The Oyster and the Pearl
The Problem of Contextualism in Intellectual History
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4496070 |
|---|---|
| Authors | John Patrick Diggins (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1984 |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 151 |
| Publication date | 1984-05-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | History and Theory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0018-2656 • E-ISSN: 1468-2303 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2505004 |
| OpenAlex | W2331215111 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
In his recent survey of state of intellectual history in America, Robert Darnton perceived a methodological trend that has come almost to dominate current discourse in field. Contextualization is strongest feature in area of history of ideas that has made strongest progress during last decade: history of political thought.1 Darnton's observation would also seem to apply to recent anthology edited by Paul Conkin and John Higham, New Directions in American Intellectual History. Although formal political thought is not emphasized in that work,2 vocabulary of contextualism is pronounced as various contributors write of paradigms, networks, structure, signs, language, parameters, environment, and other expressions that seem to imply that an idea's medium is as important as its message. Such terminology suggests that life of mind is to be understood not necessarily by what thinkers may have been contemplating as a result of their own idle curiosity, but instead by external factors that had influenced their thought, consciously or otherwise. The growing conviction today is that one should avoid treating ideas outside of their respective historical contexts, for an idea owes its historical significance to specific purposes to which it was addressed in a specific circumstance in past. The claims of contextualism are particularly relevant to discipline of intellectual history, and as such their theoretical presuppositions should be scrutinized in light of practice as well as theory. The proper study of intellectual historian, according to contextualist, is not supposedly self-illuminating document, but rather social, economic, and political conditions out of which it developed. It is context of a text that determines its historical meaning. This methodological stance implies, as Quentin Skinner has argued, that a text should not be presumed to have been written in response to the timeless questions and answers of political and social thought, perennial issues of classical treatises that be
Archaeology · Contextualism · Epistemology · Intellectual history · Interpretation (philosophy) · Linguistics · Pearl · Pearl oyster · Academic Freedom and Politics · History · Philosophy · Philosophy, History, and Historiography · Political Theory and Influence
| Unique citing works | 6 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,24 |
| Citation span | 2001 - 2019 (19) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |