by Jonathon Catlin, Paige Pendarvis, and Jacob Saliba

In recent years, intellectual history has been said to be undergoing a renaissance at the same time as it has been institutionally hollowed out. Rather than bemoan the “death” of the field, this forum seeks to chart its new lives in more materialist and global histories that may have once been the purview of other subfields and area studies. Shifting economic winds sparked by the global movement against neoliberalism surrounding Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and, more recently, the rise of new economic populism and protectionism, have helped to inspire a groundswell of new histories of capitalism and political economy. This forum highlights methodological reflection on intellectual history’s foundations and how new work in the field is taking them up by re-anchoring historical ideas to their under-examined material, economic, and political contexts.

​​2024 marked ten years since the publication of Samuel Moyn and Darrin McMahon’s co-edited volume Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, which challenged intellectual history’s quiescent methodological eclecticism. In particular, Moyn criticized the transcendent idealism of the “history of ideas” and called for reconceiving intellectual history as the study of “the social imaginary”—connecting ideas with their material underpinnings, social theory with social practices, and abstract ideas with the ideologies that sustain sociopolitical orders. This more grounded, materialist approach would reach beyond mere “representations” and incorporate “the most intimate and decisive matters of social experience,” inspiring a turn from the “high” intellectual history associated with his Doktorvater Martin Jay to more concrete and political topics such as human rights, law, and American empire. In his intellectual histories of neoliberalism, Quinn Slobodian has similarly joined together the history of free market ideology with its realization by less elite actors through institutions, policy, and economic history.

This forum seeks to bring rigorous yet creative methodological reflection to bear on intellectual history’s turn or re-turn to political economy amidst its simultaneous global turn. Questions to be addressed include: What historical-economic concepts do we need today to understand uneven global development and new phases of neoliberalism? How has intellectual history both undergone a “return to Marx” and also seemed to move out from under Marx’s shadow into new modes of analyzing capitalism? Should class be sustained or resurrected as a central category of historical analysis? How might recentering questions of production and reproduction open up the subfield beyond its traditionally and provincially Eurocentric and cisheteropatriarchal concerns? As Moyn and Andrew Sartori observed in their Global Intellectual History (2013), “Marxian global intellectual history might be expected to be concerned with the material and practical conditions for the mobility and transposability of concepts theoretically identified with the historically specific practices of a capitalist society” (24). Several of our contributors directly take up that concern, grounding intellectual history in new economic histories.

Building on recent scholarship, the pieces in this forum disclose new contexts while also drawing together innovative approaches from across the landscape of intellectual history. Think pieces cover time periods ranging from the Renaissance and Age of Revolutions to the rise of imperial capitalism, communism, and neo-liberalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They span geographies from the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and the United Kingdom to the Pacific Islands, South America, the Caribbean, and beyond. In doing so, the pieces in this forum experiment with novel theoretical perspectives on the formation of ideology and concepts, on hitherto neglected expressions of economic life, on the rise of neo-materialism and neo-empiricism, and on the relationship between critical theory and globalization. We hope this forum will function as an index of new intellectual developments, but also serve to advance them further through methodological reflection and clarification. In that spirit, we warmly invite further contributions and even responses from our readers to these essays.

Contributions will be published on a rolling basis and listed here:

The Political Economy of Ideas: Historical Materialism and the History of Ideas

Featured image: L. S. Lowry, “Going to Work” (1943), Imperial War Museum North, via Wikimedia Commons.