Arthur Onken Lovejoy (1873 - 1962) was an influential intellectual historian, and the founder of the history of ideas. As a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University from 1910 to 1939, he founded and presided for decades over the university's History of Ideas Club, which was a meeting-place for many of the early-to-mid-twentieth century's foremost intellectual and social historians and literary critics. He also founded the Journal of the History of Ideas. Lovejoy's "history of ideas" was notable for its insistent focus on "unit-ideas," single concepts (often expressed in single words) which it traced as they were expressed in different combinations through time.

External links

• Lovejoy: Founder of the History of Ideas