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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
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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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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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