This review examines Richard Whatmore’s contribution to the field of intellectual history, a work of notable clarity and ambition.. The review was published in the Journal of Faith and the Academy 9, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 93-95.

Book Review

Whatmore, Richard. What is Intellectual History? Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 2016. 180pp., hardcover, $59.95.

The history of ideas, or intellectual history, is defined as a “study of past thought [that] ought to be a process of moving from mountaintop to mountaintop” (14). Professor Richard Whatmore, Chair of Modern History and Director of the Institute of Intellectual History at St Andrews, brings to this volume the breadth of training and perspective shaped by Cambridge and Harvard. What is Intellectual History? is a look at the identity, history, method, practice, and relevance of intellectual history in the present and future. The book is a concisely written volume, yet its conceptual reach spans the defining concerns of the discipline. Whatmore maintains, “The intellectual historian seeks to restore a lost world, to recover perspectives and ideas from the ruins, to pull back the veil and explain why the ideas resonated in the past and convinced their advocates. Ideas, and the cultures and practices they create, are foundational to any act of understanding” (5).

Whatmore remarks at the outset, “The aim of this short book is to give general readers a sense of what intellectual history is and what intellectual historians do” (vii). In Whatmore's account, the intellectual historian is charged with "work[ing] out what stand the author would have taken had they been faced with the controversies of today” (viii). Whatmore’s training and his intent in the study of intellectual history centered on the reading of “historical authors...to find out what they thought about the issues that mattered to them” (viii). Key themes considered in the volume include the work of the social, economic, cultural, and intellectual historians (2). Intellectual history stands juxtaposed to all disciplines in that each has its own history of thought. The intellectual historian has long contended with formidable challenges, not least the enduring resistance to the discipline’s claims upon scholarly attention. Thus, “Intellectual historians, whether dealing with sophisticated philosophical utterances, longstanding cultural practices or spontaneous expression of national prejudice, seek to explain the origin and extent of such opinion, the history of which is never straightforward” (6-7).

Whatmore underscores the matter by noting, “Every person thinks. People present their thoughts in many different guises. These require careful reconstruction in order to understand what people are doing, what the ideas being enunciated meant and how they related to the broader ideological cultures in which they were formed” (7). Early discussions of intellectual history are often categorized as being connected to “membership of a group frequently identified as ‘The Cambridge School’ of intellectual history, which is often associated with the assertion that intellectual history is identical to the history of political thought” (viii-ix). 

In “The Identity of Intellectual History” (chapter one), John Burrow’s understanding of intellectual history is noted as “the process of recovering ‘what people in the past meant by the things they said and what these things ‘meant’ to them” (13). Burrow’s now-famous definition of the work of the intellectual historian is serendipitously noted as being “an eavesdropper upon the conversations of the past, as a translator between cultures identifiable today and those of the past, and of an explorer studying worlds full of assumptions and beliefs alien to our own” (13).

“The History of Intellectual History” (chapter two) is centered on R.G. Collingwood’s thought that “All history is the history of thought” (21). Whatmore advances the claim that the "history of ideas was always part of the studia humanitatis associated with the rise of Renaissance humanism, in which the identification and verification of ancient texts and the explanation of their meaning became paramount” (22). Quentin Skinner, expounding on the work of Collingwood, noted “that the history of thought should be viewed not as a series of attempts to answer a canonical set of questions, but as a sequence of episodes in which the questions as well as the answers have frequently changed” (39).

Whatmore construes the vocation of the intellectual historian as one marked by a discipline of prudence. In his words,

The historian learns prudence in consequence. History becomes the study of the making of decisions in circumstances where there is no black and white. Necessity cannot be found. Rather, history becomes a series of contingent choices, several of which make sense. Prudence requires the historian to distinguish between the background ideological traditions or languages that authors drew upon in formulating their ideas, and the specific utterances that made up a claim or argument (43).

In “The Method of Intellectual History” (chapter three), a number of perspectives are highlighted, such as Skinner’s “mythology of doctrines” (48), “mythology of coherence” (49), “mythology of prolepsis” (49), and “mythology of parochialism” (50). For Skinner, “the key to understanding a text was to seek the author’s intention in writing it” (52). Yet Whatmore cautions, “Although the study of the transmission and translation of an author’s thoughts might entail the reconstruction of the receiver’s intentions, often the historian would have little or no idea about the intentions behind the reception, or be dealing with anonymous or indeed large numbers of readers, whose intentions in using or recovering and altering the ideas of past authors were now lost” (55).

In “The Relevance of Intellectual History” (chapter five), Whatmore addresses the role of philosophers, noting that “Skinner contends that philosophers will always benefit immeasurably from intellectual history; they gain from a sense of the difficulties the historical actors faced in solving problems and from knowledge of the different options available to historical agents making political decisions” (73). With respect to the lineages of modern ideologies, Whatmore discerns that, “Hont described intellectual history as the vital discipline capable of evaluating modern ideologies and working out their strengths and weaknesses through historical analysis” (75). Intellectual history is relevant to ‘English Machiavellianism’ (78), ‘Renaissance republicanism’ (79), ‘tunnel histories’ (80), ‘Atlantic archipelago’ (81), and ‘The Bentham Project’ (82).

In considering “Intellectual History Present and Future” (chapter six), it becomes evident that the discipline is not to be regarded merely as an amalgam of interdisciplinary borrowings aspiring to constitute a distinct field of thought. On the contrary, “Intellectual historians tend to be skeptical of claims about progress and the advance of knowledge outside the natural sciences” (85). Intellectual histories tend to focus on primary sources, seeking to understand the evolution of ideas. Here it is noted that “One thing that unites intellectual historians is that they would never write anything without reading the works of the historical actors they are interested in. Relying on the interpretations of others and ignoring primary sources is inconceivable” (92). Intellectual history is, in the real sense, the history of ideas as formed and communicated by the author. Whatmore maintains, “The goal of intellectual history is a more sophisticated sense of past thoughts, an understanding of how they arose and of why different solutions to historical problems made sense, and of the limits to human action in history imposed by the ideological frameworks which people faced in their lives” (97).

Whatmore concludes,

Intellectual historians have reconstructed the intentions of authors in writing their texts. They have integrated the study of major published texts with less well-known published works by an author and with the whole range of manuscript sources. In addition, they have related the work of historic authors to their ideological context in order to infer precisely what authors were doing through engagement with the ideas of their own time (98).

At the heart of intellectual history is the effort “to understand why the idea was being pressed upon the world by the author, and why it was acceptable to make such arguments in the context of the time” (99). Whatmore brings his volume to a close by recalling John Burrow’s metaphors, in which intellectual historians replace poor historical practice with “eavesdropping upon alien conversations, exploring neglected perspectives and translating sometimes difficult ideas for readers who need help in recovering their meaning” (99).

This volume, authored by a leading scholar in the field of intellectual history, serves as an accessible introduction to intellectual history and, in a sense, as an intellectual history of the discipline itself. It is fitting to acknowledge the debt owed to Professor Whatmore for producing a work at once lucid in exposition and incisive in its contribution to the understanding of the historian’s craft.

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