Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History
Darrin M. McMahon, Samuel MoynRecalling past attempts to showcase the diversity & differentiation of modern European intellectual history, this volume also documents how much has changed in recent decades. Some authors are much readier to defend a history of ideas practiced over the long term - once the defining sin of the field. Others go so far as to insist on how ideas are always open to reappropriation & reevaluation beyond their original contexts - suggesting that it is an error to reduce the ideas to those contexts. Others still argue that, under threat from trends like social history, intellectual historians have forsaken any attempt to resolve for themselves how ideas are socially embodied.
The volume also registers old & new trends in history that have affected the study of ideas, including the history of science, the history of academic disciplines, the history of psychology & "self," international & global history, & women's & gender history.
°°°
Darrin M. McMahon is the Mary Brinsmead Wheelock Professor of History at Dartmouth College. The author of Happiness: A History & Divine Fury: A History of Genius, he writes regularly for the national & international press. He lives in Connecticut.