Panel Discussion

What I call the “Berkeley School” of intellectual history centered around Martin Jay and his former students has been split in the last decade by a growing divide between those (exemplified by Peter Gordon) who have sought to preserve the autonomy of ideas from their vulgarization and reduction to social and political practice, and those (exemplified by Samuel Moyn) who insist that ideas and social practices are co-constituted and should be reunited as a “social history of ideas” with a restored link to political economy and social theory. In an article in progress, I historicize this divide, which has several precedents in the mid-twentieth century. Jay’s own Doktorvater H. Stuart Hughes was a politically active progressive at the same time as he wrote transcendental intellectual histories of “great men” or “geniuses” who shaped European consciousness—a kind of idealism the Marxist-materialist historian Eric Hobsbawm sharply criticized in Hughes’s work. Gordon’s interventions remind us that “open thinking points beyond itself,” that philosophical ideas bear significance well beyond their context of origin. His attempt to carve out space for Habermasian “rational reconstruction” of philosophical ideas within the historical discipline is admirable and has undoubtedly added rigor to the field. At the same time, this approach must be combined with Moyn’s reminder that without an underlying analysis of political economy, class, and the conditions of intellectual production, such an intellectual history loses all connection to context and also loses its ability to speak to our own times.