After a discussion of the problems of recognition faced by intellectual history, in particular in France, this article surveys intellectual history as it is practised in particular in the English-speaking world. This presentation goes beyond the work of the so-called “Cambridge School” (in particular Q. Skinner, J.G.A. Pocock, D. Forbes) and refers to a wider range of historians, including those associated with the University of Sussex (such as J. Burrow, D. Winch and S. Collini). Different approaches to the subject are compared, with emphasis on a certain resistance to over-theorisation, and the question of labels is evoked, in particular the relationship to the History of Ideas. In addition, the article looks at the links between intellectual history and other fields of historical research, mainly the history of political thought (with which it is often identified), cultural history, book history or the history of science. After a discussion of the recent polemical exchanges around Jonathan Israel’s works on the “Radical Enlightenment” and in particular his defence of a certain approach to intellectual history – which is criticized by most intellectual historians as a return to a type of unhistorical history of ideas – the author presents her own practice of the discipline. She emphasizes in particular the study of controversies, illustrating this by reference to her recent work entitled Bodies of Thought, published in 2008. Its subject and treatment are briefly summarized in order to clarify what is specific about her approach.