The Scandinavian languages

This article suggests that the enterprise of Mark Bevir's book (The Logic of the History of Ideas, Cambridge, 1999), is the reverse of what his title implies. Bevir seeks not to delineate the peculiar logic of a specialised subfield of history called the ‘history of ideas’, but rather the logic which underlies historical pursuit considered in general as the ‘explanation of belief’. If this is so, then the relationship between belief, meaning, and speech act in intellectual texts, and the task and method of the intellectual historian, must be reinterpreted along lines closer to those of Quentin Skinner than Bevir would allow. Indeed, Bevir's criticism of Skinner, which hinges on his own account of malapropism, is shown here to fail. The article concludes with brief reflections on the purpose and nature of studying the ‘history of ideas’.     

Why history of ideas at all?

This article suggests that the enterprise of Mark Bevir's book (The Logic of the History of Ideas, Cambridge, 1999), is the reverse of what his title implies. Bevir seeks not to delineate the peculiar logic of a specialised subfield of history called the ‘history of ideas’, but rather the logic which underlies historical pursuit considered in general as the ‘explanation of belief’. If this is so, then the relationship between belief, meaning, and speech act in intellectual texts, and the task and method of the intellectual historian, must be reinterpreted along lines closer to those of Quentin Skinner than Bevir would allow. Indeed, Bevir's criticism of Skinner, which hinges on his own account of malapropism, is shown here to fail. The article concludes with brief reflections on the purpose and nature of studying the ‘history of ideas’.     

Derrida and fidelity to history

In the first part of this paper Hugh Rayment-Pickard challenges Mark Bevir's assumption that Derrida does not care about historical or other kinds of truth. A consideration of Derrida's early work on Husserl shows deconstruction to be a kind of skepsis or epoche launched in search of the truth. Yet deconstruction reveals the truth as ‘undecidable’, which means that Derrida's commitment to the truth must take the form of ‘faith’. The second part of the paper considers an example of definite intentional meaning given in Mark Bevir's Logic: Petrarch's ascent of Mont Ventoux. On examination, Petrach's motivation can be seen to be radically divided between secular and religious concerns, a split vividly illustrated in his imaginary dialogue with St Augustine: The Secret. Finally, Rayment-Pickard looks briefly at Derrida's own dialogue with St Augustine, ‘Circumfession’, which also argues that human intentions are irreducibly complex and plural.     

Does Bevir's The Logic of the History of Ideas Improve Our Understanding of Hegel's Philosophy of Right?

Mark Bevir's The Logic of the History of Ideas has received considerable attention recently. This article highlights a new problem with his weak intentionalism. Bevir's weak intentionalism holds that on occasion the meanings readers ascribe to texts may trump the meanings the authors express in texts. The article uses the example of Hegel's theory of punishment. The received wisdom is that Hegel is a pure retributivist. Yet, this strays far from his text and stated views. We might think we should keep to this text to uncover Hegel's views. However, Bevir's weak intentionalism has us side with how he has been read over what Hegel has said. This view is problematic as our meanings may well stray far from the texts, words or spirit. Thus, Bevir's weak intentionalism can fall victim to straying from the text when trying to interpret it.     

Whose logic? Reflections on gender in the history of ideas

The paper challenges Bevir's failure to engage with issues of gender in his attempt to establish a logic of the history of ideas. It argues that this exclusion both compromises his claim to have articulated a comprehensive (and inclusive) logic, and suggests the limitations of his model as a way in which we might bring greater subtlety and texture to the understanding of history.     

Whose logic? Reflections on gender in the history of ideas

The paper challenges Bevir's failure to engage with issues of gender in his attempt to establish a logic of the history of ideas. It argues that this exclusion both compromises his claim to have articulated a comprehensive (and inclusive) logic, and suggests the limitations of his model as a way in which we might bring greater subtlety and texture to the understanding of history.     

Derrida and fidelity to history

In the first part of this paper Hugh Rayment-Pickard challenges Mark Bevir's assumption that Derrida does not care about historical or other kinds of truth. A consideration of Derrida's early work on Husserl shows deconstruction to be a kind of skepsis or epoche launched in search of the truth. Yet deconstruction reveals the truth as ‘undecidable’, which means that Derrida's commitment to the truth must take the form of ‘faith’. The second part of the paper considers an example of definite intentional meaning given in Mark Bevir's Logic: Petrarch's ascent of Mont Ventoux. On examination, Petrach's motivation can be seen to be radically divided between secular and religious concerns, a split vividly illustrated in his imaginary dialogue with St Augustine: The Secret. Finally, Rayment-Pickard looks briefly at Derrida's own dialogue with St Augustine, ‘Circumfession’, which also argues that human intentions are irreducibly complex and plural.     

On Some Problems with Weak Intentionalism for Intellectual History

This paper argues that the notion of weak intentionalism in Mark Bevir's The Logic of the History of Ideas is incoherent. Bevir's proposal for weak intentionalism as procedural individualism relies on the argument that the object of study for historians of ideas is given by the beliefs that are expressed by individuals (whether authors or readers) since these beliefs constitute the historical meaning of the work for those individuals as historical figures. Historical meanings are thus hermeneutic meanings. In the case of insincere, unconscious, and irrational beliefs, however, the beliefs expressed by individuals are not in fact their actual beliefs, and their actual beliefs are now taken to be those expressed by the works. It thus turns out that it is not the beliefs expressed by individuals that are the object of study for historians but the works themselves, since the overriding requirement for historians of ideas is to “make sense of their material” and it is this requirement that determines whether or not the beliefs are to be construed as expressed by individuals or by the works. But once it is accepted that the beliefs that are the object of study for historians are expressed by the works and not by individuals, the original argument that such beliefs are historical hermeneutic meanings for historical figures no longer applies. The argument for weak intentionalism thus turns out to be incoherent. Bevir's argument fails to establish that the object of study for the history of ideas is external to the works, and the attempted distinction between interpreting a work and reading a text also fails.     

Language diversity,language policy and the sovereign state

An analysis of Mark Bevir's account of the role of language and tradition on the one hand, and the individual on the other in the generation of ideas, and proposal of an alternative account It endorses Bevir's project of finding a middle way between individualism and collectivism, but finds that Bevir exaggerates the role of the individual. It argues that human selves always remains dependent on language even to articulate their own intentions to themselves. Whilst they have a capacity to create new linguistic expressions, this is always limited to the exploration of possibilities already latent in the language. However, no one is a mere recipient and conduit of a given language: everyone hands it on transformed by their unique appropriation of it. The antifoundationalist analyses of Wittgenstein, Newman Collingwood, and Neurath are invoked to argue that this state of affairs also applies to the individual's relation to the beliefs and values inherited traditionally: there is no possibility of a wholesale rejection of what is received; no individual can reject all received traditions, and erect an entire belief structure from scratch, but can only modify it on a piecemeal basis, so that received tradition always remains constitutive of the individual mind. It is also argued that human self-consciousness is always socially formed, and no person ever completely integrated, and stabilized. No one is ever therefore in a state of complete self-possession. One therefore must reject Bevir's claim that the historian of ideas must initially presume that individuals are sincere, conscious and rational in their expressed beliefs: ‘sincere’ self-consciousness is an ideal never fully achieved, and beliefs as to what constitutes ‘rationality’ are so varied that specific presumptions cannot be made.     

Objectivity and the writing of history

How do historians approach objectivity? This is addressed by Mark Bevir in his book The Logic of the History of Ideas (1999) by his argument for an anthropological epistemology with objectivity in the historical narrative resting on the explanation of human actions/agent intentionality equating with meaning. The criticism of this position is at several levels. As sophisticated constructionists historians do not usually ask ‘Can history be objective?’ Rather, they work from the balance of evidence reflecting the intersubjectivity of truth and they acknowledge the problematic nature of inferring agent intentionality and the difficulties in equating this with ‘what it means’. Why Abraham Lincoln issued the 1863 emancipation proclamation is a case in point. No historian would claim to have located its true meaning objectively in effect doubting Mark Bevir's claim that ‘objective knowledge arises from a human practice in which we criticise and compare rival webs of theories in terms of agreed facts’ (The Logic of the History of Ideas, 1999, p. 98). There are also further challenges to an over-reliance on rational action theory and the problems associated with the selection of evidence. Equally, most historians in practice doubt objectivity emerges from an accurate knowledge of the motives that can be matched to weak authorial intentions and that this leads to action via decisions. Few historians today accept that their narrative mimics past intentionality and that this provides true meaning. The article offers four reasons for rejecting Bevir's position and concludes with a defence of the narrative-linguistic determination of meaning. This suggests that history is subject to the same narrative and imaginative constraints as other forms of realist writing, rather than being privileged by an access to knowable intentionality and that this constitutes objective historical knowledge.     

The political logic of discourse: a neo-Gramscian view

This article contrasts Mark Bevir's approach to the history of ideas with a neo-Gramscian theory of discourse. Bevir puts the case for an ‘anti-foundationalist’ approach to understanding ideas, yet he defends a weak rationalism centred on individual intentions as the original source of all meanings. Discourse theorists—specifically Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe—also adopt an anti-foundationalist perspective but pursue its implications beyond any rationalism. The advantages of discourse theory are argued to lie in its emphasis on power and conflict in the consitution and transformation of social meanings and identity. Laclau and Mouffe's work, it is claimed, alerts us to a political logic of discourse that Bevir's more rationalist approach to ‘ideas’ sidesteps.     

Language,tradition, and the self in the generation of meaning

An analysis of Mark Bevir's account of the role of language and tradition on the one hand, and the individual on the other in the generation of ideas, and proposal of an alternative account It endorses Bevir's project of finding a middle way between individualism and collectivism, but finds that Bevir exaggerates the role of the individual. It argues that human selves always remains dependent on language even to articulate their own intentions to themselves. Whilst they have a capacity to create new linguistic expressions, this is always limited to the exploration of possibilities already latent in the language. However, no one is a mere recipient and conduit of a given language: everyone hands it on transformed by their unique appropriation of it. The antifoundationalist analyses of Wittgenstein, Newman Collingwood, and Neurath are invoked to argue that this state of affairs also applies to the individual's relation to the beliefs and values inherited traditionally: there is no possibility of a wholesale rejection of what is received; no individual can reject all received traditions, and erect an entire belief structure from scratch, but can only modify it on a piecemeal basis, so that received tradition always remains constitutive of the individual mind. It is also argued that human self-consciousness is always socially formed, and no person ever completely integrated, and stabilized. No one is ever therefore in a state of complete self-possession. One therefore must reject Bevir's claim that the historian of ideas must initially presume that individuals are sincere, conscious and rational in their expressed beliefs: ‘sincere’ self-consciousness is an ideal never fully achieved, and beliefs as to what constitutes ‘rationality’ are so varied that specific presumptions cannot be made.     

The political logic of discourse: a neo-Gramscian view

This article contrasts Mark Bevir's approach to the history of ideas with a neo-Gramscian theory of discourse. Bevir puts the case for an ‘anti-foundationalist’ approach to understanding ideas, yet he defends a weak rationalism centred on individual intentions as the original source of all meanings. Discourse theorists—specifically Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe—also adopt an anti-foundationalist perspective but pursue its implications beyond any rationalism. The advantages of discourse theory are argued to lie in its emphasis on power and conflict in the consitution and transformation of social meanings and identity. Laclau and Mouffe's work, it is claimed, alerts us to a political logic of discourse that Bevir's more rationalist approach to ‘ideas’ sidesteps.     

The tyranny of the definite article: Some thoughts on the art of intellectual history

This essay argues, following an insight of Burckhardt, that the philosophy of history is a ‘centaur’, and that it has a tendency to hinder rather than to encourage the practice of history. It challenges many of the presuppositions of Bevir's study, demonstrating that The Logic of the History of Ideas is not, in any meaningful sense, an historically minded work. The ‘logic’ of the essay looks to the arts, especially literature and music, as providing genuinely illuminating parallels to the discipline involved in the practice of intellectual history. History cannot be understood as a process of philosophical abstraction; pertinent examples are of its essence, and plurality is therefore central to its richly textured nature. It still has much to learn from the reflexive procedures of anthropology. By examining the idea of ‘tradition’ the essay demonstrates that ‘the past’ is never dead, and that the relationship between texts is a living process: the intellectual historian is him/herself an artist, and his/her task is no less demanding than that of the creative artist, and it is always humblingly provisional.     

Objectivity and the writing of history

How do historians approach objectivity? This is addressed by Mark Bevir in his book The Logic of the History of Ideas (1999) by his argument for an anthropological epistemology with objectivity in the historical narrative resting on the explanation of human actions/agent intentionality equating with meaning. The criticism of this position is at several levels. As sophisticated constructionists historians do not usually ask ‘Can history be objective?’ Rather, they work from the balance of evidence reflecting the intersubjectivity of truth and they acknowledge the problematic nature of inferring agent intentionality and the difficulties in equating this with ‘what it means’. Why Abraham Lincoln issued the 1863 emancipation proclamation is a case in point. No historian would claim to have located its true meaning objectively in effect doubting Mark Bevir's claim that ‘objective knowledge arises from a human practice in which we criticise and compare rival webs of theories in terms of agreed facts’ (The Logic of the History of Ideas, 1999, p. 98). There are also further challenges to an over-reliance on rational action theory and the problems associated with the selection of evidence. Equally, most historians in practice doubt objectivity emerges from an accurate knowledge of the motives that can be matched to weak authorial intentions and that this leads to action via decisions. Few historians today accept that their narrative mimics past intentionality and that this provides true meaning. The article offers four reasons for rejecting Bevir's position and concludes with a defence of the narrative-linguistic determination of meaning. This suggests that history is subject to the same narrative and imaginative constraints as other forms of realist writing, rather than being privileged by an access to knowable intentionality and that this constitutes objective historical knowledge.     

Oliver Cromwell and the Cambridge Elections of 1640

Oliver Cromwell's many biographers have been puzzled by his elections as MP for Cambridge in 1640. His connections with the town at this time were slight. Historians have, therefore, fallen back on his supposed opposition to the draining of the fens or, more recently, on possible aristocratic patronage. This article proposes a new theory, based on a rehabilitation of a very old source, James Heath's Flagellum, one of the earliest Cromwell biographies. Heath claimed that Cromwell had been elected with the support of a group of minor members of the corporation. Although very garbled, the Flagellum account probably records genuine details about the election and the men it identified as Cromwell's key supporters can be shown to have opposed the religious policies of the local bishop, Matthew Wren of Ely. Cromwell was probably elected as a critic of Wren.     

Oscar Wilde,Music, and the ‘Opium-Tainted Cigarette’: Disinterested Dandies and Critical Play

This article shows how the musical references in Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray are important to the identity of the dandy, especially in relation to the literary-critical work of Matthew Arnold, whose guiding presence in Wilde's oeuvre has traditionally been somewhat underestimated. Wilde's male characters, although famously fond of music, reveal ‘disinterestedness’ in earnest musical pursuits, similar to the ‘Indian virtue of detachment’ outlined by Arnold in his exploration of ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ (1864, in Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. by Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 26–51). Furthermore, the critical attitude of the dandy–aesthete intersects with the implications that we can read into the posture of the lounging opium smoker. Extensive scholarship has already established the relationship between the East and opium in fictional works by Thomas de Quincey, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. Music is an essential ingredient to this literature, too, both in terms of its narrative presence and because it is a key element in an ongoing, nineteenth-century British exploration of how stylistic innovations could be represented as ‘music’. After disclosing the close connections between dandyism and those nineteenth-century composers whose lives and works were often represented as dandyish (Berlioz, Chopin and Schumann), the essay builds from the tradition of opium-inspired fiction. It suggests Wilde's debt to Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), while also showing Wilde's innovations in making shifts in character and narrative voice into indicators of narcotic consumption.     

A Tale of Two Train Journeys: Lawrence Bragg,C. P. Snow and The ‘Two Cultures’

It was during two train-journey meetings with the physicist William Lawrence Bragg (1890–1971) that both Charles Percy Snow's (1905–1980) civil service career and, if the anecdotal evidence is to be believed, the ‘two cultures’ metaphor originated. The first part of this paper is concerned with the background, consequences and significance of the first of these journeys: Kettering station in 1939. It will address the somewhat hazy record of Snow's wartime work found in existing accounts, and argue that Snow's wartime experience helped shape his characterisation of the scientific side of his ‘two cultures’. The second part of this paper deals with Bragg's intellectual influence on Snow, tracing the former's interest in ‘two cultures’ arguments prior to probable encounters between the two on the Cambridge to London train in the late 1940s and early 1950s, including a historically hazy one in which together they allegedly coined the famous phrase. In examining their early relationship, it becomes clear that Bragg was a key influence and support in Snow's career as an administrator and as a cultural commentator.     

A critique of freedom and equality

The study of historiography is undergoing a revolution akin to that which took place in the history of political thought in the 1960s, and the work of J.G.A. Pocock is central to both. Pocock's continuing exploration, in Barbarism and Religion (1999-), of the intellectual contexts of Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is central to this enterprise, and this essay situates the origins of his own work within a pre-‘Cambridge School’ Cambridge and its experience of what might be called the Butterfieldian moment. That was marked by a desire to treat religion seriously as a driving force in history; and the same concern is applied here to further understanding an eighteenth-century controversy in which history and religion were dramatically involved, and which profoundly affected Gibbon's own historical and religious views. The work of Conyers Middleton and John Jortin is critically examined from this perspective. These preludes to Gibbon lead to a series of postludes examining the particular contexts in which Victorian and twentieth-century historians and writers, from Henry Hart Milman to Evelyn Waugh, variously appreciated and interpreted Gibbon. The whole is to be seen as a reflexive engagement with Pocock's vitally illuminating studies in eighteenth-century historiography.