Call for papers for the Special Issue ''Between intellectual history and the sociology of intellectuals''

In recent decades, the number of research carried out in Latin America that falls within the perspective of intellectual history has grown significantly. Since the methodological consolidation of the option not to reduce ideas to their socioeconomic context, at least two different programs of approaches to ideas or discourses have been tested on our continent. Faced with a “history of ideas” that, for decades, discussed the progression of intellectual developments according to participation in a Latin American and emancipatory originality, an “intellectual history” was proposed aimed at analyzing the ideas of a given moment – ​​whether about political issues, scientific disciplines, cultural movements, etc. - in relation to the material paths that enabled the circulation of these ideas, sociability and intellectual biographies, the temporality of reading and the uses of these ideas. While in several European expressions this intellectual history appears linked to the “linguistic turn”, in Argentina and Mexico, two clear centers of intellectual history, it tends to be associated with the “material turn”, and with it the history of the book and publishing and to the reconstruction of the political-cultural itinerary not only of the intellectual elites, but also of those who carried out editing tasks, were cultural managers or writers of booklets or pamphlets. In the current development of intellectual history it is also possible to perceive an “archival turn”, since the exhaustive biblio-hemerographic tracking, the reflexive construction of the documentary corpus and the treatment of its materials attentive to the ordering and origin of these in the archives, appear as basic conditions of our intellectual history.

As shown by the responses to the recent “Encuesta sobre la historia Intellectual en el siglo XXI” coordinated by Dr Natalia Bustelo for Políticas de la memoria n° 22 (2022) and the investigation into the Argentine reception of the Frankfurt School published in History of Historiography n ° 32 (2020) by Alexandra Dias Ferraz Tedesco, our intellectual history is also closely linked to the sociology of intellectuals, pointing to the possibility of thinking about the intersection between the making of ideas, the transit of their bearers and the institutional dynamics that circumscribe their critical fortune. In this sense, this dossier also seeks to explore the possibility that methodological observatories such as trajectories and biographies, intellectual prosopographies and the investigation of institutional dynamics can also be among the specificities that strengthen an intellectual history thought in and for Latin America . We propose, finally, that the rapprochement between intellectual history and the sociology of intellectuals is an invitation to open theoretical discussions about the practice of intellectual history itself.

Taking these debates into account, this dossier seeks to consolidate the dialogue between the research teams in Buenos Aires, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and its main justification is the leading role that Brazil and Argentina play in the continental and global debate on intellectual history and the sociology of intellectuals. Thinking about the impact of this network on reflections on this field of research, the dossier brings together articles that, assuming the perspective of intellectual history, carry out research that reviews dimensions and characteristics of the interventions of teachers and students who become intellectuals and, with this, , in addition to participating in different institutionalization processes, they construct historiographies, edit books and magazines and participate in political and cultural groups. It also includes articles and contributions that focus on the possibilities of disciplinary encounter between intellectual history in its classical sense and the sociology of intellectuals, as well as more comprehensive reflections on new intellectual actors and contemporary dynamics of consecration that go beyond rigidly university dimensions. Finally, the dossier intends to contribute to a methodological debate on how the tools of intellectual history, in its multiple meanings, can contribute to the understanding of the cultural and academic dynamics of Latin American countries.