Some of these criticisms missed the mark. Fogel and Engerman did not undertake even a political economy of slavery, much less a moral evaluation. The most searching critiques, from fellow cliometricians, were arcane and technical. But they resembled disputes in the natural sciences in that the data were publicly available, and fairly well-understood criteria were available to adjudicate the issues. Furthermore, the authors’ main conclusion, which was anticipated by earlier studies, has not been refuted: slavery was indeed profitable and was not withering on the vine in 1861.
Cliometrics was an important innovation because it offered new answers to old questions and provided a methodology better suited to tackling large questions of system and structure. Although it was a new and rather spectacular technique, it did not eclipse older branches of economic history. In the United States, which had pioneered business history, institutional historians continued their work on entrepreneurs and on management tactics, while labour history was avidly pursued not only in the United States but throughout Europe. Historians were also preoccupied by peasants in numbers sufficient to justify a Journal of Peasant Studies, and, since peasants were found all over the world, peasant studies easily became comparative. These studies readily crossed the fluid boundary between economic history and social history. Quantitative analysis of the records left by ordinary people, gathered for cliometric purposes, has brought their experiences to light—the great accomplishment of the social historians of our time. Intellectual history
“All history,” as R.G. Collingwood said, “is the history of thought.” One traditional view of history, now discarded, is that it is virtually synonymous with the history of ideas—history is composed of human actions; human actions have to be explained by intentions; and intentions cannot be formed without ideas. On a grander scale, the doctrines of Christianity were the core of the providential universal histories that persisted until the 18th century, since the acceptance—or rejection—of Christian ideas was considered history’s master plot. When the providential argument in its simpler medieval form lost credibility, it was reformulated by Vico, with his conception of the tropes appropriate to the different ages of humanity, and by Hegel, whose “objective” idealism identified the development of Spirit, or the Idea, as the motor of history. In the techniques of historical investigation too, the history of ideas was the source for the hermeneutical skills required for reading complex tests. The interpretation of ancient laws and religious doctrines was the workshop in which were forged the tools that were subsequently used in all historical work.
It was not until the speculative schemes that identified the development of ideas with the historical process were generally discredited, and its hermeneutic techniques thoroughly naturalized elsewhere, that intellectual history became a specialty—the first specialized field to supplement the traditional historical specialties of political, diplomatic, and military history. It emerged slightly earlier than social history, and for a time the two were allies in a joint struggle to gain acceptance. The incompatibility—indeed, antagonism—between the two emerged only later.
Confusion can arise because history of ideas and intellectual history are sometimes treated as synonyms. The former is properly the name of a field of study in which ideas themselves are the central subject. The most sophisticated approach to the history of ideas was formulated by Arthur Lovejoy (1873–1962). Lovejoy focused on what he called “unit ideas,” such as the notion of a Great Chain of Being extending from God through the angels to humans down to the least-complicated life-forms. Lovejoy traced this idea from its classical roots through the 19th century in both philosophical and literary elaborations. Philosophical or theological doctrines (e.g., Plato’s theory of Forms, or Manichaeism, a dualist religious movement founded in Persia) lend themselves best to the unit-idea mode of study. One difficulty with the history of unit ideas, however, is that it is often difficult to establish the identity of an idea through time. The term natural law, for example, meant quite different things to Stoic philosophers, to Thomas Hobbes, to John Locke, and to the prosecutors of Nazi war criminals at the Nürnberg trials (1945–46); the meaning of the same words can change radically. This drives the historian to the Oxford English Dictionary or its equivalents for other languages to get a first take on the history of meaning changes. This step, however, must be supplemented by extensive reading in the contemporary literature, not only to see what semiotic load the words bear but also to see what controversies or contrary positions might have been in the mind of the writer.
The phrase intellectual history did not come into common usage until after World War II. It seems to owe its first currency to The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (1953), by Perry Miller (1905–63), who required it for his approach to the complex of religious, political, and social ideas and attitudes in Massachusetts in the 17th and 18th centuries. The focus of intellectual history has been not on the formal analysis of ideas, as in the history of ideas, but on the conditions of their propagation and dissemination. It also considers not just the formally articulated ideas of theorists or poets but also the sentiments of ordinary people. Even popular delusions come within the ambit of intellectual history; in this respect it intersects studies within psychohistory and the cultural history of mentalités.
Perhaps because their area of study is so ill-defined, intellectual historians have been unusually reflective and argumentative about the methods appropriate to their work. One methodological controversy was initiated in the 1960s by Quentin Skinner. Skinner questioned the custom in political philosophy of identifying certain “eternal” questions (such as “Why does anyone have an obligation to obey the state?”) and then arraying various political texts according to the answers they give. This procedure, he argued, led to invalid historical conclusions, since the eternal questions were the constructions of modern political philosophers and reflected modern concerns. Taking his cue from the ordinary language philosophy of John Langshaw Austin and other postwar Oxford philosophers, Skinner contended that the task for the historian of political thought was to discover what effect the writer of a text intended it to have.
Skinner’s best example was Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690), which for generations had been paired with Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan as one of two versions of a social contract theory. Skinner and his colleague John Dunn started from the obvious but often ignored fact that there was a first treatise by Locke that refuted the idea that political power devolved from the power that God gave to Adam. Absurd as this idea seems to contemporary philosophers, it nevertheless commanded widespread assent in 17th-century Britain. Similarly, a great deal of controversial writing was then done by clergymen, and Locke (as is evident from his many quotations of the Anglican divine Richard Hooker) participated actively in this discourse. On the other hand, there is very little evidence that Locke was responding to Hobbes.