the new cross-disciplinary collaboration has been part of the history of ideas
since the
field itself took shape in the nineteen twenties and thirties
Arthur Lovejoy is often seen as the founder, creator the history of ideas was
a philosopher who taught at Johns Hopkins
but he really made a sharp distinction between history of philosophy
and history of ideas which looked at ideas and constructs
not as formal philosophy but precisely as they crossed borders
from philosophy into literature, into the visual arts or back again
as those fields had an impact on philosophy, so he always saw it as a
field for collaboration. He always recruited people from other disciplines
into the history of ideas club. I think all of this
will continue in interesting ways.
I think that the weaning of the theory years in literature
departments has allowed literary scholars to come back to history in
important ways
partly with the new interest in material texts as well as the words in them
but partly the new historicism and those are approaches that are much easier to
work into the history of ideas than the high theory
approaches were. So I think we're going to see a lot of collaboration
I think it's tremendously important. We've been challenged most recently by
David Armitage a very brilliant Harvard intellectual historian
to work across borders both chronological and geographical to do a kind of
histories of ideas as their transmitted around the world
and in honesty there are very few people who are
competent in German, Chinese
French and the way we can solve that is by collaboration by recruiting
people from complementary fields. I Think theres a practical place for collaboration.
The range of things we will consider ideas that have an interesting history
it's just going to get bigger and bigger
will be looking at more traditions more countries more languages
historians of American thought in the Post-World War Two period
talk a lot about people they call public intellectuals
people who were not parts of usually and did not have University positions
did not have an official qualification, rarely had a PHD or formal training
but who wrote about ideas for a wide public
and in fact the real public intellectuals in postwar America were
African-American ministers Martin Luther King is the one that people remember but
there were many others like him who were
intellectuals and who were not just
acting in the street but also grappling with questions in theology and
philosophy and trying to make bridges between the two
that's one area which I expect to see in American history of ideas be very lively
in the next generation or so.
History matters tremendously now precisely because
it's been ejected from the group of disciplines that have a seat at counsel
tables
in World War Two national leaders
um, well some other my churchill were historians and all of them would
immediately have understood why you would ask historians for advice
they all did, Roosevelt did quite regularly.
Now the disciplines that are thought relevant to making a big decision shall we go back
into iraq
in the United States right now are present policy disciplines you look at
what political science tells you supposedly quantitatively about the
possibilities you, look at economics
and that helps to explain why eleven years ago we went into iraq
thinking that Sunni and Shiite Muslims got along perfectly well that
they're
coexistence would not be a major problem in the new democratic Iraq
now any historian Islam could have explained why that wasn't a good idea
but no historian islam was consulted
as Faulkner said "the past never goes away"
It never dies in fact it's not even past
it's still there with you over and over again you can we go to look in the near
east to see how that passed sticks and
makes people act in certain ways and it is historians who have some kind of
access to that.