Review of Jonathan P. Eburne's "Outsider Theory: Intellectual Histories of Unorthodox Ideas"" (original) (raw)
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Call for Papers - International Colloquium on History of Ideas
Ideas-philosophical or quotidian-are key constituents of human cultures. If cultures are the sites of contestations over meanings, ideas can be seen as 'texts' (in the Barthesian sense of the term) which are engaged in such debates. A history of ideas would hence trace the transformations in meanings of texts and practices, thereby charting the genealogies of cultures. Jointly organized by the Postgraduate Department of English, M.S.M College, Kayamkulam and the Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Kerala, this colloquium aspires to transcend disciplinary boundaries by engaging diverse disciplines such as literary studies, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies of science and technology into productive dialogues with each other. Literature, broadly conceived to include all modes of narratives, has a close relationship with the history of ideas, wherein a continuous line of development through the repeated adoption and creative adaptation of schemas can be identified. Literary texts as well as popular genres negotiate changes in ideas and ideologies over a period of time. This in turn helps these texts/genres to act as testing grounds for ideas and their artistic representations. The received readings of the narratives of the past are thus revamped and new contexts / meanings arise out of them. This includes, the readings of the semiotics of everyday practices and manners (say, the evolution of table manners), thereby bringing the crucial question of regimentalization of body into the ambit of discussion.
History of Ideas and Its Surroundings
Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method (ed. Stefan Berger), 2021
Ideas will always resist single-statement definitions, but in a rough attempt at generalization one can say that they either play or are attributed a very special role in thinking and expressive processes, in perhaps all domains of human culture. People who specialize in creating, receiving, transforming, and disseminating them are usually called “intellectuals”—even if they do not monopolize those social practices. The constitution and circulation of ideas as structures of thinking and expression, the settings in which they originate and to which they respond, the material supports in which they are conveyed as well as the intellectual agents specialized in dealing with them are studied by the history of ideas and its neighboring fields. These include intellectual history, history of concepts, histoire des mentalités, Geistesgeschichte, history of books, and even cultural history, sociology of knowledge, and the histories of science, philosophy, literature, and the humanities. As it is obvious, such labels do not support a clear-cut division of labor, nor can they be lined up in an organogram that would fix constant hierarchical relations between them. They show up with incommensurable frequency, displaying different connotations within different academic cultures. This explains why in some cases—as in Geistesgeschichte, Begriffsgeschichte, or histoire des mentalités—equivalent English terms are considered problematic or unnecessary. Having flourished, spread, and sometimes also decayed within different national, disciplinary, and generational contexts, the fields designated by them can only have intricate and overlapping limits. A good way to understand the traditions connected to the history of ideas is hence to look closely to their messy border zones. The closest and most intricate connections are those between “history of ideas” and “intellectual history,” which is reflected in the fact that these terms are often employed interchangeably—a use that will be noted also in the remainder of the present text. Even so, “intellectual history” clearly emerged as preferential designation in the English-speaking world in the final decades of the twentieth century. A reason for this is the spread of the suspicion that “ideas” are burdened by essentialist traits that would render us insensitive to historical discontinuity. The notion of ideas is also sometimes regarded as much too oblivious of the way language conditions thought, and accordingly some analysts suggest that it would be out of line with the best theoretical intelligence established since the so-called linguistic turn. However, others claim that ideas should not be equaled to expressed words, as they refer to occurrences that are best described with psychological terms such as beliefs and attitudes, and, further, that there would be non-essentialist ways of addressing them. What seems more uncontroversial is that, in comparison to “history of ideas,” “intellectual history” opens up an enlarged space of ambivalence as regards the analytical focus, which can then toggle from intellectual products to intellectual producers, consumers, and the cultural frameworks in which they interact. There are also important crossroads between the history of ideas and conceptual history (or Begriffsgeschichte), as both terms signal to the historical study of basic structures of thought. Conceptual history, however, at least in its most well-known variety, which was very much inspired by social-historical approaches, tends to be less centered on biographical and psychological issues and to introduce concepts as more depersonalized linguistic entities. Such and other connections and disconnections between the various ways of attending to “the reflective communal life of human beings in the past” will be further discussed in the following from the perspective of a geographically multicentered historical synopsis. Hopefully, its many limitations will be compensated by the possibility of bringing to the fore relations that otherwise would not become so salient.
S-USIH Conference (New York City), 2019
A new trend has emerged in transatlantic intellectual history. Within the past five years, several books have appeared that focus on European émigré intellectuals or internationally active Americans who helped build new political, legal, and economic institutions toward the middle of the twentieth century. These books feature people like the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, the diplomat and Protestant ecumenist John Foster Dulles, the political scientist Carl J. Friedrich, the sociologist Hans Speier, and the economist Wilhelm Röpke. The midcentury crisis of democracy prompted many such figures to reexamine the social role of intellectual elites and to devise new ways of institutionalizing ideas. This paper analyzes the phenomenon of "insider intellectuals" as well as the method shared by a new generation of intellectual historians, which I interpret as a return to the sociology of knowledge.