who are major public

intellectuals.5

This in turn, I suspect, is a consequence of two broaderchanges: in the relationship of the history of ideas to broader thematic andmethodological trends in the humanities, and in its relationship to the polit-ical and social climate of the English-speaking world. In both cases, condi-tions in the middle third of the twentieth century greatly favored the projectof the history of ideas, and in both cases they have since at least the 1970sbecome far less hospitable.

It is worth bearing in mind the extent to which the project incarnatedin Lovejoy’s work, in the JHI , and above all in the DHI was the product of

4

As far as I know, none of these approaches besides the history of ideas has generated acomprehensive reference work. There is, of course, plenty of history of philosophy inbooks like The Encyclopedia of Philosophy , 10 vols., ed. Donald M. Borchert (seconded., Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2006), but it is just one component of such projects.Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache inDeutschland , 5 vols., ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart:E. Klett, 1972–84), connes itself explicitly, if not always consistently, to modern Ger-many.5 Among the contributors to the DHI were the aforementioned George Boas, Isaiah Ber-lin, Owen Chadwick (then Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge: the RegiusProfessor of Law at Cambridge also contributed), Mircea Eliade, Felix Gilbert (then atthe Institute for Advanced Study), and Arnaldo Momigliano, as well as many otherswhose names are still well-known to any serious student of the humanities.

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the great conicts of twentieth-century Europe. Lovejoy composed TheGreat Chain of Being in the rst year of the Depression and founded the JHI in the rst year of World War II; the enterprise ourished with the aidof the great wave of refugee scholars who ed Central Europe in the reignsof Hitler and Stalin; and its apogee coincided with the height of the ColdWar and with liberal intellectuals’ two-front struggle against Communismand repressive anti-Communism. The DHI , in particular, is everywheremarked by this last circumstance, with (besides the participation of suchdoughty cold warriors as Isaiah Berlin) articles on ‘‘academic freedom,’’‘‘legal concept of freedom,’’ ‘‘freedom of speech in antiquity,’’ ‘‘due processin law,’’ ‘‘ideology of Soviet communism,’’ etc. 6 The NDHI covers none of these subjects explicitly—though unlike its predecessor it does have entrieson ‘‘human rights’’ (which gured in the Cold War mainly in the 1980s)and ‘‘censorship,’’ which arguably is more a practice than an idea.

The history of ideas was useful to anti-communism (and anti-fascism)at a somewhat crude level, in defending the antiquity and validity of the‘‘West’s’’ ideals, and totalitarianism’s hostility thereto: ‘‘The main elementsof academic freedom,’’ for example ‘‘are securely established in those coun-tries which recognize and respect the principles of intellectual and politicalfreedom. Academic freedom does not exist in dictatorship countries, or incountries which practice thought control’’ ( DHI I:15). Such considerationsprobably explain why the present Journal merited clandestine support fromthe C.I.A.-backed Congress of Cultural Freedom, apparently the only aca-demic journal so honored. 7 More subtly, though, the history of ideas servedto bolster a central conceptual underpinning of World War II and the ColdWar: ‘‘Western Civilization,’’ by which and on behalf of which these con-icts were (from the U.S. point of view) supposedly fought. Carlton J.Hayes produced a denitive statement of the case in a presidential addressto the American Historical Association immediately following the conclu-

6 There was a real afnity between the history of ideas and academic freedom. Lovejoywas a founding member of the American Association of University Professors in 1915and longtime chair of its academic freedom committee, and wrote an article on ‘‘academicfreedom’’ for The Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences , 15 vols., ed. E. R. A. Seligman(New York: Macmillan, 1937), s.v. For a good, relatively brief history of academic free-dom in Lovejoy’s era, see Thomas L. Haskell, ‘‘Justifying the Rights of Academic Free-dom in the Age of Power/Knowledge,’’ in The Future of Academic Freedom , ed. LouisMenand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 43–90.7 Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 2000), 333, 338. The modest support took the formof 500 overseas subscriptions, and according to Donald Kelley, has left no trace in JHI ’srecords: Donald R. Kelley, ‘‘JHI 2000,’’ JHI 61 (2000): 153.

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sion of the War. American historians, he said, needed above all to write asmembers of

a great historic culture, the ‘‘Western’’ civilization, which, takingits rise around the Mediterranean, has long since embraced theAtlantic, creating what Mr. Walter Lippmann has appropriatelydesignated the ‘‘Atlantic Community.’’ . . . Of such an Atlanticcommunity and the European civilization basic to it, Americansare co-heirs and co-developers, and probably in the future theleaders. If we are successfully to discharge our heavy and difcultpostwar responsibilities, we shall not further weaken, but ratherstrengthen, the consciousness and bonds of this cultural commu-nity.

‘‘One contribution,’’ Hayes went on to say, ‘‘would be to put much greateremphasis than in the past on cultural history . . . of art and science, of intellectual currents, and of the transit of cultures.’’ 8

All this, the history of ideas was perfectly suited to do. Not only couldit be deployed (quite legitimately) to underscore the centrality of democraticand liberal ideas to Western culture, but its disciplinary, temporal, and geo-graphic breadth tended to conrm the vaunted unity of that culture. Moresubtly, the history of ideas served to integrate the traditions of Central Eu-rope, the Atlantic Community’s borderland. As we have already seen, Love-joy’s own work, and the pages of both the JHI and the DHI , were opento the German intellectual tradition and to the waves of e ´migre ´ scholarswho brought it to the English-speaking world after 1933. Early contribu-tors to JHI included Paul Kristeller, Ernst Cassirer, Hans Baron, Paul Til-lich, Leo Spitzer, Karl Lo ¨with, Hajo Holborn, and Leo Strauss, as well asAnglophone disciples of the German school like Talcott Parsons. 9 Contribu-tors to the DHI were less heavily e ´migre ´, but they included people likeRudolph Wittkower, Rene ´ Wellek, and Felix Gilbert (the latter two mem-bers of the editorial board), as well as a number of scholars actually work-ing in Central Europe. 10 Obviously, the incredible erudition and idealist

8 Carleton J. Hayes, ‘‘The American Frontier—Frontier of What?’’ American Historical Review 51 (1946): 199–216, 207–8, 214.9 See Kelley, ‘‘JHI 2000,’’ 153–56.10 The publisher Charles Scribner, Jr., credited in the preface to the DHI as the one ‘‘whoinitiated the idea of this Dictionary,’’ and without whom ‘‘the project would not havecome to fruition’’ (I: viii) was himself a Germanophile and, inter alia , a translator of theGrimm brothers.

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presuppositions of scholars trained in the high German tradition t wellwith, and vastly enriched, the program of the history of ideas. One mayspeculate (and this would be worth investigating) that in turn the elabora-tion of a Western tradition uniting the Atlantic alliance and rooted in theclassical and Biblical cultures they had studied in the Gymnasium helpedgive Central European academics a sense of belonging in their new commu-nities, whether or not they returned to Germany after 1945.

What one might call the ‘‘strategic’’ role of the history of ideas cer-tainly helped raise its prominence in Anglo-American culture, but it alsoinvigorated the enterprise itself. Its mix of German and English traditions,of course, proved extremely fruitful. Nor was the sense of community andmission that attached itself to the history of ideas conned to a geographicor cultural dimension: it was one that could be shared widely across thepolitical spectrum as well, from the anti-communist Left to the anti-fascistRight. In an age more politicized than our own, this was a real achievement,but even so it probably made a real difference only to a minority of schol-ars, with non-political considerations overwhelmingly dominant for therest. 11 For those too, however, the history of ideas as the ‘‘common heritageof the West’’ was still a very useful model, for it provided what Lovejoy’sexplicitly delocalized project most conspicuously lacked, namely, unity .

Encyclopedias, or at least the more ambitious among them, have tradi-tionally been concerned not just with presenting information, but with uni-fying it, conceptually as well as physically. Famously, for example, Diderotand d’Alembert prefaced their Encyclope die with a substantial method-ological and epistemological treatise drawing, in its turn, on Bacon’s theo-ries. 12 If the French encyclopedists wished to order and present all of thearts and sciences yet invented by humanity, the creators of the DHI werenot vastly more modest: As JHI ’s original review stressed, though the Dic-tionary covered only ‘‘selected pivotal ideas,’’ it was ‘‘to help establish somesense of the unity of human thought and its cultural manifestations’’ ( DHI 1: vii). It dened a coherent if not entirely closed Western tradition, and thenarrative of its continuous development from Greek and Near Eastern rootscombined with the implicit or explicit sense that the defenders of that tradi-tion were locked in mortal combat with the forces of totalitarianism made

11 For an excellent discussion of the cultural politics of the Atlantic West during the highCold War, see Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: ThePenguin Press, 2005), 197–225.12 Encyclope die, ou dictionnaire raisonne ´ des sciences, des arts et des me tiers, par unesocie te des gens de lettres , 13 vols., ed, Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert (Paris:Briasson, David, le Breton and Durand, 1751–1780 [Stuttgart, 1966]), 1: i-lii.

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that unity much easier to sense than it might otherwise have been. To that,one might add the concept of ‘‘progress’’ inherited from an Anglo-Ameri-can Whig tradition, and those of Geist and Gestalt from German Idealism,all of which also served, whether they were used explicitly or not, to bestowunity on synchronic analyses or diachronic narratives. The result is that theDHI in fact achieved a remarkable unity of tone, approach, and concept,and that it did so with only the rudimentary editorial intervention of classi-fying the articles under seven semi-arbitrary headings. 13 When turning tothe NDHI , it is precisely the lack of such a natural unity that most immedi-ately strikes the reader.

First of all, the NDHI has systematically abandoned the geographicalunity that characterized the DHI , in which only a handful of articles werenot focused on the Western tradition. 14 The NDHI , by way of contrast,attempts a much more comprehensive coverage. It is not merely a case of devoting articles to non-Western ideas besides Buddhism and Islam, thoughthis is certainly the case: East Asian, Indian, and Islamic thought all receivefairly comprehensive treatment, but so do the cultures of Africa and LatinAmerica, which lack the ancient and self-conscious literate traditions thatmake Asia a relatively natural t for the methods of the Western history of

ideas. At the very least, this corrects the single most glaring fault of the oldDHI , allowing readers who are curious about such enormously importantideological systems as ‘‘Confucianism’’ or ‘‘Daoism,’’ or important areasof human endeavor like ‘‘Islamic Science,’’ or even something as basic as‘‘Judaism,’’ to learn about them. Even scholars primarily interested in theWest will not infrequently need information on such topics, for teaching if not for research, and their presence alone is more than enough to justify theproject. And as far as I can tell, these core articles are of uniformly highquality, though of necessity they are more introductory in character thanmost of those that deal with more traditionally familiar Western concepts.

Individual articles, too, are frequently divided up by geographical area. Thisoccasionally produces odd results, as with the articles on ‘‘Christianity’’ in

13 The categories are ‘‘Nature,’’ ‘‘Humanity,’’ ‘‘Art,’’ ‘‘History,’’ ‘‘Politics,’’ ‘‘Religion andPhilosophy,’’ and ‘‘Math and Logic.’’ The logic behind this division largely escapes me,as does the actual utility it might have for readers. No one, I suspect, has ever sat downwith the DHI to learn all about the ideas of art.14 There are only three clear examples: ‘‘Buddhism,’’ ‘‘Causation in Islamic Thought,’’and ‘‘The Islamic Conception of Intellectual Life.’’ There are also articles on ‘‘China inWestern Thought’’ (an extraordinarily good one) and ‘‘Oriental Ideas in AmericanThought,’’ which, of course, are primarily concerned with Western traditions. It is per-haps signicant that non-Western thought appears almost exclusively in religious forms.

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general and on ‘‘Christianity in Africa,’’ but in no other continent. (Exactlythe same is true of the entry on ‘‘Capitalism,’’ which is odd, consideringthat to date Africa has been capitalism’s Waterloo.) For the most part,though, the effect is salutary, as when ‘‘Alchemy’’ is broken down into itsdistinct Chinese and European/Islamic branches, producing a substantiallyclearer and more complete overview of the subject even than Allen G. De-bus’s ne article in the original DHI . One must still refer to that article forbibliographical guidance on the primary sources, though, a symptom of thefact that the old dictionary was more narrowly targeted towards scholars.

Even more fundamentally, the individual unit articles in the NDHI atleast ideally take a global perspective. Its editors have chosen to place Dan-iel R. Woolf’s article on ‘‘Historiography’’ at the head of the rst volume,identifying it as exemplary of their project—and implicitly inviting compar-ison with the article on the same subject that Herbert Buttereld contrib-uted to the DHI . That article, and that comparison, illustrate thisbroadening of perspectives well, with both its potential and its pitfalls. But-tereld’s article is basically Eurocentric, despite brief excursions into Chi-nese and Islamic thought. Those excursions, indeed, are ultimately ratherdismissive, in spite of enthusiasm for Ibn Kaldun and for Chinese textualcriticism: ‘‘it is doubtful whether . . . the Muslims would have contributedvery much to European historiography from the time of the Renaissance’’(DHI 2:474), while, when confronted with a historical document, ‘‘it didnot occur to [the Chinese] to interpret it construing it in terms of the peopleor situation behind it’’ ( DHI 2:481). Woolf, in contrast, covers almost everycorner of the globe, including little-known historical literatures like those of Southeast Asia. In some ways, the article encapsulates its own encyclopedicproject, a 1997 Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing that Woolf ed-ited. 15 As bets a quondam editor, Woolf is admirably even-handed in hisevaluation of all these historiographical schools, trying to describe each onits own terms, ‘‘unmittelbar zu Gott.’’ And he does all this without slightingthe traditional topics in the development of Western history.

The result is that a reader of the NDHI will emerge with a far broaderunderstanding of the history of the investigation of the human past thanone who relied on the DHI . But this does not come without a price. Tobegin with, Buttereld was an exceptional writer, while Woolf is merely avery good one. Though this is principally a matter of individual genius, itis suggestive of a slightly different attitude towards the historian’s craft in

15 A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing , 2 vols., ed. Daniel R. Woolf (New York:Garland, 1997).

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a generation that mostly received a classical and belleslettristic education.There are other elements, though, that make Buttereld’s article easier toread and easier to grasp at a structural level. One, of course, is precisely itsgeographical focus—one always knows where one stands, and most readerswill be at least broadly familiar with the relevant background. More sig-nicantly, though, Buttereld supplies a clear narrative. Over the course of his article, with frequent setbacks and in occasional contrast to the rest of the world, Western historiography develops its twin pillars of historicismand source-criticism. When these reach their full form, in nineteenth-cen-tury Germany, the resultant discipline sweeps all before it, continuing toadd new problems and tools, but complete in its basic essence.

This whiggish and ‘‘internalist’’ account is one that would come natu-rally to a traditional historian of the physical sciences like Buttereld. Andit is useful not only in supplying what Buttereld called the ‘‘basic humandemand for narrative’’ (DHI 2:498) but in articulating a shared and privi-leged agenda for author and reader alike. Buttereld wrote with great con-dence about a historical enterprise challenged, perhaps, by the rise of journalism and the social sciences, but not challenged in its fundamentals,and destined to draw strength from these neighboring disciplines. Woolf is

much less sanguine, and in this (few would dispute) he accurately reectsthe current spirit of the eld. He begins his concluding paragraph with anadmission that ‘‘At the start of the twenty-rst century, there is a high de-gree of disintegration and remarkably little consensus as to what a ‘proper’historical method is, what phenomena constitute legitimate subjects of his-torical inquiry or whether any historical narrative merits ‘privileging’ . . .as true—or at least more true—over any other’’ ( NDHI 1: lxxx). Woolf suggests that the unordered diversity of world historiographies he has de-scribed shows that this is in fact basic to the nature of historical inquiry,which may well be true, but from the point of view of the history of ideas,

the story is more complex. Simultaneously, the anomie he describes is acause of his nding diversity in historiography, by encouraging such anoutlook, and the anomie itself has been nurtured by projects of inquiry likethe one that Woolf carries out, ranging ever more broadly among culturesand (as he says is the preface to his own encyclopedia) ‘‘prescrib[ing] no‘correct’ or uniform methods and offer[ing] no argument that one particu-lar approach or interpretation is more valid than the others.’’ 16

If one seeks the broader cultural context of that style of inquiry, it is

16 Global Encyclopedia , 1: xiii.

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not hard to nd: in the same way that the struggles of the mid-twentiethcentury West, especially the Cold War, shaped the entire project of theDHI , so the political developments of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly of identity-group and liberation movements, and pre-eminently in the processof decolonization, shapes the project of the NDHI . On the shelves of myuniversity’s library, the only book between our two dictionaries is a 1997Dictionary of Global Culture edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah andHenry Louis Gates: the product of two Afro-American studies programs (atDuke and Harvard) and of Appiah’s project of creating a new kind of post-colonial cosmopolitanism, it symbolizes well the developments that inter-vened between the old dictionary and the new. 17 To say that the NDHI is aproduct of a particular conguration of the world state system and theAnglo-American academy is no more to impugn it than to say the same of its predecessor; one need not be a particularly radical historicist to believethat escaping entirely from one’s historical situation is neither possible noradvisable. The question is whether the history of ideas can be made toourish as productively under current conditions as it did in the latter partof the twentieth century.

In very real ways, in fact, the NDHI is actually about current condi-tions of intellectual inquiry, intending both to describe or at least outlinethem, and presumably to intervene in them as well. Besides the broadeningof geographic scope that we have already noted, it takes two approachesto accommodating contemporary developments. The rst, almost equallystraightforward, is the inclusion of articles on many of the concepts andtheoretical approaches that have emerged in academia over the past fewdecades: ‘‘Critical Race Theory,’’ ‘‘Eurocentrism,’’ ‘‘Neoliberalism,’’ ‘‘Post-colonial Studies,’’ ‘‘Structuralism and Poststructuralism,’’ ‘‘Virtual Real-ity,’’ and the like. These articles take pains to note the relative newness of their topics (at least as the terms are currently understood). Thus, Critical

Race Theory ‘‘sprang up in the late 1970s in response to a widespreadperception that the powerful civil rights coalition of the 1960s and early1970s’’ (and perhaps the entire liberal project underlying that movement)‘‘had stalled’’ ( NDHI 2: 501–2). As for Critical Theory in general, ‘‘fromthe 1970s, the term entered into the rapidly evolving area of lm and mediastudies,’’ and ‘‘took on at the same time a more specialized sense describing

17 The Dictionary of Global Culture , ed. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry LouisGates, Jr. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997). The most recent statement of Appiah’sproject is his Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W.W. Norton,2006), but it has been remarkably consistent through his career.

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the work of the Frankfurt School that itself spread widely through manydisciplines of the humanities and social sciences . . . from the 1970s on’’(NDHI 2: 507). The fact that the turning point is located around the timethe DHI appeared is perhaps not entirely coincidental.

Clearly, this kind of new entry pushes the entire NDHI to some extentaway from its predecessor’s focus on the more or less deep historical past,and towards being a kind of gazetteer of current intellectual discourse. Andin fact, an explicit move in that direction is the other approach that theNDHI takes to rethinking itself for the new millennium. This is seen mostdramatically in its frontmatter, especially in the elaborate ‘‘Reader’s Guide’’that prefaces each volume, designed, in the editor’s words, ‘‘to help highschool students, general readers, college and university students, and schol-ars organize their reading systematically according to their preferences’’(NDHI 1:xxvii). The concentration in the Reader’s Guide on area studiesand current academic disciplines and methods (and, of course, the articlesthat support such a concentration) suggests the degree to which the NDHI has moved into contemporary intellectual history. The Reader’s Guide is infact a very impressive work, the result of an enormous effort at absorbingand classifying the totality of the articles. It organizes the material in theNDHI in four different ways—by ‘‘the communication of ideas,’’ ‘‘geo-graphical areas,’’ ‘‘chronological periods,’’ and ‘‘liberal arts disciplines andprofessions’’—with from two to seven subheadings in each category. Thesemultiple perspectives provide an interesting point of comparison to Diderotand d’Alembert, who by their own account attempted to reconcile in onesystem ‘‘the encyclopedic,’’ that is, logically systematic, ‘‘order of ourknowledge, and its genealogical order.’’ 18 Typically French, they wanted tocreate a maximally universalizing conceptual framework; typically Ameri-can, the NDHI wants to be individualistic and useful , ‘‘offering teachers,scholars, and the general reader a way to organize their reading accordingto their preferences’’ ( NDHI 1:lxxxix, repeated on vii of every subsequentvolume). In doing so, the Reader’s Guide opts for the genealogical side of the Encyclope die’s dichotomy, organizing the contents for the most partaccording to the ways in which they are studied.

The section on ‘‘the communication of ideas’’ is the least conventionalof the group: the Guide is correct to call it ‘‘the newest aspect’’ of the proj-ect, though whether ‘‘cultural studies, communications studies, and cul-

18 Diderot and d’Alembert, eds., Encyclope die, 1: xv: ‘‘Nous avons choisi une division quinous a paru satisfaire tout a ` la fois le plus qu’il est possible a l’ordre encyclope ´dique denos connoissances & a ` leur ordre ge ´ne ´alogique.’’

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tural history are moving the disciplines in this direction’’ ( ibid .) might beopen to some dispute. The very invocation of those practices, however, indi-cates the dominance of academic organization within the guide, seen alsoin the standard geographic and chronological divisions and explicitly in the‘‘liberal arts,’’ which ‘‘is in accord with the university divisions’’ ( NDHI 1:cxxviii). There is a tension between this a posteriori organization and theproject of interdisciplinarity and openness to the non-academic generalreader promoted by the NDHI and by the practice of the history of ideasitself. Lovejoy would have said that that gap was bridged by the ideas them-selves, a common currency of academic disciplines and non-academic in-quiry; the Reader’s Guide seems to implicitly make a similar assumption,particularly in the subheadings (under ‘‘liberal arts’’) for ‘‘multidisciplinarypractices’’ and ‘‘especially interdisciplinary entries.’’ And as the prefacesays, the ways in which a given article appears in ‘‘the multiple sections of the Reader’s Guide aim[s] to prevent the reader from treating any listinglocation as rigid’’ ( NDHI 1:xxxi).

But however interdisciplinary the approach is and however one denesit, the history of ideas is overwhelmingly an academic pursuit; one aim of the NDHI thus becomes providing an introduction to current academic

discourse. Especially prominent is what goes under the broad rubric of ‘‘theory.’’ Indeed, in the years since the idealist Wissenschaft and more orless positivistic empiricism that had guided the history of ideas at its foun-dation lost their privileged place in academic discourse, as is reected inWoolf’s article on historiography, ‘‘theory’’ has been the leading candidateto replace it. 19 The NDHI ’s coverage of this eld is rather hit-and-miss. Thearticles covering post-colonial studies and post-colonial theory are particu-larly disappointing (the latter is little more than a confusingly-annotatedreading list), given the strong inuence that such ideas have clearly had onthe editorial approach of the NDHI itself. The article on the key topic of

structuralism and poststructuralism is clear and thorough, and an articleon ‘‘Critical Theory’’ has the same virtues, though it covers some of the

19 A good, though highly polemical introduction to that process is the collection Theory’sEmpire: An Anthology of Dissent , ed. Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral (New York:Columbia University Press, 2005). Of special interest from our point of view is an essay‘‘Destroying Literary Studies’’ (pp. 41–51) by Rene ´ Wellek, a major contributor to andmember of the editorial board of the DHI , originally published in the New Criterion in1983. Probably the other major contender for hegemony in academic discourse in thisperiod has been rational choice theory. It receives a brief and rather narrow article in theNDHI , and while the broader applications of this approach may be somewhat slighted, Ilack sufcient expertise in the subject to explore it in any depth.

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same ground in a more compressed way. Readers familiar with Theory andits discontents will nd these and similar articles helpful in their systematicpresentation, and those not so blessed will nd them to be a good introduc-tion to the subject.

But there is at least one fault that seems to be shared by all of thesearticles, good and bad alike: none of them extend their narrative muchfurther back than the rst half of the twentieth century, with occasionaldetours to Nietzsche. In making this choice, the various authors seem to meto be giving up one of the most valuable elements of the traditional historyof ideas, namely its depth. Too often, polemics around contemporary theo-retical concepts conne their historical horizons to vague hand-waving inthe direction of ‘‘the Enlightenment.’’ Greater rigor and a broader chrono-logical focus would not only be desirable in themselves, but would also beof great help in allowing scholars to understand their own tools better anduse them with greater care and sophistication. In that sense, the NDHI hasnot fully lived up to its promise—but simply by bringing so much of thissubject into the purview of the history of ideas, it may well set the stage formore searching investigations in the future. At the very least, it would beuseful to combat the occasional self-promoting or hysterical suggestions

(depending on whether they come from promoters or detractors), that post-modern theory is somehow radically incommensurable with all humanthought that has gone before it.

Even by the most generous interpretation, such theory also forms onlya part of the current academic landscape, and the NDHI certainly reectsthat fact. Another contemporary approach, which one might term ‘‘identitystudies,’’ receives quite comprehensive treatment in the NDHI , too, witharticles on subjects from ‘‘Afrocentricity’’ to ‘‘Women’s History.’’ (The lat-ter is another example of the annoying tic of arbitrary geographical focus,with sections only on Africa and Asia.) Again, these articles tend not to

have great historical depth, though in this case, since they often deal withinstitutional realities that date back to the 1960s at the earliest, it is harderto see how this could have been avoided than in articles dealing with morepurely conceptual subjects. It is also clear that the vast majority of thesearticles are by people committed to the respective areas of study and to thepolitical claims more or less inevitably associated with them, connected asthey are to specic groups with specic interests and deeply rooted griev-ances. This is as it should be, not only because sufcient expertise would bedifcult to come by outside the group of dedicated followers, but becausemany of these elds are still in the process of explaining themselves to out-

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siders, and the space for a distanced and disinterested perspective does notyet exist. With that said, however, such a space will inevitably open up, andagain, from the perspective of scholars in the history of ideas, the inclusionof these topics in the NDHI can be read as a call to subject them to morewide-ranging scrutiny in the future.

At an even more general level, the NDHI has a number of articles onsubjects that have only recently become focuses of academic study, regard-less of the theoretical or political basis of that study. This, too, is part of avery conscious attempt to broaden the eld of the history of ideas. Accord-ing to the preface, ‘‘the rst Dictionary of the History of Ideas is knownespecially for the history of inuential texts,’’ but ‘‘there are very few arti-cles in the NDHI that are primarily the history of texts’’ ( NDHI 1: xxvii).Indeed, articles on the ‘‘Communication of Ideas,’’ ‘‘Oral Traditions,’’ and‘‘Language, Linguistics, and Literacy’’ (especially notable for both its clar-ity and its scholarly breadth), for example, cover non-written communica-tion theoretically in a way the original DHI did not—when the majortheorist of orality, Walter Ong, wrote an article for the DHI , he did it on hisother scholarly interest, the inuence of the sixteenth-century educationalreformer Peter Ramus. This move produces a lot of interesting material. I

found the entry on ‘‘Cinema’’ fascinating, though it is really a history of lm studies rather than an investigation of the ‘‘idea of cinema,’’ whateverthat might be. Certainly, there is little to quarrel with in an extension of thesources for the history of ideas, even while recognizing that nothing canreplace the precision and durability of written texts in recording and givingaccess to ideas.

At the same time, the kind of focus on the academic study of specicconcepts or technologies that is visible in the article on cinema, thoughagain probably inevitable in a dictionary produced within an academic set-ting, can be limiting. An article on ‘‘Honor,’’ for example, does a very good

job of discussing the ways in which contemporary anthropologists and his-torians have conceptualized that characteristic, but it says little about theactual history of the idea, remaining silent, for example, on dueling, or theentire question of fama and infamia in Western law (the accompanyingarticle on ‘‘Middle Eastern Notions of Honor,’’ in contrast, is very informa-tive on equivalent questions). Once again, to a certain extent this editorialapproach marks out a future territory for the history of ideas as much as itrepresents the current state of the eld. I suspect that the number of subjectsthe NDHI has felt it necessary to cover has rather outpaced the number of qualied experts who are really familiar with the methods and approaches

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of intellectual history. This is a problem that can be remedied both by agreater diversity in the subjects intellectual historians set themselves, butalso by a greater effort, which the NDHI seems to take in hand, to makethose approaches familiar to a wider segment of the academic universe.

While the NDHI explicitly does not aim to replace its predecessor,there are many subjects treated in both—by my rough count, about a thirdof the articles in the old dictionary have fairly close counterparts in the newone. A comparison of those articles retained and those left by the waysidereveals nothing obvious: there is perhaps a bit less in the NDHI that dealswith the social sciences, and some concepts of the physical sciences havebeen trimmed as well, as have a selection of the topics of traditional intellec-tual and literary history. By and large, the new authors seem to haveworked to create articles that can protably be read together with theirpredecessors. In some cases, new articles pick up where the old ones leftoff: thus, while the DHI traced the idea of ‘‘The State’’ up to the end of thenineteenth century, the NDHI (in two sub-articles) examines its roles intwentieth-century social science and in the post-colonial context. Othersrecast the subject somewhat: Max Oelschlaeger, for example, writes for theNDHI an article on ‘‘Nature’’ not only more up-to-date but more systemat-

ically historical than George Boas’ lovely but highly philosophical essay onthe subject in the DHI . One element, though, that each of these new articlesshares with the one on historiography discussed above is some acknowledg-ment of the ways in which the general loss of unifying assumptions that hasintervened since the DHI was written changes our understanding of thetopic at hand—and, by extension, the entire enterprise.

How, then, is one to evaluate the NDHI overall? It certainly does agreat deal that its predecessor did not, and it does so without either jettison-ing the basic elements of the traditional history of ideas or treading on thetoes of the DHI . Achieving this was clearly the central challenge of the

project for a new reference work in the history of ideas, and with it accom-plished, it is now safe to say that if you need such a reference work, youneed the NDHI ; the availability of the DHI in a free, online form onlyserves to make its successor more valuable. At the same time, though, andindeed as a necessary consequence of its success, the NDHI is a very differ-ent work from the DHI . With its broader coverage, it aims at a broaderaudience, including undergraduates and secondary students and, more gen-erally, anyone in need of a guide to the current landscape of the academichumanities. Like the NDHI ’s vastly increased geographical scope, this newfocus sometimes means that one loses a little of the depth of coverage and

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unity of approach that characterized the traditional history of ideas. Behindthat change, however, is a much deeper shift than a desire for novelty or amarketing gambit. I admit to an intermittent sense of dissatisfaction whilereading the NDHI , but I am inclined to believe that it is in large part epi-phenomenal: what I am really dissatised with is the current state of thediscipline and indeed of academia in general.

The fact of the matter is that no one, at this point, really knows howto deal with the relatively new demand that the humanities study all of theworld’s culture at once. Nobody really knows what methods or approachesto humanistic inquiry are likely to be the most productive—which may ormay not be an improvement on the situation ten or fteen years ago, whenacademics had many, mutually contradictory, certainties on the subject.Closer to home, it is much less clear than it once was what the role of thehistory of ideas is within the humanities or, a fortiori , in the broader ideo-logical landscape of our times. This, I suspect, is ultimately why the intro-ductory and organizational material of the NDHI is so much moreextensive than that of its predecessor: the articulation and genealogy of thematerial seems much less self-evident now than it did a generation ago, andinvites much more scrutiny. While those efforts are certainly valuable, not

least to non-professionals consulting the NDHI , their organization princi-pally around academic practice suggests the limits of what a project like theNDHI can achieve in clarifying what is, at the moment, inherently unclear.

Clarifying these issues is not necessarily a very pressing matter—muddling along unsystematically is a valuable if unglamorous skill—but itis certainly worth our while to keep trying to build a new understanding of the history of ideas. What exactly that will look like I cannot say, of course,but I suspect that it will mainly be a matter of doing more work: of expand-ing the study of non-Western cultures both in quantity and in quality, of understanding and integrating such cross-cultural studies, and of taking

proper stock of the theoretical and methodological transformations of thepast generation, using the tools already to hand. A suitable metaphor forthe current situation might be found where I (and, more signicantly, Lo-vejoy) began my encounter with the eld: Gilman Hall at Johns HopkinsUniversity. It was built in 1915 to house a library and all of the university’shumanities and social science departments. The library and social sciences,for the most part, have moved, but the humanities remain, shoehorned intoa maze of twisty little passages all the same and constrained by architecturalnecessity to interdisciplinary discourse. Over the years, it, like the projectof the history of ideas, has proven a fertile incubator of a cosmopolitan and

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broadly humanistic discourse. But it, too, has to face the tribute of time,and is currently undergoing a nearly complete interior reconstruction. 20 TheNDHI gives a snapshot of the renovations underway in the history of ideas;only time will tell how successfully A. O. Lovejoy’s physical and intellectualhomes can be rebuilt.

Duquesne University.

20 See Maria Blackburn, ‘‘If These Halls could Talk,’’ The Johns Hopkins Magazine 58(February, 2006): 50–56.

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