History of ideas

The history of ideas is a problem-oriented sub-discipline of the history of philosophy. It deals with the nature, origin, the changes and effects of philosophical, religious, political and scientific ideas, ways of thinking and questions. In Germany, Friedrich Meinecke holds, the more developed the idea of ​​history from the traditional intellectual history, as one of its most important representatives. Under significant influence of his students, the approach of a social history of ideas ( social history of ideas ) developed after the Second World War in the United States.

History

During the Weimar Republic, the German literary historian Hermann August Korff published in 1923 the work of the spirit of Goethe's time, in which he tried to grasp the intellectual history as a history of ideas. He wrote: "The book is so consciously history of ideas, not in the usual sense of literary history ( their own right to be so touched in any way ). But it is the history of ideas with a special rights because based on the belief that our classical-romantic poetry is only by a history of ideas viewing essential to enlighten. " Korff saw the idea of ​​history as a story that goes beyond the history of literature. For, according to him the objects of the history of ideas not only in literary history phenomena are manifest, but latently or openly present in all cultural.

The traditional history of ideas was in the wake of the linguistic turn, among others accused of historical discontinuities, social contexts and linguistic constituents neglecting general " ideas ". In addition to the social history of ideas, the so-called history of the concept is a response to these methodological problems.