A concern with the present and one's position, with the need to diversify and globalise, and a turn towards more careful consideration of texts, ideas, and their contexts seem to animate academic history in recent times. Even in more popular works one finds these emphases, trying to make sense of our current ideological and cultural impasses as well as environmental and socio-economic challenges. Why does religion continue to hold significance in our times? Are humans better off, adaptable, less violent, consistently unpredictable? How can we understand the course of our political history and the seeming dominance of democracy and its discontents, not least the legacies of coloniality and empire? While nationalist historiographies prevail in many contexts as well as Marxist and other approaches, the trend seems to be towards connected histories, the transnational and the global. Much of this constitutes intellectual history, which as one leading expert puts it, “seeks to restore a lost world, to recover perspectives and ideas from the ruins, to pull back the veil, and explain why the ideas resonated in the past and convinced their advocates.” Ideas are expressive of cultures and norms, practices and dispositions, of actions and events that lie at the very core of human experience such as sovereignty and power, mind and matter, profanity and spirituality.

Ideas require us to make sense of their bearers, their transmitters, the discourses, epistemic and conceptual frameworks in which they are debated, and the apparatuses that they evince and produce. Of course, that brings with it raging debates on questions of method, assumptions about the nature of the agency of individuals, as well as the desire to go beyond ideas as the domain of intellectual elites and those privileged to inscribe their prejudices into history.