The Return of Political Economy in Intellectual History: A JHI Blog Forum

Introduction by Jonathon Catlin, Paige Pendarvis, and Jacob Saliba

In recent years, intellectual history has been said to be undergoing a renaissance at the same time as it has been institutionally hollowed out. Rather than bemoan the “death” of the field, this forum seeks to chart its new lives in more materialist and global histories that may have once been the purview of other subfields and area studies. Shifting economic winds sparked by the global movement against neoliberalism surrounding Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and, more recently, the rise of new economic populism and protectionism, have helped to inspire a groundswell of new histories of capitalism and political economy. This forum highlights methodological reflection on intellectual history’s foundations and how new work in the field is taking them up by re-anchoring historical ideas to their under-examined material, economic, and political contexts…

The first two contributions are now up:

Mikkel Flohr, The Political Economy of Ideas: Historical Materialism and the History of Ideas

Marie Louise Krogh, Hegel’s “Brown Rivulet of Coffee”: Colonies, Commodities, and Context

More will be added.