1.1 Monodisciplinary Studies

Where do scholars present their ongoing research on eighteenth-century grammar books, a nineteenth-century Italian historian, or art historians’ ideological conformity in Nazi Germany? For many, the biennial conference organized by the Society for the History of the Humanities is an attractive venue for trying out ideas. It is here that they meet scholars working on similar themes. Consequently, not a few of their papers end up in History of Humanities, even though in many cases they could also have been submitted to Historiographia Linguistica, Storia della Storiografia, or the Journal of Art Historiography. In a sense, this is a reassuring observation. The history of the humanities is not a prerogative of seasoned scholars, able to oversee the entire humanities landscape and capable of determining “the specificity of the humanities in regard to the sciences.”Footnote ¹⁷ There is room for small, monodisciplinary case studies, too.

Judging by the journal’s first ten volumes (2016–25), many of these case studies focus on individual scholars. Alois Riegl, Heinrich Wölfflin, Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, and Edgar Wind – all art historians – are but a few of the individuals whose work is subjected to historical scrutiny. Others include the historian Gabriel Monod, the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, and the literary historian Semen A. Vengerov with his two million filing cards about Alexander Pushkin and other Russian writers. Special issues devoted to “Classics of the Humanities” (2019, 2024) also foreground individuals, often in relation to disciplines they helped create (Ignác Goldziher as a pioneer of the study of Islam; Roberto Busa as a forerunner of digital humanities). While these specials do transcend boundaries – they bring non-English texts to the attention of English-speaking readers while expanding Western canons with African scholars such as Cheikh Anta Diop and Joseph Hanson Kwabena Nketia – they leave disciplinary borders pretty much intact. Diop, the Senegalese historian, is hailed for his historiographical contributions; Nketia is presented as an ethnographically inspired musicologist.Footnote ¹⁸

The discipline features even more prominently in a second set of contributions. History of Humanities has published articles on philology in Germany and China; on history writing in Peru, Germany, France, and Italy; and on literary studies in the Ottoman Empire, Russia, and the Netherlands. If these contributions use the discipline as a convenient frame of reference, so do forum sections on “Practices of Historical Research,” “Materials and Techniques in Art History,” and “Literary Theory in Eastern Europe.” Other articles even explicitly deal with the genesis and development of humanities disciplines. Dirk van Miert, for instance, examines how eighteenth-century historia literaria (“histories of learning”) with their historical accounts of existing and emerging branches of study paved the way for “the rise of disciplines” in nineteenth-century Europe.Footnote ¹⁹ A forum in the same issue is devoted to “the origins of musical disciplines,” while a theme issue entitled “Unfolding Disciplines in the History of the Humanities” (based on a 2021 conference with this title in Barcelona) shows an almost perfect fit with the history of disciplines as described by Marchand.

Her obituary for the genre may therefore have appeared a little too early. Despite its cross-disciplinary ambitions, the history of the humanities has plenty of room for histories of disciplines as well as for studies of people and practices situated in a single discipline. And so it should be: disciplines have been too important to be put aside as outdated topics of study.

1.2 Cross-Disciplinary Comparisons

Nonetheless, the enthusiasm that is palpable in so many history of humanities events seems to come from elsewhere. Arguably, part of it stems from the joy of discovering that things familiar from one’s own field have analogies or equivalents in other disciplines. Another, equally important source of energy is the excitement of looking beyond one’s own turf or joining others in collaborative work. Indeed, when historians compare humanities fields, collaborative research is the standard rather than the exception, if only because few authors are able to oversee more than one or two disciplines. Most comparative work follows the classic format of John Plumb’s Crisis in the Humanities (1964): essays by disciplinary specialists, all of which explore the same topic in a different field, with the actual comparison being done by the editor.

Perhaps the most straightforward example of such a collaborative enterprise is Efraim Podoksik’s edited volume, Doing Humanities in Nineteenth-Century Germany (2020). Each of the contributors has been assigned a single discipline – philosophy, history, classical philology, literary studies, and so forth – and a single question: How did nineteenth-century practitioners of this discipline navigate the tensions between three powerful trends, namely the rise of historicizing modes of interpretation, the quest for beauty and harmony in various forms of neoclassical aestheticism, and the development of “scientific” (positivist-inspired) methodologies?Footnote ²⁰ Although not all of the chapters engage in equal depth with this question – this is the inevitable fate of edited volumes – the book does give readers a feel for the uneven significance that German Geisteswissenschaftler assigned to history, aesthetics, and science. More specifically, the volume shows that these differences hinged on individuals as much as on disciplines, judging by committed historicists in fields such as literary studies, traditionally associated with the pursuit of beauty, and the persistence of aesthetic aspirations among historians in an age of methodological standardization.

Recent History of Humanities volumes also contribute their share to the comparative project, for instance, with a theme issue on “Scholarly Forgetting in the Humanities” (2020).Footnote ²¹ After decades of research on memory – what canons did scholars create, which predecessors did they deem worthy of commemoration? – this issue draws attention to figures, ideas, and approaches that were forgotten, be it intentionally, through academic patricide or retellings of the past, or accidentally, by the passage of time. With contributions on classics, linguistics, art history, musicology, and other fields, the issue aims to understand how forgetting “affects our understanding of our disciplines.”Footnote ²² What needs to be ignored or repressed in order to keep a discipline’s self-image intact? And how, if at all, does the recovery of lost voices enrich our own understandings of what classics, linguistics, and art history are about?

Versions of these questions also surface in a 2021 forum section on “Colonial Humanities.” While ideas of race and patterns of racism (two different things) can historically be found in all humanities fields,Footnote ²³ the forum zooms in on fields of study with strong colonial legacies, such as Turkish studies and the study of Amazigh (Berber) culture. Historically, these fields were sites of encounter between European disciplines and what Shamil Jeppie, paraphrasing Eric Wolf, calls “countries without disciplines.”Footnote ²⁴ Just as in the previous examples, the editors’ aim is to enrich, challenge, or disrupt conventional accounts of “the development of the humanities disciplines,” in this case primarily by foregrounding the importance of local knowledge and its appropriation by scholars in the service of colonial powers.Footnote ²⁵

What these examples show is that comparative work in the history of the humanities, more often than not, remains focused on disciplines. This has practical motives – it allows for divisions of labor à la Plumb – but intellectual reasons, too. Even if authors try to move beyond monodisciplinary narratives, they remain interested in disciplinary identities and the muddled genealogies behind them.

1.3 Traveling Objects

Important as disciplines are, they figure less prominently in what is perhaps the most vibrant strand of research today: the study of how ideas, concepts, and practices travel across disciplinary borders. It is here that the analogy with Beckert’s Empire of Cotton (2015) and Bosma’s The World of Sugar (2023) comes in. At a time when many historians feel constrained by the legacies of “methodological nationalism” (the habit of studying the past through national prisms), authors such as Beckert and Bosma offer welcome alternatives. By tracing how the production, trade, and consumption of commodities connected people over vast distances, they make networks visible in which nation-states are only one type of actor among others. Similarly, historians of the humanities now write histories that take the reader on journeys through a wide range of disciplines, sometimes even outside of the humanities.

What, then, is the humanities’ equivalent of sugar? For Carlos Spoerhase, it is the offprint: the separately printed book chapter or journal article that twentieth-century scholars used to distribute among colleagues, “with compliments from the author.” Sharing offprints, for the sake of information exchange or authorial self-promotion, is but one example of a practice that was widely shared across the humanities. As such, it allows historians to study the world of the humanities without adopting a disciplinary perspective. (Like sugar, offprints also traveled literally, of course. Their itineraries tell us something about the geographical span of scholars’ networks.)Footnote ²⁶

If Spoerhase, together with Steffen Martus, has done much to show the potential of a “praxeological” (practice-oriented) approach to the history of the humanities,Footnote ²⁷ others examine how more abstract things such as concepts, methods, and ideas traveled across the world of the humanities. Rens Bod et al. speak about “flows of cognitive goods,” with “flows” denoting movement and “cognitive goods” being a technical term for tools of knowledge making.Footnote ²⁸ Along these lines, Devin Griffith traces the spread of the “comparative method” across the humanities, while Michael Facius does something similar with notions of “useful,” “practical,” and “applied” knowledge – adding a transcultural dimension by focusing on exchanges between Europe and East Asia.Footnote ²⁹ There are studies on the gradual spread of concepts such as “generation” and “historicism” among humanities scholars, while a 2022 forum section on “exactitude” even finds “cross-pollination between the humanities, arts, and sciences” – with humanities scholars looking to the sciences for inspiration, but meanwhile developing notions and practices of exactitude in their own right.Footnote ³⁰

As this last example shows, tracing the journeys of a practice, concept, or method does not come with the guarantee that travelers will stay within the realm of the humanities. It is perfectly possible to study scholars’ virtues and vices – their understandings of qualities that scholars had to possess or avoid – as a discourse shared across the humanities.Footnote ³¹ But as soon as one traces the vicissitudes of a single vice term, such as dogmatism, the itinerary may take one from Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy via post-Darwinian controversies in late Victorian England to the field of psychology in Cold War America, where Milton Rokeach developed a “dogmatism scale” for diagnosing “closed-mindedness.”Footnote ³² In nineteenth-century Germany, the concept of facts fascinated historians, philologists, and physicists alike – bien étonnés de se trouver ensemble.Footnote ³³ Historical methods, likewise, found their way not only into the manuals of early twentieth-century art historians and musicologists but also into the writings of Julius Ruska, a German chemist and Arabist who pioneered a so-called chemical-historical method.Footnote ³⁴

The project of following ideas, concepts, or practices on their journeys across time and space may even take one outside of the academic realm. While this obviously applies to regions and periods in which scholarship was conducted mainly under the patronage of rulers or religious elites, it is worth recalling that the humanities even in recent times have not always thrived primarily or exclusively in university settings. (“Public humanities” are not a twenty-first-century invention: the humanities have always had a public-facing side.)Footnote ³⁵ Speaking about the popularity of critical theory in the Federal Republic of Germany, Philipp Felsch argues that the paperback revolution of the 1960s, together with the “counter university” called the radio, enabled philosopher Theodor Adorno to reach audiences far beyond the circle of his Frankfurt students. While reading clubs across the country spent long evenings discussing the 1962 paperback edition of Minima Moralia (1951), Adorno received stacks of letters from readers young and old, with requests for advice that Felsch interprets as evidence of the high status of the public intellectual in postwar West Germany.Footnote ³⁶ A Swedish study, likewise, argues that the “arenas of the humanities” in the postwar period were not limited to the university. Both critical theorists and Christian humanists in 1960s Sweden frequently switched between academic and nonacademic spaces, meanwhile transmitting themes and concepts from the one into the other.Footnote ³⁷ Even more important were the nonacademic humanities in Poland and Czechoslovakia under Socialist rule, where “flying universities” and “underground seminars” provided alternative infrastructures for dissident scholars and students especially from the social sciences and humanities.Footnote ³⁸

All this illustrates that historians of the humanities, in addition to continuing historical research along disciplinary lines, often find themselves expanding horizons. They try to open up new avenues of research, beyond the monodisciplinary gaze that has dominated so much of the history of scholarship and beyond the university as a privileged site for research and teaching. The humanities thereby serve less as a subject of research than as a space within which disciplinary borders can be crossed – albeit that even this space is not always large enough to accommodate all journeys. Perhaps this is part of what makes expanding horizons so attractive: one cannot tell in advance where the journey will end.

2.1 Multiple Layers

What the humanities are depends on whom you ask. Scholars tend to approach the question differently, depending, among other things, on methods and perspectives customary in their fields. Philosophers are a case in point. In trying to unravel what distinguishes the humanities from neighboring fields, such as the sciences, philosophers typically foreground the humanities’ epistemological ambitions – that is, the sort of knowledge, understanding, or insight they aim for and the means they employ to this end.

Already in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Wilhelm Dilthey, Wilhelm Windelband, and Heinrich Rickert defined the Geisteswissenschaften by contrasting them with the Naturwissenschaften. Dilthey argued that understanding (verstehen) rather than explaining (erklären) is what humanities scholars do, whereas Windelband spoke about an “idiographic” approach, focused on particulars and individuals, which distinguishes itself from “nomothetic” searches for patterns and laws of the kind in which scientists engage. Similarly, Rickert argued that the “historical cultural sciences,” as he preferred to call the Geisteswissenschaften, deal with value-laden realities, which they approach with an interest in the particular and the individual rather than the recurrent and the general.Footnote ⁴¹ All of these definitions focus on epistemic aspirations indeed – not on institutions, modes of teaching, or publication habits, but on types of knowledge and methods associated with them.

Epistemic issues are central also to recent philosophical work by Willem Drees, Chris Haufe, Stephen Grimm, Rik Peels, and René van Woudenberg. For Drees, the humanities are “academic disciplines in which humans seek understanding of human self-understandings and self-expressions, and of the ways in which people thereby construct and experience the world they live in.”Footnote ⁴² According to Haufe, they produce “disciplinary knowledge of human experience.”Footnote ⁴³ Similarly, Grimm, Peels, and Van Woudenberg highlight the humanities’ epistemic aims by foregrounding their “quest for understanding” – a quest for understanding objects that are meaningful, saturated with intentions, and imbued with values. Even in their chapter on political and moral agendas, the epistemic perspective remains dominant insofar as the authors argue that non-epistemic aims can coexist with epistemic ones and sometimes even yield epistemic benefits.Footnote ⁴⁴

Arguably, this epistemic perspective is of paramount importance. Empirically speaking, however, humanities scholars do much more than pursuing epistemic aims. Historians of the humanities, therefore, preferably cast their net a little wider. Although they are interested in knowledge, too, they treat this knowledge “as if it was produced by people with bodies, situated in time, space, culture, and society, and struggling for credibility and authority.”Footnote ⁴⁵ They draw attention to institutions that enable scholars to devote themselves to research and teaching, to expectations that come with funding for the humanities, be it from public or private sources, and to students without whom there would be no academic humanities at all. How such interventions seek to broaden the conversation beyond epistemic concerns can be shown with three concrete examples.

The first example is David Hollinger’s edited volume, The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion since World War II (2006). In fields such as literary theory and media studies, says Hollinger, research methods and rules of evidence are often more contested, and therefore less stable, than in chemistry or economics. Also, they tend to remain more closely tied to issues of public concern. For this reason, the humanities have historically been “borderlands between Wissenschaft and opinion, between scholarship and ideology.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Hollinger’s volume explores how this entanglement of knowledge and politics shaped the humanities in Cold War America. Some chapters deal with capital P politics, for instance, by examining how “area studies” (Russian studies, Latin American studies) were established with financial support from an American government that had political reasons for “knowing the enemy.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Others, by contrast, look at the small p politics of disciplinary inclusion and exclusion. How much room did the postwar humanities provide to female, Catholic, or Black scholars? “On what basis was this or that idea, text, project, or social group included or excluded? To what extent was scholarship expected to reflect the ethnoracial, religious, or gender group of which a scholar was a member?”Footnote ⁴⁸ Although “truth” and “truth seeking” have made it into the index, too, this is a volume about the social and political realities in which American humanities scholars studied the world, built their disciplines, and educated their students.

From a very different angle, Steffen Martus and Carlos Spoerhase examine scholars’ daily routines. They are interested in working rhythms, reading habits, collegial exchanges, and media of communication – the latter including handwritten letters as well as business cards and offprints. Drawing on the rich personal papers of two literary scholars, Péter Szondi and Friedrich Sengle, Martus and Spoerhase provide a “history of everyday life” (Alltagsgeschichte) in the twentieth-century humanities. Epistemic pursuits play no minor role, as Szondi and Sengle spent much time doing research and writing books. Just as important and demanding, however, were other tasks, such as attending department meetings, mentoring junior colleagues, and writing letters of recommendation. Also, while humanities scholars may have the reputation of doing their best work in splendid isolation at their own desk, drawing on their own research, Martus and Spoerhase show that collegial dependency exists everywhere – if only in the form of institutions providing research time and secretaries typing out handwritten drafts. All this can be interpreted as empirical input for a social epistemology, attentive to the many hands that contribute to supposedly single-authored studies. In reality, however, the perspective is even broader. Scholars’ everyday life as portrayed by Martus and Spoerhase also includes quarrels between colleagues, workplace romances, and family holidays during which the work-addicted literature professor “continues to read with pencil in hand.”Footnote ⁴⁹

In addition to these political and social (“praxeological”) histories of the humanities, there is the history of emotions as practiced by Constanze Güthenke in a study on nineteenth-century philology. Academic life has, of course, its own emotional texture, with plenty of occasions for joy and jealousy. Güthenke’s primary interest is in philologists’ love life or, more specifically, their love of Antiquity. As much as nineteenth-century scholars insisted on methods and virtues, their language was often imbued with feeling, longing, and desire. German scholars’ relationship with the ancient Greeks in particular, says Güthenke, was one of “longed-for and yet sublimated proximity.”Footnote ⁵⁰ This desire was perhaps most visible in an idealization of ancient Greek ethics and aesthetics, especially in the early stages of German Philhellenism. Just as real, however, was the discourse of love permeating philologists’ didactic practice. Güthenke quotes a German educator according to whom “the efficiency of a teacher will depend … first and foremost on love for the ancients and on a desire to sow new seeds of this love” in students’ hearts (preferably in seminars or “exercises,” which philologists lovingly regarded as modern-day equivalents of Plato’s symposium).Footnote ⁵¹ Knowledge of the ancients, in other words, was inseparable from feelings of longing, aspiration, and nostalgia.

In none of these examples, scholars’ search for knowledge is ignored or trivialized. Yet in all of them, epistemic pursuits are embedded in broader scholarly cultures, shaped by social conventions, political agendas, and emotional identifications as much as by desires for knowledge, recognition, and societal relevance.Footnote ⁵² This is historians’ first contribution: they stress the multilayered, multidimensional nature of the humanities.Footnote ⁵³

2.2 Temporal and Geographical Horizons

Adding historical depth and geographical breadth to the current debate is a second feature of historians’ work. Historians like to show that the humanities as we currently know them are products of history, with genealogies that stretch much further back in time than most of us realize. Many, perhaps especially in English-speaking countries, treat the humanities as if they originate in the mid-twentieth century. Such stories of origin have their own rationale: they reveal what sort of legacies, positive or negative, authors experience as relevant and what the standard is against which they perceive the humanities as “declining” or “in trouble.” However, when historical analysis does not reach further back than three-quarters of a century, there is the risk of the recent past receiving too much attention. Arguably, “short-termism” is not of much help in understanding the humanities.Footnote ⁵⁴

Why does the twentieth century figure so prominently in current thinking about the humanities? Toby Miller’s provocative book, Blow Up the Humanities (2012), offers a clue. Speaking about media and cultural studies, Miller bemoans that these fields, despite a track record of more than half a century, still stand in the shadow of classic humanities disciplines such as literature, history, and philosophy. Not only are cultural and media studies poorly represented at Ivy League universities, but they are also often ignored in highbrow treatises on the humanities such as Martha Nussbaum’s Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2010).Footnote ⁵⁵ As Miller is committed to interdisciplinary study of contemporary society more than to elitist Bildung, he feels that the humanities as he would like to practice them are hampered by the continuing dominance of mid-twentieth-century tropes (“humanism,” “democracy,” and “high culture”) that have long reached their expiration date.Footnote ⁵⁶ Similarly, if English professor Neil Badmington accuses the humanities of being too anthropocentric – “If ‘the human’ is no longer a credible category, how can the humanities remain something in which to have faith?” – he takes issue with a legacy that he sees epitomized in Ronald Crane’s essay, “The Idea of the Humanities.”Footnote ⁵⁷ For Badmington, this text from 1953 exemplifies how strongly the humanities are inclined to treat human beings as “absolutely, naturally, ontologically different from – and superior to – all other beings.”Footnote ⁵⁸ The humanities in which Badmington has ceased to believe are therefore of a historically specific kind. Like Miller, Badmington distances himself from a mid-twentieth-century version of the humanities or, more specifically, from a type of justification of the humanities offered at a time when “man” was perceived to be in crisis and in need of support.Footnote ⁵⁹ Like Miller’s, Badmington’s humanities are the postwar American humanities as described by Geoffrey Galt Harpham: “Defined in opposition to science, ideology, mechanization, behaviorism, mass society, the overvaluation of rationality, and modernity in general, the humanities were identified with notions of empowerment, liberation, cultivation, civic responsibility, and, almost invariably, ethical behavior and the development of character.”Footnote ⁶⁰

Historians will be the last to deny the lasting impact of this postwar American legacy. As Eric Adler has shown, much of what advocates of the humanities claimed or promised in the 1950s and 1960s is still being repeated, for good or for ill.Footnote ⁶¹ Nonetheless, it would be short-sighted to reduce the history of the humanities to this recent episode in American intellectual life – as if the humanities did not exist before the twentieth century and outside of the United States. Arguably, it would even be counterproductive to grant so much definitional power to the recent American past. If the humanities as construed at that particular moment in time and place cease to convince, it would seem as if the humanities as such are at risk.

Historians like to remedy this problem by tracing the humanities further back in time (thereby turning “humanities” from an actor’s category into an analytical one). They seek to expand the story by offering more extended genealogies of the humanities. Although Section 3 will show that different authors construe these genealogies in different ways, what their work has in common is an awareness of historical layers that have shaped the humanities over the course of centuries. Some of these layers are indeed of recent origin. As Harpham shows, the idea that immersion in the humanities helps students cultivate a democratic mindset is of twentieth-century provenance (it was especially popular in the Cold War era).Footnote ⁶² A longer perspective is needed, however, to explain why humanities courses found their way into American higher education curricula. According to James Turner, the crucial factor were historically Protestant colleges and universities in the United States, which by the early twentieth century sought to replace mandatory courses in Christian moral philosophy with less markedly religious alternatives.Footnote ⁶³ Even larger time scales are needed for understanding how classifications of disciplines into clusters such as “science” and “humanities” developed over time.Footnote ⁶⁴ Still older are methods of textual scholarship. Christopher Celenza points to the lasting influence of the studia humanitatis as practiced in Renaissance Italy, while Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams extend the story to Biblical philology in the age of Origen and Eusebius.Footnote ⁶⁵ By drawing attention to different historical layers, these accounts help us appreciate how far the roots of the humanities reach back in time.Footnote ⁶⁶

If this puts the present-day humanities in historical perspective, historians also try to broaden the geographical scope of the conversation, to prevent the story from becoming too provincial. Speaking about the humanities in Ireland, Michael O’Sullivan explicitly takes issue with American-centric stories like Harpham’s. While it may be true that America’s global influence imbued the word “humanities” with distinctively American connotations, perhaps especially in non-American ears, this does not warrant the conclusion that the humanities are originally American. The Irish humanities, for one, have their own sources of inspiration, such as John Henry Newman’s famous book, The Idea of a University (based on a 1852 lecture series in Dublin, where Newman went on to become the founding rector of the Catholic University of Ireland).Footnote ⁶⁷ Although American versions of humanities were exported worldwide, with or without money from Rockefeller and other private foundations, Ali Erken argues that a simple diffusion model of American humanities spreading across the world does not hold. As shown by the case of mid-twentieth-century Turkey, American-style humanities collided and blurred with local traditions of learning, thereby producing forms of research and teaching that were no longer recognizably American.Footnote ⁶⁸ Meanwhile, European historians write histories of the Geisteswissenschaften in Central and Eastern Europe,Footnote ⁶⁹ with this German term now routinely being translated as “humanities” (even if human studies or human sciences might actually be more accurate).Footnote ⁷⁰ Although “humanities” has no clear equivalent in Chinese, the term is also used in English-language scholarship on Chinese higher education.Footnote ⁷¹ Likewise, there is an emerging body of literature on the humanities in Africa.Footnote ⁷² While these examples testify to the inescapability of the word “humanities” in an age of global English, they also illustrate that American stories of origin are too narrow to account for the global variety of practices nowadays referred to as humanities.

In sum, just as historians refuse to believe that the history of the humanities starts with the coinage of the term “humanities,” they are disinclined to confine this history to a single country. By tracing the humanities through time and space, they seek to enlarge the conversation both temporally and geographically.

2.3 Exemplary Stories

At this point, a skeptical reader might ask to what extent these efforts at uncovering forgotten layers and branches really increase our understanding of the humanities. If historians are in the habit of complicating things, bringing up counterexamples whenever someone tries to bring clarity in definitional matters, don’t they run the risk of obscuring rather than illuminating the nature of the humanities?

This risk is real insofar as clarity of insight is equated with one-sentence definitions. Few historians are prepared to believe that the question of what the humanities are is one allowing for short answers. Consequently, the clarity that historians aim for is of a different kind. They try to give their readers a feel for the interplay of continuity and change over time. They try to show how the humanities have not been created ex nihilo but come into being under the influence of multiple factors, old and new. They try to elucidate how the humanities took on different shapes and forms in different times and places, while cultivating a proper awareness of the many interacting dimensions – aims, methods, institutions, values, emotions – that make up the humanities. In other words, historians teach their readers that the humanities are multilayered realities, “heterogeneous entanglements of facts and values, formulae and stories.”Footnote ⁷³ Historians, says Simon During, do not offer “an idea of the humanities but rather a picture of them as they are, and one largely drawn from the stages and mutations through which the humanities got to be what they are.”Footnote ⁷⁴

This explains why historians’ preferred intellectual operations are narrativization and exemplification. The development of ideas, methods, practices, and institutions over time is better captured in story form than in tables or formulae. Historians, therefore, write stories: narratives of continuity and change over time. They constitute their object, not by defining it as succinctly as possible, but by telling stories about it. Philosopher Louis Mink, reflecting on this storytelling habit, infers from it that historians aim for a type of understanding that is different from both definitions (what do the humanities have in common?) and typologies (which disciplines make up the humanities?). Historians aim for “configurational” rather than theoretical or categorial understanding. Narratives are their privileged means for creating representations – “pictures,” as During says – that hold together sameness and difference, unity and diversity, or continuity and change.Footnote ⁷⁵

How, one might ask, can historians write such narratives or create such images without properly delineating their topic? This is where exemplification comes in. As Lorraine Daston explains, exemplification takes place whenever historians present a specific example (say, Greek philology in Victorian Britain) as capable of illuminating something larger (say, the development of the humanities in nineteenth-century Europe). As historians have no means to determine the representativity of Victorian philology, they cannot reason inductively from case to pattern. What they can do instead is present their cases as glimpses into a world or as snapshots that show us something important about the humanities. It is as if their narratives say: “These are elements that have to be taken into account. These ideas, practices, habits, or emotions are part of what we call the humanities. Whatever else the humanities may entail, these are elements that matter, or dimensions that should not be overlooked.”

So, as long as historians regard it as their task to restore complexity to current conversations about the humanities, they will be among the last to come up with well-defined analytical categories. Their preferred modus operandi is not theoretical but configurational. This is why the stories that historians write seek to exemplify rather than define the humanities. Although these stories do not capture the humanities in their entirety – we see other things if we shift our gaze to other periods, regions, or disciplines – they do alert us to aspects of the humanities that are notable, revealing, and perhaps even characteristic.Footnote ⁷⁶

3.1 Four Narratives

Where do the humanities come from? According to Rens Bod, the humanities are almost as old as humanity itself. Although he acknowledges that the humanities as academic fields of study are products of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he emphasizes that the study of language, art, and history as such has much older roots. Even distinctions between the study of nature and that of the human world appear to have longer histories than often assumed. Via Giambattista Vico and the Renaissance studia humanitatis, Bod traces the story back to the Roman artes liberales “and further to the Hellenistic curriculum known as enkyklios paideia.” “In writing a general history of the humanities, we thus need to start where we first find these studies – in Antiquity.”Footnote ⁷⁸ True to this ambition, Bod’s book, A New History of the Humanities (2013), provides a longue durée overview of humanities scholarship, focused on methodological principles that scholars devised and applied in fields such as logic, rhetoric, poetics, and history. While the story features famous names such as Herodotus and Pythagoras, it also devotes ample space to the analogists of Alexandria, the anomalists of Pergamon, the Sanskrit Nāṭya Shāstra, the musicological work of Liu An, and the principles of painting outlined in the Ṣaḍaṅga. These and many other books and authors constitute “the humanities of the ancient world,” as Bod calls them, which in turn provided a foundation for everything to come, including the flourishing of learning in the so-called Islamic Golden Age.Footnote ⁷⁹

This is a very different story from Geoffrey Harpham’s, whose book The Humanities and the Dream of America (2011) we already encountered in the previous section. Whereas Bod zooms out as far as possible, Harpham zooms in on a single country in a single century. Although he does not fail to devote a few pages to the philological antecedents of the twentieth-century humanities, Harpham maintains that “the modern concept of the humanities” appeared only in the 1930s’ United States. In the aftermath of World War II, the concept established itself as “the heart and soul of general education,” “founded on explicitly American notions of human nature, human culture, and human flourishing, and … promoted by those saw these notions, and the nation that sponsored them, as being under threat in a dangerous world.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Also, whereas Bod’s dramatis personae are individuals who lent their names to methodological breakthroughs, Harpham’s story largely revolves around the humanities’ self-understanding as articulated in reports such as Harvard’s Redbook of 1945 – “the single most important document in the history of ‘the humanities’” – the Truman Commission Report of 1947, and the 1964 Report of the Commission on the Humanities.Footnote ⁸¹ So, this is a story, not about methodological advances in linguistics or art history, but about a particular conception of liberal arts education, which Harpham, unlike Bod, sharply distinguishes from the “human sciences” and Geisteswissenschaften as practiced outside of the United States.Footnote ⁸²

Somewhere between these extremes lies James Turner’s book, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (2014). As his title suggests, Turner moves Harpham’s philological antecedents into the center of attention. He argues that twentieth-century humanities scholars were heirs to generations of philologists, with “philology” prior to the twentieth century covering textual scholarship (classical, Biblical, oriental philology) as well as inquiries into the nature and evolution of language (linguistics avant la lettre).Footnote ⁸³ Turner’s story, then, is one about “the birth of the modern humanities … from the womb of philology.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Central to this account is the rise of disciplinary identities and the intellectual boundary work accompanying it. Turner’s aim is to show “how different humanistic fields of study grew over time, in changing relationship to each other and to other areas of knowledge.”Footnote ⁸⁵ For this reason, Philology resembles Suzanne Marchand’s history of disciplines (see Section 1) more than Harpham’s history of humanist metadiscourse. Also, insofar as Turner maintains that “today’s multiple humanities collectively form the latest version of a millennia-long Western tradition of inquiry,” he aligns himself with Bod more than with Harpham.Footnote ⁸⁶ Unlike all of them, however, Turner sees little reason to identify with the modern humanities. Rather than depicting the rise of disciplines as a triumph of professionalization, he tells a story of gradual decomposition, in which “thickly interconnected” branches of philology gradually developed into distinct intellectual enterprises, each with its own questions, methods, and agendas (notwithstanding occasional exchanges of the sort discussed in Section 1). Turner’s overarching story line, therefore, is one of unity dissolving into multiplicity.Footnote ⁸⁷

An even less optimistic tone permeates our fourth and last example: Archaeology of Babel: The Colonial Foundations of the Humanities (2018) by Siraj Ahmed. Like Turner, Ahmed makes a case for the humanities descending from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philology. But whereas Turner mainly dwells on England, Scotland, and the United States, Ahmed shifts the focus to late eighteenth-century India, where scholars such as William Jones put their scholarship into the service of the British colonial government. Jones was, of course, a man of great learning and huge influence: he helped establish the idea of an Indo-European language family. However, as Ahmed points out, Jones’ grammars and dictionaries were tools of dominion, too. By standardizing languages on the basis of small corpora of written texts, they contributed to the demise of regional languages and oral traditions. Also, drawing on the European idea that language and literature reflect the soul of a nation, they offered colonial administrators a “scientific” tool for defining Indian identity. Add to this the developmental schemes of Jones and his colleagues, according to which India lagged behind Europe, and it is clear that philologists were complicit in the colonial project – and remain so to the extent that they keep working with the canons and concepts developed by Jones cum suis. Ahmed therefore insists that humanities scholars should see themselves as “inheritors of a colonial legacy,” responsible for coming to terms with what the book’s subtitle calls “the colonial foundation of the humanities.”Footnote ⁸⁸

So, despite all four books tracing origins of the humanities, they end up in different places. They highlight different episodes, while also taking different evaluative positions. What should we make of this? Are Bod, Harpham, Turner, and Ahmed contradicting each other? Or are their studies complementary – the humanities’ equivalents of aerial photos of the Nile, technical reports about water mass flow rates, and ecological studies of bankside vegetation?

3.2 Interpretive Choices

To answer this question, it helps to assess in greater detail where the differences between our authors lie. Without aiming to be exhaustive, I list six variables that enable us to specify what makes Turner’s Philology so different from Ahmed’s Archaeology of Babel, and Harpham’s story so unlike Bod’s.

First, authors define their scope of inquiry. What aspects of the humanities do they study? Do they hone in on research methods, teaching practices, disciplinary identities, student enrollment statistics, or public defenses of the humanities? If Harpham examines “the discourse of the humanities” or the value attached to the humanities in American public life, this is a different topic from the “quest for principles and patterns” that is central to Bod’s history of linguistics, musicology, art history, and the like.Footnote ⁸⁹ Periodization and geographical scope also help delineate the subject matter. As most of Turner’s book is focused on the English-speaking world, its scope differs from that of Efraim Podoksik’s Doing Humanities in Nineteenth-Century Germany.

Methods are a second, broadly construed variable. At first sight, all four books practice a somewhat traditional kind of intellectual history, revolving around influential scholars and their publications. None of the books engage in statistical, prosopographic, or bibliometric analysis or draw on systems theory (Niklas Luhmann) or field theory (Pierre Bourdieu) – though all of these methods have occasionally been employed by other historians of the humanities.Footnote ⁹⁰ Still, even if all authors provide some kind of intellectual history, there are notable differences in how extensively they engage with primary sources, how much they are prepared to generalize their findings, and how they operationalize concepts such as “legacies.” Whereas Turner stresses how much the humanities have lost since the late eighteenth century – his story has little room for enduring legacies – Ahmed, by contrast, emphasizes that the humanities remain heirs to a “still-unconsidered and hence unresolved colonial legacy.”Footnote ⁹¹ (But if that is the case, how many other unresolved legacies are there? What does it take to leave a dark legacy behind? Haven’t decades of postcolonial thinking had any effect?)Footnote ⁹²

The third variable is modes of explanation. What are drivers of change in the history of the humanities? A generation ago, historians of science distinguished between “internalist” and “externalist” approaches. The former preferably attributed scientific change to scientists’ own hypotheses and experiments, without granting much agency to outside factors. The latter, by contrast, maintained that science is also shaped, sometimes even decisively, by the social, political, and institutional realities in which it is practiced.Footnote ⁹³ Although most historians of science now prefer to avoid these extremes, the distinction still serves heuristic purposes. It allows us to see that Bod’s narrative, for instance, focuses more exclusively on scholars’ ideas than Ahmed’s account of the colonial uses of philological knowledge, or Harpham’s analysis of the political contexts in which humanities scholars in Cold War America could successfully make a case for liberal arts education. Apparently, authors make different assessments of factors contributing to the emergence or persistence of scholarly ideas, methods, and practices.

Next, there are the plots or storylines that structure historians’ accounts. How do authors tell the story of the humanities? Does the story amount to a narrative of progress (“professionalization”) or rather resemble a tragedy, with the protagonist steadily heading toward downfall (“crisis of the humanities”)?Footnote ⁹⁴ Although Bod writes a story of continuity more than improvement, he does not hesitate to end his book on a positive note: “The humanities are doing better than ever.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Turner, by contrast, is so dismissive of disciplinary silos that his rich account of discipline formation ultimately reads like a history of decline. If these examples invoke the archetypes of comedy and tragedy, respectively, Ahmed opts for a plot in which good (postcolonial) forces remain in battle with bad (colonial) powers, with the outcome of their struggle yet unsure.

Related to these storylines are authors’ subject positions. One may interpret this variable in narrowly biographical terms, as referring to authors’ social, political, or disciplinary positionality. The notion of subject positions, however, refers more specifically to stances that authors adopt toward their subject matter.Footnote ⁹⁶ How closely do they identify with the people, ideas, or practices they write about, or with the humanities at large? How much distance do they maintain, either morally (by condemning all colonial practices) or methodologically (by adopting an observer’s position and refusing to subject the past to moral evaluation)?Footnote ⁹⁷ Bod’s almost apologetic tone reflects a degree of identification that is significantly larger than Ahmed’s, just as Harpham identifies more closely with the twentieth-century humanities than Turner is prepared to do.

Finally, there are the normative messages that stories send to their readers (“this is what we should do”). Ahmed is perhaps most explicit in this regard, urging his readers to join him in developing a “postcolonial humanities,” disentangled from the colonial project, aimed at restoring justice to what textual scholarship since the eighteenth century has erased. “We would need to read texts differently,” says Ahmed, attentive to “the uncompromisingly unhistorical and therefore nameless” voices that the colonial archive sought to suppress.Footnote ⁹⁸ Although Turner is less explicit, his concluding note on a future humanities that may “broaden the monoglot, narrowly focused scholarship increasingly common in the humanities during the past half century” leaves no doubt about the direction in which he would like to push his readers.Footnote ⁹⁹ Even Bod ends on a normative tone, with a plea for celebrating diversity: “We would be better advised not to just put up with the versatility of the humanities, but to embrace it.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ (Such messages tend to become most explicit when historians engage with the alleged “crisis of the humanities,” on which more in Section 4.)

Arguably, the six variables identified so far are not exhaustive. Genre may be another relevant category, with Toby Miller’s manifesto, Blow Up the Humanities, clearly belonging to a different genre than the deftly written and extensively annotated essays in David Hollinger’s The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion since World War II. Also, intended audiences may be a helpful variable, able to account for the level of detail in which authors present or discuss their findings. Nonetheless, the six variables go some way to providing us with a toolkit for understanding what distinguishes the books reviewed in Section 3.1. Scope, methods, modes of explanation, storylines, subject positions, and normative messages are variables that allow us to grasp how Bod, Harpham, Turner, and Ahmed construe the history of the humanities in different ways.

3.3 Competitive or Complementary?

What, then, does this tell us about overlap or competition between the books under review? The six variables allow us to see that the authors focus their attention on different themes, while studying them from different points of view. In other words: our authors find themselves in different places of the Nile system. Had they shared a scope, a method, and a mode of explanation, divergent findings would have made their studies collide. Yet as long as they focus on different aspects of the Nile, while examining them from different methodological angles, there is no reason to interpret diverging results as evidence of contradictions. A study of rainfall in the Nyamagabe district does not contradict an inspection report of the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, just as an ornithological survey of the northern Nile Valley does not compete with an archaeological study of ancient farming practices in the Faiyum region. These analogies, to be sure, do not aim to downplay the differences between Bod, Harpham, Turner, and Ahmed. On the contrary, they seek to take them seriously, to the point of suggesting that the four authors sometimes barely have common ground. Although they all engage with the origins of the humanities, the strands on which they focus their attention are so different that their studies cannot plausibly be read as contradicting each other.

There are two more reasons for interpreting the books as complementary rather than as mutually exclusive. The first of these is that authors explicitly point to the limitations of their chosen perspectives or find themselves reminded of these by vigilant reviewers. A New History of the Humanities is largely about “pattern seekers”: men such as Pāṇini, the Sanskrit grammarian famous for “the discovery of grammar.” Bod generously acknowledges, however, that the quest of patterns and principles “has not been the only thread in the history of the humanities.” For every pattern seeker there was a pattern denier. Indeed, the “pattern-rejecting tradition,” as Bod dubs it, has been an “ongoing line in the history of the humanities,” too. In the final sentences of his book, Bod goes so far as to call this alternative tradition “at least as fascinating” as the one covered in his book.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Whatever exactly this means, it seems to convey a helpfully anti-reductionist stance, which refuses to narrow the history of the humanities to what a single book can cover.Footnote ¹⁰²

By drawing attention to alternative layers or legacies, book reviewers also play a part in promoting multi-perspectivity. While Ahmed’s book makes painfully clear how much of British philology around 1800 was entangled with colonial projects, speaking of “the colonial foundation of the humanities,” in the singular and with a definite article, obscures the importance of other formative traditions. This is why James Porter argues that “Ahmed’s study operates with an unnecessarily narrow view of philology,” while forgetting that “philology is not an ideological monolith.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Although Turner tells a more subtle and multilayered story, he, too, finds himself reminded of alternative traditions. If Turner gives a decidedly negative answer to the question of whether philosophy was part of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century humanities (“Absolutely not”),Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Stefan Collini recalls that nineteenth-century ideals of aesthetic education largely emerged out of late eighteenth-century moral philosophy. “Indeed, as compelling a story can be made for ‘moral philosophy’, in its broad eighteenth-century sense, as for philology as the matrix out of which much of the modern humanities syllabus derived.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ So, in all of these cases, it is clear that the authors are not covering all of the humanities, but only unearthing some of their origins.

What adds to this is a second observation. None of the books starts from scratch; all assume familiarity with earlier stories about the history of the humanities. Turner makes this explicit by speaking about “forgotten origins,” as does Bod by calling his book a “new history.” “It is often assumed,” explains Bod with a footnote referencing Hans-Georg Gadamer, “that the humanities did not form a separate field of study before the nineteenth century” – an assumption his book subsequently tries to falsify.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Each in their own way, then, Turner and Bod challenge a piece of received wisdom. It is as if they respond to some kind of inherited narrative, pointing out its limitations while remedying them by calling attention to dimensions that the story overlooks. This standard narrative should, of course, not be sought in a single book, if only because different authors have different axes to grind.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Nonetheless, our four authors mostly respond to how the history of the humanities was construed in the decades following World War II. Explicitly or otherwise, they are in critical conversation with “humanist metadiscourse” from the 1950s to the 1960s – the discourse that Harpham’s book seeks to historicize. There are three things in particular with which they take issue:

1. 1. Stories that limit the humanities to “our own Western tradition,”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ thereby turning Asia, Africa, and Latin America into “continents without humanities” (sometimes to the point of recommending curricula hardly broader than “Homer, one or two of the Greek tragedies, Plato, the Bible, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Tolstoy”).Footnote ¹⁰⁹

2. 2. Stories that limit the humanities to the extraordinary achievements of extraordinary men (starting with the ancient Greeks or Romans, ignoring the Middle Ages, and dwelling at length on Renaissance humanism before arriving via the Scientific Revolution and the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in the modern era).Footnote ¹¹⁰

3. 3. Stories that limit the humanities to legacies with which modern practitioners can proudly identify (“an unbroken tradition in the humanities with which her present practitioners can identify and which must be to us a source of unending pride,” as philosopher Albert William Levi put it in 1968).Footnote ¹¹¹

We might read our four books as four different responses to this received template. While Harpham reads it contextually, as an expression of postwar American aspirations, his three colleagues seek to overcome its limitations by drawing attention to “forgotten” strands within the history of the humanities. If this reading makes sense, two things follow from it. First, the books should not be mistaken for histories of the humanities in toto. Like much of the research surveyed in Section 1, they position themselves within the broad domain of the humanities rather than claiming a bird’s-eye point of view from where they can oversee the historical development of the humanities in all their many facets. Second, to the extent that they zoom in on different facets – be it half-forgotten episodes, areas outside of Europe and North America, or dark pages in the history of the humanities – they expand on the standard narratives in different ways. Rather than contradicting each other, the books enrich the history of the humanities by adding to their genealogy.Footnote ¹¹²

The history of the humanities, in sum, is like the Nile: too long, too rich, and too multifaceted to be captured in a single text. There are more tributaries than the Renaissance, more waterways than ancient Greece and Rome. Tracing the origins of the humanities is a way of increasing our awareness of the many streams contributing to the river we call the humanities.

4.1 The Rhetoric of “Crisis”

Why do historians hesitate to say that the humanities are in “crisis”? One reason, no doubt, is a professional aversion to language that is rhetorically powerful but analytically imprecise. Another, more important one, is the timescale implied in the word “crisis.” A crisis, writes Frank Donoghue in a book on the steadily growing influence of corporate thinking in the academic world, is “a suddenly looming emergency for which we need to find a dramatic and immediate solution.”Footnote ¹²⁰ But insofar as “the crisis of the humanities” refers to the humanities’ inability to meet students’ and employers’ demands for vocational training, the short-term connotations of the phrase obscure the long-term causes of the problem:

Likewise, in his book, The Humanities “Crisis” and the Future of Literary Studies (2014), Paul Jay notes that “the term ‘crisis’ suggests a dramatic turning point at the brink of catastrophe, a decisive moment of instability portending collapse.”Footnote ¹²² He is prepared to accept that this is how things felt for faculty who in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis heard their university presidents announce the closure of entire humanities programs. From this specific point of view, Jay agrees with Stanley Fish that the current crisis of the humanities symbolically began on October 1, 2010, when George M. Philip, the president of New York State University in Albany, made the national headlines by declaring that classics, French, Italian, Russian, and theater studies would be discontinued. Jay immediately adds, however, that the calculations behind this decision were anything but new. The capitalist idea that teaching must pay off, for universities as well as their students, can be traced at least a century back.Footnote ¹²³ Clearly, then, historians feel uncomfortable with what Donoghue calls “the foreshortened timeline of the crisis model.”Footnote ¹²⁴

Closely related is the demand for resolution, or the imperative that something must be done. “Crisis is a dramaturgic term, suggesting urgent problems that require immediate heroic solutions.”Footnote ¹²⁵ In this context, several authors cite Reinhart Koselleck, whose influential work on the conceptual history of Krise emphasizes that “crisis,” derived from the Greek κρίνειν, refers to the “right moment for a decision.”Footnote ¹²⁶ As we shall see, historians are not insensitive to the idea that action is needed. When it comes to “the crisis of the humanities,” many are eager to offer advice. However, making decisions or implementing solutions is not something that falls within historians’ realm of competence. Even university administrators have limited agency beyond their own institutions. So, if a crisis constitutes a state of emergency in which exceptional measures are needed, who is the sovereign able to lead the way out?Footnote ¹²⁷

Because of these connotations, some authors avoid the term “crisis,” preferring more prosaic alternatives such as “an ongoing set of problems.”Footnote ¹²⁸ Others, more realistically perhaps, retain the term but try to twist it in such a way as to alleviate its short-termism. Along these lines, Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon speak about a “permanent crisis,” while Sverre Raffnsøe insists that the humanities’ crisis, insofar as there is one, is a “productive crisis.”Footnote ¹²⁹ As always, however, historians intervene most powerfully by historicizing the topic at hand. In the spirit of the nineteenth-century adage that “the true critique of dogma is its history,” they challenge humanities’ crisis rhetoric by writing its history.Footnote ¹³⁰ This is what Hampus Östh Gustafsson does in showing with a range of historical examples that crisis rhetoric almost invariably invokes a golden age. Nostalgic comparisons between idealized pasts and current predicaments are “crisis-generating mechanisms”: they make people feel that the humanities now fare worse than they did.Footnote ¹³¹ In their book, Permanent Crisis (2021), Reitter and Wellmon add that crisis rhetoric not only fuels frustration but also, more positively, fulfills a social function by uniting scholars otherwise separated by theories, methods, or disciplinary divides. Insofar as the humanities are charged with the task of remedying modernity’s ills – cherishing human values in a world governed by impersonal forces – a lack of societal recognition may, paradoxically, even underscore the humanities’ importance. This leads Reitter and Wellmon to argue that “crisis has played a crucial role in grounding the idea that the humanities have a special mission.”Footnote ¹³² Crisis is a foundational category for the humanities. Or, as Harpham asks rhetorically: “What would the humanities be without their crisis?”Footnote ¹³³

Crucially, this historicizing treatment of the humanities’ crisis discourse does not warrant the conclusion that worries about the future are unnecessary. Even if historians write histories of crisis rhetoric, they do not deny that real problems exist. Their point, however, is that most of these problems have deeper historical roots than the crisis metaphor is able to convey.

4.2 Unraveling the Crisis

What, then, are these problems? Several historians try to unravel “the crisis of the humanities” by identifying its constituent elements and disentangling their often overlapping histories. Paul Jay, for one, distinguishes between administrative budget cuts, dwindling enrollment numbers, Culture War perceptions of humanities faculty abandoning time-honored traditions in favor of political correctness, and the humanities’ cultivated distance from a capitalist logic that expects economic investments to generate returns.Footnote ¹³⁴ Without denying the legitimacy of other worries, Jay argues that the humanities’ real problem is their disconnect with a labor market operating on capitalist principles. In his reading, the tragedy of the humanities is that they are framed, by friends and foes alike, as islands of “uselessness” and “impracticability” in a world where practical utility is what counts. In postwar America, this alleged uselessness may have been a unique selling point: it allowed the humanities to present themselves as guardians of meaning in a world of technological modernity. But with capitalism advancing further, even deep into the academic world itself, this otherness has gradually become anomalous:

Reitter and Wellmon also point to the unintended consequences of expecting the humanities to compensate for the ills of modernity.Footnote ¹³⁶ “Many of the most significant attempts to define or defend the humanities,” they write, “have been not only oppositional but also defensive, pitting them against various threats: the sciences, the Soviet Union, technology, utility, the practical or vocational, authority, religion.” The humanities, in other words, have been presented as “the redemptive solution to a larger crisis routinely referred to as modernity.”Footnote ¹³⁷ Unlike Jay (and Harpham, for that matter), Reitter and Wellmon see this happening not only in postwar America but already in early twentieth-century Germany. During and after World War I, influential scholars such as Eduard Spranger believed that Geisteswissenschaftler had to instill values in their students, to the point of educating them into Weltanschauungen (“worldviews”).Footnote ¹³⁸ But is this a responsibility the humanities can bear? Apart from facing problems of value pluralism – which visions of the good life are worth propagating? – the humanities, say Reitter and Wellmon, are ill-equipped for such edifying work. Their methods and techniques lend themselves to second-order analysis of values and worldviews more than to first-order advocacy of moral principles. Whenever humanities scholars forget this, hubristically presenting themselves as agents “through which we will overcome modern crises of meaning,” they engage in what Reitter and Wellmon call “overpromising” – with all the risks involved in it. Sooner or later, inflated expectations will backfire on them.Footnote ¹³⁹

If these two examples stress the humanities’ complicity in the “crises” they are facing, a more optimistic diagnosis is offered in our third and last example: Sverre Raffnsøe’s book, A History of the Humanities in the Modern University (2024).Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Rather than foregrounding the humanities’ societal contexts or rhetorical self-justifications, Raffnsøe tells a story of how the humanities since the early nineteenth century have continuously managed to reinvent themselves. Time and again, they have welcomed new subjects, new questions, and new fields of study – think of cultural studies, women’s studies, and Black studies – and even new ontologies, such as Bruno Latour’s post-anthropocentric actor–network theory. Although Raffnsøe acknowledges that, empirically speaking, scholars’ openness to innovation has varied considerably – new paradigms often have more critics than supporters – he stresses that resistance is an inevitable by-product of scholarly innovation. In Raffnsøe’s view of things, therefore, talk of “crisis” is indicative only of growing pains. Stemming mainly from fields that “take great pains to polish handed down silver heirlooms,” this crisis talk can be ignored by all those who, like Raffnsøe himself, prefer to give up ancient inheritances for the sake of joining natural and social scientists in interdisciplinary enterprises such as environmental humanities.Footnote ¹⁴¹ If the story of the humanities is one of perpetual self-reinvention, “crisis” is another word for the pain felt by scholars for whom innovation is moving a little too fast.

Different as these diagnoses are, all three books offer an interpretation of what “the crisis of the humanities” entails. Rather than subjecting the rhetoric of crisis itself to historical scrutiny, they try to identify the causes of scholars’ perceptions of crisis. What they seek to understand, therefore, is not the humanities’ past but their present predicament.

4.3 Lessons from the Past

To what extent do these diagnoses translate into remedies? Although professional historians are often reluctant to draw lessons from the past – the history of their field is full of examples where historical understanding suffered from all-too-enthusiastic sermonizing – none of the authors featured in this section seems hindered by such hesitations.Footnote ¹⁴² If Raffnsøe diagnoses crisis moods as growing pains, it follows that humanities scholars should not look over their shoulders but move forward, courageously embracing new opportunities for expanding their understanding of the human. If anthropocentric humanism has had its day, scholars should not hesitate to reconsider humanist legacies and restructure their fields in such a way as to facilitate transdisciplinary cooperation with colleagues studying the human from ecological, biological, or biochemical perspectives. This is why Raffnsøe says that his history of the humanities – a story of “constant forward-moving” – seeks to engender “enthusiasm.”Footnote ¹⁴³ Without prescribing anything, it wants to encourage “fertile self-transgression” and stimulate scholars “to find, reassert and explore new modes of … cognition.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Jay, too, seeks to offer guidance. Extending the trend of growing corporate influence into the future, Jay predicts that the demand for vocational training “is only going to accelerate.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ In a context where labor market perspectives are all-decisive, it is counterproductive to keep associating the humanities with disinterested, unpractical, nonvocational pursuits. Therefore, “humanists and their supporters need to stop the ritualized lamentations over the crisis in the humanities and get on with the task of making them relevant in a twenty-first-century world.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Drawing on the example of a Google director who stresses the practical benefits of the thinking skills he developed as a PhD student in philosophy, Jay maintains that “transferable skills” such as analytical reasoning, critical thinking, and problem-solving are key to the survival of the humanities in a capitalist world. Leaving nineteenth-century visions of liberal education behind, humanists should recognize that “the practical value of a humanities education for employers” is what matters.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

Speaking about the boomerang effect of “overpromising,” Reitter and Wellmon also try to offer remedies. In Max Weber’s 1917 lecture, “Scholarship as Vocation,” they recognize a healthy antidote to Sprangerian equations of humanities teaching and moral instruction. Although Weber acknowledged that moral issues permeate everything scholars do – the German sociologist was anything but epistemologically naïve – he found it important to practice a certain amount of asceticism. In Reitter and Wellmon’s reading, Weber wanted classrooms to be spaces for reflection on modernity’s “value polytheism” rather than places where teachers and students speak out for or against particular values.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Drawing on this historical example, Reitter and Wellmon suggest that the humanities should abandon the pretension of knowing what the good entails. “Rather, they should induce students to reflect conscientiously on the values they presume to be their own.” The humanities prove their value, not by claiming a monopoly on meaning or moral insight, but by embodying “the moral urgency of sober, unglamorous, disciplined thinking in times of crisis.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹

Lest these three books appear as exceptions, nonrepresentative of the history of the humanities as a whole, let me conclude this section by mentioning two other, deftly researched monographs that also culminate in words of advice. Eric Adler’s book, The Battle of the Classics (2020), is a historical study of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates over the value of classical education. At the same time, its subtitle, How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today, reveals that the book can also be read as an intervention in the present. At a time when educators often stress the value of non-discipline-specific skills, Adler presents Irving Babbitt’s “substance-based apologetics” as a model to which humanities scholars should return if they care about the future of their fields. “If American institutions of higher learning persist in relying on a skills-based, substanceless approach to pedagogy, the humanities will continue to wither.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Even Christopher Celenza, the author of a learned study on The Italian Renaissance and the Origins of the Modern Humanities (2021), is not afraid of providing direction. Talking about the gradual decoupling of textual scholarship and moral philosophy in early modern Europe, Celenza notes how dangerous it is to isolate research training from character formation, or the pursuit of knowledge from moral reflection. “Unless we recover it – unless we can code-switch between specialized and non-specialized, between inward-facing and outward-facing forms of humanities scholarship, between humanities as evidence gathering and humanities as reflection on the self and on life – we may not have institutionally based humanities for much longer.”Footnote ¹⁵¹

The differences between these recommendations are considerable. Adler’s substance-based apologetics runs counter to Jay’s emphasis on transferable skills, whereas Celenza’s musings on the indispensability of moral education contrast rather sharply with Reitter and Wellmon’s plea for academic asceticism. Yet what matters for our purposes is not what kinds of advice historians of the humanities have on offer. What matters is the fact that they are prepared to bring in historical expertise in debates about the future of the humanities. While historians traditionally guard the boundaries between the is and the ought, “the crisis of the humanities” is a topic on which authors are willing to speak out, not just in historical terms, but with an eye on what must be done. Drawing on a distinction originating in the study of intellectuals, we might say that the historians covered in this section are willing to adopt the persona of the critic in addition to that of the expert. As Lloyd Kramer explains, critics distinguish themselves from experts in that they are oriented toward the future, intent on putting knowledge into the service of agendas that aim to change the present for the better.Footnote ¹⁵² Historians of the humanities, too, are not content with tracing origins of the humanities: many are eager to provide direction. As experts-cum-critics, they offer historically grounded advice on what the humanities should do to prevent their crisis from becoming a drama.

5.1 Going Global

In 2023, Lorraine Daston wrote: “In the past decade a new field called the history of the humanities has been assembled out of pieces previously belonging to the history of learning, disciplinary histories, the history of science, and intellectual history. The new specialty tends to be more widely cultivated in languages that had never narrowed their vernacular cognates of the Latin scientia to refer only to the natural sciences, such as those of Dutch and German.”Footnote ¹⁵³

Although English has become the lingua franca of the history of the humanities community, Daston is right to point out that the field has its geographical center of gravity in Europe, more specifically in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. Without downplaying contributions from other parts of the world, it is undeniable that authors based in these five countries are strongly overrepresented in the journal History of Humanities. Also, the conference series, “The Making of the Humanities,” has an unmistakable European flavor, if only because nine of its first twelve installments (2008–26) took place in Europe.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

Many feel embarrassed about this predominance of European voices. Rens Bod, for one, has repeatedly expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that only 11.3 percent of all the 864 papers presented at “The Making of the Humanities” conferences (2008–22) or published in History of Humanities (2016–22) deal with topics from the Global South – a finding related to the fact that less than 9 percent of the authors are based in the South.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Bod therefore seizes every opportunity to call for a “global” history of the humanities, in which Timbuktu and Xian are treated on a par with Amsterdam and Totonicapán.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ This is consistent with how, back in 2016, he and his fellow editors defined the mission of History of Humanities. Under the title “Going Global,” they argued for a “transgeographical history of the humanities,” intent on showing that scholarship on art, language, and history originates from different parts of the world.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

What exactly, one might ask, makes global perspectives important? While many recognize the need to rethink the humanities on a global scale, the reasons for doing so vary. Some scholars are primarily concerned about knowledge deficits. If the humanities are construed so broadly as to span the entire globe, the scholarly attention they receive is very unevenly distributed. In the Western world at least, the German Geisteswissenschaften are studied far more intensely than the Arabic آداب (adab, literature) or the Chinese 国学 (guoxue, Chinese learning), despite the fact that the latter two have exercised wide-ranging and centuries-long influence.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Other scholars see globalization as a way out of the “crisis” discussed in the previous section. Referring to the 2024 World Humanities Report, which documents burgeoning activity around the world, Wiebke Denecke, Alexander Forte, and Tristan Brown argue that the Euro-American crisis discourse is largely an “exercise in navel-gazing”: it shows no awareness of how the humanities are thriving in continents such as Asia. This leads Denecke et al. to suggest a “reenergizing” of the Euro-American humanities through engagement with “non-Western knowledge traditions.” If scholars in Europe and North America would dare to look beyond their own regions, wouldn’t they find sources of inspiration for reconfiguring or reimagining the humanities at home?Footnote ¹⁵⁹

Finally, there are scholars who seek to challenge and correct historians’ Eurocentric biases by drawing attention to traditions of learning suppressed by Western colonial powers. For them, “going global” is a means to “provincialize Europe” or de-universalize the Euro-American humanities by showing that they could achieve their hegemony only by silencing alternative traditions, most notably in colonial contexts.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Along these lines, Joel Barnes points out that the Australian humanities until deep into the twentieth century were deeply entangled with Eurocentric ideologies, to the point that “the study of indigenous non-European cultures” was excluded from the humanities as practiced at the Humanities Research Center at the Australian National University.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Barnes agrees with Bod that a “global, transhistorical vision of the humanities” should not reproduce such exclusions. Unlike Bod, however, Barnes wonders whether expanding the notion of “humanities” is the best way to achieve this objective. Given the historical legacies attached to the term, shouldn’t historians of the humanities attend more closely to “the historicity of definitions,” in order to find out “how and whether the humanities can be conceptualized” apart from their long-term Eurocentric connotations?Footnote ¹⁶²

Clearly, different motivations for pursuing a global history of the humanities come with different challenges. If knowledge deficits were the only problem, it would perhaps suffice to intensify measures of the sort taken already by History of Humanities (a theme issue on Africa, invited essays by Asian scholars) and the Society for the History of the Humanities (a conference in Cape Town, travel funding for scholars from the Global South). However, if the historicity of “the humanities” is at stake, things become more challenging. Denecke, Forte, and Brown leave no doubt that a truly global history of the humanities must be prepared to put the term “humanities” in brackets. “While acknowledging the necessary limitations of working in an English-language context, we believe that close philological engagement with ancient languages and concepts from around the globe is necessary to realign (and perhaps even replace) theoretical frameworks developed in the Euro-American academy.”Footnote ¹⁶³ On a more critical note, they warn against a “pseudo-global Eurocentrism” that adds the adjective “global” to a noun that remains imbued with Western connotations (humanities vs. science, humanities vs. religion, humanities fostering democracy).Footnote ¹⁶⁴ The challenge of “going global,” therefore, entails more than a widening of scope and an immersion into new languages: it requires a rethinking of the very categories in which the object of study is captured.Footnote ¹⁶⁵

5.2 The Conflict of the Disciplines

Issues of scope (which parts of the humanities are covered?) and participation (who are contributing to the conversation?) also play a role in what we might call, with an allusion to Immanuel Kant, “the conflict of the disciplines.” Conflict may seem too harsh a metaphor for an enterprise that welcomes scholars from across the humanities. It also seems to square badly with the heightening interest that the history of the humanities receives among scholars from the “new humanities” – a term that has a history of its own but now conventionally refers to areas such as digital and environmental humanities.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Even if Hampus Östh Gustafsson is correct to argue that scholars in traditional disciplines (classics, history, English) often find it easier to identify with “the humanities” than their colleagues in cultural studies or media studies,Footnote ¹⁶⁷ both digital and environmental humanities have claimed their rightful place within the history of the humanities.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Likewise, a recent cultural studies volume on “humanities laboratories” explicitly positions itself “in the increasingly popular field of history of the humanities.”Footnote ¹⁶⁹ So, if there is a conflict, it is not one about admission to the history of the humanities.

The problem is rather that different disciplinary backgrounds not seldom translate into different methodological expectations. This is apparent already from the diverging interpretive choices discussed in Section 3. It is even clearer, however, from methodological polemics of the sort in which, for instance, Sverre Raffnsøe engages. Drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche’s celebrated criticism of Rankean historiography, Raffnsøe explicitly voices his disdain for “mere empirical and factual” work of a sort that values accuracy and precision over vision and imagination.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Clearly, Raffnsøe is no friend of books such as Jo Tollebeek’s Men of Character: The Emergence of the Modern Humanities (2011) – a richly textured portrait of two Dutch literary scholars, based on painstaking archival research.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Within a community as broad as the history of the humanities, such diverging orientations are inevitable. Methodological disagreements are bound to occur whenever scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds come together. The question only is how much room participants grant each other.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, given the field’s historical orientation, professional historians sometimes set the bar quite high. The most critical review of Reitter and Wellmon’s Permanent Crisis came from a historian of scholarship who worried about the casual manner in which the authors, both trained in German studies, relate to existing historical scholarship.Footnote ¹⁷² The most principled criticism of Will Bridges’ history of “inhumanities,” in the 2019 volume of History of Humanities, came from an intellectual historian who feared that excessive attention to elitism, racism, and colonialism in the history of the humanities might fail to appreciate the extent to which resistance to such practices also came from within the humanities.Footnote ¹⁷³ Similarly, it was an intellectual historian who, in the pages of Modern Intellectual History, took issue with Bod’s history of pattern seeking, attributing all of its perceived ills to the author’s disciplinary background: “At the risk of maligning a discipline, I infer that this has something to do with Bod being a linguist of the modern stripe, if that is now a discipline for which principles and patterns matter, as they do very little for the rest of us.”Footnote ¹⁷⁴

In drawing attention to disciplinary backgrounds, my aim is not to add an ad hominem dimension to debates about interpretive choices. It is worth noting, however, that disciplinary diversity raises a methodological challenge or, more precisely, a meta-methodological question. Are intellectual historians, or historians of scholarship, in a position to stipulate how the history of the humanities must be written? As an intellectual historian myself, I believe this question cannot be answered with a simple “No, of course not!” Intellectual historians have set high standards for the study of ideas, just as historians of scholarship have spent decades figuring out how to write histories of academic practice.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ When scholars trained in other fields join them in such endeavors, they may want to profit from available expertise and methodological wisdom. At the same time, the history of the humanities should not be dominated by professional historians or be turned into a subfield of intellectual history. Insofar as it seeks to provide a space for historical reflection that is accessible to scholars with other questions, sensibilities, and relationships with the past than those sanctioned in the historical profession, it should try to combine intellectual rigor with methodological openness, especially to interventions that treat the past not as an object of disinterested study but as a yoke that must be broken, or as a painful legacy with which present-day scholars have to come to terms.

So, this is the second challenge that historians of the humanities face: How to keep up high standards while accepting, perhaps even encouraging, a diversity of viewpoints on what it means to do history? How to accommodate models as different as Ranke and Burckhardt, Ritschl and Nietzsche, Benjamin and Braudel, Momigliano and Latour?

5.3 Coetzee’s Luncheon Table

This question repeats itself when we try to position the history of the humanities vis-à-vis other, more systematic modes of inquiry, such as the philosophy of the humanities discussed in Section 2 and the “humanities theory” proposed by Amanda Anderson and Simon During in a recent little book with this title. Of course, without continuing a centuries-long tradition of mutual hostilities, it is possible to see history and philosophy as distinct enterprises, driven by questions of their own. One might accept as a matter of fact that philosophical attempts at defining the quintessence of the humanities do not engage with historical scholarship, just as historians can produce first-rate scholarship without ever consulting a philosophy book.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Arguably, however, such indifference would be intellectually unproductive, for two reasons. First, insofar as historians expand horizons, tell stories, trace origins, and provide direction, they cannot avoid touching on definitional issues. As previous sections have argued, historians often try to correct approaches that fall short in historical depth, geographical width, or analytical subtlety. This implies that historians engage with how others define the humanities – apart from that they themselves, explicitly or not, put forward their own visions of what the humanities are. Inevitably, therefore, historians share an intellectual space with philosophers. (The opposite is true as well: Philosophers never work in a historical vacuum. If Stephen Grimm and his coauthors exclude philosophy from the humanities, while situating cultural studies in a border area between the humanities and the social sciences, they operate with a historically situated and geographically specific understanding of the humanities, which may have little purchase outside of present-day Anglophone academia.)Footnote ¹⁷⁷

More important is a second reason as to why historians and philosophers of the humanities may want to cooperate. Precisely insofar as the two bring their own perspectives and insights to the conversation, they can help each other sharpen their questions, concepts, and theories. Imagine that historians would do their best to engage with some of the more systematic approaches to the humanities that have recently been put forward – with books such as Humanities Theory and A Philosophy of the Humanities or the scholarship of Willem Drees, Chris Haufe, and Sami Pihlström mentioned in Section 2. It might elicit a discipline-transcending conversation over issues relevant to everyone engaged in studying the humanities:

1. 1. What aspects or layers can we distinguish in the humanities? How helpful is it to differentiate analytically between epistemic, ontological, aesthetic, moral, political, and institutional dimensions of the humanities?

2. 2. How do these aspects relate to each other? Are philosophers who restrict their scope of inquiry to the humanities’ epistemic ambitions talking at cross purposes with historians who study the humanities from institutional points of view? Or are these aspects sufficiently entangled for such studies to touch upon each other (“no knowledge without knowledge ecosystems”)?

3. 3. If some aspects are more characteristic for the humanities than others (at a certain time and place at least), which ones would qualify as such? Does it make sense to conceive of the humanities as primarily a knowledge-producing system, analogous to the sciences, or are they better seen as an educational enterprise (“a curriculum training a social élite to fulfil its predetermined social role”)?Footnote ¹⁷⁸

4. 4. Do the humanities have an essence or common core? Given that historicizing and contextualizing are second nature to most historians, it comes as no surprise to see most of them responding in the negative. Stefan Collini, for one, believes that one cannot be “too essentialist” about a term that has been as unstable and historically contingent as “humanities.”Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Simon During, who in many papers has emphasized the humanities’ loose coherence, puts it even stronger: “Philosophy cannot describe what the humanities are because neither it nor the humanities have an essence.”Footnote ¹⁸⁰ This runs straight against Grimm et al., who believe that a philosophy of the humanities stands or falls with such an essence.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Yet even philosophers have expressed doubts. In the 1980s, Albert William Levi already warned that stating “the essence of the humanities while standing on one foot is no easy task. Essences are precarious things.”Footnote ¹⁸² This raises the question of what we understand “essences” to mean – and for which types of inquiries essentializing and de-essentializing are epistemically productive strategies.

This brief list of suggestions is, of course, illustrative rather than exhaustive: there may be many more issues that historians, philosophers, and others might want to discuss. The crucial point is that such discussions are beneficial for everyone involved. Exchanges across disciplinary borders may help ground conceptual and normative interventions in empirical realities, past or present, while making historians aware of definitional and classificatory choices that no one can avoid. The third and final challenge, therefore, is to open up the space of reflection that is the history of the humanities to scholars approaching the topic from more systematic points of view. Perhaps the time has come for what I have elsewhere called an “integrated history and philosophy of the humanities,” analogous to integrated history and philosophy of science.Footnote ¹⁸³ This should not be misinterpreted as a plea for yet another field, in addition to the history of the humanities. “Integrated HPH” is not a field but a conversation between scholars from different backgrounds. It is an invitation for dialogue and mutual learning, premised on the assumption that historical and systematic approaches to the humanities can mutually enrich each other.

If this last challenge must be captured in a single image, I think of the luncheon table in J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. The novel’s main protagonist, Elizabeth, has just heard her sister, Blanche, give a spirited talk on the history of the humanities. The upshot of the lecture, delivered during a graduation ceremony at a South African university, was that the litterae humaniores are poor substitutes for Christian moral education insofar as they remain wedded to moral and aesthetic ideals of classical provenance. Elizabeth wholeheartedly disagrees: She values everything her pious sister rejects. The conversation over lunch, presided over by the dean, therefore inevitably steers toward the nature and purpose of the humanities. Within minutes, Blanche, Elizabeth, the dean, and an English professor named Peter Godwin find themselves discussing the most diverse conceptions of the humanities, ranging from textual scholarship (“a set of techniques”) to moral edification (“guiding in perplexity”). Of course, by the time the dean breaks off the conversation, no one has convinced anyone else. But in the following days, the discussion continues, with Elizabeth trying to learn from her sister without giving up her attachment to Hellenist ideals of beauty and youth.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Perhaps this is the spirit in which an integrated history and philosophy of the humanities might be practiced: intellectually fierce, committed to disciplinary standards of rigor, but humble in its awareness that the humanities are too large a world to be reducible to what can be grasped from a single point of view.