Intellectual History, Context, and Robert Brandom

Abstract

What does it mean “to put an idea in context”? Does it mean explaining the idea as the effect of a certain set of causes? Or articulating the range of responses to an issue that are recognizably conventional in a particular place and time so that the force of any given response can be assessed? Something else? Intellectual historians answer this question about context in a variety of ways, but I think all would recognize that this is a particularly important question for intellectual history as a field of inquiry. The book under review here may seem to be beyond the purview of Modern Intellectual History. After all, Robert Brandom's A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology is a book written by a philosopher for philosophers. Perhaps it could be called history of philosophy (though even that is debatable), but it is certainly not intellectual history. Nevertheless, I think this is a book that intellectual historians should be dealing with. Why? Because, among other things, the book offers a compelling and illuminating answer to the question of what it is to put an idea in context. This is not because the book itself does contextual work. Brandom ignores almost everything that intellectual historians would regard as contextual for Hegel. Kant is a figure in the book, yet the broader tableau of early nineteenth-century German philosophy, politics, and culture is almost completely absent. But the book does offer a theory of concepts. In doing so, A Spirit of Trust also gives us an account of context. Here, I'll be arguing that this account of context is important for intellectual historians and helps us to understand more clearly debates that we have been having recently about how we do our work. In particular, I think Brandom helps us see that there is no necessary tension between putting ideas in historical contexts, on the one hand, and developing them critically, on the other. And this helps us overcome a binary between context and critique reinforced by a recent debate between Peter Gordon and Ian Hunter.