The long shadow of Arthur Lovejoy
A CULTURAL HISTORY OF IDEAS Volumes 1-6
SOPHIA ROSENFELD AND PETER T. STRUCK, ANTHOLOGY EDITORS 1,728pp. Bloomsbury Academic. £450.
ARTHUR ONCKEN LOVEJOY, a German émigré professor at Johns Hopkins University, is one of the most celebrated figures in the history of ideas. He is best known for a series of lectures on The Great Chain of Being (published in 1936). These suggested that, from the ancient Greeks – Plato in particular – to the middle of the eighteenth century, a “unit idea” (the “great chain of being”) could be found, where everything from God, through the angels, down to the simplest life forms on earth is connected. A unit idea was something held in common for generations, but within this particular unit idea certain key principles functioned to give order to the complexities it overlaid: continuity suggested that among infinite different forms of life, each form shared something with its neighbour; graduation proposed that different levels of connectivity had some sort of reason within an overall hierarchy; and plenitude reckoned that all possibilities within the great chain of being exist to reach their fullest potential.
Lovejoy’s approach was profoundly influential, and some have recently sought to revive it, but it has generally fallen out of favour. Cultural and social approaches to the history of ideas broadened the scope of their subject from elite discourses and highbrow texts to popular culture, often quite capaciously construed – from clothes and books to humour and houses, from structures of racist oppression within systems of law and order to radical analyses of film and language. At the same time historians of political ideas refocused attention on locating ideas within particular contexts framed by available languages, or the plausible intentions of authors, grounding everything in thick contexts and moments rather than intergenerational connectivity. The universal, or the unit, gave way to the finergrained in a seemingly more disenchanted age.
These six new volumes, stylishly presented and curated, often elegantly written, have been edited together as A Cultural History of Ideas, ranging from the ancient world almost to the present. They have been organized by reference to the same key concepts in every volume (knowledge, the human self, ethics and social relations, politics and economics, nature, religion and the divine, language, poetry and rhetoric, the arts and history). Clearly the editors see them as inspired by a post-Lovejovian concern to avoid thinking of discrete concepts as necessarily framed by larger unit ideas. Yet at the same time, by charting paths through swathes of time and space with the same suite of overlapping concepts, it begins to look as if a certain set of big-picture ideas continue to orientate cultural history. It makes for an interesting intellectu
