On Materialist History

“In the debate between Samuel Moyn and Peter Gordon in Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History on ‘contextualism’ in the history of ideas, there are a few key points of convergence: they each reject notions both of ideas’ absolute transcendence of material conditions and ideas’ absolute debt to material conditions. For both, that is, the reified distinction between the two is spurious... Though their essays have different subject matters and aims—Gordon speaking to a kind of ‘high’ intellectual history of prominent thinkers, Moyn bringing readers toward a ‘proper social history of ideas’ that takes society itself as ‘ideationally founded’ —both develop a dialectical compromise between the ideal/intellectual and the material/social. This is to say that there seems to be some consensus that these dualisms in intellectual history are unhelpful. ”

Alec Israeli, “Mind, Matter, and the Question of Materialist Intellectual History” - https://www.jhiblog.org/2025/12/22/mind-matter-and-the-question-of-materialist-intellectual-history/. Interesting summary of debate about the methodological challenges in intellectual history. That an idea’s transcendence is immanent in a material context seems like a simple tension, but cultural historians have long struggled with the discipline’s emphasis upon “disincarnated minds – which take on a life of their own outside time and space” (Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations, 1988, 23). This led annales historian Roger Chartier to posit “‘idea materials’ (matériaux d’ idées)” in response (Chartier 1988, 26). My own work aimed to take this further in light of Derrida’s grammatology in my book on enlightenment print, and more recently by integrating extended mind theory into the study of religion. In brief, I’ve been working for some time on ways to overcome the same dualism Moyn and Gordon note.