Compagnon on Brunetiere, pt 1

Compagnon, Antoine, Connaissez-Vous Brunetière ?: Enquête sur un antidreyfusard et ses amis. (Seuil, 1997).

I’m still in the middle of reading this, but I wanted to pause and record some impressions. Above all, confusion about how and to what purpose Compagnon constructs his books. Compagnon is an immensely productive and interesting scholar—I’ve read various essays, most of his book on Proust, chunks of Les Antimodernes, and some of Troisième Republique des lettres (I’m going to have to go through that one with some care in the coming weeks). He seems to be interested in many of the same things I am (what hubris). For instance, since working on Maurras I’ve been impressed by Albert Thibaudet—and Compagnon has set himself the task, apparently, of sparking a renewal of interest in this interwar critic. [See the two brand-new and hefty collections, Réflections sur la littérature and Réflections sur la politique, both 2007, Gallimard Quarto and Bouquins, respectively--so it's pretty obvious which one has more prestige.] I’ve gone over what seem to be the most important texts in his polemic with Naomi Schor about the French canon—and I must say that he seems to me both conservative and correct in his opinion that the canon as manifest in coursework and publications in French studies is smaller than it should be. I’m less certain about the “shrinking” part. It’s painful to admit, but I think he gets the better of Schor.

At any rate, as I said, I’ve just begun this book. The introduction is sure-footed, and makes a case for investigating Brunetière and looking more critically at the intellectual positions which radicalized themselves into for-or-against during the Dreyfus affair. But then, and I suppose the book will be as much about her as about Brunetière, we get 40 pages on the history of the family of “Mme Alexandre Singer, née Ratisbonne.” The family is interesting (uncle Alphonse famously converted to Catholicism in Rome...Compagnon points out that William James discusses the case at some length—I’m reasonably certain that I remember this, at least, from Varieties). Indeed, the history of Jews in 19^th century France is inherently fascinating. It’s cosmopolitan, but also speaks volumes about the vicissitudes of Republican ideology. Indeed, I’ve also today just finished a relatively careful reading of Pierre Rosanvallon’s The Demands of Liberty—and admit with some chagrin that only now do I realize that he doesn’t mention (possibly even once) the case of the Jews. I know very little about it. Perhaps it isn’t relevant to the problem of intermediary organizations.

Perhaps the remainder of Compagnon’s book will justify or explain what seems now like a totally unnecessary narrative side-track.

urban revolution

Georgakas, Dan and Marvin Surkin. Detroit: I Do Mind Dying. South End Press, 1998. [2nd edition]

If through some weird turn of fate I ever end up teaching a 20th century US course, or, more likely, anything on the ideology of revolution, this book will have to be on the syllabus. I'd have to be a bit better educated about various macroeconomic history issues...

Barrow's survey

Barrow, J.W. The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848-1914. Yale University Press, 2001.

It’s good to have something to read at night that, first, I can write in directly, and second, that I don’t have to pay very close attention to. I’ve decided to fill this slot with survey histories. I’ve just finished J. W. Burrow’s The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848-1914. The book was published in 2001 as part of the Yale Intellectual History of the West.

I won’t offer any kind of comprehensive evaluation—that would be a bit silly. I will say that Barrow’s takes a resolutely old-fashioned approach: ‘high’ intellectual history, supplemented only very lightly with broader cultural, social or institutional trends. Europe means England, Germany, France, Russia and Italy—pretty much in that order, though I’d have to somehow tabulate index-lines or something to be sure about ordering England and Germany. Certainly J.S. Mill popped up rather more than I’m used to. America makes brief appearances—William James, Walt Whitman, TS Eliot and Ezra Pound (the last two, I think, aren’t actually described as Americans). The ‘orient’ is mentioned in connection to certain currents of German philosophy, Joseph Conrad (gone native!) and the proliferation of occultist movements around the end of the century.

The sweep of the book is none the less extremely impressive. It contains scores of two to three page sketches of the important figures of the period, the most important of whom recur in different contexts, sometimes quite revealingly. (For instance, one knows that Herbert Spencer was important, but it’s more than a little depressing to see exactly how important.) I’m an intellectual historian, my ‘period’ overlaps substantially with what is covered here, though almost only for the French figures. Burrow seems to me to have provided fine (though necessarily reductive) treatments of those figures I know the most about first or second hand—Proust, Huysmans, Maurras. Even Sorel-as-moralist is given what seems to me an eminently fair shake, though, “set to verse we might be hearing Swinburne” (142) makes me think Barrow hasn’t been much exposed to Sorel’s own prose. Or perhaps I have been underexposured to Swinburne’s verse.

The general organization of the book is suggestive. There are six chapters: the first is about science in the strictest materialist sense of the term, and the last about spiritualist occultism. On the way, we pass (in some kind of transcendental order of operations?) through the new sociological and economic sciences; nationhood and other political communities; philosophy; and art. There is an oddly appended epilogue on avant-garde art, the point of which is that the post-1918 forms of high culture all come from before the war. Thus, perhaps, to suggest the radical autonomy of ideas from even the most traumatic of events? The last words of the book, I think, probably give the game away in this respect.

“Essentially, with some modifications in its expressive languages, the post-war avant-garde was still recognizably the pre-war one. In a sense the latter is still ours. Experiment has become the norm; its different idioms are to pre-war Modernism what schools of art in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had been to the mimetic techniques established at the Renaissance: essentially variations. Post-modernism in literature, for all the critical volubility expended over it, looks more like a gloss on Modernism than its historical grave-digger. Modernism is our tradition.” (252-3)

This book could only have been written over a long period of time. Perhaps the epilogue suggests that Barrow, at Oxford, tasted the to-him bitter fruit of postmodernism late in the process of writing? At any event, it betrays a real lack of concern for the impact of context on the meaning of ideas. Put most bluntly: to stand on a street-corner and should about the sacrament of meaningless violence signified something different in 1907, when it was (for middle-class Europeans, anyway) largely a fevered dream, than it did in 1917, when it was very much their reality. Intellectual historians more than anyone should be sensitive to the shifting meanings that identical forms and words can take on as contexts change.

Still, this is a good and useful book (despite, as I have just noticed, what the Amazon.com reviewers had to say).

I already have Marcia Colish’s Medieval Foundations. I see that Ron Witt is treating the late Renaissance and Early Modern period. These are two Oberlin historians whom I failed to take classes from there. I also failed to seek out Bob Soucy, as I obviously should have done, and, for whatever reason, stayed away from the excellent Japanese history survey class. This isn’t to say that I didn’t take good classes, and learn from excellent professors. Rather, it is to admit to myself that I am already dogged by a sense of lost opportunity.

Nussbaum, animals and compassion

Last night I head Martha Nussbaum speak. The title of her talk was “Compassion: Human and Animal.” During the talk I was immensely impressed. The more I think about it, the less I think it holds together.

The general orientation was to suggest that although humans are usually rated above or equal animals in our capacity for compassion, there are certain ways in which we fail to have even the compassion of which an animal would be capable. She needs first to argue that animals do indeed display compassion. In order to do this she breaks compassion down into three component judgments: similarity, seriousness, and eudemonistic. This last is her own somewhat idiosyncratic coinage, meaning not so much happiness, as goal-oriented judgment.

She has examples, not all of which I found convincing. She argues that often, indeed most perniciously, when humans fail to be sufficiently compassionate, it is part of a refusal to admit to their own bodily nature—that is, the facts of death, aging, various forms of excretion. She calls this, I’m not sure why, ‘anthropodenial.’

Now, she seems to me fairly certain that she is a good judge of what is and is not compassionate behavior. She seems to me to have forgotten how powerful relativist critique really is. One of her examples (the novel Effi Briest) is staged more or less as a pure anti-bourgois morality play. A woman married too early, and consequently has an affair because she is unsatisfied in her marriage. She realizes the wrong she has done, breaks off the affair, and lives happily for many years. Eventually, the fact of the affair comes out, her husband and family reject her, she dies alone, mourned only by her dog. While I and no doubt practically everyone in the room agreed with Nussbaum that the other characters in this novel had failed to display compassion (that is, after all, the whole point), it seems to me awfully fast to leap to the conclusion that it is simply and everywhere true.

By making the link to the compassion of animals, and, crucially, making gender relations the paradigmatic case of anthropodenial causing human suffering, Nussbaum gestures at universality. Indeed, for her the root of our hatred and fear of our bodies seems less to be existential dread of death (if this were the case, she would have little argument against salvationist religion) than early childhood experiences, culminating in potty training. Our intelligence at an early age, coupled with our inability to do anything to assuage our own hurts, this is the human condition, which is repeated in different forms throughout our lives. For Nussbaum, this leads to the equally universal human characteristic of ‘securing’ one’s transcendence by denying it to another. By this logic, white supremacists in the 1920s ‘secured’ whiteness by equating blackness with everything sensual and shameful. Nazis did the same to Jews and—Nussbaum’s central empirical argument—so did right wing Hindu nationalists to Muslims in Gujarat in 2002.

I’m not doing her argument justice here, but I think I can say that I’m very unhappy with the easy universalism, the ahistoricism, and the conceptual slippage. Her argument sounds to me to be an updated form of psychoanalysis with all the attendant traps, above all eurocentrism, but also extrapolation of ‘truth’ from symptom (Tolstoy is certainly not anything like a sexually healthy human being—‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ is not a reliable model for human relationships more generally. It isn’t even an average symptom.)

At any rate, I register objections. It would have been interesting to hear what Frans de Waal had to say in response to Nussbaum, but the fire alarm went off after her talk—I gave up waiting and came home.

--------

[added, 11/10/07]

A world full of compassionate people is actually not sufficient. That's the marxian point, mostly represented today by critical race theory and this sort of analysis of institutionalized racism. People of good will can still cause systematic discrimination and exploitation.

This is still the case even if we accept the idea that there is such a thing as a baseline 'animal' compassion that all humans ought to exhibit, which I think is a terrible idea.

Prendergast on Sainte-Beuve

C. Prendergast, The classic : Sainte-Beuve and the nineteenth-century culture wars, (Oxford ; New York, 2007).

Christopher Prendergast’s exploration of Sainte-Beuve’s defense of ‘the classic’ (le classique) meanders across the whole middle of the 19^th century in an attempt to provide a genuine multi-layered contextualization of its subject—in a certain sense a single essay from October of 1850, “Qu’est-ce qu’un classique?” Prendergast’s ‘provocations’ are first Marcel Proust, whose famous essay makes it difficult these days to take Sainte-Beuve’s side in anything, and Renée Welleck’s somewhat remarkable claim in his History of Criticism that Sainte-Beuve has a crucial position in not just the history of literary criticism, but intellectual history in general.

Prendergast takes a broadly thematic approach in his contextualization, with chapters on comparative philology, Goethean cosmopolitanism, Romantic historiography, mass culture, and then various issues around interpretations of antiquity and the middle ages in 19^th century culture. On any of these issues, he is fascinating and informative. His pages on Renan, for instance, are genuinely useful and remarkable. The scholarship is impressive and sustained, but to my eye oddly lopsided.

On the question of Proust, Prendergast is wonderful and understated. Proust’s engagement with Sainte-Beuve [which i’m tired of writing—hereafter: SB] is not the subject of the book, but by the end, I at least, came to feel that Proust’s antipathy for the earlier critic may have been the result of proximity—that is, a factional battle rather than an inter-party one. I’ll be honest and admit to having only flipped through Contre Sainte-Beuve. But I’ve heard the arguments presented several times, and the novel I know a little bit. Proust sounds just like Sainte-Beuve! Proust condemns him for his obsession with literary mediocrity, yet one of the most attractive things about Proust’s own work is the intensity with which he observes and renders metaphysical the most mundane and ordinary objects. That is, just as SB makes the médiocre the measure of a period, so for Proust the ordinary object unlocks, or triggers, the most important parts of spiritual life. Prendergast leaves all this unsaid, but I think he must be aware of it. For instance, he comes back several times to SB’s somewhat odd references to literary works and military battles as though they were both oeuvres in the same way. The narrator of the Recherche has a very similar attitude. (As an aside, I should look in Tadié and Compagnon, to see if these passages around Doncières are pre-WWI, and if this changes).

Prendergast supplements Welleck’s assertion about the importance of Sainte-Beuve in intellectual history, but specifies that it is the intellectual history of the cultural-racist right—of Barrès and Maurras, eventually T.S. Eliot and Brassillach. The afterward is concerned with this right-wing appropriation of SB’s legacy. This has a lot to do with the politics of Latin and Latinité, which I know from working on Maurras was really important. Prendergast has contextualized it nicely in terms of the nationalistic implications of the philological work coming from Germany.

From the very first pages, though, it seemed to me that Prendergast was missing a crucial contextual element. Prendergast organizes his book around the idea of ‘the classic,’ and the 1850 essay. Most of his citations come either from the 1840s, or after—indeed, it is part of the point of the argument that SB’s doctrine of the classic was a way of dealing with the social chaos (that is, democracy) apparently unleashed of 1848. This means that not much attention is paid to SB’s early years. This is important because Sainte-Beuve was associated with a group of young liberals during the Restoration who thought very hard about the relation of literary culture to politics, and what the best political forms might be.

Prendergast refers to le Globe a few times as a Saint-Simonist journal, which it was, but only after 1830. Not only does Prendergast not take the Saint-Simonists seriously, but he completely ignores the liberal, entirely non-socialist milieu in which SB moved before 1830. My knowledge about this comes largely from the massive La jeune France libérale by Jean-Jacque Goblot (1995). These people were associated loosely with some of the doctrinaires (Guizot was an actionnaire of the journal), but were less concerned with day to day politics. They were students of Cousinaian eclecticism, and for them the spiritual basis of society was a crucial literary concern. Indeed, they practiced a remarkably modern-seeming kind of cultural-literary criticism. Sainte-Beuve was there as a young man (quite young), and not a negligible member of the group. The whole story of Sainte-Beuve’s political engagements and cultural politics looks different if it is seen in this light.

It isn’t that what Prendergast says is not compatible with this, but rather that his story would have been more interesting and coherent with it. For instance, he points out that it was important that SB as a critic was a sort of popularizer, between scientific discourses of various kinds (not least literary) and a general reading public (see pg 17, for instance). This was a major characteristic of the role of le Globe in the cultural field of the Restoration. More pointedly, Prendergast is simply at a loss when SB begins to talk about a sort of correspondence or harmony between society and literature as a mark of health (64-5). To Prendergast this kind of talk rapidly becomes meaningless. Would it remain so if put next to the ideas Guizot elaborated about liberal government as not so much a direction as an expression of society? There seem to be some real rhymes here to me, but Prendergast, for whatever reason, has not explored this context.

There are other moments when I think a more broad-minded contextualization would have been useful—and by broad-minded I mean one that escapes from lettered culture as such, into politics proper (Guizot), or into contemporary historiography on the period. For instance Judith Lyon-Caen’s book on the uses of the novel in the 1830s and 1840s would have made a fascinating comparison with all the talk SB engages in about what literature, and especially classics, are supposed to do for you. For SB (and this is not something Prendergast thematizes) it seems always to have to do with making the reader feel better, more at peace with themselves and the world. Lyon-Caen makes the strong argument that many people really did use Balzac and Sue (both of whom SB railed against) to understand the rapidly changing world around them.

Most disappointing, though, is what Prendergast looses at the end of his book by not even speculating on a liberal-doctrinaire heritage for Sainte-Beuve’s cultural politics. The last chapter is on Maurras and his ilk, if it was really the case that Sainte-Beuve carried the banner of the doctrinaires into the Second Empire then his adoption by the far right during the 1880s and 1890s would suggest the need to rethink the whole dynamic of liberal cultural politics in the 19^th century.

This is all very sketchy. And I’ll say straight out that I’m not at all familiar with other scholarship on Sainte-Beuve (P seems mostly to be writing against Wolf Lepenies here). And naturally I want more context, that’s why I’m an historian. And I should say again, after the lines of objections, that the book is really quite good. I've for the most part left the central points aside here, and they're untouched by my complaints.

psychoanalysis

There must be deep psychological truth associated with the fact that we use words before we know what they mean.

Dis-agreement class discussion

Today was the class on Rancière’s Dis-agreement. We didn’t talk very much about the last two chapters of the book, which were for me some of the most interesting. For instance, I found Rancière’s discussion of the outlawing of Holocaust denial as a symptom of the contemporary situation telling about his own position. But we didn’t get to talk about it

[A note on this word, symptom: Rancière doesn’t use it, I think, but I can’t stop doing so. Even in inappropriate contexts. Perhaps I find the inexactitude of it attractive? I need to discipline myself to use it in a more precise medical or psychoanalytic sense.]

Indeed, the most interesting comments were all, for me, at the end of class. They also largely came through attempts to compare Rancière and Laclau—a necessary comparison, I think, and one that suggests what the real limits to this theoretical imagination might be. For one thing, the question of pluralism came up. This raises three cascading points/questions.

First, In light of Rancière’s articulation of politics as rising everywhere to meet police, Laclau seems to posit a convergent logic. I mean by this (I think it’s what other people meant as well), that for Laclau, politics is about building a unity, whereas unity does not seem to be necessary for Rancière. At least, it isn’t if politics is an interruption, or refiguring, of the police order of the perceptible. Even if we speak in terms of the creation of subjects, Rancière allows for a kind of multiplicity and disconnectedness between specific struggles that it is the whole point of Laclau’s project to transcend. Now—I wonder if things have changed for Rancière since 1995? The main thing here is Laclau's need to invoke one form of ego-ideal or another. Rancière doesn't feel this need.

[I’ll just say again, terminologically: I use ‘articulation’ and ‘problematic’ too often. I believe they are Althusserian technical terms which have entered common academic parlance—I should be more responsible. It makes my skin crawl when people say ‘deconstruct’ when all they mean is ‘argue against,’ or worse, ‘argue for the constructed nature of...’]

Second, on the other hand, Rancière does talk a great deal about the demos, and those of the part of no part, who must have everything or nothing. This is democratic politics. I don’t ever remember him adjudicating the relationship between politics and democracy—the two are by no means the same, though. I assume that we are to understand radical democratic politics as making totalizing claims, which would make it look very similar to Laclau’s radical democracy, or populism.

Third and finally, I wonder about the connection of this, the necessity, of the logic of equality. It is certainly the operative motor of politics for Rancière, so I suppose it cannot be excised from the system. But, if we re-orient Rancière’s chain of reasoning, what is it about subjectivization that requires equality? It seems that nothing requires this. It is just that the limit case of political subjectivization is that of the demos, which reaches this limit by radicalizing the logic of equality.

I suppose the question really is: can the Police order only be challenged qua order through the logic of equality? Rancière’s answer must be yes—to me this doesn’t make intuitive sense. I would toss in here also the problem of historicity. Again, I think the comparison between Rancière and Laclau is instructive. In some ways, Rancière is obviously the more transcendental and a-historicist of the two. The equality of speaking beings is not open, philosophically, to question. It is in the nature of speaking beings to be equal. The treatment Rancière gives to forms of government, especially republicanism, also seems very transhistorical. Republicanism goes straight from Plato and Aristotle to the French Third Republic. Yet, by the same token, history is present in the texture of Rancière’s writing—the slow evolution (this term is absolutely not teleological, and strictly speaking, means the same thing as mutation) of concepts and structures across history is very much on his mind. Laclau, for all his historical sketching of the progress of an idea, gives really the impression of creating a model which might safely be applied transcontextually.

I wish I had a better language to describe why the two writers seem so distinct to me, possibly it’s a matter of pure style. Laclau’s prose is expository: making provisional definitions, defining terms, returning to the definition; raising possible objections, dealing with them; even creating typologies of examples. Rancière demands that you follow the twisting line of his thought. There are certainly returns, spiraling redefinitions, but there is no regularity.

foucault citing

pardon the pun.

this is from a NYT op-ed on capital punishment, dateline Asheville, NC, by Mark Essig (the author of a book on Edison and the Electric Chair).

"It was only in the 1850s or so that Americans became squeamish about the pain suffered by executed prisoners. Before that, pain wasn’t a problem; it was the point. Through drawing and quartering, beheading, shooting or hanging, the state inscribed its power on the body of the convict and provided a lesson in the perils of disobedience."

medieval historiography

Yesterday I attended a talk/mini-conference on Medieval history and historiography. Fascinating stuff, pretty far outside my area of competence (not ready to speak of expertise at all yet). Gabrielle Spiegel and Rachel Fulton, respectively of Johns Hopkins and Chicago were the speakers. There was then a roundtable discussion, and later wine and sushi (also beer and cheese). I'll just say once at the outset, both these talks were immensely impressive and stimulating. Not that I haven't got some objections, especially to Fulton's talk, which I think she designed specifically to get them.

Spiegel’s talk was a lightning summary of what she considered to be the most exciting papers from a recent U Penn conference (soon to be published as a book) called “Representing Medieval History.” It was a little hard to follow, because she spoke quickly and densely. Some highlights, then, from her highlights, with no pretense to total coverage.

Historians today are interested in medieval practices of memorialization and legitimatization. They have examined and rejected the idea that genre conventions are central. Indeed, it seems that genre is important in large measure for it to be transcended as a mode of legitimization, as a way to give authority to whatever text—window, chronicle, statue.

Spiegel spoke especially about the new work on liturgical practices and their relation to the medieval historical imagination. The suggestion is that liturgy—ritualized, cyclical, saturated with symbolism—was a crucial mode of historical understanding. That is, events are linear and literal, but also cyclical and symbolic. Linked to this is the continued assertion that the today-necessary distinctions between documents (evidence) of the past, representations of events/people, and commentary on all these things, were simply not operative for medieval historians. The work on liturgy Spiegel summarized for the audience argued that, and this is a close paraphrase, liturgy was the default mode of medieval historiography. Pointing to particular kinds of chronicles (about which she wrote a book), Spiegel made the counter-assertion that medieval historians were perfectly able to default into genealogical forms—modeled on biblical ones, for instance.

Fulton’s talk was more theoretical and self-consciously provocative. The larger point seemed to be that we remain, somehow, largely trapped within what she prefers to call a Roman-Christian tradition of thought. She cites Marshal Sahlins to the effect that theological categories under-gird social science models in ways that are only just now being recognized. I wish she’d said the name of the article where Sahlins talks about this. This argument has to do, for her, with the apparently unrecognized ways in which early christian practice of worship is continuous with pagan Roman practices of worship. Indeed, the word ‘worship’ is one she we need in order to see this, so as to orient ourselves away from ‘religion’ and ‘belief.’ These are categories built by the Christians themselves in order to be distinguished (since they were so much the same) from the Roman precursors.

Now, what I do know about these centuries suggests strongly to me that there is great continuity between late antiquity and the early medieval period. Indeed, the years between 400 and 800 seem to me fascinating. Byzantine history should step in here, because these are years in which the Byzantines flourished—but for a variety of reasons, this hasn’t happened. I’ve read exactly one book of Byzantine history (John Julius Norwich, A Short History of Byzantium). It seems to me intuitive that our historiographical prejudice in favor of the north—France, England, Germany—was bequeathed to us as a profession by history-as-national-history, and is why we don’t do this. Of course, along with Byzantium we ought to get the various Muslim states after the 9^th century. Africa should not be a foreign country to European historians, but it is.

Fulton seems aware of all this, yet she’s not managed to get very far outside of it. I think the way out of the categories that she has identified as problematic is going to be a geographical/disciplinary reorientation, rather than a redoubling of reflexivity. There was some discussion in the round-table period of the ‘technical’ problems associated with what seems like an obvious disciplinary reorientation: in order to do a ‘responsible’ intellectual history of the period, one must be a classicist (Latin and several kinds of Greek), and also do Arabic and probably other languages. Geographically, the focus must be the Mediteranean, which has always been obvious, but which is none the less not recognized as a subspecialty in the way that, say, ‘France’ very much is. The national bequest again.

Fulton also talked about periodization. She is especially concerned with the ‘objectification’ of the middle ages—that is, their creation as a discrete unit of time. I must say that this concern, and the concern about periodization in general, seems a bit overblown to me. It isn’t that there aren’t real problems, or that, as one commentator put it, some questions seem valid only in certain time periods—that’s all true. It’s just that these are standard problems. They are worked out. Periods are set apart by technical difficulties as much as geographical areas are. Not all scholars are energetic enough to jump the barriers set up by the profession—but some are, and the 19^th century specialist who has the energy to take seriously the medieval period will presumably be rewarded for bringing methodological innovation or conceptual breadth across the barriers to his or her own period. That, anyway, is my utopian idea of how these things work.

During the round-table, an opinion was developed or arrived at (that’s a very passive way to say it, but I think it’s more or less what happened) about the way to mitigate the limitations of periodization that arise not just out of professional but also (and I thought this was a good point) out of narrative necessity: multiple temporalities. This is a fancy way of saying: thematize. I think it’s a sensible idea.

I’ve just started looking at J. W. Burrow’s survey The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848-1914. This seems to be his approach. I may return to his book specifically, because it’s useful for me. For the moment: six chapters, each of which roughly covers the whole period of the book, but from the point of view of a different, we might say, conceptual knot. So, the history of science has a periodization that does not match up with the periodization in the history of philosophy. They clash and contrast in interesting ways. A history of ‘high’ politics will interact in productive ways with a history of social structures. This is an old idea—and, one might point out, pretty transparently a model of how the world itself is thought to work.