Intelectual History

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 inÐ'Џuential 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