Preface

The aim of this short book is to give general readers a sense of what intellectual history is and what intellectual historians do. Intellectual history is currently a highly active research field. Intellectual historians are at the forefront of the current global, transnational, comparative, spatial, visual and international turns in the historical profession. There are intellectual histories of scientific doctrines, passions and senses, of urban planning and nation-states, of cannibalism and (more natural forms of) consumption, of the working classes, of biography and of hymns. Any attempt at a definition is going to be seen to be partial. Equally, it has to be acknowledged to be personal; hopefully this is forgivable in an introductory text such as this one. A book defining intellectual history could deal more directly with the intellectual history of science or of art or music or anthropology, where remarkable work has been done since the 1950s. Equally, the relationship between intellectual history and the history of philosophy, or intellectual history and the history of literature, have proved fertile ground in recent times. In the text I try to push the reader towards what I think are useful guides to these areas. This book's contents, inevitably, has been shaped by my own interests. These developed through what might now be termed the traditional route. I was fortunate to have been educated at the University of Cambridge, where I was introduced to intellectual history in the 1980s through two undergraduate courses with the inspirational titles of ‘Political Thought before 1750’ and ‘Political Thought after 1750’. John Dunn, Mark Goldie, Duncan Forbes, Quentin Skinner, Gareth Stedman Jones, Richard Tuck and other luminaries were the lecturers and tutors. It was only after graduating, when I spent a year at Harvard, that I realized I had become a member of a distinctive tribe.

At Cambridge Massachusetts I took a course on ‘Enlightenment Political Theory’ with the incomparable Judith Shklar. In the classes Shklar encouraged graduate students to connect the texts of the historical authors being studied with contemporary political questions. The key was to work out what stand the author would have taken had they been faced with the controversies of today. In consequence, one of the issues discussed at length was ‘whether Montesquieu would have burned the flag [of the United States]’. I found such discussions odd because there did not seem to be any point in trying to work out an answer to such a question, which it appeared to me at the time, and still does, added neither to our knowledge of Montesquieu nor to our knowledge of the nature of political ideas, historic or contemporary. I had been taught that the point of reading the work of historical authors was to find out what they thought about the issues that mattered to them. There might well be a connection to present politics, but this would be complicated and indirect. By contrast, Shklar wanted those in her seminar to discuss the arguments they found in the texts they were reading, to evaluate them and to measure them against contemporary argument. Shklar was an inspirational teacher, ever-questioning and pushing her students to work things out for themselves. Unlike tutors I had had in Cambridge UK, she refused to give her own view of the subject in question, or to turn the seminars into an exercise in conveying information about how people thought in the past. I felt frustrated because I knew that Shklar had a better grasp of eighteenth-century politics than I would ever have, and wanted her to do the instructing.

Making this point will mark out my approach to intellectual history. Some readers may think it declares membership of a group frequently identified as ‘The Cambridge School’ of intellectual history, which is often associated with the assertion that intellectual history is identical to the history of political thought. This was never the case. For Cambridge authors and for intellectual historians elsewhere, there was always more to the history of ideas than politics, and politics in any case might be approached through economics, anthropology, natural philosophy or a host of other disciplinary areas. One of the aims of this book is to show that such a label as The Cambridge School, while useful in describing a series of path-breaking justifications of intellectual history, can be abandoned today. It no longer describes the research questions addressed by some of the best intellectual historians, many of whom are still linked in one way or another with that university. Intellectual historians associated in the popular mind with Cambridge represent divergent approaches to intellectual history, replicated across the Anglophone world, that need to be recognized. This said, the contribution of individuals labelled historians of political thought to the establishment of intellectual history cannot be overlooked; the fact that some of them continue to set the agenda for intellectual historians is underlined here. Many of the examples and illustrations of the arguments have been drawn from the history of political thought, especially during the long eighteenth century. This is the ground where I feel most secure. An anonymous reviewer of the first draft of this book asked whether the title of the book ought to be ‘What is the history of political thought?’ The intention has been to write an introduction to intellectual history, and in doing so to deal with the relationship between these still interlinked fields. One of the points made in the book, which has also been made elsewhere, is that intellectual history is at a crossroads. What may well be the final works of several of the founders of intellectual history as presently constituted are currently being published; at the same time the methods and attitudes of these leading figures are being applied to a host of new research fields and problems. Where intellectual history goes next is anybody's guess.

Introduction

On the eastern side of Lake Windermere in Cumbria, in the north west of England, there was once a quarry at Ecclerigg Crag producing slate and stone for the remarkable buildings of the region. Active between the eighteenth and the early twentieth century, the quarry was sufficiently large to have its own dock. Having passed into history, what remains in the grounds of the hotel now standing on the site are five large slabs with detailed carvings made into the bedrock, in addition to ad hoc rocks both submerged in and out of the water. Some of the carvings are dated between 1835 and 1837. One of the master craftsmen employed at the quarry evidently took it upon himself to carve messages into the bare slate. The carvings include names of national and local significance, including ‘Nelson’, ‘Newton’, ‘Walter Scott’, ‘Wordsworth’, ‘Jenner’, ‘Humphry Davy’, ‘Richard Watson’, as well as the owner of the site, ‘John Wilson’, the friend of the Lake Poets and a well known local personage through his writing for Blackwood's Magazine and his being Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh (1820–51), and ‘John Laudon McAdam’, of road-repairing fame, in addition to the names of several individuals who had endowed local schools. One of the largest slabs, almost five metres high, gives an indication of the opinions of the mason, declaring in gigantic letters ‘National Debt L800,000,000 / O, Save My Country, Heaven! / George 3, William Pitt / Money is the Sinews of War / Field Marshal Wellington / Heroic Admiral Nelson.’¹

What can historians make of these carvings? The social historian might seek to find out information about the social status of quarry workers, their working conditions, their lives beyond the workplace, and the nature of the society in which they lived by reference to class, gender, ritual and identity. The economic historian might seek information about the comparative wages of the workers, the economic conditions of the time, and the relative position of quarry employment by comparison with other local trades, and against national trends more generally. Related carving might be sought and evaluated. The cultural historian might speculate about the local and regional and national discourses through which individuals and social groups expressed themselves, and go further and analyse the power relations between them, painting a picture of the relationships between specific historic individuals and broader social groups. The intellectual historian has to start with the words. What was the author doing the carving seeking to convey? Why did he do so in precisely this manner? How were the arguments he was making stated elsewhere? What was their lineage and what was their reception?

Such labour can be difficult, especially in a case where the meaning is hard to discern or, as in this instance, the words are carved singly or in an epigrammatic fashion. Tracking down the names of the individuals mentioned in the carvings is relatively easy. They reveal a person with knowledge of leading figures in the locality, seemingly respectful of their position, and valuing charitable activity and more especially the endowment of schools for the poor. They also underscore a respect for technological invention and for science, for poetry and literature, and for military prowess and for acts of heroism. Further than this it is more difficult to go, except for the arguments that are contained in the statements on the slabs. This identifies the condition of the country as lamentable due to the national debt, and in need of saving (‘O, Save My Country, Heaven!’). Antagonism towards the relationship between money and war is evident in stating that ‘Money is the Sinews of War’. William Pitt is mentioned twice alongside this claim, raising the possibility, impossible to confirm or reject, that the author considered Pitt the warmonger of an earlier generation, and possibly of his own youth given the references to Nelson and to Wellington. Typically for that generation, it was possible to laud in a patriotic fashion the qualities of such great men while lamenting the extent of war and its consequences.

More significant is the fact that the quotation ‘O, Save My Country, Heaven!’ was taken directly from Alexander Pope's epitaph for Dr Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester, who died in exile at Paris in 1732, in the arms of his daughter, and was held to have uttered such a phrase. Atterbury's own use of the epigraph was well known, and derived in turn from that of Father Paolo Sarpi, the great Venetian historian, who on his deathbed said ‘Let her endure’ (Esto perpetua), a hope that Venice would maintain itself as an independent sovereign power. The claim that ‘Money is the Sinews of War’, refuted by both Niccolò Machiavelli and Francis Bacon, can be traced to Cicero's Fifth Philippic, and was echoed by authors as diverse as Rabelais and Tennyson. What did these statements mean to the Ecclerigg Crag mason? They were commonplace in eighteenth-century literature, bemoaning the growth of luxury and commercial society, and predicting dire consequences for all societies because of the corresponding unleashing of the libertine passions, of war, and of increasing debt. David Hume, in his essay ‘Of public credit’ in his Political Discourses (1752), provides a good example of the literature of jeremiad that the mason inherited. Hume was increasingly desperate about the consequences of debt for the nation-states of Europe, and used the singular image of cudgel-playing in a china shop to describe the consequences for contemporary international relations. The key fact was that the china would be smashed, and the same held for domestic economies and civil societies whose states were heavily indebted. Fear of debt reached a peak during the wars with revolutionary France and with Napoleon Bonaparte, with the debt itself standing at more than 250 per cent of gross domestic product, a figure that has not been reached since. Pitt's association with the debt, especially in 1797 when the government released the Bank of England from the obligation to convert currency to gold, would have been obvious to those living at the time.

Fear of a war or debt-induced bankruptcy was a major reason why so many observers of national life in the eighteenth century were certain, with David Hume, that Britain was declining as a state. With the benefit of hindsight we can identify the spark and smouldering of what was later termed ‘The Industrial Revolution’. Economic growth, some historians argue, was never greater than during the eighteenth century.² Equally, Basil Willey and others have described the period as having been characterized by the growth of stability, a prelude to Victorian self-confidence. For contemporaries, however, eighteenth-century Britain was a new state in crisis, plagued by debt, war and political division, between Jacobites and Hanoverians, Whigs and Tories, Anglicans, Catholics and Dissenters, and by enemies and advocates of the commercialization of society. Few commentators believed that the future could be seen in the present, except to the extent that it presaged national ruin. Great transformations were widely viewed to be on the horizon; a sense of uncertainty pervaded. Even authors who were famously phlegmatic or even optimistic about Britain's prospects, such as Adam Smith or Jean-Louis de Lolme, did not think that the status quo was either stable or worth preserving. Far more commonplace was the jeremiad predicting the collapse of Britain and its defeat in war.

That Britain survived the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, and did so to emerge as Europe's leading state in terms of economic and political power, was all the more remarkable given the reservations of a legion of observers. Yet despite becoming a model state in terms of polity and economy for so many other countries, intellectual life in Britain continued to be characterized by a sense of false greatness, of inevitable decline and of unnatural development to a peak of political and commercial supremacy that would never last. With the debt levels of the eighteenth century only marginally diminished by the 1830s, echoes of the old lament about British decline could still be heard. This was exactly the case of the mason of Ecclerigg Crag. The man was a throwback to a previous age of apocalyptic concern and anticipation of national ruin. His carvings are significant in revealing the persistence of particular ideas, and of the continued fears for the future on the eve of the ‘age of equipoise’ itself. As such, the mason's words matter, in giving us a perspective upon the early Victorian era that is sometimes forgotten.

Understanding the meaning of the mason's words underlines the capacity of intellectual history to reveal what is hidden from us in past thought, the ideas and arguments that are neglected because they have been abandoned or rejected by later generations. The intellectual historian seeks to restore a lost world, to recover perspectives and ideas from the ruins, to pull back the veil and explain why the ideas resonated in the past and convinced their advocates. Ideas, and the cultures and practices they create, are foundational to any act of understanding. Ideas are expressive of the actions of leading philosophers, whose conceptions of liberty, justice or equality stand in need of elucidation, of the actions of culturally significant persons in any society, or indeed of the expounders of any form of popular culture. To take an example from the second group, Henry Williamson, the naturalist and author, who came to fame after the publication of Tarka the Otter in 1927, was interviewed in 1964 for a BBC documentary on the Great War. He recalled that on Christmas Day in 1914, in the aftermath of the bloody First Battle of Ypres, when he was in the Flanders trenches as a private soldier in the Machine Gun Corps, he had fraternized with German troops, who had briefly concluded a spontaneous armistice with their British enemies that was to last for between hours and days depending on the location along the line. During this time Williamson spoke to a German soldier, who told him that the German side was fighting for ‘the Fatherland and for Freedom’. Williamson replied that the Germans had started the war, that it was the British who were fighting for liberty, and that God and Justice were indubitably in favour of his side. Williamson added that the war would soon be over because of the strength of the Russians on the Eastern Front. The German soldier responded in turn that Germany would soon be victorious as the Russians were about to collapse, and that there was no point in arguing because neither could convince the other. This exchange of opinions changed Williamson's view of the war. He could not understand why the soldiers of each side were convinced that right was with them, and, given such a fact, fighting became pointless, because it translated into a war of attrition resulting only in the death of people and the destruction of nations. Williamson's later flirtation with fascism in the 1930s, which he believed might supply the kinds of moral certainty that the Western democracies appeared to lack, was a direct product of his ideological revelation of 1914, that both sides were convinced of the absolute righteousness of their cause. Explaining such convictions, their origins, nature and limits, is exactly what intellectual historians seek to do, ideally without sliding into extremism.

Further examples can be drawn from popular culture. In the first film version of John Buchan's novel The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), directed by Alfred Hitchcock and released in 1935, the Flying Scotsman locomotive reaches Edinburgh Waverley station and, from a carriage shared with the fugitive hero Richard Hannay, one of two English lingerie salesmen says to the first Scotsman that he sees, selling newspapers through the windows of the train, ‘Do you speak the language?’ Soon after in the film, when Hannay is being chased by police in the lowlands north of Edinburgh, a crofter is seen to begin beating his wife for giving away his coat to the freezing Hannay. The crofter, played by John Laurie of subsequent Dad's Army fame, is represented as mean, brutal, antisocial and false, in being willing to sell out Hannay to the police after taking money from him to keep silent. The cinematic representation in the interwar years of bigoted English attitudes towards the Scots, and of Scottish Calvinism as a hypocritical, self-centred and barbaric creed, merit scrutiny of the ideas behind such national stereotypes, their provenance, prevalence and demise. A more recent illustration of the effect of transformed ideas derives from the film Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott in 1982, and based on Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, depicting a dystopian Los Angeles in 2019. In the film, almost every character smokes cigarettes incessantly. Neither Ridley Scott nor Philip K. Dick could have known that soon after the turn of the century the act of smoking, rather than informing the viewer about the status and likely attitudes of a person, precisely dated the film as being about the postwar era rather than about an imagined future. Intellectual historians, whether dealing with sophisticated philosophical utterances, longstanding cultural practices or spontaneous expressions of national prejudice, seek to explain the origin and extent of such opinion, the history of which is never straightforward. As Elisabeth Labrousse wrote of Pierre Bayle's Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697):

The history of ideas shows that, once removed from its original socio-historical context, and read as the vehicle of a universal message, a work exerts its greatest influence not through the mechanical repetition or the exact reflection of its ideas, but through the ambiguities, misconceptions and anachronisms which find their way into its interpretation.³

So many representations of life and ideas are concerned with anticipations of expected altered circumstances, and history typically plays tricks upon those who claim the gift of prophecy.

All of this amounts to an assertion that although it can sometimes appear possible to overlook ideas in human history, by studying trade cycles or demographic regimes or harvest yields or some such, ideas cannot be avoided. Every person thinks. People present their thoughts in many different guises. These require careful reconstruction in order to understand what people were doing, what the ideas being enunciated meant and how they related to the broader ideological cultures in which they were formed. Working out the meaning of ideas is only possible after historical interpretation. Intellectual history, as such, is very much akin to the kinds of ethnographic explorations that have become commonplace in anthropology and related social sciences. These were best described by Clifford Geertz in his famous essay ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’; Geertz began from the point that culture is semiotic, because ‘man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun’.⁴

Geertz took the term ‘thick description’ from Gilbert Ryle, who famously used the example of two boys contracting the eyelids of their right eyes. In one case the twitch was involuntary. In the other the movement was a message to friends intended to convey meaning. A third boy then initiates a parody of the winks and twitches. Thick description is recovering, in this case, the ‘stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures in terms of which twitches, winks, fake-winks, parodies, rehearsals of parodies are produced, perceived, and interpreted’.⁵⁶

England in the Age of the American Revolution⁷

⁸⁹

¹⁰The Logic of the History of Ideas¹¹¹²

What is History? series

Copyright page

Dedication

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Notes