Intellectual History and the History of Political Thought

This chapter examines the tense relationship between the history of political thought and intellectual history, arguing that a modern history of political thought first took shape as intellectual history in response to the 1848 revolutions in Europe, and that it did so in order to make claims about contemporary politics. By so doing, it set in motion a central dilemma for the discipline of the history of political thought, namely, whether or not there is a necessary rather than a contingent relationship between the need to study political thought and practice historically, in order to speak meaningfully about political ideas and activity in the present. In order to illustrate this, my discussion takes as a starting point some recent accounts of the Great War, during the years of its centennial, in order to show the ways in which political thought and intellectual history seem inextricably intertwined. It then moves back to the nineteenth century, and then forward to contemporary debates about global intellectual history and the history of political thought, suggesting that the primacy of politics is ultimately what differentiates the history of political thought from a potentially more eclectic field of intellectual history.