The Descent of Ideas: The History of Intellectual History.

Donald R. Kelley. The Descent of Ideas: The History of Intellectual History.

Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2002. viii + 320 pp. index. $59.95. ISBN: 0-7546-0776-3.

Donald R. Kelley has written an information-rich and stimulating study which, as he writes "is a series of mappings and soundings in the large, and largely uncharted, fields of the practice and theory, ante litteram, primarily of intellectual and secondarily of cultural history" (6). Kelley sees an intimate link between intellectual history (which includes ontogenetically the "history of ideas") and eclecticism, which is his point of departure in chapter 1. He begins there with an examination of the nineteenth-century French scholar Victor Cousin (+1867) who at his zenith was "virtually the 'official philosopher'" (10) in France. For Kelley, Cousin did more than anyone else--though sometimes self-servingly, sometimes naively--to put eclecticism on a firm and respectable footing. As Cousin put it, he recommended an "'enlightened eclecticism which, judging with equity, and even with benevolence, all schools, borrows from them what they possess of the true and neglects what in them is false'" (12).

Throughout, Kelley stays focused on the theme of ideas and how they have been interpreted by scholars at various moments and by diverse figures throughout western history. Since eclecticism is important (given the multifarious manifestations of ideas in different cultural realms), in chapter 2 he begins in late antiquity, with Diogenes Laertius and the doxographical model of treating the development of ideas through their exponents. This model was strongly associated with the notion of "successions"--or diadochai--in which thinkers effectively established schools, passing down doctrines which themselves were subject inevitably to change in the process of reelaboration. The late ancient environment is even more important for Kelley, because that was when eclecticism as such was established, only to have its reputation tarnished in the modern era in the wake of the canon-making history of philosophy written by J. J. Brucker. Given that these conceptions--related to eclecticism and its permutations--are by necessity trans-disciplinary, so too is Kelley's narrative, as he considers various self-defined moments, such as "the history of philosophy," "the history of literature," etc.

Chapter 3 presents examinations of these various disciplines (usually, as Kelley would put it, ante litteram) in early modern Europe, more or less up through the eighteenth century. In chapter 4, "The Way of Ideas and the Way of Words" (a chapter which deliberately ranges widely chronologically), Kelley treats an age old problem--essentially that of universals--as this was worked out intergenerationally up through the era of Kant and Schleiermacher. On the one hand were those who saw ideas as independent, dematerialized realities whose reality can never really be accessed (something to aim for but which can never be reached) and, on the other, those who believed it was of primary importance to view the presence of ideas in the world, in language and history; as Kelley puts it vis-a-vis this latter approach: "Ideas take shape in language, change shape in communication, and undergo deeper transformations with the passage of time" (122-23).

Chapter 5 takes up what Kelley calls "The New Eclecticism," by which he means to highlight pre-Enlightenment and Enlightenment modes of thought which stressed libertas philosophandi--the "freedom to philosophize"--whose practitioners, in the venerable Senecan tradition, did not feel bound to the doctrines of any particular school. G. J. Vossius and Christian Thomasius come in for special consideration here, as do a number of others, including Brucker, who, despite stigmatizing late ancient eclecticism in his work, is happily eclectic himself, explicitly paying attention to external as well as internal dimensions of the history of philosophy. This combination of an internalist and an externalist approach is a key moment for Kelley, for it is precisely this combination of perspectives often kept separate to which Kelley is most drawn.

This combination in the various dimensions of intellectual history serves as an Ariadne's thread which he pursues with vigor throughout the rest of the book, which contains chapters on the modern (ca. nineteenth-century to the present) histories of literature, science, the human sciences, and philosophy (263-89), winding up with an interesting chapter, "After the New Histories," in which Kelley confronts recent developments in the theorizing of intellectual history. This tenth and final chapter ends with a set of reasonable recommendations for intellectual history's future. These include paying attention to the inherent dilemmas of intentionalism and textuality as well as the historian's obligation sensitively to create multi-dimensional contexts for viewing the past, an aggregate of strategies--each with a rich history of its own--which together, as Kelley avers, "forbids a reversion to an innocent faith in ideas except as unexamined shorthand for deeper questions of language, discourse, interpretation, and communication imposed on historians" (314).

CHRISTOPHER S. CELENZA

Michigan State University