This book is a collection of essays by leading practitioners of modern European intellectual history, reflecting on the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the field. The essays each attempt to assess their respective disciplines, giving an account of their development and theoretical evolution, while also reflecting on current problems, challenges, and possibilities.

Where do ideas fit into historical accounts that take an expansive, global view of human movements and events? Teaching scholars of intellectual history to incorporate transnational perspectives into their work, while also recommending how to confront the challenges and controversies that may arise, this original resource explains the concepts, concerns, practice, and promise of "global intellectual history," featuring essays by leading scholars on various approaches that are taking shape across the discipline. The contributors to Global Intellectual History explore the different ways in which one can think about the production, dissemination, and circulation of "global" ideas and ask whether global intellectual history can indeed produce legitimate narratives. They discuss how intellectuals and ideas fit within current conceptions of global frames and processes of globalization and proto-globalization, and they distinguish between ideas of the global and those of the transnational, identifying what each contributes to intellectual history. A crucial guide, this collection sets conceptual coordinates for readers eager to map an emerging area of study.

Modern European intellectual history is thriving as never before. It has recovered from an era in which other trends like social and cultural history threatened to marginalize it. But in spite of enjoying a contemporary renaissance, the field has lost touch with the tradition of debating why and how to study ideas and thus lacks both a well-articulated set of purposes and a range of arguments for exactly what it means to pursue those purposes. This volume revives that tradition. Recalling past attempts to showcase the diversity and differentiation of modern European intellectual history, this volume also documents how much has changed in recent decades. Some authors are much readier to defend a history of ideas practiced over the long term - once the defining sin of the field. Others go so far as to insist on how ideas are always open to reappropriation and reevaluation beyond their original contexts - suggesting that it is an error to reduce the ideas to those contexts. Others still argue that, under threat from trends like social history, intellectual historians have forsaken any attempt to resolve for themselves how ideas are socially embodied. The volume also registers old and new trends in history that have affected the study of ideas, including the history of science, the history of academic disciplines, the history of psychology and "self," international and global history, and women's and gender history.

This non-technical introduction to modern European intellectual history traces the evolution of ideas in Europe from the turn of the 19th century to the modern day. Placing particular emphasis on the huge technological and scientific change that has taken place over the last two centuries, David Galaty shows how intellectual life has been driven by the conditions and problems posed by this world of technology. In everything from theories of beauty to studies in metaphysics, the technologically-based modern world has stimulated a host of competing theories and intellectual systems, often built around the opposing notions of 'the power of the individual' versus collectivist ideals like community, nation, tradition and transcendent experience. In an accessible, jargon-free style, Modern European Intellectual History unpicks these debates and historically analyses how thought has developed in Europe since the time of the French Revolution. Among other topics, the book explores: * The Kantian Revolution * Feminism and the Suffrage Movement * Socialism and Marxism * Nationalism * Structuralism * Quantum theory * Developments in the Arts * Postmodernism * Big Data and the Cyber Century Highly illustrated with 80 images and 10 tables, and further supported by an online Instructor's Guidet, this is the most important student resource on modern European intellectual history available today.

For courses in European Intellectual History. An exploration of the major issues in thought -- from the French Revolution to Structuralism and beyond.