ABSTRACT
The best starting-point is perhaps Karl Lamprecht's Kulturgeschichte, which was first denounced and then praised as 'new history' and which emphasized factors of 'spirit' and 'consciousness', individual as well as national. Even earlier his supporter Eberhard Gothein, a historian of Italian culture, defended cultural history against the charges of materialism and went so far as to declare that 'in its pure form cultural history is the history of ideas'. The conditions of writing intellectual history have been sharply problematized in the past generation or two, and there is a vast literature on challenges from literary theory, history of science, and philosophy. The idea of a 'new intellectual history' may seem to go against the premise of these studies, which have focused largely on the old - on the continuities which still underlie the apparent and highly publicized ruptures of modern and postmodern culture.
