For half a century, let us say from 1930 to 1980, there was an intellectual movement, now forgotten, which premised that the queen of the disciplines was tracing how ideas emerged and then, over time, altered or were corrected, and then either ended or were transformed into a different basic idea. What people thought was always framed by where they stood in the development of some key idea and, during that time, history of ideas was more important than, let us say, administrative or political history for explaining how history worked. Many movements came afterwards, such as environmental history or post colonial history, but there it was during its reign. There was Arthur Lovejoy expounding how for many centuries thought was dominated by a great chain of being so that there was an inherent hierarchy whereby every person and every animal had their place in nature. There was Carl Becker’s analysis of how the Enlightenment and the American Revolution ticked. There was Ernst Cassierer’s magisterial view of how the Renaissance and the Enlightenment evolved into Kant. There was F. R. Leavis tracing the moral arc of the English novel from Defoe to Virginia Woolf. There was even the early Herbert Marcuse criticizing, early on, the limitations of the Weberean sense of capitalism before going on to see how Marxism transformed itself into Soviet Marxism before in the Sixties becoming the spokesperson for a leftist ideology in America. That point of view was different from the concurrent interest in intellectual history, which concerned more details, such as what books Rousseau or Darwin had consulted or whether Mendel had faked his counts on whether peas were in proper proportions to what genes would predict should happen. It was about big ideas, how they changed, not how people changed, and I thought of myself as seeing as well that this was the way to unfold history.
The idea of the social contract is a good example of the history of ideas because it starts, gets modified over time, and then either ends or transforms into some other basic idea. It starts with Hobbes in that the main influence on Hobbes, by general agreement, was Thucydides, who indeed posited that people made cold blooded calculations in dealing with one another. What Hobbes proposed, however, was a much more extended and fundamental idea: that every society engaged in an exchange whereby the leaders of a nation, speaking for the nation, gained compliance from their subjects or citizens so as to gain the security of their personhood as well as the administration of law so that the population would be prosperous as well as secure. Unrest in the streets disrupts business as well as gets a passing stranger dead. Hobbes thought that the agreement of a social contract was tacit or implied in that people continued to reside within that state but the real reason is that you cannot know how a nation could exist in an orderly fashion unless there was such a tacit agreement.
As the story usually goes, Locke corrected Hobbes by saying that people readily and overtly remake the social contract, which is to be an organized society, whenever they take the fancy to do so. Because people are gregarious creatures and so will always be on the lookout or take the opportunity to remold the society when they are sufficiently displeased with the going order of things. In fact, most social relations do not require a social compact in that people will arrange personal contracts, such as to work for an employer for a particular wage, and that is satisfactory even if the wages seem unjust so long as their lives aren’t threatened, which would invoke the general social contract. Farther ahead, Rousseau got rid of the tacit idea of social contract entirely and thought that the actual and historical social contract was established by yearly elections. For their part, the Founding Fathers took the social contract to be based on the idea that the rights of the citizens could be guaranteed by the government and that was the purpose for creating the government. Rather than a concession by the government so that the populace would be specific, social peace and prosperity was the sole purpose of the government.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the basic concept had shifted away from the basis of government to its mechanisms. How would democratic government work so that it accomplished peace and prosperity and that included the peaceful succession of power? It included the idea of extending the franchise to include the poor, women and Blacks, and to adopt the Australian ballot so that voting became private. There were further attempts to improve the election system with proportional representation and the wide use of referenda, but those have not managed to stick in the United States even if a referendum was in fact used by Great Britain to decide whether to break with the European Union.
Problems with the social contract theory remain. What is part of the social contract, which is the fundamental agreement, and what is just a policy which has been followed by a number of legislative enactments? Maybe Social Security is part of the social contract in that the full faith and credit of the united States is pledged to it, just as is the case with the federal debt, but maybe, as some Republicans think, social security is to be changed from an entitlement to an insurance investment and so just a matter of policy rather than a fundamental part of being a citizen. The argument is put as a question of whether it is a right or not, just as whether reproductive health care is to be considered a right or not, so deeply embedded that it cannot or should not be altered without having compromised the list of rights that are now considered part and parcel of what would earlier have been considered as part of the social contract.
Another good example of the history of ideas approach is offered by the theory of evolution. Famously, Darwin is supposed to have brought with the HMS Beagle two books: Lyll’s “Geology” and Malthus’ “An Essay on the Principles of Population”, the first to provide extended time as allowing for the operation of natural selection, and Malthus for showing how producing farms are limited in countering the expansion of population and so are in competition with one another, some people to survive and the others to die. But it doesn’t matter if he really took those books with him just as it doesn’t matter if Thomas Jefferson had Locke’s Second Treatise at Monticello because the ideas of Darwin derived out of time and competitive populations just as Jefferson’s idea of inalienable rights is derived from social contract theory. The ideas connect, not the people. What Darwin did was to reconceptualize how to think about species. Their anatomies are to be understood functionally: what was accomplished by having one or another anatomical feature. Structural features accomplish something, though for no particular intent, just so that the species or its long term evolved species can survive. There is no purpose in the process and that is a very frightening prospect: a universe without ideas, just creatures in competition with one another.
Evolution was modified or could be considered advanced by introducing the idea of mutation as the mechanism whereby change over a long time takes place and to result in new species. That makes evolution a science in that the modifications are specific and cumulative, just as what happens in physics where a unitary atom is replaced rather than modified by the Bohr atom and then by subsequent iterations, Modification, though, might mean the same thing as scientific advance. And you might think there were setbacks in evolution in that evolutionists could not show many of the stages of a species evolved one from another or how the hydraulic structures that allowed giraffes to push their blood up to their brain could evolve unless less tall creatures thought it would be nice in a few hundred generations to be able to get at high trees. That left with Stephen Jay Gould’s view that evolution was a history where some things are noticed to have evolved while others don’t rather than a science of what had to happen.
Instead, evolution became an image that came to overtake the imagination of international life and social life. The usual modification observed is that biological evolution became regarded as social evolution or Social Darwinism, races competing with one, which meant that nations were in a dog at dog struggle to survive, each their own race or kind trying to use its skills and geniuses to prevail. But it should also be said that some of the great sociological theorists were also beholden to the Darwinian tradition. William Graham Sumner championed the entrepreneurial spirit and thought that obsolete social structures, such as slavery, would lose their usefulness and so die on the vine though those who cl;ung to it might have to be abolished by force. Sumner was angry at the social customs that lasted too long while a biological evolutionist doesn’t get mad because the eohippus may have taken a while to depart the scene. Durkheim was also an evolutionist in thinking that social cohesion made it possible for society to survive and that societies adapted so as to perfect their internal cohesion, and Parsons thought that the abstracted functional prerequisites were rooted in the functions they each provided whereby a society could exist much less prosper. The idea of functionality was key and so that school of sociology was correctly named “functionalism”. Weber and Simmel were not wedded to the evolutionary model, preferring to look at inevitable aspects of social life, such as class, status and party, by thee one, and conflict and cooperation by the other.
It is possible to generalize the history of ideas approach from being a method whereby to notice that ideas emerge, are transformed in successive iterations, and then cease to be of importance, but as well as that is a theory of how thought has and does and supposedly will operate. It could be said that there are perhaps a dozen or so major ideas that have emerged out of the Western world and that they constitute Western history, filling all the mental space or cultural space with just those ideas and, by implication, political and social history are just the applications of one or another of those grand ideas. It begins with the post New Testament, Catholic theologians, who begin with Tertillian saying that Christian belief was absurd, to Augustine saying that you could explain some things but not others, and transformed more than a thousand years into Christian history, with St Anselm claiming and trying to show that everything in Christianity made sense and was rational. There follows Scholasticism which begins with Abelard asking questions, results in Aquinas explaining everything, and then transforming itself into empiricism, which is the new method that would unfold as scientific method, a movement of thought that seems inexhaustible even if what it now says such that events a great distance apart can affect one another, seems to me to be incomprehensible. Then there was the Protestant insight that the transformation of the soul was internal and invisible, there no longer a need for the intervention in the world of the supernatural world, and so doing without miracles or the Mass, and altering itself, during its six centuries, from internality to worldly success as a measure of religiosity, and then, in Harnack, into a social gospel where visible churches do good deeds and that is the way to further or fulfill the christian promise, to the so called atheistic theologians who claimed that god was now invisible and we Christians would have to cope with that, only Evangelical Christians clinging to the old fashioned religion of a fervent belief as the core of Christianity.
Simultaneously, there was the key idea of large scale systematic theory, from Descartes through Leibniz and Spinoza finally realized in Kant, equally comprehensive, and summing up this grand tradition of saying all grand theory is analytic because it cannot be otherwise that people have free will, cannot avoid “should”, everything following from that, just as Descartes and the others, thought that everything was contained in some self-evident premise, such as, famously, “I think; therefore, I am”. Following that, is Marxism and Pragmatism and ordinary language theory and phenomenology. Add three or four ideas from the ancients--the Stoics, the Epicureans, the Skeptics and maybe add in Plato and Aristotle and maybe Plotinus, and there you have it: the full complement of ideas to which you add any at peril of being just a version of one of the already extant ones. There are rarely new philosophies under the sun. I can dismiss you for being, after all, just a version of a right wing Hegalian, and that, after all, was just a version of Plotinus, just extended forward in history rather than hierarchically arranged Plotinus like levels of being.
There are problems with this history of ideas as the substance of all thought empirically discovered what actually does happen in the course of mental history. Three of these break the back of a general theory of how ideas work even if it is attractive to think of a taxonomy of ideas, slowly evolving, that allow everyone to be placed within their types, very few original ideas but filled with nuances, modifications and logical thinking. The firs problem is that the basic ideas are predominantly philosophical and philosophers may preen at the idea that all other thought is a version of a philosophical idea. But there are many intellectual movements that do not easily fit into a philosophical mold. Classicism and Romanticism do not fit even if people do ponder it and there are second rate philosophers, like Herder who might claim to be an essential Romanticism. Moreover, what happens in other fields of endeavor do not match up with the philosophical movements. It is a stretch to think that the plain prose of Hemingway and World War II newspaper correspondents were a version of ordinary language philosophy and that Restoration cynicism was a version of grand systematic theory. The second problem is that there are so many candidates for new and fresh ideas that to include them is to vitiate the idea of some magic dozen but allow intellectual movements to be what they seem to be: popping up there as they do because of peculiar individuals and insights. Is Psychoanalysis properly one of those basic insights? It lasted only about seventy yearseven though the movement itself did go through an evolutionary transformation from id to ego psychology and from sex fixation to matters of power, as in Adler, and identity, as with Erikson. Evolution may have the privilege of being one in the charmed circle, but what of imperialism or manifest destiny? Are they just extensions, by a stretch, of evolution and Marxism? It would seem best to treat them as themselves even if the large and basic movements want to gobble them up.And third of all, a focus on history of ideas neglects the fact that there are other sources than ideas as the basis for social movements, social forces do that, whether Weber’s classic ideas of class, status and party, or his compelling idea of the city, Now the socially driven movements such as Feminism and ethnic history may indeed go through that special theory of great ideas in that the ideas have natural histories whereby they modify themselves, as in feminism, which moves from De Bouvoir to a Marxist reduction of women as always exploited labor to a question about abolishing biology as an inevitable force over reproduction or work roles, but does not fit a geneal theory where feminism is an example of someone else but has a flavor all its own, populating humankind with the nuances and brute obviousness that women are part of humanity,
At the moment, gender and ethnic history crowd out the field of the history of ideas and suggest ideas are elaborated because of interests rather than the ideas themselves. The point is to fill out the landscape with women and people of color rather than to promulgate a particular idea about them. Women and Blacks and transgender people are there rather than explanations of what their roles are, even if some ideologues in some supplementary way want to say that, for example, slaves provided the surplus capital that was required to make white America become prosperous. Debateable or not, that is not the animus of Black history, just that they have been here for four hundred years, just as gays have been here however much they were disregarded as having any prestige. What matters is the social process whereby an actual social group exerts power rather than explains itself. That is a very different kind of dynamic, a social one rather than an intellectual one. The idea, for example, that freedom is a concept that evolves by negating the idea of slavery is a category mistake because freedom is not a developing idea but an always available structural opportunity when people decide they have had enough and decide to rebel.
While the difference between science and intellectual ideas may well be that science is cumulative in that science is additive, giving ever more amplification or specification of ideas al;ready established, while intellectual ideas are merely modified in that the iterations of an idea are only modified from previous iterations, even contradicting them, should that distinction be meaningful, social movements differ from both to science and ideas in that there is no sequence of iterations. A social movement is full blown from the beginning. Women want the sme thing they have wanted since the beginning of the Woman’s Movement since Seneca Falls: equality, which means to be capable of doing whatever men did, whether to voteor engage in occupations or have active sexual lives, the venueschanging but not the principle, just as racial equality meant equality even if it backpedalled the idea of misolgony for many years because that was inexpedient. What happens is that different goals are expressed in different organizations. The NAACP was engaged in legal action; the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was for agitation and negotiation and showcasing Martin Luther King Jr. Whitney Young engaged with big corporations so as to use their influence. Perhaps the lasting impact of the history of ideas is to notice these different processes rather than to specify the core ones.