Essay About Intellectual History And New Cultural Historyð

Intelectual History
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Intellectual History vs. the Social History of
Intellectuals
Daniel Wickberg
University of Texas at Dallas, USA
With the prominence of the �new cultural history’ in the last 15 years, much
of what had once been called intellectual history has passed into the sphere
of cultural history; intellectual historians now do silent battle with the old
�new social history’ establishment for proprietary claim to the methods, substance
and insights of cultural history, and job and course descriptions join
intellectual and cultural history as frequently as they do social and cultural
history. If cultural history today stands as the great middle ground, where
intellectual and social historians can meet, and if not agree, then at least disguise
their differences under a common rubric, it is equally true that the lack
of distinct boundaries between intellectual, cultural and social histories has
led to a serious erosion of the distinctive approach to the past that intellectual
history offers. Intellectual history, once generally recognized as a distinct
and autonomous sphere of practice, has in the past thirty years lost its distinctiveness
in becoming part of the mainstream of general historical practice
(Bouwsma 1980; Bender 1997). The blurring of genres characteristic of recent
academic thought has made some methods and approaches associated with
intellectual history broadly inÐЏuential under the rubric of вЂ?culture.’ As with
any success, however, there has been a price to pay. Others have been concerned
with the erosion of the distinctive