Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

In the years since then, the Journal of the History of Ideas has continued to explore the subtle ways in which one idea in history leads to another. Here are some recent articles: Plato’s effects on Calvin, Nietzsche’s admiration for Socrates, Buddhism and nineteenth-century German thought, a pre-Freudian psychologist of the unconscious (Israel Salanter, 1810–1883), the link between Newton and Adam Smith, between Emerson and Hinduism, Bayle’s anticipation of Karl Popper, the parallels between late antiquity and Renaissance Florence. Perhaps the most substantial spin-off of the Journal was the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, published in 1973 and edited by Philip P. Wiener, who had followed Lovejoy as editor-in-chief. This massive work, in four volumes, of 2,600 pages, had 254 contributors, seven associate editors, including Isaiah Berlin and Ernest Nagel, and seven contributing editors, among whom were E. H. Gombrich, Paul O. Kristeller, Peter B. Medawar and Meyer Schapiro.⁴⁰ The dictionary identified nine core areas – these were: ideas about the external order of nature; ideas about human nature; literature and aesthetics; ideas about history; economic, legal and political ideas and institutions; religion and philosophy; formal logical mathematical and linguistic ideas. As one reviewer remarked, ‘it is a vast intellectual Golconda’.

In an essay in the Journal, to mark fifty years of publication, one contributor singled out three failures worthy of note. One was the failure of historians to come up with any understanding of what one big modern idea really means – this was ‘secularisation’; another was the widespread disappointment felt about ‘psychohistory’ when so many figures – Erasmus, Luther, Rousseau, Newton, Descartes, Vico, Goethe, Emerson, Nietzsche – cry out for a deep psychological understanding; and the third was the failure among both historians and scientists to get to grips with ‘imagination’ as a dimension in life generally and in particular so far as the production of ideas is concerned. These alleged failures are something worth bearing in mind as this history proceeds.⁴¹

In the pages of the Journal of the History of Ideas a distinction is often made between ‘the history of ideas’ (an English language, and mainly American, usage), and several German terms – Begriffsgeschichte (the history of concepts), Geistesgeschichte (history of the human spirit), Ideengeschichte (history of ideas), Wörtegeschichte (history of individual words) and Verzeitlichung (the anachronistic disposition to insert modern concepts into historical processes). These are useful terms for scholars, for refining the subject. The general reader, however, needs only to be aware that this deeper level of analysis is there, should they wish to take their interest further.

In this Introduction, by discussing the theories and arguments of others, I have tried to give a flavour of what a history of ideas is and can be. But perhaps another, altogether simpler way of looking at this book is as an alternative to more conventional history – as history with the kings and emperors and dynasties and generals left out, with the military campaigns, the empire-building conquests and the peace treaties and truces omitted. There is no shortage of such histories and I assume here that readers will know the bare bones of historical chronology. But although I do not explore particular military campaigns, or the deeds of this or that king or emperor, I do discuss advances in military tactics, the invention of new and influential weapons, theories of kingship and the intellectual battles between kings and popes for the minds of men. I do not discuss in any detail the actual conquest of America but I do dwell on the thinking that led to the discovery of the New World and the ways in which that discovery changed how Europeans and Muslims (for example) thought. I do not describe the build-up of empires but I do discuss the idea of empire, and of colonialism. I explore ‘The imperial mind’, how for example the British changed Indian thinking and vice versa. Ideas about race haven’t always been as contentious as they are now and that, in itself, is a matter of interest and importance.

One set of arguments I make space for is the alternative to Lovejoy’s ‘Great Chain’ thesis, as epitomised by James Thrower’s excellent, if little-known, The Alternative Tradition.⁴² This is a fascinating exploration of naturalistic views of the past, in other words ideas which seek to explain the world – its existence and order – without recourse to God or the gods. In my view this tradition has not had the attention it merits (and is needed now more than ever). Thrower’s book is discussed in Chapter 25.