So I have set up a fairly ambitious reading plan for the new year. Now, I’m not one to make resolutions, so that’s now what’s going on here. I just thought it would be fun to try a sustained reading focus for a year on a given topic and see how I fare. Instead of picking up books on topics here and there, letting ideas slip back out of mind, and then reading another book down the line (which is all fine and inevitable, of course), I thought I’d try immersing myself more in a topic (though still keeping it part of my “casual” reading, not academically intense or anything).
So this year my topic is intellectual history, mostly from the Enlightenment until now, with an even more specific focus on U.S. intellectual history. Now, there are all sorts of topics I can’t cover, for which I even have a few good books (e.g., history of medicine, history of science, biography of Freud). Those will come later. Right now I want to create a better framework for understanding the growth of these enterprises, along with the intellectual climate of Revolutionary America and a basic overview of 20th-century intellectual history, specifically with the rise of the various academic disciplines with which we’re now so familiar.
Think I can (will) do it? I’m have my doubts, but I’m hopeful. There’s a logistical problem, of course, namely, the fact that many of these books are hefty volumes, the sum total of which approaches 7,500 pages or so (including the notes and bibliographies, I think, so that brings it down a bit). But I may also revisit a few books, such as Susan Jacoby’s Freethinkers, which I enjoyed.
My interest in intellectual history is not to be good at trivial pursuit or to have pointlessly pedantic conversations (or monologues). I really want to be able to place people and ideas in a better historical context, to situate important and even radical ideas in the world of ideas in which they grew. I want to be able to appreciate better the significance of the ideas that we take for granted now and understand where they came from, how they were argued or supported or opposed. I don’t pretend for a moment that I’ll really be getting my hands super dirty and that I’ll come out of this an expert on any of these ideas. I don’t pretend (or even hope for) that at all.
I just want some blessed perspective. In short, I want to have a clue.
Tags: American history, anti-intellectualism, Bertrand Russell, Books, Enlightenment, having a clue, Henry May, history, History of Medicine, History of Science, ideas, Intellectual History, Louis Menand, Peter Gay, Peter Watson, philosophy, reading, Richard Hofstadter, Susan Jacoby, William H. Goetzmann
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