For decades, intellectual historians studied great thinkers. They traced how Plato influenced Augustine, how Locke shaped Jefferson, how ideas moved through minds across centuries. The discipline operated like a relay race of concepts, passed from one genius to another.

Then came the 1960s and 1970s. A generation of historians argued this approach fundamentally misunderstood how ideas actually work. Ideas don't float free—they're tools people use to do things in specific moments. Understanding Locke means understanding what Locke was trying to accomplish when he wrote, not just what his words seem to mean to us now.

This methodological revolution transformed the field. But it also raised an uncomfortable question: if intellectual history becomes entirely about contexts—social, linguistic, political—what distinguishes it from social history or political history? The discipline's boundaries began to blur, and some wondered whether it had dissolved entirely.

Quentin Skinner and J.G.A. Pocock, working at Cambridge, launched the most influential attack on traditional intellectual history. Their argument was deceptively simple: you cannot understand a text without understanding what its author was doing by writing it.

Skinner drew on speech act theory from philosophy of language. When someone says 'I promise,' they're not describing a promise—they're making one. The utterance performs an action. Skinner argued that political texts work similarly. Locke's Two Treatises wasn't a timeless meditation on government. It was an intervention in a specific debate, designed to legitimate certain political positions against others.

Pocock extended this by emphasizing languages rather than individual speech acts. Political thinkers work within available vocabularies—civic humanism, natural jurisprudence, commercial sociability. These languages constrain what can be thought and said. Innovation happens at the margins, by stretching or combining existing idioms.

The implications were radical. The great conversation between canonical thinkers—Aristotle to Aquinas to Locke to Mill—largely dissolves. Each thinker addressed different problems in different conceptual languages. The appearance of continuous dialogue is a retrospective illusion created by later readers who stripped ideas from their contexts.

Takeaway

Ideas are interventions, not abstractions. Understanding what someone meant requires reconstructing what they were trying to do when they said it.

German historian Reinhart Koselleck developed a different contextual approach. Rather than focusing on what individual authors intended, Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual history) traces how key political and social concepts transformed over time. These transformations reveal deeper historical changes.

Koselleck argued that between 1750 and 1850—a period he called the Sattelzeit or 'saddle period'—fundamental concepts like 'state,' 'revolution,' 'history,' and 'progress' underwent radical transformation. Old concepts gained new meanings. New concepts emerged. The temporal horizon of politics shifted from cyclical patterns to linear progress.

This approach treats concepts as indicators and factors of historical change. When 'revolution' stops meaning a return to origins and starts meaning radical transformation toward the future, something profound has shifted in how people experience time and possibility. Concept change both reflects and enables social change.

Unlike the Cambridge School, Begriffsgeschichte doesn't privilege authorial intention. It examines semantic fields and usage patterns across many texts. Individual thinkers matter less than the collective transformations of meaning that shape what any individual can think. The history of concepts becomes a kind of historical anthropology of political imagination.

Takeaway

The words we inherit aren't neutral containers—they're sediments of past struggles and transformations that shape what we can imagine as possible.

Not everyone accepted the contextual turn. By the 1990s and 2000s, some intellectual historians pushed back. Their concern: excessive contextualism dissolves ideas into their circumstances, losing what makes intellectual history distinctive.

Historian Richard Whatmore and others argued that the Cambridge School, despite its sophistication, often reduced thinkers to their strategic intentions. Recovering what Locke was 'doing' can slide into treating his texts as merely political moves, ignoring their philosophical content. The ideas themselves—their arguments, their truth claims—disappear.

Philosophers joined this critique from a different angle. If Plato's arguments about justice are only intelligible within ancient Athenian contexts, how can we explain their persistent capacity to challenge and illuminate? Great works seem to exceed their contexts, speaking to concerns their authors never imagined.

Some scholars now advocate a middle path. Context matters for avoiding anachronism—we shouldn't read our concerns into past texts. But intellectual history should also engage with ideas as ideas, asking whether arguments succeed, how they might be developed, what they still offer. The author returns not as a genius transmitting timeless truths, but as someone who achieved something worth understanding on its own terms.

Takeaway

Context prevents misreading, but shouldn't prevent genuine engagement. Past thinkers may have been doing something in their moment—and also saying something that still matters.

Intellectual history's identity crisis remains unresolved—and perhaps that's appropriate. The field exists at an uncomfortable intersection: historical enough to demand contextual rigor, philosophical enough to care whether arguments work.

The Cambridge School and Begriffsgeschichte permanently changed the discipline. No serious intellectual historian now treats ideas as disembodied essences floating through time. Context is unavoidable.

But the recent pushback reminds us that ideas are also reasons—claims about how things are or should be. A field that only explains why people believed things, never engaging with whether they were right to, has lost something essential. The productive tension continues.