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approach to the study of cultures past and present. "At no moment,
indeed, in the life of the race has the pertinency of the Delphian
imperative been more tragically apparent," wrote Lovejoy in the
politically tragic year of 1940. Isaiah Berlin fully shares Lovejoy's
conviction that the history of ideas affords useful self-knowledge as
well as perspective. Berlin, however, is too much of an essayist and
moralist to be categorized as a strict Lovejoyian, a methodologist who
aims to discriminate among the uses of ideas and concepts and to sort
out ambiguities and enumerate meanings. Lovejoy had argued that the
historian should analyze "unit-ideas" in terms of their component
elements to show what characteristics certain ideas have in common. In
1941, in a seminal essay on "The Meaning of Romanticism for the
Historian of Ideas," he suggested that German Romanticism was an
important factor in producing "a state of mind upon which the
totalitarian ideologies depend for their appeal." The controversial idea
that ideas could cause ideas and shape mentalities, which in turn could
produce events and reshape reality, was a bit much for both Marxist
materialists and pragmatic naturalists-though one suspects that as
authors both Karl Marx and John Dewey would agree, as would Berlin.
Today it is difficult to say anything by way of demonstrating or
denying such claims since much of contemporary intellectual history
no longer seems to take the external world as its object of study.
Historians influenced by structuralism tend to treat the external social
order as governed by rules inaccessible to the activity of mind-though
not necessarily their minds. Contextualists maintain that an idea takes
on meaning not because it may illuminate aspects of social or political
reality but rather because it reflects the political or linguistic condi–
tions from which it arose. Psychohistorians, moving from the "exter–
nal" to the "internal" explanation of ideas, probe the unspoken
motives behind beliefs held by thinkers in the past; and thus a
philosopher like William James, for example, is seen as affirming the
proposition of freedom by reaffirming his will to believe in it as a
means not so much of resolving the theoretical problem as winning his
struggle for personal autonomy against his father's powerful influence.
Then there are the "metahistorians," those who equate historical
understanding with the literary forms of historical narrative and
thereby locate the meaning of past experience in the modes of its
expression in a given historical text. Was the French Revolution
tragedy, irony, or farce? In all these new approaches to intellectual
history where the object of discourse is no longer regarded as equally as
important as its context, "ideas" ain 't what they used to be.
