Inspired by a panel at the 2025 American Historical Association annual conference, this JHI Blog Forum will collect and publish short reflections on the relationship between new work in intellectual history and political economy, broadly conceived, concerning Europe and beyond.
2024 marked ten years since the publication of Samuel Moyn and Darrin McMahon’s co-edited volume Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, which sought to challenge the subfield’s quiescent methodological eclecticism. In it, Moyn specifically criticized a transcendent idealism operating within the “history of ideas” and called for reconceiving intellectual history as the study of “the social imaginary”—connecting ideas with their material underpinnings, social theory with social practices, and abstract ideas with the ideologies that sustain sociopolitical orders. This more grounded, materialist approach, he proposed, would reach beyond “representations” and incorporate “the most intimate and decisive matters of social experience.” Indeed, Moyn’s own corpus charts such a turn from the history of philosophy and the “high” intellectual history associated with his mentor Martin Jay to more concrete and political topics such as human rights, law, and American empire. In his intellectual histories of neoliberalism, Quinn Slobodian has similarly joined together the history of free market ideology with its realization by less elite actors through institutions, policy, and economic history. For Moyn, securing intellectual history’s future will require jettisoning Dominick LaCapra’s arch distinction between “intellectual” history and “dumb” history, for “a division of historians between those who attend to intellectual activity and those who attend to non-intellectual matters is wrong at the start.”
This forum seeks to bring rigorous and creative methodological reflection to bear on intellectual history’s turn or re-turn to political economy amidst the field’s global turn. Rather than bemoan the “death” of intellectual history, it seeks to chart its new lives in more materialist histories that were once the purview of other subfields and area studies. Questions that contributions might address include: What historical-economic concepts do we need today to understand uneven global development and new phases of neoliberalism? How has intellectual history both undergone a “return to Marx” and also seemed to move out from under Marx’s shadow into new modes of analyzing capitalism? Should class be sustained or resurrected as a central category of historical analysis? How might recentering questions of production and reproduction open up the subfield beyond its traditionally and provincially Eurocentric and cisheteropatriarchal concerns?
Two already planned contributions include Paige Pendarvis on doing “intellectual history from the middle,” drawing upon her work historicizing the notion of the economic “standard of living” in modern France, which centers on “bridge figures” (Camille Robcis) close to institutions and power. Jonathon Catlin will chart generational and geographic divergences in the tradition of Frankfurt School Critical Theory that became clear around its centennial, as it diverges between liberal theory and a Marxian “return to labor,” the focus of the Institute in its first decade.
Contributions should take the form of “think pieces” (circa 1,500–2,000 words, including notes) and should follow the Blog’s style guide. Those interested in contributing should contact contributing editor Jonathon Catlin (jcatlin4 [at] ur.rochester.edu) with a brief pitch or abstract by May 15, 2025. We plan to publish contributions on a rolling basis beginning in June. The forum will be co-edited by Jonathon Catlin, Paige Pendarvis, and Jacob Saliba.
Featured image: L. S. Lowry, “Going to Work” (1943), Imperial War Museum North, via Wikimedia Commons.
