I grew up in Western Europe in the 1990s, during a time proclaimed to be the “end of history.”[1] One of my early memories is of seeing the Berlin Wall come down on TV. I was twelve. When I went to university in 1995, the economy was booming, and liberal democracy went unquestioned. Indeed, so little seemed to be happening that the trial of OJ Simpson—a former NFL player accused of murdering his wife—drew global attention. Even in places like my home country Belgium, where no one had ever heard of Simpson (or the NFL, for that matter), there was wall-to-wall coverage of the eight-month trial.
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Essay Series on Learning the Scholar’s Craft: Reflections of Historians and International Relations Scholars
“How I became an Intellectual Historian”
Essay by Annelien de Dijn, Utrecht University
12 December 2024 | PDF: http://issforum.org/to/E602 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo
Series Editor: Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: Christopher Ball
I grew up in Western Europe in the 1990s, during a time proclaimed to be the “end of history.”[1] One of my early memories is of seeing the Berlin Wall come down on TV. I was twelve. When I went to university in 1995, the economy was booming, and liberal democracy went unquestioned. Indeed, so little seemed to be happening that the trial of OJ Simpson—a former NFL player accused of murdering his wife—drew global attention. Even in places like my home country Belgium, where no one had ever heard of Simpson (or the NFL, for that matter), there was wall-to-wall coverage of the eight-month trial.
Of course, there were signs that the new order was more fragile than it appeared at the time. With the violent breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991, war and genocide had returned to the European continent. In several European countries, right-wing extremists managed electoral breakthroughs on virulently anti-immigrant platforms. Yet instead of seeing these events as portends of darker things to come, most of us thought war and racism were atavistic holdovers from the past, which would surely disappear of their own accord.
At university, I decided to major in history. My interest in the past was largely nostalgic. The world I was living in seemed safe, predictable, and therefore boring. Earlier times, by contrast, seemed much more interesting. My favorite history book was Johan Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages, first published in 1919.[2] An amazing stylist, Huizinga offered his readers a vivid recreation of the lives and times of the Dukes of Burgundy, who, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, had come to rule large swathes of eastern France as well as what is now Belgium. Huizinga had a great eye for telling details and vignettes, and his work has an almost novelistic quality, comparable to that of Barbara Tuchman.[3]
But what I loved even more was that the world he described felt so completely alien. Huizinga made a considerable effort to draw out the strangeness of the culture he was describing—the bizarre notions of chivalry, the religiosity, the obsession with death and the afterlife. Even the stuff they liked to eat was weird. (Swan meat, anyone?) For very similar reasons, I also loved reading nineteenth- century British novels—Jane Austen was a particular favorite, and I also devoured writers like Anthony Trollope. I was fascinated by the long-lost aristocratic world they depicted, and I wanted to learn more.
My nostalgic interests dovetailed nicely with what was then the dominant paradigm in history: the anthropological turn. In the 1960s and 1970s, the discipline of history had been dominated by Marxist historians, who were interested in the past because they believed that it held the key to understanding the future. Theirs was a self-proclaimed “history from below,” which was mostly inspired by presentist concerns about ending marginalization.[4]
But that changed in the 1990s. As historians came to be influenced by anthropologists like Clifford Geertz, the past was now to be approached as a “foreign country,” where things were done differently and for reasons often hard to fathom.[5] Presentism was bad. Being a historian became less about being an activist or social scientist, and more about being a detective trying to unravel the secrets held by the past, as showcased by historians such as Robert Darnton in his brilliant collection of essays on eighteenth-century France, The Great Cat Massacre. Likewise, Lynn Hunt’s work on pornography in the French Revolution showed how the scabrous attacks on Marie-Antoinette weren’t just filth or smut but served to undermine a monarchical order that was based on a deeply paternalistic ideology.[6]
The goal of doing history under the anthropological turn was not to better understand the laws governing human societies, or to help break the shackles of marginalized groups, as in the older Marxist paradigm. To the extent that studying the past had any use at all, it was to foster a relativistic attitude: it highlighted that the way we do things in the here and now is by no means the only or even the most natural way of doing so. Becoming better acquainted with the weirdness of the past was supposed to foster a broadly liberal, tolerationist approach to humanity and its many foibles. Other historians were even more radical: they argued that understanding the past had no use at all, except for the intellectual joy brought by Geertzian exercises in code breaking. Historians were to be engaged solely in l’art pout l’art, in history for its own sake. I lapped this all up.[7]
After my undergraduate degree at the University of Leuven in Belgium, I applied to Columbia University. My plan was to do a PhD in British history with David Cannadine, who had written on the British aristocracy.[8] He turned out to have left Columbia by the time I got there, so I was left to my own devices. I took a course with another scholar of Britain, David Armitage, which sparked my interest in the history of early modern political thought.[9] Armitage was unwilling to advise me though. I admittedly knew next to nothing about early modern British history; this became painfully clear when during a graduate seminar, to audible gasps from my fellow students, I confused Thomas and Oliver Cromwell. Who would have thought there were two of them!
I ended up realizing that I wouldn’t flourish in the cutthroat atmosphere at Columbia, so I went back to Belgium to do my PhD there. My brief stay at Columbia had a major impact on the rest of my career, though. I decided to specialize in the history of political thought, albeit with a focus on France rather than Britain, and I became friends with students from my cohort like Dominique Reill (currently at the University of Miami), with whom I continue to spar about how to do history until this very day.[10]
When I started upon my PhD, the history of political thought was dominated by the Cambridge School, based on the methodological approach pioneered by Quentin Skinner. In his classic 1969 article “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” Skinner argued that we should try to understand past political thinkers not as oracles spouting wisdom for all times, but as historical actors addressing their own parochial concerns and interests.[11] Contemporary readers of Thomas Hobbes or John Locke thus should not assume that these thinkers were speaking to them but carefully reconstruct the historical context in which they were operating. They should then use that contextualization as a basis to understand the original, historical meaning of the Leviathan or the Second Treatise. To do otherwise, Skinner forcefully warned, would only lead one to read ideas into historical texts that weren’t there. And what could be the point of that? If the goal was to philosophize for the present, we had better do that in our own name, instead of attributing our own ideas and concerns to past thinkers.
“Meaning and Understanding” made a huge impression on me, not just because I was persuaded by its arguments, but also because I thought it was riotously funny, laced as it was with irreverent takedowns of senior scholars. I quickly became a card-carrying member of the Cambridge School, despite never actually studying at Cambridge. Its anti-presentist sensibility dovetailed nicely with the anthropological perspective I had imbued during my undergraduate years, as well as with my interest in the more distant past. Cambridge-School historians tend to focus on early modern political texts and thinkers. After all, these texts are far harder to decipher than books written in the more recent past, such as the twentieth century, and therefore pose more of a challenge to their readers.
I ended up writing my dissertation on nineteenth-century French liberalism. While liberals are traditionally seen as the harbingers of modernity, I tried to show they were all but that. Many of them were violently opposed to the advent of democracy, which they believed to be a major threat to liberty, and pleaded instead for very different kinds of regimes, ranging from constitutional monarchy to highly elitist regime-types in which power was monopolized by the one percent. Other liberals rejected not just democratic institutions but also the more levelled society created by the French Revolution. Some even ended up defending the reintroduction of primogeniture (inheritance laws privileging eldest sons) in an attempt to recreate the Old Regime in the post-1789 world. In short, liberals like Benjamin Constant or Alexis de Tocqueville spoke to their own world, not to ours, and to use them as sources for thinking about freedom in the present, I concluded, was ill-advised at best.
After completing my dissertation, I spent six long years in the postdoctoral netherworld. Even though I managed to get my PhD published as a book in the CUP series Ideas in Context,[12] it proved challenging to find a permanent position. I spent my postdoc years flitting about between Belgium and the United States, where I held visiting appointments and adjunct positions at various institutions, including my alma mater Columbia University. I was terrible at dealing with the insecurity that comes with life as a postdoc and I tried to leave academia, only to realize that I disliked working outside of academia even more. (I was briefly employed by Deloitte, the accountancy and consultancy firm.) Luckily I had a supportive partner who earned enough money to keep us both afloat while I was working for less than minimum wage. People sometimes wonder why academics tend to skew left-wing. I am pretty sure experiencing so many years of debilitating job insecurity has at least something to do with this.
In 2011, I was hired as an assistant professor by the University of Amsterdam Political Science Department, my first tenure-track job. A new world opened up. Not only did I now have job security, giving me headspace to think about longer-term research projects, I was also challenged in different ways. Before joining the University of Amsterdam, I had rarely ventured outside of a history department. My mentors had always been historians as well. Suddenly, I was interacting on a regular basis with colleagues who had no idea who Thomas Hobbes was, nor did much care about my careful reconstructions of past thinkers’ ideas. In water cooler-conversations about our research, they showed little interest in my attempts to rewrite the history of liberalism by pointing to the reactionary ideas of French thinkers such as Benjamin Constant. Instead, they wanted to know whether one should take Constant’s objections against democracy seriously—and if not, why it was worth studying him at all.
My training had left me ill-equipped to answer such questions. As a result, I started to feel dissatisfied with the Cambridge School approach, a dissatisfaction that was also fueled by more extraneous events. After 9/11, the end-of-history glow that had persisted well into the late 90s was dissipating, a process hastened by the brutally incompetent reaction to the attacks by the United States and its allies. The global financial crisis of 2008 and the era of austerity that followed it left little room for optimism. In 2009, while working as a postdoc in the US, I watched with incomprehension as Barack Obama’s attempts to make health care more broadly accessible fueled the rise of the Tea Party, which was neoliberalism on steroids. It felt like the world was burning, which made the history-for-its-own-sake argument a lot less appealing. Why do history at all if all it promised was to allow its practitioners to revel in the differentness of the past?
As I was pondering these existential questions, exciting new developments were taking place in the field of intellectual history. Notably, the prohibition on presentism was waning.[13] A book that had a particular resonance for me is Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia, published in 2010.[14] In less than 230 pages, Moyn laid bare the ways in which human rights, one of the most cherished ideals of our time, was not an age-old utopia, but an invention of much more recent vintage. This allowed him in turn to show how the rise of human rights in the 1970s had gone hand in hand with the demise of far more radical ideals, notably the “new international economic order” that had been promoted by newly decolonized states. Readers were left to draw their own conclusions, but it was hard not come away from Moyn’s book with the strong impression that the triumph of human rights had in fact been the victory of a bland and weak ideals displacing much more radical proposals for global justice.
This was strong stuff and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Moyn’s book singlehandedly steered the history of political thought in a different direction. The Last Utopia was an avowedly presentist book: its goal was not to reconstruct hard-to-follow arguments by ancient political thinkers. Instead, it tried to explain when and how contemporary ideals such as human rights had come to be embraced, showing that their genealogy was far less glorious than assumed. Moyn’s book also focused on the more recent past than Cambridge School historians tended to do, breaking new ground in this regard as well. In the 2010s, a new generation of intellectual historians came of age who provided critical genealogies of contemporary political ideas, such as Or Rosenboim’s The Emergence of Globalism, Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking after Empire, or Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas’s Welfare for Markets: A Global History of Basic Income.[15]
All of this steered my own work in a new direction. I decided to write a critical genealogy of another cherished contemporary ideal: freedom. I wanted to examine why the identification of liberty with a minimal state, which seemed so dominant in the 2010s, had come about. In exploring this question, I was able to build both on my own earlier work on French eighteenth and nineteenth-century political thought as well as on a vast literature on early-modern conceptions of freedom produced by Quentin Skinner and other Cambridge School historians. In his seminal Liberty Before Liberalism, Skinner had recovered an older way of thinking about freedom he called republican (or neo-Roman) which equated liberty not with an absence of state interference, but with establishing popular control over state power.[16]
Building on these insights, I wanted to examine when liberal freedom had displaced the older republican type of freedom, and even more importantly why. The book that resulted from this project, Freedom: An Unruly History, gave an overview of the intellectual history of freedom from Herodotus to the present. It set out to debunk the myth that modern freedom was invented in the Reformation or by the natural rights thinkers of the Enlightenment. Instead, it showed that our way of thinking about freedom had been invented around 1800 by counterrevolutionary thinkers, to defend privileged elites and their property rights against democratization. While it had continued to be challenged throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by radical abolitionists, suffragettes, and socialists, it had become dominant after World War Two, when the “free West” came to be defined in opposition to “totalitarianism.”[17]
I had the bad luck/good fortune of having my book on freedom come out in August 2020, in the middle of the Covid-19 lockdowns. This was bad luck because it meant that my book launch as well as other events had to take place online. But it also meant that the concept of freedom, invoked to protest mask mandates and other health measures, had become more contested than ever. Hence there was more media interest in my book of over 400 pages (plus a whole lot of footnotes) than would otherwise have been the case. I was able to develop skills I had never needed to develop, including appearing on radio and TV as well as being interviewed on podcasts. I also started writing op-eds and shorter pieces for newspapers and magazines, which I really enjoy doing. These new experiences expanded the meaning of “doing history” for me.
I am currently mulling new questions. When I was a graduate student in the Low Countries, female professors were a rare breed. At my university in Catholic, conservative Belgium, the history department counted just one single (!) female professor among its staff members. There were more women in my cohort of graduate students, but still, we were in a distinct minority compared to the men. When I started casting about for a PhD project, and my (male) supervisor suggested that I work on women’s history, I felt that that was an attempt to slot me into a less prestigious field. So I resolutely went the other way, choosing the field that was most male-coded I could think of: the history of political thought.[18]
Now, twenty-odd years later, it has started to grate on me that I spend most of my time studying dead white males. I’ve therefore become more interested in the work of feminist philosophers and historians of political thought like Hannah Dawson, Serene Khader, Kate Manne and Sarah Tyson.[19] Their work has made clear that expanding the canon to include women isn’t just a work of reclamation but can also result in a radical rethinking of key political concepts and ideals At the same time, the rise of Donald Trump and like-minded politicians has made it abundantly clear that patriarchy (just like racism) is by no means dead nor even slightly moribund. This raises some hard questions: where does patriarchy come from? Why does sexism have such a hold over our political imaginations? I hope to be able to contribute to these issues in my future work.
Annelien de Dijn is Professor of Political History at Utrecht University. Her most recent books are Freedom: An Unruly History (Harvard University Press, 2020) and Rethinking Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2022), edited with Hannah Dawson.
[1] Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?”, The National Interest 16 (1989) 3-18.
[2] Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and The Netherlands in the XIVth and XVth Centuries (Normanby Press, 2013).
[3] E.g. Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (Random House, 1987).
[4] See, for example, E. P. Thompson, “History From Below,” The Times Literary Supplement, 7 (April 1966): 7 April 1966, 279-80.
[5] Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (Basic Books, 1973) in particular was an important source of inspiration for historians like Robert Darnton.
[6] Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (Penguin Books, 1984); Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution. (University of California Press, 1992).
[7] Lynn Hunt, “Against Presentism”, Perspectives (40: 5) 7-9; Frank Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford University Press, 2005).
[8] David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (Vintage Books, 1999).
[9] David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
[10] You can read Reill’s amazing essay on the murder of a Croatian historian and what this means for history as a discipline here: https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/historian-murder-trial/. Dominique Reill, “The Historian and the Murderer: A Croatian Historian’s Death Ultimately Put Our Profession on Trial,” Zócalo Public Square, June 2021.
[11] Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8 (1969) 3-53.
[12] Annelien de Dijn, French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville: Liberty in a Levelled Society (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
[13] See Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, “Introduction: Whose Present? Which History?” Modern Intellectual History 20 (2023) 559-570.
[14] Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010).
[15] Or Rosenboim, The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939-1950, (Princeton University Press, 2017); Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton University Press, 2019); Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas, Welfare for Markets: A Global History of Basic Income (The University of Chicago Press, 2023).
[16] Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 1998). In addition to my 2008 book, I had also written on eighteenth-century debates about liberty in Annelien de Dijn, “On Political Liberty: Montesquieu’s Missing Manuscript,” Political Theory, 39 (2011) 181–204; de Dijn “Rousseau and Republicanism,” Political Theory 46 (2018) 59-80; and De Dijn,” Republicanism and democracy : the tyranny of the majority in 18th-century political debate,” in Yiftah Elazar and Geneviève Rousselière, eds., Republicanism and the Future of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2019) 59-74.
[17] Annelien de Dijn, Freedom: An Unruly History (Harvard University Press, 2020).
[18] For an illuminating overview of intellectual history as a discipline and its hostility toward women and women’s writing, see Sophie Smith, “Women and Intellectual History in the Twentieth Century, Part Two: Activists, Academics, and the Future,” Journal of the History of Ideas 85:4 (2024): 633-679.
[19] See, for example, Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford University Press, 2017); Sarah Tyson, Where Are the Women?: Why Expanding the Archive Makes Philosophy Better (Columbia University Press, 2018); Hannah Dawson, ed., The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing (Penguin Classics, 2023); Serene Khader, Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop (Beacon Press, 2024).