Towards a New Approach to Researching the Social Impacts of the Arts

Abstract

In so far as this book attempts to trace historically the evolution of commonly held beliefs on the effects of the arts on individuals and society, it constitutes, in the first instance, a study of ‘public intellectuals’, and is inscribed within a research area that broadly corresponds to that of the ‘history of ideas’, or ‘intellectual history’. According to Allan Megill (2004, 549–50), ‘intellectual history focuses on ideas that have some substantial degree of explicit, consciously thought-out and often conceptually inclined development and expression, rather than on beliefs and practices that appear as quasi-natural aspects of the “form of life” of a particular group, or even of an individual’. The latter Megill sees as the objects of fields of research that are distinct, if adjacent, to intellectual history: history of mentalities, history of everyday life and ‘new’ cultural history.1 According to William J. Bouwsma (1990, 340–1), intellectual history is best understood as an attempt to reconstruct ‘the history of meanings’, putting forward, thus, the idea of a discipline rooted ‘in the conception of man as an animal who must create or discern meaning in everything that he does’.