The Lovejoy Affair

This study surveys twentieth- and twenty-first debates on the methodologies of the “old” history of ideas and of “newer” forms of intellectual history and proposes a rehabilitation of Arthur O. Lovejoy’s original methods, which have been unfairly attacked on social-cultural, linguistic and sociological grounds in the name of more “progressive” trends in the study of ideas in history. It shows that Lovejoy’s original history of ideas already incorporated an emphasis on contextualism, non-essentialism and cultural-historical particularity, discursive and
polemical contexts, or the plural constitution of ideas, all while advancing a unique form of “epistemic balance”.