History of ideas

The history of ideas, a field of research in history and in related fields, deals with the expression, preservation, and change of human ideas over time. Scholars often consider the history of ideas a sister-discipline to, or a particular approach within, intellectual history. Work in the history of ideas usually involves close research in the history of philosophy and the history of literature. Recently some colleges and universities, such as Pitzer College and the University of Washington have begun to offer undergraduate degrees in this field.

The historian Arthur O. Lovejoy (1873-1962) first used the phrase history of ideas and initiated its systematic study in the early decades of the twentieth century. For decades Lovejoy presided over the regular meetings of the History of Ideas Club at Johns Hopkins University, where he worked as a professor of history from 1910 to 1939. Aside from his students and colleagues engaged in related projects (such as René Wellek and Leo Spitzer, with whom Lovejoy engaged in extended debates), scholars such as Isaiah Berlin, Michel Foucault, and others have continued to work in a spirit close to that with which Lovejoy pursued the history of ideas.

Unit-ideas

Lovejoy's history of ideas takes as its basic unit of analysis the unit-idea, or the individual concept. These unit-ideas work as the building-blocks of the history of ideas: though they are relatively unchanged in themselves over the course of time, unit-ideas recombine in new patterns and gain expression in new forms in different historical eras. As Lovejoy saw it, the historian of ideas had the task of identifying such unit-ideas and of describing their historical emergence and recession in new forms and combinations.

See also

• Idea, and compare sociology of knowledge, the History of Consciousness, history of concepts and intellectual history.
• Isaiah Berlin
• James Burke (science historian) and The Day the Universe Changed
• Historiography, other approaches to history.
• Otto Maria Carpeaux
• Meme

External link

• Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas. Ed. Philip P. Wiener. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973-74. (Online edition from the University of Virginia library's Electronic Text Center.) This book also appeared in Chinese- and Japanese-language editions.