Prolegomena to the study of intellectual history

Intellectual history has become a well-recognized field in this century, but it occupies still an anomalous position. On the one hand it is regarded as a sub-department of the discipline of history; on the other hand it reaches out to aspects of thought and culture, high and low, which have not, classically and normally, been the province of most writers of history and yet which arguably offer greater challenges than war, politics, and institutions and other common preoccupations of historians. Nor have theoreticians of history confronted the problems of intellectual history nearly as seriously as they have the methods for studying the public—the economic, social, and political—world, which have customarily served to define the proper study of history. Why should this be?