The trouble with the history of ideas

.. or ‘No, Jean-Jacques Rousseau does not have a lot to answer for’

The history of ideas is a rich and fascinating field that lends itself to some bad intellectual habits. The first is simple idealism: a focus on ideas out of context as if they really have a history of their own. It is perhaps an occupational hazard for those who spend much of their time reading and thinking about what people wrote in the past that they give can undue weight to the transmission of ideas. There’s a particularly unfortunate tendency to trace ideas back through time as if they were passed on from thinker to thinker without ever touching the ground.

Nevertheless, the history of ideas matters precisely because ideas do have consequences. When combined with human agency, they change material circumstances – as well as people’s minds, which to some extent is the same thing – just as surely as material circumstances give rise to ideas. With due sensitivity to this dynamic, it is possible to write very good ‘history of ideas’, just as it is possible to write the ‘history of art’, or indeed ‘women’s history’, without imagining either proceeds in splendid isolation from the mundane or the male.

Thomas Edison and his big idea

In her engaging biographical account of Henri Bergson’s thought and its reception, Emily Herring notes that Bergson himself, ‘believed that the history of philosophy should not aim to uncover the intellectual genealogy of ideas, but instead should determine what is truly novel in each thinker. Therefore, the search for “influences” made little sense’.*

Even where there seems to be little or nothing novel in someone’s ideas, however, the circumstances within which they are situated will never be quite the same as those prevailing when the putative ‘originator’ of those ideas was writing. In that sense, you can’t even think of the same river twice. The interesting question – besides whether an idea is true – is not where it came from, but why and with whom it resonates now.

In the case of Bergson, for example, his philosophy of subjective experience resonated with readers at the turn of the 20^th century who were unnerved by the advance of objective methods and measurement into every aspect of life. They intuited that something essential to our humanity was being squeezed out. Bergson’s thought was a corrective to this prevailing intellectual current. And if Bergson enjoys a revival of interest in our own time, as Herring suggests he might, it will be because his ideas, and others in a similar vein, speak to the needs of the moment. It will not, so to speak, be Bergson’s fault.

I put it that way because a second bad habit associated with the history of ideas is not so much intrinsic to the field as the intrusion of a more basic human vice: scapegoating. This is probably less of an issue with professional historians than with writers drawn to the field for political reasons, but there are plenty of those. They engage with the history of ideas less as an academic discipline than as a polemical idiom. Specifically, these writers are seeking to answer that perennial question: when did the rot set in?

There are a few reliable candidates. The Sixties. Cultural Marxism. Actual Marxism. The Enlightenment. Rousseau in particular (who conveniently stands both for the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment). The Reformation. The Gothic (or is that just Simone Weil?). The Norman Conquest. The fall of Rome. The rise of Christianity. The Neolithic Revolution. The fall of Adam. The Big Bang.

Admittedly, not all these are purely intellectual developments, but they do all come with intellectual baggage. The more recent ones in particular are presented as wrong turns based on false beliefs and assumptions that must be questioned or, better still, simply discarded. Worse than that, they are wheeled out as dubious explanations for why people believe or argue certain things today.

Occasionally, this involves inadvertent flattery, with the implication that: ‘you only think that way because you’re so steeped in all three volumes of Marx’s Capital’. (Unlikely.) At other times, critics actually draw attention to the weakness of the inheritance: ‘you’re a third-rate Marxist’. In that case, they might even suggest their antagonist would benefit from a closer acquaintance with the thinker or school in question. Rarely a bad idea.

The worst kinds of intellectual genealogists are those who project everything they dislike about a current idea onto some supposed progenitor. This leads to a third bad habit: the tendency to mischaracterise the thinkers of the past in order to fit them into a particular story.

An illustrative effect of this is that the meanings attached to particular intellectual labels change over time. For example, until quite recently, the term ‘Marxist’ was often used simply to mean ‘economic determinist’. Today, it is more likely to mean ‘tending to reduce everything to a conflict between oppressors and oppressed’.

In theory, this kind of slippage need not be a problem as long as the label is understood as a shorthand, and not as a reliable guide to the thinker or school invoked. And as long as that thinker or school is not ‘blamed’ for later movements draped in their name, whether by advocates or detractors. But both of these things happen almost inevitably.

While you can point to aspects of Marx’s own thought, or passages in his writing, that seem to support both of the above tendencies, neither is a fair summation of decades of thinking and writing by the man himself. And it’s almost certainly wrong to attribute a contemporary thinker’s Manichaeanism to having read too much Marx. (Or, to be fair, too much Mani.) Nevertheless, I am constantly reading and hearing both that Karl Marx invented the distinction between oppressors and oppressed, and that the woke left’s obsession with those categories is his enduring legacy.

That this has become a kind of background common sense in (post-)liberal and conservative circles does not make it true. And occasionally someone who has actually read Marx, sympathetically or not, will point this out. But the urge to attribute intellectual blame dies hard. In recent years, I’ve lost count of the times I’ve found myself nodding along with a writer or speaker as they explain that ‘woke’ has nothing to do with Marxism, only to roll my eyes in despair as they conclude, ‘No, it’s much more like Calvinism’.

The case of Calvinism

Calvinism has become a shorthand for a division of the world into the elect and the damned, or now the woke and the deplorable. This is based on Calvin’s doctrine of predestination, according to which, since all human beings are sinners deserving of damnation, it is God’s will alone – not our own virtue or otherwise – that decides whether individuals are saved. There is no hope for those who are not. This seems to chime with the unforgiving character of woke scolding, with no way back for transgressors.

If it also seems to chime with the self-righteousness of the woke, however, this is where the analogy breaks down. No doubt there have always been Christians, including Calvinists, who exult in moral superiority over others, but this is exactly what Calvinist doctrine properly understood rules out. The point of predestination is that salvation is a free gift made possible by the self-sacrifice of Christ, leaving no room for self-righteousness. The elect are blessed by a gratuitously merciful God, not rewarded for anything they have done.

This also means the elect are not virtuous by virtue of being elect! While woke morality often seems to operate on the assumption that sinful oppressors can do no right and the virtuous oppressed can do no wrong, Calvinism – like religion in general – upholds an objective moral law. Although the elect are in the process of being ‘sanctified’ (made holy), as mortal sinners, even they can and do transgress that law, and they are wrong to do so. The difference is that they will not ultimately be condemned for it. They are already ‘justified’ by Christ’s sacrifice on their behalf. This shocking idea, with its worrying implications for public morality, was famously satirised in James Hogg’s novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824).

For all its protestations to the contrary, modern secular thought is far more comfortable with old-fashioned religious moralism. With judging people by what they do or don’t do – even if the focus of ethical concern has shifted considerably. The commonsense idea is that we can all be good people if we just make an effort. Indeed, this is echoed in the woke injunctions to ‘do the work’, to ‘educate yourself’ or simply ‘do better’. If anything, this has more in common with what Calvinists and other Protestants call ‘works righteousness’.

To be clear though, woke moralism is no more the second coming of medieval Roman Catholicism than of Calvinism. It is a product of the 21^st century. As I argued in a previous essay, ‘Woke is best understood as a response both to the shortcomings of liberal capitalism and to the failure of Marxism.’ It expresses not fresh enthusiasm for the ideas of the past, but frustration at their impotence. Rather than excavating the sources of its eclectic and often incoherent vocabulary, critics should acknowledge that frustration as a fact about the present.

If we want to argue effectively with political opponents in the here and now, we need to understand where they are coming from – not take aim at where we think their ideas are coming from. If, on the other hand, we really want to understand the historical appeal of Calvin, Rousseau, Marx or Bergson, we need to consider what it was about their ideas that seemed to answer the questions being asked by people at the time. Or at least what it was about the questions they asked that caught fire in their particular historical context.

Whether those questions resonate with us today or not, they cannot fail to enrich our own thinking about the matters these thinkers were wrestling with, and more. At least, that is, if we approach them with curiosity and an open mind, and not with the condescension of posterity. That, surely, is the proper work of the history of ideas.

* Herring, Emily. Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People (2024)