What's the Big Idea? Intellectual History and the Longue Durée
Open accessAbstract
Summary Historians of all kinds are beginning to return to temporally expansive studies after decades of aversion and neglect. There are even signs that intellectual historians are returning to the longue durée. What are the reasons for this revival of long-range intellectual history? And how might it be rendered methodologically robust as well as historically compelling? This article proposes a model of transtemporal history, proceeding via serial contextualism to create a history in ideas spanning centuries, even millennia: key examples come from work in progress on ideas of civil war from ancient Rome to the present. The article concludes with brief reflections on the potential impact of the digital humanities on the practice of long-range intellectual history.
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Several scholars have argued for building intellectual connections between political theory, the history of political thought, and other fields of political science.
“A number of scholars have insisted on building intellectual “corridors” to connect political theory and the history of political thought with the other fields of political science (Armitage 2012b).”
From The Past, Present, and Future States of Political Theory (2022) · cites this paper as Armitage 2012b
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The Past, Present, and Future States of Political Theory
Hunt, E. M. (2022) · Society · doi:10.1007/s12115-022-00703-1 · Cited by 2 · see citing works
- Authors
- Armitage, D.
- Affiliations
- Harvard University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Armitage, David
- ORCID
- Armitage, David
- Venue
- History of European Ideas
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2012-08-29
- Volume
- 38
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 493-507
- ISSN
- 0191-6599 (ISSN-L)
- 1873-541X
- OpenAlex
- W2108402156
- Cited by
- 125
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 7 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 11 · 2021: 15 · 2020: 7 · 2019: 12 · 2018: 8 · 2017: 14 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 15 · 2014: 4 · 2013: 16
- FWCI
- 230.92
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- nrs.harvard.edu
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- History of European Ideas (publishedVersion)
- Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) (Harvard University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History › Philosophy, History, and Historiography
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Philosophy and Historical Thought
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Literature and Literary Theory › Digital Humanities and Scholarship
- Keywords
- longue durée, intellectual history, civil war, ancient Rome, digital humanities, historiography of ideas
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