Doing Ideas: Intellectual History as a History of Thinking

One area that is consistently identified as deserving further research in intellectual history has been the role of intellectual experience and practice: not just thought, but thinking. In 1968, Cambridge School’s John Dunn posited that histories of ideas or thought should be written as histories “of men battling to achieve a coherent ordering of their experiences.” Thinking, Dunn wrote, is an “effortful activity on part of human beings” and “incompleteness, incoherence, instability and the effort to overcome these are its persistent characteristics”.Peter Burke thought about a “historical anthropology of ideas”.while Jonathan Israel has urged the necessity of a reformed intellectual history, one that puts emphasis “less on thinkers and theories than on ‘thinking’ and debates”.

         But what would it mean to study not just the ideas people held, but the embodied practices through which ideas are made, contested, and felt? Histories of thinking intertwine with two of history’s turns in particular: the practical and the personal. They understand intellectual history as an investigation into intellectual practices, which, because thinking is done by individuals, often requires digging into biographical circumstances, rather than simply the social context. A social history of intellectual practices—that is, the investigation of the circulation of ideas, the intersections of function and meaning, and the experiential dimension of ideas—has the advantage of providing clearer insight into how ideas become entrenched and in which form. Everyday practices of thinking are rarely about pure thought, but their adaptation, modification, and contestations—doing ideas, so to speak.

        Thus, histories of thinking have become common in the history of science and knowledge. Research in the history of studying and universities has long drawn on notebooks, correspondences, and lectures to look into practices of annotating, copying, extracting, or excerpting—traces of processes of thinking, even though it tends to be looked at in the light of transmission of knowledge rather than individual intellectual reflection. Anthony Grafton’s highly enjoyable history of the footnote has been joined by a wide array of studies on note-taking and text-books.

         However, thinking should not be limited to (semi-)professional knowledge production. At first glance, intellectual history as the study of intellectuals and ideas seems to be primarily concerned with those social echelons where thought is part and parcel of the profession or a way of life. Traditionally, intellectual history has been associated with political thought (primarily, but not solely because of the Cambridge School) or, when focused on individuals, with intellectuals or institutional intellectual history. It also appears that the divergence between abstract ideas and thought on the one hand and their specific understanding, application, or transformation on the other appears all the wider the further the domain of thought is from the domain of reception. But investigations of individual encounters with ideas can range across society, from elite to non-canonical or marginalized groups—not just to understand the spread and diffusion of ideas, but also to acknowledge that ideas and intellectual activity are not just inherited frameworks but active instruments of self-understanding. Robert Darnton’s essay on letters to Rousseau and Lynn Hunt’s chapter on novel reading in her history of human rights have both investigated how diverse people responded to new ideas about love, equality, and gender posed to them.

Precisely because thinking is everywhere, it has close affinities with approaches that do not seem its primary allies (in contrast to, say, literature or philosophy), such as ethnography, the history of emotions and experiences, material culture, or social and working-class history. Both Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy (1957) and Carlo Ginzburg’s Cheese and Worms (1976) are fine enquiries into the way everyday thinking adapted, transformed, and challenged political, social, or religious ideas. Thomas Laqueur’s exploration of Sunday Schools (Religion and Respectability, 1977) or Gareth Stedman Jones’s studies of Chartist linguistic form as integral to the movement (Languages of Class, 1983) have emphasized how the ability of working-class groups to conceptualize political and social ideas led to the formation of political subjectivities. Recent research into the intellectual life of the working-class, Black thought in the early Atlantic, or the libraries of soldiers has continued this avenue of cultural intellectual history, exploring the diversity of intellectual experiences, including its possibilities and potencies under conditions of oppression and violence. Ideas, these studies emphasize, are not just abstract units, but affective, sensual, and felt. They matter to people.

Correspondences of well-known luminaries have been thoroughly studied, but the letters, diaries, or commonplace books of non-canonical or marginalized groups can equally yield insight into thinking beyond high thought. The memoirs and letters of a social group such as soldiers, for instance, are usually mostly read for war experiences, but rarely for how they reflect on ideas about war or conceptualize their reality in accordance with circulating ideas about war—in other words, how soldiers thought about war in a specific situation through embodied practices of intellectual reflection. During the Peninsular War (1808–14), one of the most violent and resource-intensive war engagements to that date, British soldiers thought intensely about ideas of ‘just war’: were massacres after sieges justified, given the high number of soldiers perishing in the storm and the obstinacy of the besieged? Could one muster understanding for the Spanish population’s partisan warfare given the French were plundering resources and engaging in collective punishment? To what extent did the feeling of ‘horror’ indicate violence was illegitimate? 

​ Letter written by William Warre, a Portugal-born English officer, to his father on 8 June 1808. Warre wrote regularly to his family, discussing army life and the conduct of the war, while also sharing his impressions of the Peninsula and the locals.

He frequently reflected the grand ideas of his time—here, the meaning of liberty, national independence, and tyranny: "we are exceedingly anxious to get away after six weeks of delay, the army are in the highest spirits, indeed the cause we are engaged in is the noblest a soldier could & to support the liberties & independence of a country so lately our enemy … is worthy of the British name. … It may be the crisis of the Tyrants Power, if he fails now it may open the eyes of Europe."

Ego-documents make manifest the intellectual micro-level, the practices of reading, circulation, conversation, and rumination through which individuals engage with ideas. They also attest to the embodied nature and affective dimension of intellectual operations. Monique Scheer, in her influential article on emotions as a kind of practice has devoted a section to how “writing about feelings, talking about feelings … or putting a name on our emotions” are both cognitive and affective acts and bound up with bodily practices. Historians of emotions are often doing intellectual history by tracing the meaning and uses of ideas about feelings, she writes, but need to take into account that the “formulation of thought is different when one is moving a pen across paper or typing on a keyboard as opposed to when one is speaking”.

Attending to the ways ideas are done—the micro-level practices through which individuals engage with ideas and thought across the full range of social experience—opens intellectual history to the full texture of how thinking has been done.

Dr Kerstin Maria Pahl is a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development as well as an associate researcher at the Université du Québec à Montréal. In Trinity Term 2026 she was a visiting fellow at the Oxford Centre for Intellectual History.

The author would like to thank the National Army Museum for permission to reproduce the above images.