Gender and Intellectual History

by Brian M. Ingrassia

Recently I have been thinking about gender and intellectual history.  Without going into all the details, this reflection was prompted by Lauren Kientz Anderson’s post of October 31, in which she referred to her (perhaps) “infamous” post from last year on women in intellectual history. After rereading that 2011 piece—and the 47 comments it generated!—I started asking myself a few questions.  These are not necessarily new questions, but it might help to air them in one place and ponder their implications. First of all, why does it seem that relatively few women (compared to men) identify with the field? Second, is there something inherently “male” about the field? And a third, much bigger question: What is intellectual history, why do we do it, and what bearing might the answer to this question have upon the field’s ability to incorporate analysis of women and gender?

Regarding the first question, I posit a practical answer that at least one commentator has already suggested.  While there certainly are women historians who do intellectual history—especially the intellectual history of women, gender, or feminism—many (though not all) tend to identify, or be identified, as historians of women or gender. Of course, they use intellectual history methods primarily as a way to understand the place of women and gender in society more broadly, not necessarily as a way to understand only "intellectuals," whether male or female.  In addition, there are practical incentives for scholars (many of whom are women) who study the intellectual history of women or gender to identify as historians of those fields rather than as intellectual historians. Quite frankly, there are many fewer academic positions in intellectual history than there are in women’s and gender history.  In the current academic job market, a young scholar has little or no reason to identify as an intellectual historian when s/he could identify as a scholar of a more professionally viable field such as women’s or gender history.

Regarding the second question, I do not think that intellectual history is inherently a “male” field—nor is it simply a place where men who reject gender or race analysis go for affirmation. Speaking from personal experience, I am a male who embraces gender and race analysis, yet I still think that it is important to study intellectual history. Nevertheless, there may be a grain of truth to the perception that intellectual history is for men because it is about men. Consider the obvious: in many historical contexts, especially before the twentieth century, very few women were considered intellectuals. To study the intellectual history of many time periods, one must focus largely, if not exclusively, upon men who were in a position to construct and disseminate discourses that were perceived as “intellectual” in nature. For those interested in the history of women and gender—including many female historians—this may not seem to be a worthwhile project, since it is just reinforcing androcentric models rather than critiquing or challenging them.

This is where things get thornier, and where I start to ask that third question. What is intellectual history? A few days ago, one guest blogger noted that we analyze the “history of ideas.” That may be a good definition of what intellectual historians do, but I think it compels us to ask more questions. Which ideas—whose ideas—do we analyze? Do we merely seek to understand ideas that were consciously appreciated as ideas in the times and places in which they were created? Or should we seek to understand the ideas of a number of different groups or individuals—including women—even if they were not necessarily seen as intellectuals within their own historical context?

If we define intellectual history as the history of ideas that were perceived as part of an avowedly intellectualdiscourse in their time and place of creation, then in many cases we have to restrict our analyses to male subjects. But if we interpret the field more broadly, then the methodology of intellectual history can be applied in many different contexts.  I will never forget the day in 2002 when one of my professors at Illinois—a prominent practitioner of the “New Social History”—propped his feet up on his desk and told a first year graduate student interested in intellectual history (me) that someday a historian would find a way to write the intellectual history of sanitation workers (i.e., the ideas of “garbage men”). Ever since that day, I have found his suggestion to be a fascinating one, and if I could only find the primary sources I might write such a study!

I suspect, though, that at least some of us would be turned off by this idea, or would suggest a caveat: If we write the intellectual history of sanitation workers, then we would have less time or energy to devote to those individuals who were consciously focused on the life of the mind.  On a related note, I suspect that maybe a couple of folks might (quietly) say something similar about studying the intellectual history of women: it’s interesting and important, but it could take our energy away from studying those individuals who were considered intellectuals within their historical context and thus shaped the most prominent discourses of their time and place.

So why do we do intellectual history? Is it so that we can understand how prominent individuals (academics, theologians, statesmen, cultural critics, and so on) shaped predominant discourses? Or is it so that we can understand how the ideas of diverse individuals or groups developed and changed over time?  We might frame this as an issue of canon—of whether or not we draw boundaries around the parameters of the field. Furthermore, how do we approach the history of ideas? Do we first strive to understand the inner logic of ideas and then place them in historical context, or do we strive to show how historical context has caused certain ideas (and not others) to emerge in a particular time and place?  The latter approach, I would note, is much friendlier to an analytical framework that consciously critiques categories such as gender, race, and/or class.

In short, is intellectual history a field that studies intellectuals, or is it a methodology that studies the history of ideas generated in many different cultural and social contexts?  In all honesty, I do not think that these are mutually exclusive categories—and many of us have probably pursued either at one time or another. Nevertheless, it is helpful to think about why we do what we do. And, admittedly, we should note that there are strengths and weaknesses to either approach. On the one hand, if intellectual history is a subject field that studies prominent idea creators (“intellectuals”), then it may be a more coherent field even though it will probably have less relevance for those scholars (especially women) who are interested in fields such as the history of women and gender. On the other hand, if intellectual history is primarily a methodology, then it may have larger utility to a wider variety of scholars even though its identity as a distinct, coherent field of study may be diminished.

These are just some thoughts, and I am sure I have said nothing new here.  But perhaps this will spark some interesting discussion about what we do and how that affects who identifies with this field.

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Brian M. Ingrassiateaches American history at Middle Tennessee State University.  He is the author of The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education’s Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football (University Press of Kansas, 2012), as well as the new series editor of the Sport and Popular Culture Series at the University of Tennessee Press.

Reception History: A New Word for An Old Methodology?*

A few weeks back, while I was reading Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s American Nietzsche, I posted here asking readers to list their favorite reception histories. Thanks to you all for helping put together a very comprehensive list. Today, having just read Martin Woessner’s really smart Heidegger in America, I post again about reception history, this time asking more of a meta-question: Are intellectual history and reception history two words for the same thing? Woessner comes close to making this argument, at least insofar as intellectual history is understood to be the history of thought and the history of thinking, not necessarily the social history of intellectuals.

One thing I noticed about both the arguments of Ratner-Rosenhagen and Woessner: The key to understanding the American reception of Nietzsche and Heidegger is understanding America. Such is the logic, at least, of reception history as they seem to understand it. Reception history for them is about how ideas morph when moving from one context to the next, such as from Germany to the United States, or from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. Their reception history is also interested in how ideas represent culture; how ideas help people cope with culture; how ideas even sometimes remake culture. Ratner-Rosenhagen “argues that confrontations with Nietzsche laid bare a fundamental concern driving modern American thought: namely, the question of the grounds, or foundations, for modern American thought and culture itself.” In other words, she is less interested in Nietzsche, per se, or those intellectuals who fashioned themselves “American Nietzscheans,” and more focused on those “American readers making their way to their views of themselves and their modern America by thinking through, against, and around Nietzsche’s stark challenges.”

Woessner frames his book similarly: “Heidegger’s reception tells us as much—if not more—about the course of American intellectual and cultural history over the past half century as it does about Heidegger himself.” But Woessner takes this a few steps further, in what amounts to an ambitious if not downright grandiose methodological plea. I will quote Woessner extensively to give you a taste of his strong methodological gesture.

“Detailing how Heidegger was (re)made in the U.S.A. will demonstrate how the history of ideas might be reconfigured for a new era.”

“And yet many intellectual historians continue to work as if such messy realities (that texts and contexts go together) do not impinge upon the life of the mind, as if the widest context necessitated by intellectual-historical inquiry is that of an intellectual’s biography. In doing so, they needlessly narrow the scope of the history of ideas when, in truth, intellectual history is relevant to almost all aspects of historical reality.”

“If these assumptions are correct, then it can only be beneficial to view all history of thought in terms of reception history. What the intellectual historian does, fundamentally, is trace networks of reception: he exposes hidden and not-so-hidden influences; he charts legacies of thinkers, books, ideas, discourses, and concepts.”

“All intellectual historians are interested in the fate of ideas as much as their origins, especially since every origin is always already a point of reception itself. Although the dynamics of reception are more noticeable when translation across national or linguistic boundaries occurs, because the distances between the contexts of creation and reception are often greatest in these instances, we should not lose sight of the fact that ideas are always and everywhere caught up in a process of reception.”

“From the moment an idea is expressed, either verbally or in print, it is traveling.”

What do you all make of this? Is it a new way of saying something old? Or is it a stark challenge? I’m genuinely undecided.

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* My title is, of course, a riff on James Kloppenberg's classic article, "Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking?"

What's the Big Idea?

This was the catchy title of a critically important session I attended at the AHA this January -- important for me, anyhow. And judging by the fact that every seat was taken, and there were people sitting on the floor along the walls and in the aisle, and there were more people standing in the doorway, it was important for a lot of other folks too. How often do you get to hear David Armitage, James Kloppenberg, Darrin McMahon, and Sophia Rosenfeld in conversation together about their methodological approaches to long-range intellectual history, with Lynn Hunt as the MC? That session was the place to be, and I'm glad I had a seat.

Since most USIH blog readers didn't have a seat in the room, I thought I'd use this blog post to briefly summarize just one highlight of the panel: David Armitage's description of his methodological approach for doing long-range intellectual history.

Armitage described his current work -- a history of the concept of "civil war" -- as a "transtemporal history", governed by a method of "serial contextualism" that is diachronic, not just synchronic, resulting in not a "history of ideas," but a "history in ideas."

That's saying a lot. And, because it was David Armitage talking, it all got said really fast. Happily, he took time to expand upon what he meant by each of these points.

transtemporal history

A "transtemporal" history links discrete moments over large stretches of time. Someone tracing the long-range history of the contestation of an idea should be looking for both "continuities and conceptual ruptures." These moments are "inflection points" in the diffusion, reception, repurposing and transformation of ideas or texts or arguments.

serial contextualism

A "serial contextualism" zooms in on these transtemporal moments to closely examine and illuminate the larger historical context in which a particular instantiation of the "big idea" is embedded, or out of which it emerges.

history in ideas

Doing "history in ideas" (rather than a history of ideas) involves telling a long-range narrative of human experience as expressed in human thought.

This last point of Armitage's, hinging on the seemingly simplest of lexical shifts -- substituting one preposition for another -- was the most conceptually complex. Alas, my brain was working so hard to grasp the implications of "history in ideas" that I faltered in my note-taking.

However, I think what Armitage presented in this compact phrase was a shorthand summation of observations he had made in the introduction to his talk. In the course of giving a rapid-fire historiographical overview of the "history of ideas," Armitage took us from Lovejoy to Braudel to so-called "Big History."

While acknowledging some justice in Skinner's critique of Lovejoy's approach as an exercise in "non-contextualism," Armitage found approaches that treat ideas as epiphenomenal, or as precipitates of presumably deeper forces at work in history, likewise wanting.  "Materialism," Armitage said, "reduces reflection to physiological reflect and intellect to interest." A materialist view of history trivializes and ultimately dehumanizes the past. "There is little that is more shallow than what we call 'deep history' because it evacuates the human mind of its purview."

In other words -- and these are my words, not Armitage's -- the purpose of history is to find and understand the meaning that people have made of their lives and their world. We find that meaning, and so make meaning for own time, by telling the stories of the past through the medium of ideas.
Believe me -- it made a lot more sense when David Armitage was saying it.