History of the Human Sciences

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Intellectual history and cultural history: the inside and the outside
Donald R. Kelley
History of the Human Sciences 2002 15: 1
DOI: 10.1177/0952695102015002123

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HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 15 No. 2

2002 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) pp. 119
[0952-6951(200205)15:2;119; 024123]

Intellectual history and cultural

history: the inside and the
outside
DONALD R. KELLEY

ABSTRACT
What is the relationship between intellectual and cultural history? An
answer to this question may be found in the area between the two poles
of inquiry commonly known as internalist and externalist methods. The
first of these deals with old-fashioned ideas (in Lovejoys sense) and
the second with social and political context and the sociology and
anthropology of knowledge. This article reviews this question in the
light of the earlier historiography of philosophy, literature and science,
and debates over the role of context in determining historical meaning.
Within the horizon-structure of experience and interpretation the short
answer is that cultural history is the outside of intellectual history and
intellectual history the inside of cultural history. Ideally, historians
ought to work both sides of the historical street.
Key words contextualism, cultural history, externalism,
intellectual history, internalism

What is the relationship between these two fields of study between intel-
lectual and cultural history or, as it would have been put a generation or two
ago, between the history of ideas and the social history of ideas? There is no

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2 HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES 15(2)

simple answer to this question, but posing it in a straightforward way may

give some form and direction to this article, whose subject is how to make
sense of the thought and behavior of that foreign country that is the past.1
Essentially, the problem is that of hermeneutics according to the famous
formula of Dilthey, whose views are derived from Schleiermacher how to
find the I in the Thou,2 that is, the presently intelligible in the historically
Other. It is not a question of memory but of historical meaning that must
somehow be conveyed from one subject or context that is past and forever
lost to another that is still present but soon to be past. The dilemma is not
unlike that of the early explorers or modern anthropologists, whose choice
is to take possession of the foreign terrain and impose names and meaning
on it, or else to go native and accept, if perhaps not quite understand, the
foreignness of the country being explored.3
For historians this intellectual project has been carried on between two
poles of inquiry which have been commonly known as internalist and exter-
nalist or the intellectualist and contextualist methods.4 The first of these
polar positions is located in individual psychology and mental phenomena, the
second in collective behavior, inherited or learned practice, and cultural sur-
roundings. For history this takes the following form: on the one hand tracing
ideas in terms of an inner dynamic, or familiar logic, similar to what the 18th
century called reasoned or conjectural history; and on the other hand trying
to place ideas in the context of their own particular time, place and environ-
ment, without assuming continuities of meaning. The contrast I have been
making also has an epistemological aspect, which is between what has been
called makers knowledge and the social or cultural construction of know-
ledge.5 The first is the old belief going back to Vico, Hobbes and indeed Plato
that one is able to understand only what one has made, or is able humanly
to make, and this implies a meeting of minds across the ages through ideas,
theories and other intellectual creations. The second is the newer belief that
knowledge is shaped or even determined by the conditions limitations as
well as possibilities of a society and questions of power relations, class struc-
ture, and factors of gender, race, nationality, etc. Put differently, the contrast
is between a phenomenological view which takes ideas on their own terms, that
is, as mental phenomena, and a reductionist or constructivist view which treats
them as Something Else or at least as derivative of particular cultural context.
Note that the IO distinction refers not to questions of subjectivity and
objectivity but to the way of employing sources. The inside of history treats
the words, and so presumably thoughts, of historical agents, while the
outside deals with political, economic, social and cultural environment.
Obviously the same source can serve both purposes. Montaignes Essays can
be read as the reflections of a critical intellectual or as evidence for the moral
and political climate of the 16th century; and so, in a different way, can Jean
Bodins Republic. From an internalist point of view Montaigne and Bodin can

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INTELLECTUAL HISTORY AND CULTURAL HISTORY 3

be set in traditions of thought and ideology, skepticism in Montaignes case

and absolutism in Bodins; from an externalist standpoint they appear against
the background of the French religious wars. Of course these two approaches
cannot be separated, for their writings can be read in several contexts. In
particular there are not only synchronic contexts but also diachronic con-
texts. Questions not only of society, institutions and politics but also of lan-
guage, discourse, mentality and associated traditions involve, in their own
temporal and less tangible way, contexts and what Gadamer has called the
experience of tradition the latter occupying, in general, internalist terrain.6
For some scholars this internalistexternalist distinction, which was
restored to currency a generation ago in the wake of debates provoked by
Thomas Kuhn, has fallen out of favor. Steven Shapin has recently rejected it
as silly and unworthy of discussion, apparently because he believes that the
latter, constructivist approach has prevailed and assimilated the naive inter-
nalist view.7 But such Angloid revisionism (Dr Johnsons kicking the stones
of vain philosophy) is hardly the last word on the subject. A distinction
between inner and outer will persist until there is an end to asking ques-
tions about the history of concepts, theories, paradigms, revolutions, thematic
origins of scientific thought, and other decontextualizable epiphenomena
which have occupied thinkers for centuries in many contexts and hermeneu-
tical conditions. In fact the opposition between internal and external is deeply
embedded in western thought and languages, most obviously and most par-
adigmatically, perhaps, in Platos distinction between the true (and inner)
world of ideas and the false (and outer) world of appearances. This funda-
mental dualism was reinforced by the Christian dualisms of body-and-soul
and letter-and-spirit, as well as the Cartesian distinction between res extensa
and res cogitans, Kants starry heaven above and moral law within, and
Nietzsches rejection of Platonic ideas for the truth in appearances. Nor do
I think that either history or language allows us to evade this conventional
structure of thought, no matter how many rocks we may kick or what our
context or historical vantage point.

II

The earliest sites of this innerouter distinction have been the histories of
religion and of philosophy, where the dualism of body and soul still prevails.
In the mid-18th century J. L. Mosheim organized his ecclesiastical history
(1867[1755]) according to just this division. As the history of the church is
External or Internal, he remarked, so the manner of treating it must be
suited to that division. The external history of the Church included matters
of government, secular learning and major events, and the internal history
matters of the spirit doctrine, heresy, ceremony, etc.8

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4 HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES 15(2)

The history of philosophy, which had emerged as a new discipline in the

17th century, displays a similar structure. At first this took the form of
doxography in the style of the classic (but also trivial and untrustworthy)
work of Diogenes Laertius on the lives and opinions of philosophers. As the
historian of philosophy, Ephraim Gerhard, complained in 1711, doxogra-
phers were interested only in external matters such as anecdotes about
Pythagoras father, Platos mother, or Aristotles son, in the physical condition
or temperaments of philosophers, or in the later fortuna of their writings.9
The very first periodical devoted to the history of philosophy, the Acta
Philosophorum edited by C. A. Heumann beginning in 1715, exemplified the
old doxography as expanded by new scholarship. Heumann himself believed
that philosophical self-understanding required not merely inward-looking
speculation but also inquiry into the human conditions of philosophizing,
since, as Heumann aphorized, Philosophers are made, not born (Philosophi
fiunt, non nascuntur), reversing the condition of the poet (nascitur non fit).10
Following Augustine, Heumann also went on to wonder if bastards had a
special talent and whether women or castrati were capable of philosophy.
Beyond psychological factors, Heuman considered the influence of environ-
ment, climate, the stars, race, nationality, and historical periods.
In sharp contrast to this vulgar externalism was the work of such thinkers
as Jacob Thomasius, who was, ante litteram, a historian of ideas tracing con-
cepts of God, nature, being, etc., from the ancient schools down to his own
age. As his former student Leibniz wrote to Thomasius in 1669, Most others
are skilled rather in antiquity than in science and give us lives rather than doc-
trines. You will give us the history of philosophy [historia philosophica], not
of philosophers.11 In the terminology used by Leibniz (and given new cur-
rency in our time by Thomas Kuhn), Thomasius revealed not the outside but
the inside not the body but the soul of the history of philosophy.
The internalist view came to full flower in Hegels concept of Philoso-
phiegeschichte. The essential connection between what is apparently past and
the present state reached by philosophy, he wrote, is not one of the exter-
nal considerations which might have attention in the history of philosophy
but expresses instead the inner nature of its character. For Hegel this inter-
nalist history had nothing to do with an alien Thou and everything to do with
the philosophizing I. The course of history does not show us the Becoming
of things foreign to us, he added, but the Becoming of ourselves and of our
own knowledge.12
The result was to emphasize the doctrinal and what I would like to call the
propositional conception of the history of philosophy and of ideas. Not the
wit, wisdom and life-style of Diogenes, we may say, or his intellectual com-
munity, but the ideas and theories which produced common ground between
Plato and Leibniz and which permitted the discussion of perennial ques-
tions by a philosophical we without regard to the limits of 17th-century

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INTELLECTUAL HISTORY AND CULTURAL HISTORY 5

cultural horizons or indeed of language in general. As Georg Simmel, himself

torn between philosophy and sociology, put it, If history is not a mere
puppet show, then it must be a history of mental processes. . . . Attempts to
reconstruct the physical conditions responsible for the peculiarities of
historical events do not alter this fact.13 So the external history of philosophy
was overshadowed by an internal, spiritual history which produced a
rational, triumphalist and Whiggish narrative of the progress of reason
down to the present or rather, the history of our reason down to our
times.

III

One classic example of this polarity in the intellectual history itself appears
in the critical reactions to Arthur O. Lovejoys The Great Chain of Being
of 1936, which is a paradigm of the internalist history of ideas.14 The next
year, in the Marxian Quarterly, Science & Society, the young scholar
Charles Trinkaus found his neglect of the social determinants and conse-
quences of this idea to be a serious omission, since the concept of cosmic
hierarchy, which was homologous to the gradation of social and political
ranks, not only reflected the structure of class society but also appears to
have been used to justify and strengthen class domination. Nor was it sur-
prising, Trinkaus added, that the temporalization of the great chain and
evolutionary ideas coincided chronologically with the advent of progres-
sive bourgeois capitalism and its attendant hierarchies. Trinkaus himself
later turned to the most purely internalist sort of intellectual history, becom-
ing a leading historian of Renaissance moral (and conspicuously not
political) thought. At this point, however, he was following a Marxist model
of externalist history, and he was taken to task by the philosopher Ernest
Nagel for his assumptions, in particular the notion of ideas being a reflec-
tion of social conditions, which was a metaphor that neither explained nor
predicted anything, at least not without evidence that Trinkaus had failed to
offer. Having criticized Lovejoy for his own departures from logic, Nagel
applied the same internalist rigor to the contextualist suggestions ventured
by Trinkaus.
This illustration concerns the history of ideas in its classic and innocent
state, but on one point Lovejoy and his critics were in agreement the need
for an interdisciplinary approach. In fact the most important advances in
intellectual history in this century have been made not in history as such but
rather in some of these overlapping disciplines, especially in the history of
philosophy, of natural science, and of literature. These disciplines have all
been scenes of IO conflicts, and I draw on each for perspective on the past
and insight into the present state of the question.

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6 HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES 15(2)

IV

The war between internalism and externalism has left its mark on the study
of literary history (historia literaria), another discipline that emerged in the
17th century.15 Histories of literature have been divided generally between
undiscriminating surveys of authors and books or else critical and opinion-
ated studies of capital-L Literature. As Leibniz wanted a history of Philos-
ophy, not merely of philosophers not merely old-fashioned doxography
so Friedrich Schlegel wanted a history of Literature, not merely a sequence
of authors.16 In general the externalist road was taken by historians of litera-
ture, while the internalist path was followed by capital-C Critics, who
treated questions of aesthetics, originality and the classical status of texts.
For critics literature is the offspring of individual genius and risks being
spoiled by analysis and considerations of climate and context. For the
historians, according to the famous aphorism of Bonald, Literature is an
expression of society.17
In literary history constructivism is of two sorts, one psychological and the
other social, and each of these is nicely represented by a French master of the
last century. Psychological constructivism, or reductionism, was the specialty
of the great critic Sainte-Beuve. What he did in his weekly column, the Lundis,
was to shift attention from the creative artist to another self (un autre moi)
that appeared not in the published oeuvre but rather in letters, social gossip,
and the perceived character inferred from the context of salon culture. This
externalist impulse also underlay Sainte-Beuves monumental study of 17th-
century intellectual history, which was defined not merely by the ideas of
Arnauld, Jansen and Pascal but by the lives, opinions and interactions of all
the members of the monastery of Port-Royal and by the changing social
context.18 (Recall that Sainte-Beuve was himself the victim of such anec-
dotalism as a result of his affair with Victor Hugos wife; whether or not this
scandal shed light on the literary practice of either, it was, said the externalist
scholar Irving Babbitt, a delicious morsel for the ultra-biographical school.)19
To literary artists and historians who championed the internalist values of
aesthetics this attention to gossip and character seemed a violation of the
autonomy of art and the privileges and the genius of the artist. The man is
nothing, Flaubert told George Sand; the work is everything.20 This line of
protest was summed up in Marcel Prousts Contre Sainte-Beuve, which
denounced the critic on the grounds that he sees literature under the category
of time and follows a method which consists in not separating the man from
his work.21 In other words he sees the outside but not the inside of the artist.
As for the social version of constructivism, this was associated especially
with the younger French literary critic and historian Hippolyte Taine, who
regarded Sainte-Beuve (as Proust remarked) as a predecessor in the discovery
of the scientific method formulated more rigidly by Taine himself.22 Taines

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INTELLECTUAL HISTORY AND CULTURAL HISTORY 7

method was expressed most famously in the contextualist trinity of race,

moment, milieu, which relate literary creations to the external dispositions
of national character, pressures of the natural environment, and periods of
cultural development. To literary artists like Flaubert, Taines fatalism was
no less objectionable than Sainte-Beuves psychologism. For Taine, Flaubert
complained, The masterpiece no longer has any significance except as a
historical document.23
What Taine seemed to disregard was the large distance between document
and artistic work (according to the distinction of Heidegger) between tra-
dition and the individual talent (in the phrase of T. S. Eliot).24 How can one
distinguish between authors living in the same century and moral climate?
One can indeed show all the relations they have with the time in which they
are born and live . . . Sainte-Beuve wrote in a critique of Taines method, but
one cannot tell in advance that [the age] will give birth to a particular kind of
individual or talent. Why Pascal rather than La Fontaine?25 These are ques-
tions which seem to be ignored by externalist interpretations.
The insideout conceit conceals another problem of intellectual history,
and this is the semantic gap between authorial intention and the reception by
later readers and critics. It is the aspiration of philologists, editors and some
interpreters to establish, or to divine, the creative spirit underlying texts (on
the analogy of fundamentalist biblical critics), but once set down the word
takes flight among the vulgar and the predisposed, and even the original
author cannot be trusted to reconstruct the creative moment. It is only
making the best of this hermeneutical predicament to add that meaning,
which in any case transcends the meaners and their intentions, is improved
and enriched by such dissemination.
Constructivism is associated with another sort of distraction from auth-
orial autonomy, which goes by the name of contextualism.26 A classic debate
over this issue was staged two generations ago between the Cambridge critic
F. R. Leavis, speaking as the Responsible Critic, and F. W. Bateson of
Oxford, posing as the champion of scholarship and what he called the disci-
pline of contextual reading (as exemplified by Rosamond Tuve).27 The
notoriously opinionated Leavis demurred, arguing that the idea of placing a
poem back into total context was nonsense and that social context was an
illusion arising involuntarily out of ones personal living (inevitably situated
in the 20th century). For Leavis in any case social was an invidious term
which should not be allowed to contaminate the high art of Literature, and
such pretensions to scholarship suggested an inability to read poetry and to
make the sort of intuitive aesthetic judgments that were the office of the
critic.28 Diverted by biographical details and irrelevant context Shake-
speares laundry lists was the scornful phrase some literary critics and
historians tended to lose sight of what Wellek and Warren called the intrin-
sic study of literature and modes of existence of the literary work of art.29

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8 HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES 15(2)

This debate was revived a generation later by another Cambridge scholar,

Quentin Skinner, who invoked Bateson and his contextualist reading against
Leavis and transported the arguments into the context of political theory,
which had been suffering from the same sort of contempt for history that
Leavis had displayed with regard to literature.30 The vulgar and socially
reductionist versions of contextualism were represented, on the left and right
respectively, by Karl Marx and Lewis Namier, focusing in particular on social
background; they studied history and behavior but were looking for Some-
thing Else. Skinner, however, advocated a less ideological (or anti-ideological)
and more linguistic attention to historical context in order to avoid anachro-
nism and to understand original authorial intention and meaning.

The IO distinction has become especially heated among historians of

science. Ian Hacking sums up the issue in this way:
External history is a matter of politics, economics, the funding of insti-
tutes, the circulation of journals, and all the social circumstances that
are external to knowledge itself. Internal history is the history of indi-
vidual items of knowledge, conjectures, experiments, refutations,
perhaps.31
And he adds that We have no good account of the relationship between
external and internal history.
Again, there is little new in this distinction. As Jean-Sylvain Bailly wrote
about the chain of truths that constitute science, but the chain of truths is
not the order of their discoveries.32 Reviewing what he called intellectual
evolution and the progress of the human spirit Auguste Comte spoke of
the difference between doctrinal and historical advance, between la marche
dogmatique and la marche historique, noting that they were by no means
identical.33 On the one hand one could analyze the successive conceptual
achievements of scientific disciplines, as Comtes colleague Cournot did in
1868 in his Considerations on the March of Ideas and Events in Modern
Times. On the other hand one could trace the complex and serendipitous
pattern of history, as Emile Boutroux did six years later in his provocative
book on The Contingency of the Laws of Nature.34 The former explained
disciplinary progress; the latter depicted what Comte called the effective
development of the human spirit.35 The former preserved logical sequence
and demonstrable truth; the latter admitted not only the existence but even
the heuristic value of error and the blind alleys as well as the high and Whig-
gish road to Scientific Correctness.
In this old debate the basic question was again the issue of inside and

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INTELLECTUAL HISTORY AND CULTURAL HISTORY 9

outside of pure scientific thought and its social and institutional conditions.
Can the sociology of knowledge, as David Bloor put it, investigate and
explain the very content and nature of scientific knowledge?36 This is the
issue defined by the seminal and polar books of Thomas Kuhn and Karl
Popper The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and The Logic of Scientific
Discovery but again there is a longer history to the debate.
In 1873 (less than a decade after the appearance of Taines History of
English Literature) Alphonse Candolle published a History of the Sciences
and of Men of Learning, which studied, through statistics and quantitative
researches, a wide range of extra-scientific influences, including family
background, religion, language, geography, gender, and especially heredity,
and natural selection.37 Soon these objects of research were to be further
relativized by association with the idea of mentalit which was given cur-
rency by Lucien Levy-Bruhl and adopted by younger historians of science
such as Abel Rey, Gaston Bachelard and Alexandre Koyr.
In the 20th century in the Anglophone world the debate centered on the
pioneering work of Robert K. Merton, who, following the line of Weber,
found striking correlations between the extrinsic factors of Puritan belief
and interest in science.38 The suggestive results of such pioneering forays into
the sociology of science were reinforced by more dogmatic Marxist views of
the role of material factors; and despite the decline of Marxist influence, what
has been called the strong thesis of the sociology of scientific knowledge
(SSK in the trade) has been widely accepted as grounds for plotting the story
of western science. Externalism has returned with a nominalist and localist
vengeance in recent works, expressed most strikingly, perhaps, in those of
Shapin and Andrew Pickering, the first investigating not just the history of
truth but The Social History of Truth and the second not just contingency but
messy contingencies.39
As in literary history one crucial question is the role of individual genius,
and here a methodological consensus can never be reached. The cest la faute
de Voltaire theory of the origins of the French Revolution may be discred-
ited, but analogous views of the Scientific Revolution are still accepted,
especially by philosophers. To the fundamental work of Galileo in the math-
ematization of nature Edmund Husserl traces not only this revolution but
also the 20th-century crisis of European sciences.40 Contrast this with the
radical minimalizing of the role of the heroic discoverer by Bruno Latour in
his virtuoso account a sort of counter-epic of the pasteurization of
France.41 Husserl based his view on an account of Galileos motivations from
a presentist standpoint, while Latour turned attention to the debates, cultural
climate and political environment of proto-bacteriology and the 19th-century
hygiene movement in which Pasteur was a mainly symbolic figure. Latours
story is an Odyssey with Odysseus left out.
It is such lines of questions that underlie what G. S. Rousseau and Roy

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10 HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES 15(2)

Porter have celebrated as an irreversible new revolution in the history of

science, which has extended its horizons into the cultural context and has
radically reduced the role of hard history of science in historical under-
standing.42 The work of David Lachterman and Joan Richards shows that
even mathematics which in any case has in this century lost its absolute
foundations and universal claims has a rhetorical form and social dimen-
sion associated with the language of members of a community at a particular
time.43 Indeed Euclidean geometry and Cartesian analysis appear, from this
externalist standpoint, to be classic examples of the demonstrations of math-
ematics as human constructions.
Another aspect of current views of the history of science is the emphasis
placed by scholars on rhetoric as a constituent of scientific theory as well as
a means of dissemination. Marcello Peras recent book, The Discourses of
Science, proposes a new scientific dialectics which expands the old Bacon-
ian or Cartesian paradigm of the solitary inquirer interrogating nature by
adding a third party, the scientific community and attendant context of intel-
lectual debate.44 The upshot is a game with three players, and according to
Pera, it accommodates external as well as internal history the sociology as
well as the logic of scientific discovery.
But the debate continues, and the poles are not only far apart but also, it
seems, without common ground between them. At one extreme we see
defenses of the integrity of pure science, such as the manifesto by Noel
Swerdlow published in the Journal of the History of Ideas on behalf of what
he calls the technical content of science, as opposed to social, literary and
other contextualist concerns, which he finds repetitious and sterile as well
as also anti-scientific. How can we ever come to understand earlier science
in its own terms and free of the prejudices and preconceptions of our own
age, he continues, if we confine ourselves to fashionable issues of philos-
ophy or social studies of science?45
The major figures in the revolution of modern science are favorite loci for
internalist debates, the Copernican revolution serving as the target and para-
digm of such questions of method. The strong internalist thesis is offered by
Swerdlow, who finds the eurekan key to Copernicus conceptual break-
through in the so-called Tusi couple, which had been developed by the 14th-
century Arabic astronomer Ibn-al-Shatir as a geometrical model to account
for rectilinear motion within the framework of circular movement. No
historical evidence has been offered for this connection, nor did Copernicus
hint at such influence (although he did admit ancient predecessors); but
Swerdlow nonetheless concludes that the major question is not whether, but
when, where, and in what form this transmission occurred.46
Copernicus has also been studied in the context of late medieval cosmo-
logical speculation, Renaissance humanism, neo-Platonism, ecclesiastical
politics, and other considerations that concern not merely the intentional

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INTELLECTUAL HISTORY AND CULTURAL HISTORY 11

point, the eurekan moment of discovery or conceptualization, but also the

questions of why, when, in what context, and how understood. For Hans
Blumenberg, the historian of science must address the broader preconditions
that made Copernicus discovery possible and the postconditions that deter-
mined its reception and effects (Wirkungsgeschichte). Internal history explains
the meaning of Copernicus achievement but does not reach its larger mean-
ings, such as why his reception took so long or indeed why he did not
become the Aristarchus of the sixteenth century, a thinker without an effect.47

VI

The one accessible place where internalist and externalist concerns seem to
intersect is language, which is internalized in individuals but which is also the
object of science and which can be analyzed in terms both of makers know-
ledge and of social construction. What Emile Durkheim said of religion
applies also, and even more fundamentally, to language:
Collective representations are the result of an immense co-operation,
which stretches not only into space but into time as well; to make them,
a multitude of minds have associated, united, and combined their ideas
and sentiments.48
Or as Karl Mannheim put it, Strictly speaking it is incorrect to say that the
single mind thinks. Rather it is more correct to insist that he participates in
thinking further what other men have thought before him.49 In these days
of the linguistic and textualist turns one should substitute writing for ideas,
sentiments and thinking; for it is in the effort of writing in particular that
the subject philosopher, scientist, literary artist ventures out into the
surrounding cultural space and perhaps historical notice. The authors
thought is already a cultural construction, no doubt, but communication and
dialogue give it external form subject to interpretation and criticism.
In short (and to return to the original analogy) parole occupies the center
of the horizons of understanding (in the Saussurean formula), while langue
fills up the rest. (This is the case with technical as well as ordinary languages.)
Here the I and the Thou meet in a common medium lexicographically
if not spiritually. Here intellectual and cultural history intersect and the
internalistexternalist dilemma retreats into the realm of pure epistemology,
where it will cause less trouble for the research agenda of intellectual and
cultural historians.
To shift from the horizon analogy to a more linear model, intellectual
history can be seen as defining a large spectrum ranging from the most
restricted sort of history of ideas (the Tusi couple in Copernicus, the Merton
rule in Galileo, the topoi studied by Ernst Curtius) to the most expansive and

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12 HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES 15(2)

theoretical efforts to relate human efforts to a larger collective reality,

whether designated spirit, climate of opinion, culture, Weltanschauung, social
base, ideology, mentality, practice, tradition, paradigm, or universe of dis-
course.50
There are many contexts diachronic, synchronic, disciplinary, pro-
fessional, rhetorical, etc. which can be (and for centuries have been) put to
use by historians.51 The point is not to privilege one sort of interpretation as
Ideologically or Methodologically Correct. This is a counsel not so much of
relativism as of complementarity and a reminder of the enduring concern,
which is not final closure but continuing inquiry into the ups and downs
and ins and outs of history, and perhaps, with this vicarious experience,
some measure of wisdom the self-knowledge that comes not only from
reflection on the I but also from the many alien Thous that are encoun-
tered in the study of intellectual and cultural history.

VII

In any case this is one way of answering the question posed at the beginning
of this article: cultural history is the outside of intellectual history, and intel-
lectual history is the inside of cultural history. A philosophical argument, a
literary creation, a eurekan discovery of science are all putative creations of
individual genius, a thinking subject. Yet they are also, somehow, the
products of intellectual tradition and cultural incubation; and so they are the
offspring of their time and place.
Think of the IO duality as contrasting or complementary forms of
inquiry undertaken within a horizon-structure of experience. The center
of this intellectual space locates the historical subject (conscious, intentional,
or even unconscious), or perhaps an act of discovery, or creation, or con-
ceptualization a pure phenomenological moment that becomes a target of
historical examination. The surrounding space encompasses contexts of the
subject of study preconditions, possibilities, resonances, influences, inter-
connections, and effects involving other fields of cultural activity, states of
disciplinary questions, and climate of opinion. And beyond the edge of the
circle we may imagine the transition from intellectual and cultural history to
future ideals, and so to cultural criticism and action.
A third (and these days more fashionable) possibility would be a decen-
tered horizon-structure, which is implied by notions of the death of the con-
scious subject, the author, the socially conscious agent, and (one would infer)
the far-seeing critic. Here meaning is not something registered by a stable
subject or an intelligent analyst but rather an illusion or a Derridean ghost
(as Allan Megill calls it) which resists definition in the infinite and indeter-
minate free-play of signs. This version of the paradigm, however, invites not

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INTELLECTUAL HISTORY AND CULTURAL HISTORY 13

historical inquiry nor even historical skepticism but only silence which may
be a sort of wisdom but which is not what historical writing is about.
Since Hegel (if not Nicholas of Cusa) philosophers and social theorists
have tried to resolve the IO problem. Hegel pretended to do this by identi-
fying the ideal and the real was innen ist, as he put it, ist aussen. In various
ways Husserl, Heidegger and Cassirer have also sought to join subject and
object, inside and outside, in a single field of cognition; and Georges Gusdorf
performed the prodigious feat of writing a history of all the sciences, human
as well as natural, in phenomenological terms. Social theorists have
approached the question from the opposite an external standpoint. Marx
(or vulgar Marxists anyway) proceeded by identifying the ideal with ideology
and rendering it a function of material reality, and other more or less reduc-
tionist methods have sought, paradoxically, to place external factors at the
center of historical analysis. Vilfredo Paretos residues, Critical Theory, Pierre
Bourdieus fields of cultural and literary production, Foucauldian archeology,
Cultural Materialism, the New Historicism, and sociobiology all, in different
ways, claim to have found a privileged view from the outside.
Historians, however, do not have the luxury of settling down into such
comfortable theories. History is still (as it has been since Herodotus) a critical
art of inquiry which must question such resolutions as well as its own pro-
cedures. Historians do not have a metalanguage to bring about explanatory
closure, or indeed to define exhaustively its own field of operations; and so
they must continue both to reflect and to scan the horizons of experience
both to essay retrospective mind-reading to assess motives, intentions, lines
of argument, goals, values, etc., and to seek connections with external con-
ditions, forces and parallels. Of historical questions there can be no end, and
certainly no final answers nor is there, on this side of the grave, any way to
evade the Inside and the Outside of our common hermeneutical predicament.

NOTES

1 For recent discussions in an international context see Donald R. Kelley, Anthony

Pagden, Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Edoardo Tortarolo and John Christian
Laursen (1996) in the first annual newsletter of the International Society for Intel-
lectual History; also Kelley (1990a). This essay is a byproduct of my forthcoming
book, The Descent of Ideas: The History of Intellectual History.
2 Dilthey (1927: 191): Das Verstehen ist ein Wiederfinden des Ich im Du.
3 Kelley (1997: 27593).
4 See Smocovitis (1996: 7396); Hesse (1980: 27ff.); Butts and Brown (1989); Geertz
(1994: 93); and Golinski (1998).
5 Prez-Ramos (1988) and Hacking (1999).
6 Gadamer (1982: 310ff.).
7 Shapin (1996).

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14 HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES 15(2)

8 Mosheim (1867).
9 Gerhard (1711: 2).
10 Heumann (1715: 567656); and cf. Ringler (1941: 497504). Boeckh (1986: 139),
citing the formulas Criticus non fit, sed nascitur, attributed to David Ruhnken, and
interpres non fit, sed nascitur.
11 Nizolio (1670: fol. 2v); Leibnizs preface (non philosophorum, sed philosophiae
historia); also in Leibniz (1969: 93); and see Leibniz (1993).
12 Hegel (1995: 4).
13 Simmel (1979: 39).
14 Trinkaus (1937).
15 Morhof (168892: I, 2); Reimann (1709); Heumann (1718); and Stolles (1728).
16 Behler (1991: 12).
17 Bonald (1829: II, 223).
18 Sainte-Beuve (1959: IX, 172), letter to Renan, 29 August 1852, and his Lundi,
9 March 1857; also Wellek (1965: III, 34); and Lehman (1962: 79).
19 Babbitt (1913).
20 Flaubert (1953: 249), letter to George Sand (December 1875).
21 Proust (1954: 127).
22 Proust (1954: 124), referring to Taines preface to his LIntelligence; also Leger
(1993), Pozzi (1993) and Lacombe (1906).
23 Cited by Wellek (1965: IV, 1112).
24 Heidegger (1971: 17ff.); cf. LaCapra (1983: 30); and Eliot (1950: 311).
25 Sainte-Beuve (1932: III, 213).
26 Hacking (1999).
27 Leavis (1968: II, 280ff.).
28 Anna Karenina and Other Essays (1967: 195).
29 Wellek and Warren (1949: 139).
30 Tully (1988: 69).
31 Hacking (1991: 191).
32 Bailly (1785: vi).
33 Comte (1949: I, 123).
34 Boutroux (1874).
35 Comte (1949: I, 145); and cf. Cournot (1922).
36 Bloor (1991: 3).
37 Candolle (1885[1873]).
38 I. B. Cohen (1990: 14550).
39 Hesse (1980: 29); H. F. Cohen (1994: 229); Pickering (1995).
40 Husserl (1970).
41 Latour (1988).
42 Rousseau and Porter (1980: 1).
43 Lachterman (1989); Richards (1988: 61), on non-Euclidean geometry and math-
ematical truth; and see David (1989: 5368).
44 Pera (1994: 189); Dear (1991).
45 Swerdlow (1993: 315).
46 Huff (1993: 54).
47 Blumenberg (1987: 124, 167).
48 Durkheim (1965[1915]: 29).

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INTELLECTUAL HISTORY AND CULTURAL HISTORY 15

49 Mannheim (1952: 3).

50 Dantzig (1954).
51 Machimer (1994: 14960) posits the following five levels of inquiry:
(1) individual human level: ideas, cognitive schemes, strategies or goals, desire
for money, fame, or power, background beliefs, paradigms, religious beliefs,
unconscious needs, leadership, genius, anomie, alienation, sexuality, patrio-
tism;
(2) small group level: families, motherfatherchildren, sibling order, political
parties, friends, church, armies, trade unions, clubs, corporations;
(3) large group level: educational systems, political structures, legal systems,
religious institutions, nations, bureaucracies, transnational entities, alliances,
systems of trade);
(4) cultural level: intellectual fields, habits, shared metaphors, linguistic schemes,
languages, kinship structures, economic systems, race, status, rituals, clan
structures, power, ideology;
(5) material conditions level: climate, diet, agriculture, geographic location,
material resources, technology, gender, physicality.

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INTELLECTUAL HISTORY AND CULTURAL HISTORY 19

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

DONALD R. KELLEY is James Westfall Thompson Professor of History at

Rutgers University and editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas. Among
his many publications are History, Law and the Human Sciences (1984), The
Human Measure (1990), The History of Ideas: Canon and Variations (1990),
Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder (1998) and The
Descent of Ideas: The History of Intellectual History (forthcoming).

Address: Department of History, Rutgers, the State University of New York,

88 College Avenue, New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8542, USA. Tel: 732/932-
1227 or 1228. Fax: 732/932-8708. [email: dkelley@rci.rutgers.edu]

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