by Alec Israeli
In the debate between Samuel Moyn and Peter Gordon in Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History on “contextualism” in the history of ideas, there are a few key points of convergence: they each reject notions both of ideas’ absolute transcendence of material conditions and ideas’ absolute debt to material conditions. For both, that is, the reified distinction between the two is spurious. For Gordon: “To present the possible options of intellectual history as a stark choice between social immanence and intellectual transcendence misses the dialectical entanglement by which immanence and transcendence cannot confront one another merely in a stance of abstract negation” (50). For Moyn: “representations help constitute the social order, to the point that there is no choosing between the study of one and the other” (118). Though their essays have different subject matters and aims—Gordon speaking to a kind of “high” intellectual history of prominent thinkers, Moyn bringing readers toward a “proper social history of ideas” that takes society itself as “ideationally founded”—both develop a dialectical compromise between the ideal/intellectual and the material/social.
This is to say that there seems to be some consensus that these dualisms in intellectual history are unhelpful. Even if one were to take Gordon’s position that an idea’s “conditions for meaning” allow it to travel “beyond its initial context of articulation” into our present as a position defending ideas’ transcendence above the unfolding of history, that still does not permit an ignorance of the social-material realm of reception. As Mikkel Flohr’s piece in this JHI Blog forum reminds us: “Any interpretation of historical texts involves translating them across temporal and conceptual divides and thereby transferring and transforming them so that they can be understood within contemporary frameworks of meaning.” What we may perceive as ideas’ transcendence is merely our own present cognition of recorded and transmitted thought.
Here the distinction of the intellectual historian’s work from other fields of historical inquiry is most visible: our objects of study—ideas of the past—are by their very constitution receivable as such in the present. “Equality” or “value” can seem to exist for their historians in the present in a way that the precise commodity flows of a seventeenth-century trade route do not. Further, if one understands themselves to be a materialist intellectual historian, there is difficulty in having one’s primary object of study—ideas—simultaneously not serve as the prime mover in one’s theory of historical causality. How to write a history of something that in its disembodied form, which we so often take for granted in the very nature of the idea of an idea, seems able to move beyond history? The key is seems:ideas merely appear transcendent, to move forward and backward of their own accord (and they do, per Gordon, move forward), but they are not reducible to this appearance. Intellectual historians must be able to demystify this appearance, and so account for the conditions in which people produce and apprehend ideas, even in their reified status. At the same time, intellectual historians must recognize the significance of that appearance: the mode in which ideas are so commonly received.
Political economy’s reentry into the history of ideas, then, may involve a rejection of neither transcendence nor material context as such, but rather an attempt to articulate the very conditions that made such conceptual cleavage possible. Thus, this methodological debate over context in the history of ideas seems to recapitulate longer-standing philosophical debates over the relative primacy of the ideal and the material in understanding the world. And that world today is almost necessarily shaped by capitalist production, the development of which posed all kinds of curiosities that added new layers to, but also sharpened, older questions about the mind/matter distinction. Such questions indeed preoccupied intelligent observers of and participants in the capitalist incubator of Europe and the Americas in the nineteenth century.
The figure of Karl Marx, of course, looms large here. The first volume of Capital famously begins with an analysis of the commodities—existing in a then-historically-unprecedented quantity—produced under capitalism. This system made, en masse, a world of things, of endlessly rearranged matter coming at consumers and workers nonstop. Marx is obvious and direct on this point: “The commodity is, first of all, an external object” (Capital, 125). Soon enough, though, wrinkles appear. Marx informs us: the commodity, upon further analysis, “is abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” And so we are in a doubled world, surrounded by more things than ever before but also by their conceptual mysteries—a world of odd idea-positing matter, matter even shrouded by those ideas. In the following pages Marx proceeds to describe the fetishism of commodities, wherein the material history of social labor undergirding the commodity’s existence is obscured by the exchange relation between individual producers and the assumption of the value form. In this process of mystification—by which the commodity “transcends sensuousness,” operating in an ideational realm disconnected from its objective attributes—commodities thus appear “endowed with a life of their own” (163–64). They seem to move through the market, through a present history, without the humans who are responsible for their existence.
Commodities, in a word, appeared transcendental—floating in an ahistorical realm of the ideal. And, crucially, Marx was not merely trying to prove that this transcendence was “false,” but rather to demystify it, while hardly discounting the important fact that people perceive commodities in this way. It may be said, then, that the epistemology of the commodity form manifests itself in intellectual historians’ perception of ideas, whose supposed ahistorical transcendence and even apparent self-movement tends to mask their concrete embeddedness in social systems. But as with demystifying the commodity, to demystify ideas, neither of these aspects of appearance and being (or, in Moyn’s terms, “representation” and “practice”) should be neglected.
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Beyond this methodological parallel, there is also something to be gleaned from the historical intertwining of ideas and commodities in context. It is not only the case that the world of ideas seems to have become perceived like the world of commodities, but also that in the world of commodities, ideas take on a particular kind of explanatory importance: movement in the world is assumed to be governed by disembodied ideas. Analyzed alongside Marx’s writing on commodity fetishism in the 1850s and 1860s, a case study of some of his contemporaries in the United States illustrates this historical development.
Consider the iron industry—a most material and matter-ful industry if there ever was one. In the 1850s United States, iron was central to every sector of the industrializing economy: from resource extraction itself to the machine parts of Northern factories to cotton gins on Southern plantations to agricultural equipment in the Midwest to the railroads (the Iron Horse!) that connected them all. Yet there was not much of a coherent iron industry to speak of beyond the largescale ironworks of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast; in most of the country, production proceeded at small, local scales without the use of the latest modern metallurgical methods. Worried about British competition, northern iron capitalists in 1856 thus formed the American Iron Association (AIA) with the aim of bringing disparate hinterland producers into their fold.
Above all, this group saw knowledge production as a prerequisite for consolidating a national iron industry. The very concept of a “national iron industry” could only be manifested through the collection and distribution of data about it; otherwise, iron producers had no identity beyond their local market. The association’s secretary, Pennsylvania geologist J. Peter Lesley, was given the daunting task of traveling and collecting information on the location, production methods, and output statistics of every iron production facility in the US. This survey took him and his assistants years to complete and culminated in an 1859 tome, The Iron Manufacturer’s Guide.
Lesley himself was a consummate bourgeois polymath. He was a surveyor and geologist variously employed by the state of Pennsylvania and private railroads; he was also an amateur philologist and trained theologian. His own personal writings indicate his affinity for Transcendentalism and contemporary idealism. As he wrote in an 1858 letter to his brother during his iron survey, he held that “The progress of the world… is not by physical force, but by mental and spiritual struggles—the crash of ideas,” that the “almightiness of the human will is the standing miracle of all time.” Lesley believed that the mind’s exercise could control the uncertainty of a material world subject to market vicissitudes.
Lesley’s analysis, spread across the Guide and bulletins to AIA members, combined statistical tables and the “science of political economy” with extensive writing on the chemistry and geology of iron in all the different ores in which it is found. In attempting to contain the risks of matter through the power of mind, Lesley thus engaged in a telescoping of iron’s scale beyond its immediate appearance to ironworkers—down to the molecular and up (through and past the economic) to the geologic, neither graspable by the eye, one too small and the other too large to be something other than a concept abstracted from general observations and principles. Lesley told ironmasters how to conquer production by focusing on the invisible, as against the experiential productive knowledge of craftworkers. Indeed, in the coming decades, control over the shop floor in the metal trades was partially wrested from workers by replacing their somatic judgements with proclamations from the company chemist sent from above.
A system built on a combination of a priori knowledge and inert matter, mediated by mental abstraction rather than by the labor process, could render a vision of a factory as something that moved without human aid. Observing a massive ironworks in Lehigh, Pennsylvania, Lesley looked past its workers and instead fixated on the appearance of self-motion: the furnace had a “life and force given by the jilts of steam”; working with “the regularity of a corporate animated being,” it was “grand and self-sustained.” Labor’s presence was mystified by a system powered, in Lesley’s eyes, by scientific laws. Despite the extensive data that Lesley collected for his Guide, the book provided no information on iron labor. As with all commodities, the iron he described appears as self-generating.
In Lesley’s writings, then, we can see how the fetish form—manifest in this uncritical primacy of the ideational—informed a distorted view of the broader economy of production. A philosophical privileging of the mind expressed and justified different industrial-scale labor regimes, obscuring the exploitation they involved. The conditions of industrialized labor had indeed already produced an emergent distinction between “mental” and “manual” laborers, with the former naturally dominating the latter—an idea also present among contemporary slaveholders in their theorization of racial slavery, with the white mind directing the black body. Lesley and the AIA took things a step further: less a self-conscious division between mental and manual labor, and more a notion that industrial value would proceed from the abstracted planning of the bourgeois mind and the application of general scientific knowledge to specific instances of production. Lesley’s was a notion of production without producers.
Marx, of course, made much of the growing role of knowledge in capitalism, especially in a reified form severed from the material conditions of production. In Capital he observed,“large-scale industry makes science a potentiality for production which is distinct from labor and presses it into the service of capital” (482). Earlier, working through these ideas in the Grundrisse, he further considered the apparent primacy of the ideational. General social knowledge itself materialized in the fixed capital of machinery: the “accumulation of knowledge […] of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of capital” (694). Thus follows a remarkable passage:
Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. […] They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. (706)
Knowledge becomes a productive input. A “general intellect”—a phrase that scholars have since made much use of in explorations of both the postindustrial “knowledge economy” and, more recently, the capitalist deployment of artificial intelligence—comes to control social life itself.
The ideational thus rules over the capitalist world in a fetish form, crystallized in a self-appointed ruling class of brainworkers that sees the world in its own ideal image (think of Lesley and the AIA’s project of industrial reorganization through knowledge). At the same time, as Marx notes, the ideational permeates this world at the deepest level of material production to the point of indistinguishability, enabling capitalism’s leaps and bounds while simultaneously drawing attention away from its own diffuse material history.
Let us now return to and conclude on that rare point of agreement between Gordon and Moyn: intellectual historians can afford to reject neither ideas’ appearance of autonomy nor their social and material imbrications, precisely because the relations of production which have calcified this dualism depend on its simultaneous maintenance and negation. To own up to our own historicity as intellectual historians, we must be able to account for this simultaneity head-on. Here we might take direction from Lesley and Marx’s contemporary Henry David Thoreau, himself a sharp observer of American capitalist development: “There are various tough problems yet to solve, and we must make shift to live, betwixt spirit and matter, such a human life as we can.”
This think piece is part of the forum “The Return of Political Economy in Intellectual History.”
This text has been partially adapted from talks presented by the author at the 2025 meetings of Historical Materialism in Athens, Greece and the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic in Providence, Rhode Island.
Alec Israeli is a PhD student at the University of Chicago in the Department of History and the Committee on Social Thought, and serves as a contributing editor for the JHI Blog. His research focuses on overlaps of intellectual history, the history of capitalism, and labor history in the nineteenth-century United States. You can read his work in Modern Intellectual History, Jacobin, and the JHI Blog, among other venues.
Edited by Jonathon Catlin.
Featured image: Lithograph of Crane Iron Works, Catasauqua, Pennsylvania, ca. 1857. Source: P.S. Duval & Sons. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
