The scholarly efforts of the eighteenth century can be traced to The Advancement of Learning (1605), Francis Bacon's call for what he termed "a literary history".
The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (2001), by Louis Menand and The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–50 (1973), by Martin Jay.
The historian Arthur O. Lovejoy (1873–1962) coined the phrase history of ideas[8] and initiated its systematic study[9] in the early decades of the 20th century.
Aside from his students and colleagues engaged in related projects (such as René Wellek and Leo Spitzer, with whom Lovejoy engaged in extended debates), scholars such as Isaiah Berlin,[12] Michel Foucault, Christopher Hill, J. G. A. Pocock, and others have continued to work in a spirit close to that with which Lovejoy pursued the history of ideas.
The first chapter of Lovejoy's book The Great Chain of Being (1936) lays out a general overview of what he intended to be the programme and scope of the study of the history of ideas.
Lovejoy said that the historian of ideas is tasked with identifying unit-ideas and with describing their historical emergence and development into new conceptual forms and combinations.
The principles of methodology define the overarching philosophical movement in which the historian can find the unit-idea, which then is studied throughout the history of the particular idea.
[9] The British historian Quentin Skinner criticized Lovejoy's unit-idea methodology as a "reification of doctrines" that has negative consequences.
[14] The historian Dag Herbjørnsrud said that "the Skinner perspective is in danger of shutting the door to comparative philosophy, and the search for common problems and solutions across borders and time.
[16] Michel Foucault rejected narrative, the historian's traditional mode of communication, because of what he believed to be the shallow treatment of facts, figures, and people in a long period, rather than deep research that shows the interconnections among the facts, figures, and people of a specific period of history.
[20] J. G. A. Pocock and John Dunn are among those who recently have argued for a more global approach to intellectual history in contrast to Eurocentrism.