ABSTRACT
Intellectual historians and historians of ideas did regularly grapple with the political implications of ideas, from the revolutionary commitments of Enlightenment philosophers to the existence of Marx’s epistemological break, to intellectuals’ struggles with political engagement. The sociology of ideas offered one compelling response to these questions. Building on the heritage of Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl Mannheim, sociology since the 1970s, especially as elaborated by Pierre Bourdieu, directly addressed the relationship between intellectual production and power. Globally, the heightened visibility and revolutionary promise of black radicalism and Third Worldism meant that black and non-European intellectuals and artists could no longer be innocently ignored. The intellectual and political legacy of the Revolution was at the core of these debates in France; their significance ramified across Anglo-American histories of political thought and culture as well. A parallel trend can be found in new scholarship on past political imaginaries and alternative social futures.
