The Society of Ideas. For a Synthesis of Intellectual History with the Sociology of Concepts

Intellectual history and the sociology of intellectuals have developed separately in the USA and France. The present article is the result of more than six years of collaboration, culminating in the publication of a Routledge Handbook of the History and Sociology of Ideas, and proposes ways of linking these approaches, while taking stock of recent (and proliferating) developments within each of them. This disciplinary divergence is unnecessary; on the contrary, the approaches can be mutually enriching, both methodologically and theoretically. Intellectual history benefits from a more systematic apprehension of the “context” of enunciation, using the concept of field, the analysis of individual and collective trajectories, and quantitative methods (e.g. network analysis of citations). Conversely, the sociology of intellectuals, which had too often neglected content, is enriched by approaches promoted by the Begriffsgeschichte, historical epistemology, and the Cambridge School, partly introduced in France not only by historians but also by the social history of political ideas research program, which had already suggested such a synthesis and worked towards it. The present proposal expands on this, incorporating contributions from the burgeoning field of American intellectual history.