Intellectual History and the History of Philosophy

This chapter outlines the origin and development of intellectual history and its methodology. The discipline emerged in the 1960s as a reaction to weaknesses in the methodology of another historical discipline, namely the history of ideas, first established in the 1930s. Ultimately, the history of ideas grew out of yet another discipline, namely the history of philosophy, dating back to the 1740s. It is argued that this disciplinary background is important to intellectual history since, to a large extent, it defines itself in opposition to history of philosophy, and since the future developments of intellectual history and history of philosophy, to some extent, depend upon the division of labour between these two disciplines.