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Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Democracy: A History of Ideas -- 1 Democracy and Value Pluralism -- 2 What Is the People? A Conceptual History of Civil Society -- 3 From Ancient Virtues to Modern Values: Positive Liberty and the Creative Will -- 4 The Teleology of Modern Time: Negative Liberty and Human Nature -- 5 Splitting the Individual: The Subatomic Values of Liberalism -- 6 Conservatism and the Temporal Order -- 7 Socialism and the Power of Social Unity -- 8 Democracy as a Pattern of Disagreement -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

The story of American intellectual history's decline, fall, and phoenix-like rebirth in recent decades has become trite with the retelling: knocked from its position of prominence by the new social history and plunged into the chastened soul-searching of the famed Wingspread Conference of 1977, only to find itself rescued in part by the linguistic and cultural "turns" that swept the entire discipline of American history in the 1980s and 1990s. Like many a narrative, this one undoubtedly imposes too clear a pattern of meaning on a messier reality, but also like many a narrative, it has powerfully shaped the professional identities of American intellectual historians by giving them a sense of where they have been and how they arrived at their current place. That current place is a hospitable one, in many ways, for in the last couple of decades American historians seem to have grown increasingly receptive to the notion that ideas have mattered in history.

Intellectual historians often make empirical claims, but can never know for certain if these claims are right. Uncertainty is thus inevitable for intellectual historians. But accepting uncertainty is not enough: we should also act on it, by trying to reduce and report it. We can reduce uncertainty by amassing valid data from different sources to weigh the strengths and weaknesses of competing explanations, rather than trying to "prove" an empirical claim by looking for evidence that fits it. Then we should report our degree of certainty in our claims. When we answer empirical questions in intellectual history, we are not telling our readers what happened: we are telling them how strong we think our evidence isâ€"a crucial shift of emphasis. For intellectual historians, then, uncertainty is subjective, as discussed by Keynes and Collingwood; the paper thus explores three differences between subjective and objective uncertainty. Having outlined the theoretical basis of uncertainty, the paper then offers examples from actual research: Noel Malcolm's work shows how to reduce and report uncertainty about composition, and David Wootton's work shows how to reduce and report uncertainty about beliefs. © 2011 Wesleyan University.

This article suggests that the enterprise of Mark Bevir's The Logic of the History of Ideas (1999) is the reverse of what his title implies. Bevir seeks not to delineate the peculiar logic of a specialized subfield of history called the "history of ideas," but rather the logic that underlies historical pursuit considered in general as the "explanation of belief." If this is so, then the relationship between belief, meaning, & speech act in intellectual texts, & the task & method of the intellectual historian, must be reinterpreted along lines closer to those of Quentin Skinner than Bevir would allow. Indeed, Bevir's criticism of Skinner, which hinges on his own account of malapropism, is shown here to fail. The article concludes with brief reflections on the purpose & nature of studying the "history of ideas.". 13 References. Adapted from the source document.

Interest in Research on the History of Ideas in Latin America is Increasing, but the product is spotty and uneven. As might be exepcted, much of the important work has been done by Spanish Americans and Brazilians. In 1950, in his Social Science Trends in Latin America, the author pointed out the interest in intellectual history, especially in Mexico, Argentina, and Uruguay, and this interest has increased notably since that time.

Publication of a new general biography of Marx is a reminder that no intellectual biography exists. This is an extraordinary omission, and the present article offers a draft outline of such a biography. Some central elements from established 20th century views of Marx are reviewed and upheld, such as the centrality of his early ideas before 1848 and the essential unity of his thought overall. Yet there are also substantial revisions and clarifications: the supreme importance of labour (rather than alienated labour); the revised status of the 'German Ideology'; the mistaken neglect of the Poverty of Philosophy; Marx' identity as a synthetic and universalist thinker. More important than any particular finding is the underlying analytical standpoint. Marx is treated as a historical subject like any other. He is removed from the partial isolation created by political constraint or embarrassment, and located unreservedly within the broad stream of the history of ideas, a stream which is continuous with the present. In this history Marx and his bourgeois and Marxist reception are two of the greatest subjects.