Un sous-champ historique sur la défensive: Une réflexion sur la pertinence de l’histoire intellectuelle dans l’historiographie québécoise

Abstract

This article reflects on the relevance of intellectual history. Attacked by some defenders of a social history from the bottom up, intellectual historians often seek to justify their subject by exaggerating the shortcomings of their subfield and trying to distance themselves from it. However, practice shows that intellectual history is an open field, with broad methodological and theoretical implications, which does not suffer from a reductive definition. Intellectual history can easily be presented as complementary to a social history, which cannot really hide its dependence on abstractions, ideas and ideologies. In response to a Quebec historiography that has considered suspect certain categories intellectuals, this article rather suggests studying them as an integral part of society.