Sign of the Tomes
BY Peter Mitton
Illustration by Rob Elliott/Swizzle
For 30 years, scholars, students and other thinking folk have cracked the Dictionary of the History of Ideas to check the origins of such notions as, say, democracy or communism or Zoroastrianism. “But it was getting to the point where I didn’t want to refer students to it any more,” says Mary George of New Jersey’s Princeton University. The modest librarian’s “personal lobby” for an updated dictionary—something less Eurocentric, less patriarchal, less … crusty 1974—has finally paid off.
“For years at meetings of the [American Library Association], I would bewail whoever was on duty at Scribner’s exhibit,” she says. In 2000, the dictionary’s publisher, Charles Scribner’s Sons, relented and sent someone to hear her plaints. This past December a fully “re-envisioned” sequel rolled off the presses.
Entries in the New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, which weighs in at six hefty volumes and costs more than $800, come from experts the world over. Previously ignored topics such as African and Asian intellectual history and women’s studies are there, as well as ideas that academia didn’t take seriously in 1974, like sexual harassment.
“The history of ideas is an essential way of looking at our world,” says George. “And I always found the work very innovative.” A choice word, that. “Innovative” just happened to be on the lips of Daniel Woolf, dean of arts at the University of Alberta, who contributed a 40,000-word entry on “historiography.”
“Take ‘innovation,’” he says, in describing the need for a dictionary of ideas. “Today it’s an idea with good connotations. But in the 16th century, when society was instinctively conservative, ‘innovation’ was something of an evil concept.” Clearly, ideas change—even at the sometimes glacial pace of academia. “We used to pay lip service to, say, Islam,” says Woolf. “But today we realize that the [European] tradition is just a fragment of the intellectual history of the world.”
Enter another Canadian contributor, Sebastian Günther, a University of Toronto scholar who wrote an entry on Islamic concepts of education. Works like this, which take Islamic ideas seriously, he says, “may eventually help us overcome some of the misconceptions of Islam common in the Western world not only since September 11.”
So, file the New Dictionary of the History of Ideas under “another crack in the ivory tower.” Just make sure you have a very large file.
