Identifying Scholarly and Intellectual Communities: A Note on French Philosophy, 1900-1939

Abstract

Anachronistic standards and subjective criteria for the definition of a field of study are, of course, two of the most grave flaws in any field of history. Intellectual historians seem to have found it particularly difficult to avoid these two sins of historical method and have consequently often vitiated their works by using either ahistorical or subjective standards of judgment, and sometimes both at once. Indeed, few obviously good rules readily suggest themselves either for identifying the dominant ideas of an era or for determining the membership of scholarly and intellectual communities. Justifiable procedures have been rare enough to constitute something of a methodological scandal in intellectual history. Too often the vexing problems of deciding upon the membership of an intellectual community and distinguishing those of its members whose works merit close textual study are resolved by dubious standards of definition and selection. For example, the purportedly intrinsic quality of an author's work is a commonly used criterion of whether it ought to be read, despite the fact that this is not properly speaking an historical standard. Similarly, works and authors that have withstood the test of have frequently been favored. But the verdict of the ages, because it does not necessarily coincide with the verdict of the age being studied, is an anachronistic gauge of the historical significance of a subject. Finally, historians have often simply studied scholars and intellectuals whom they found interesting. No more subjective (or ahistorical) a criterion for defining a field of study can be imagined than this widespread practice. In short, while few would seriously argue that the inherent quality, or the test of time, or an individual's likes and dislikes make good measures of the historical importance of a topic, it remains true that in intellectual history better yardsticks have seemed awkward to devise. Without better criteria, however, it will remain very difficult ever to make satisfactory generalizations in the field. One way to add rigor to generalizations about intellectual communities, and one that has been used with considerable success, is to study the groups of scholars constituted by membership in formal institutions such as universities, academies, and professional organizations. This approach works best for those eras and intellectual fields such as thirteenth-century philosophy or twentieth-century biology in which universities and similar institutions were nearly coterminous with intellectual activity. But at other times and for other currents in the history of ideas such as the Enlightenment formal institutions were rather more marginal. Variations in the importance of scholarly and intellectual institutions have also occurred from country to country in the same period and in the same field of intellectual endeavor. Thus in Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, philosophy was mostly done in the universities; in England at the same time it was not. (Think of Kant and Hegel on the one hand, Hume and Mill on the other.) In short, workable institutional criteria are sometimes available, sometimes not. Most often perhaps, they are available and helpful, but not sufficient. This would

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.