Introduction: What was the History of Ideas?

Most directly and nominally, the history of ideas is a legacy of the eighteenth century, the pious German Aufklarung even more than the French lumieres or the English Enlightenment. From J. J. Brucker, Vico borrowed the phrase 'history of ideas' to designate one aspect of his 'new science'; and thereafter the concept and term had a rich fortuna in European thought through the French eclectic school of the nineteenth century down to the time of the American philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy and various contemporaries. The history of ideas may seem to bridge the gap between the ideal and the real, but this is an illusion to the extent that these ideas are already incarnate in conventional language. Beyond the circle of experience, beyond perhaps even the resources of language, we may imagine a transition from intellectual and cultural history to philosophical speculation and metahistorical criticism.