Intellectual History: 5 Questions

The 5 Questions-series format is to ask five questions linking personal experience with scholarly work, not because there is any deep or global truth in biography but because scientific disciplines, their research and methods, are also inherently historical and contingent. A way to approach the question of what intellectual history is and how it can (and should) be made is personal, institutional, professional and disciplinary going from the most individual to the greatest material and ideational changes in politics, society and university. By linking the questions of the personal exposure to intellectual history with reflections on both one's own work and the state of our discipline, we hope to provoke scholarly self-reflective thought as well as provide a little bit of material to the grander tale of intellectual history. Interviews with Carlos Altamirano, Terrence Ball, Duncan Bell, Mark Bevir, Warren Breckman, Roger Chartier, Vincenzo Ferrone, Michael Friedman, Carlo Ginzburg, Jacques Le Goff, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Knud Haakonssen, Jonathan Israel, John Christian Laursen, Sven-Eric Liedman, Darrin McMahon, Allan Megill, Jan-Werner Müller, Kari Palonen, Philip Pettit, John Pocock, Hans-Jørgen Schanz, Quentin Skinner, Patricia Springborg, Edoardo Tortarolo, Richard Whatmore