Zeev Sternhell’s position in the contemporary intellectual landscape was something of a paradox. He renovated the study of fascism and, more generally, of intellectual history. But he also recognized his deep roots in an “old” historiographical tradition which many would have no problem terming obsolete. In methodological terms, this professor of political science at the University of Jerusalem was a declared conservative. The historiographical currents that emerged over the last five decades were of no interest to him, except insofar as they produced regressions that deserved the most intransigent of critiques.

For Sternhell, social history was guilty of ignoring the autonomy of ideas; in his view, the Cambridge School’s founders Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock — preoccupied with contextualizing political philosophy on the plane of language — were lost in the torments of particularism and relativism. Hence, the “linguistic turn” was nothing but a form of irrationalism, the contemporary version of an old obscurantism in revolt against the Enlightenment.

The models which Sternhell counterposed to these dangerous tendencies — Ernst Cassirer, Raymond Aron, and Arthur Lovejoy — were themselves a little dated. The first two were “militant” historians and philosophers engaged in an intellectual battle clearly inspired by classical liberalism. The third had schematized a conception of the history of ideas as a dialogue between timeless thought categories (unit-ideas) that could cross eras, languages, and cultures — a claim few today are prepared to defend.