Two Cheers for Context

Though contextualism is a powerful orthodoxy in the Humanities, it is not without its critics. They complain that reliance on context creates the illusion of full meaning at a work’s point of origin, unjustly contains the work within a historical box, and neutralizes the critical potential of past texts and ideas. Starting with the Spitzer-Lovejoy debate over Geistesgeschichte and History of Ideas in the 1940s and moving to a discussion of recent critics of contextualism, the essay concludes by rethinking the nature of contextual knowledge.