As witnessed in the encyclopedic text, critical discourse of the Enlightenment seeks to empower knowledge. Restructuring the relation between subject and object, the practitioner of knowledge and the thing represented as knowable, critical discourse implements powerful techniques for producing knowledge, in such varied domains as moral philosophy, natural science, esthetics, and political theory. Intellectual history is the discipline that proposes to describe this knowledge and evaluate it in an historical perspective. So long as it remains a history of ideas, however, intellectual history may not be the most effective idiom for articulating the practice I claim produces this knowledge in that it overlooks the relation between the idea and the representational practice that presents it as such, as something knowable. The intellectual historical idiom remains an idealizing one insofar as it severs its object from the material practice that produces it, and above all from the practice of intellectual history. While it makes comforting sense to believe that terms such as the Enlightenment “mind,” “thought” or “spirit” refer to some grounding source or governing cause exterior to the practice of knowledge, I would argue these terms refer instead to effects of a representational practice, constructs that are an intrinsic part of it. Insofar as the discourse of intellectual history fails to articulate how knowledge results from particular idioms or practices of knowledge (including its own), these practices will remain ungraspable, invisible, unknowable.

For quite some time the need has been felt to “rethink intellectual history,” to write a “new literary history” or found a “new historicism.”