Showing papers on "Intellectual history published in 1971"

Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays

Abstract: No figure among the western Marxist theoreticians has loomed larger in the postwar period than Louis Althusser. A rebel against the Catholic tradition in which he was raised, Althusser studied philosophy and later joined both the faculty of the Ecole normal superieure and the French Communist Party in 1948. Viewed as a "structuralist Marxist," Althusser was as much admired for his independence of intellect as he was for his rigorous defense of Marx. The latter was best illustrated in "For Marx" (1965), and "Reading Capital" (1968). These works, along with "Lenin and Philosophy "(1971) had an enormous influence on the New Left of the 1960s and continues to influence modern Marxist scholarship. This classic work, which to date has sold more than 30,000 copies, covers the range of Louis Althusser's interests and contributions in philosophy, economics, psychology, aesthetics, and political science. Marx, in Althusser's view, was subject in his earlier writings to the ruling ideology of his day. Thus for Althusser, the interpretation of Marx involves a repudiation of all efforts to draw from Marx's early writings a view of Marx as a "humanist" and "historicist." Lenin and Philosophy also contains Althusser's essay on Lenin's study of Hegel; a major essay on the state, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," "Freud and Lacan: A letter on Art in Reply to Andre Daspre," and "Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract." The book opens with a 1968 interview in which Althusser discusses his personal, political, and intellectual history."

Eighteenth-century British logic and rhetoric

Abstract: Wilbur Samuel Howell has been shaping and strengthening our knowledge of logical and rhetorical theory for well over a quarter of a century. His treatment of these two areas of study places his work in the history of ideas, and all students of his subject matter recognize themselves as deeply in his debt. None will be surprised that his most recent book, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric, gives added cause for gratitude and admiration. It is a large book, more than 700 pages, and the material it covers could easily have overwhelmed a lesser man. Howell's grasp of the whole pattern and the significance of the parts and pieces is formidable. He has produced a book that is certain to be a basic text, a necessary starting place, for the study of eighteenth-century logic and rhetoric for many years to come. The firm and secure foundation he has laid must be regarded as a clear advancement for this entire field of study. The precision of his method and the breadth of his erudition will both inspire and inform future investigation. Those who are familiar with Howell's earlier book, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700, will know what to expect from the new volume, for it follows a similar pattern and sets similar goals. What Howell has given us is a description of the movements of logical and rhetorical theory during the period he has investigated. Theory, in this case, is a rather rarified altitude of specialization, and future readers of this book need to be warned not to expect of it what it never aimed at doing. I suspect that a large percentage of its readers will be interested in logic and rhetoric as parts of movements or symptoms of the larger whole of intellectual history and will, therefore, find themselves wishing that the book were more of an account of logical and rhetorical practice. They may well want to know not so much what theoretical doctrines were preached as what effect, if any, those doctrines had on the structure and quality of the communicative writing of the period. They might want to know, for example, if theory followed practice, or if the practice was formed by the theory. Such concerns, however, play no important part in Howell's design, although it must be said that with his sorting and pointing of theoretical movements, much work toward a description of logical and rhetorical practice has been done. After they have consulted this book, students of the practice of these disciplines will have a clearer idea of where they are going, what terms and issues to work with, and what sort of distinctions they will need to make.

From Social History to the History of Society.

Abstract: This essay is an attempt to observe and analyze, not to state a personal credo or to express (except where this is clearly stated) the author's preferences and value judgments. I say this at the outset in order to distinguish this essay from others which are defenses of or pleas for the kind of history practiced by their authors?as it happens social history does not need either at the moment?but also to avoid two misunderstandings especially com mon in discussions heavily charged with ideology. All discus sions about social history are. The first is the tendency for readers to identify authors with the views they write about, unless they disclaim this identification in the clearest terms and sometimes even when they do so. The second is the tendency to confuse the ideological or political moti vations of research, or its utilization, with its scientific value. Where ideological intention or bias produces triviality or error, as is often the case in the human sciences, we may happily condemn motiva tion, method, and result. However, life would be a great deal simpler if our understanding of history were advanced exclusively by those with whom we are in agreement or in sympathy on all public and even private matters. Social history is at present in fashion. None of those who practice it would care to be seen keeping ideological company with all those who come under the same historical heading. Nevertheless, what is more important than to define one's attitude is to discover where social history stands today after two decades of unsystematic if copious development, and whither it might go. I

In Search of the Enlightenment: Recent Attempts to Create a Social History of Ideas

Abstract: The history of the Enlightenment has always been a lofty affair-a tendency that will not be regretted by anyone who has scaled its peaks with Cassirer, sucked in delicious lungfuls of pure reason, and surveyed the topography of eighteenth-century thought laid out neatly at his feet. But the time has come for a more down-to-earth look at the Enlightenment, because while intellectual historians have mapped out the view from the top, social historians have been burrowing deep into the substrata of eighteenth-century societies. And, as the distance between the two disciplines increases, the climates of opinion multiply and thicken and the Enlightenment occasionally disappears in clouds of vaporous generalizations. The need to locate it more precisely in a social context has produced some important new work in a genre that is coming to be called the "social history of ideas." Peter Gay, who has sponsored the term,' has attempted to satisfy the need with the second volume of The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (New York, 1969). A half year after the appearance of Gay's book, another secondvolume work came out in France: Livre et societ (Paris, 1970), the sequel to a pioneering collection of essays on sociointellectual history produced by a group at the VIP Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. These two volume 2's make fascinating reading together, because they show two different historiographical traditions converging on the same problem. Gay descends from Cassirer, the VIP Section group from the "Annales" school and from Daniel Mornet's experiments with quantitative history. Curiously, the two traditions seem to ignore each other. In a bibliography that totals 261 pages in both volumes, and that covers an enormous range of European history, Gay never mentions Livre et societ. He makes only a few, irreverent references to Mornet and does not seem to have assimilated much "Annales" history. The second volume of Livre et societe' (the first appeared a year before Gay's first volume) does not refer either to Gay or Cassirer. In fact, Cassirer's The Philosophy of the Enlightenment was not translated into French until 1966 and has not made much impression on French study of the Enlightenment since its original publication in German in 1932, a year before the appearance of Mornet's Les origines intellectuelles de la Re'volution fran(aise and fourteen years before Paul Hazard's La pensee europeenne au 18' siecle. So here is an opportunity to compare the methods and results of two attempts, expressing two separate historiographical currents, to solve one of the knottiest problems in early modern history: the problem of situating the Enlightenment within the actualities of eighteenth-century society.

The Philosophy of Bishop Stillingfleet

Abstract: EDWARD STILLINGFLEET (1635-1699), the Bishop of Worcester, is known only as Locke's opponent. Although he was a leading figure in seventeenth century intellectual history, he is now almost completely forgotten. 1 He is only mentioned once in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy as the first person to write against Deism. 2 His texts have been ditlicult to locate, and have hardly been studied. Although Locke's answers to him comprise a large volume in Locke's Works, little interest has been shown in Stillingfleet's side of the story. His letters to Locke were last printed in the 1710 edition of his works. (I am now publishing a photoreproduction edition of the attacks on Locke, and a photoreproduction of the six volumes of his works is due soon.) In spite of this neglect, Stillingfleet was a quite interesting figure. He was not a simple moss-back, a religious reactionary, fighting progressive theories like Locke's. Rather, he was trying to maintain some basis for religious belief in the face of the intellectual upheavals in the seventeenth century. For over forty years he struggled against a wide range of philosophical and theological developments of the time that he saw as leading to scepticism and infidelity. Stillingfleet attempted to defend the reasonableness of Christianity in an intellectual world dominated by the new science, the new philosophy, the religious wars, the rise of irreligion, Bible criticism, and Spinozism. In the new scientific, philosophical and theological context he sought to show how an intelligent, reasonable man could maintain his religious views as more probable than their denials. And, he tried to show the perils involved in various new lines of thought. As he wrote to Locke, "in an age wherein the Mysteries of Faith are so much exposed by the Promoters of Scepticism and Infidelity, it is a thing of dangerous consequence to start such new methods of Certainty as are apt to leave men's minds more doubtJull than before." 3 Stillingfleet criticized various new views of thinkers like Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza and Locke, and tried to show that they were unreasonable and

John Dee's library catalogue

Abstract: John Dee (1527-1609) has emerged as one of the most influential figures in the intellectual history of Tudor England. He was best known among his contemporaries as a mathematician, but his other major interests included navigation, astrology, alchemy and medicine. He was one of the first scholars to advocate the collection of manuscripts from the dissolved monastic libraries, and his own library, perhaps the largest assembled in England by one man before 1600, supported all his own interests and those of his pupils and heirs. This study, which includes a facsimile of the detailed catalogue of 1583, narrates the growth of his library and its dispersal after Dee's death. A large proportion of the manuscripts he owned have been located and described, together with the survivors (about a tenth) of his printed books.

Fact and Relevance: Essays on Historical Method

Abstract: 1. Reason in social study 2. History and the social sciences 3. The historical method in social science 4. Function and dialectic in economic history 5. Fact and relevance in historical study 6. Economic and social history 7. Economic growth 8. A plague of economists? 9. The uses and abuses of economics 10. Agriculture and economic development: a lesson of history 11. Technological progress in post-war Europe 12. A study of history 13. Karl Marx: a democrat? 14. Hugh Gaitskell: political and intellectual progress.

La Trahison des clercs--1927 and Later

Abstract: Students of intellectual history are well aware of the pitfalls in trying to determine the influence of a scholar, artist, or other intellectual figure on future generations.3 One can never be certain that a forgotten author is really dead and buried, neatly in place with a paragraph in the literary histories. Because external conditions become propitious, or perhaps even through the dedicated efforts of a scholarly defender, an author can quite suddenly be found relevant, cited and reprinted, translated and talked about.

Intellectual Achievers: A Study of Eighteenth-Century Scotland

Abstract: Eighteenth-century Scotland produced many important intellectual leaders. Study of the lives of the individual achievers as well as the parishes in which they were born and educated indicates that education was the key to achievement and that most of the achievers came from urban areas, were born into the upper middle class, attended university, and lived longer thant the average person. In sum, the eighteenth-century Scottish achiever seems to resemble his twentieth-century counterpart in many ways.

The History of Ideas: Substantive and Methodological Aspects of the Thought of Leopoldo Zea

Abstract: One of the most striking developments in Mexican historiography during the last twenty-five years is the burgeoning of the genre known as the 'history of ideas'. The origins of the movement date back to I925, when German historicist and existentialist philosophy made its entry into Mexico through the ideas of Jose Ortega y Gasset. More recently the impetus came from the seminar in the History of Ideas initiated at El Colegio de Mexico and at the National University by the Spanish philosopher, Jose Gaos. So great has been the influence of Gaos that it is fair to say that until very recently the history of ideas or intellectual history in Mexico has been dominated by his students-men such as Luis Villoro, Francisco L6pez Camara, and Leopoldo Zea.1 Edmundo O'Gorman, while not a student of Gaos, shares his views and has come to be considered as a natural member of the history of ideas group. The significance and implications of this fact, while widely recognized within Mexico itself, are insufficiently appreciated abroad, particularly in the United States. The substantive concerns and the particular methodology pursued by these philosopher-historians are frequently baffling to Latinamericanists. We often fail to recognize that these men work from assumptions quite distinct from those of most professional historians. I would like to probe this lack of comprehension through an examination of the ideas of Leopoldo Zea. Beyond his high reputation within Mexico, Zea is also a Latin American philosopher of rank and the leader of an enterprise devoted to the 'History of Ideas in America '. First, let us analyze a characteristic substantive theme in Zea's writings, and then use these writings to point up some problems of method in the history of ideas.

A history of European ideas

Abstract: 3 G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, II. Band 7 (Hamburg, Meiner Verlag, 1986), 71 ss. 4 S. Bagge, ‘Medieval and renaissance historiography: Break or continuity?’ in The European Legacy, 2, 1997, essentially 1336–1337. 5 J. Burkhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (Basle, 1860). See also: P. Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (London: Arnold, 1969). 6 E. Garin, Rinascite e rivoluzioni. Movimenti culturali dal XIV al XVII secolo (Bari: Laterza, 1975). 7 The frontiers and the historiography of legal and political thought in Europe: From the Middle Ages to Hegel

Slave Narratives: Dismissed Evidence in the Writing of Southern History.

Abstract: FEW OF ULRICH B. PHILLIPS'S APPRAISALS of Southern history have gone unquestioned, but one judgment which he seems to have made almost in passing remains unexamined as a guide for research among the documents of Negro American slavery. Regarding the use of slave narratives as evidence, Phillips said: "Solomon Northup went as a Negro kidnaped into slavery and wrote a vivid account of plantation life from the under side. But ex-slave narratives in general, and those of Charles Ball, Henry Box Brown and Father Henson in particular, were issued with so much abolitionist editing that as a class their authenticity is doubtful."' In major works on slavery since Phillips, the only evidence of disagreement with him on this matter is negative: historians have generally chosen to ignore even Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave, which had Phillips's approval. Slave narratives have been dismissed, for the most part, as evidence for the writing of Southern history. The extraordinary paradox here is that the widespread agreement with Phillips' dismissal of the narratives has been accompanied by a frequent, almost ritualistic, assertion that "any history of slavery must be written in large part from the standpoint of the slave .. ."2 A dramatic example of the kind of illogic which such contradictory impulses produce is found in Kenneth Stampp's The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South. In the first paragraph of his preface, Stampp affirms the historian's faith that knowledge of the past is important for understanding the present, and he adds: "In this instance I firmly believe that one must know what slavery meant to the Negro and how he reacted to it before one can comprehend his more recent tribulations."3 Such a statement would seem to commit Stampp firmly to providing testimony from slaves about the nature of their experience, and he does, in fact, make references to at least four slave narratives, though with little apparent conviction regarding their significance. As Phillips did, he relies mainly for evidence upon the records of planters and the reports of travellers in the South. Well into the book, Stampp explains this apparent contradiction: "Since there are few reliable records of what went on in the minds of slaves, one can only infer their thoughts and feelings from their behavior, that of their masters, and the logic of their

Commentary on Nationalism in Japan: Nationalism as Intellectual History

Abstract: If the several articles assembled here dramatize a long-standing suspicion that our understanding of nationalism has not progressed very far beyond its original conceptualization, they also reveal the limitations of this tradition of discourse which we have had to work in. Yet in disclosing the limitations of this tradition they have in fact gone beyond it. In viewing the subject as a condition of a more basic problematik they have raised new questions demanding serious accountability and, perhaps, cleared the way for a total reassessment of nationalism as history and hermeneutic. In the following pages I would like to rehearse a few of the ideas found in these papers and pursue some of the implications of their suggestiveness.

Attitudes toward Deviant Sex in Ancient Mesopotamia

Abstract: Sex should be regarded as legitimate a subject for historical study as religion or economics or medicirle. If historians are to arrive at a complete picture of the history of humanity the historical evolution of sexual attitudes would seem to be a key to understanding. Such a study becomes particularly important as preliminary to understandirlg our own attitudes towards sex, particularly towards such variant sex practices as homosexuality. The history of sex, however, is not by itself a special branch of history. Rather it overlaps several specialized historical fields such as those of law, religion and philosophy, medicine, social and intellectual history in general. If we could draw a precise picture of sex for each period in history encompassing legislation, religious and philosophical doctrines, public opinion, literature, biographies, it might be possible to arrive at a picture of man's attitudes towards sex. Such studies must be made with care because much of the historical introductory material to works on sex by scholars as noted as Havelock Ellis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Albert Moll, or Magnus Hirschfeld, is superficial and unscientific in character. In order to support a psychological or endocrinological theory they simply cited some historical antecedent without taking very seriously what they were doing, and in the process often used documents which were mediocre and unevaluated. In this fashion many errors and old wives' tales, some of which are patently absurd, have been preserved and are cited by numerous studies in sex as being gospel truth simply because they were referred to in the works of men who in their day were great sexologists but were not trained to research historical documents.

Samuel Johnson and Traditional Methodology

Abstract: T HE GROWTH of interest during the last two decades in a clearer understanding of the nature of Samuel Johnson's thought and of the inner workings of his discourse has so far neglected an evidently important and distinctive feature of his writings: his frequent use and sound grasp of the concepts and idioms of traditional western methodology. The reason for this neglect may lie chiefly in the fact that methodology itself was not clearly understood to constitute a strong and closely determined tradition until, again, the past two decades.' The aims and conventions of thought and language that made up that tradition are in their present dress active notions in our scientific culture, but they remain by and large unfamiliar ingredients of our cultural history. But whatever the reason for the neglect of Johnson's methodology, it is demonstrable that he says more about the role sound method has to play in literary criticism and that he more pointedly shows its effective use than any other English critic. It is the purpose of t!his paper to indicate the general nature of the insightful methodological statement his writings contain. We need to see his discourse about literature and criticism, as well as other subjects, not only from the point of view of the theories and opinions he analyzed and synthesized but from his methodological perspective as well if we are to see his work as he saw it himself, or if we would see clearly his place in western intellectual history and his relevance for the critical thought of our own time.

Thucydides and the Uses of History

Abstract: The question ‘Is History an art or a science?’ will be familiar to anyone who has answered more than a handful of General Papers, and it is tempting to think of it, not as a real question, but as a sort of logical puzzle, rather on the lines of ‘Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?’ To set it aside, however, or to answer it on a purely theoretical level, is to disregard a problem which is as old as History itself and which concerns historians now perhaps more than at any other time. Is History subjective ? Must it necessarily reflect the ideas and values and conceptual framework of those who write it ? Is the historian by his very nature a distorting medium? Or is this merely an excuse that historians themselves have invented? Is it possible, after all, to be objective ? Are there such things as historical facts, and is it possible so to arrange these facts that they speak for themselves and not with a voice from another and alien age ? Behind these questions, and to some extent bound up with them, there is, of course, another: if History is subjective, is this necessarily bad, and if it could be objective would this be desirable?