Accounting for intellectual traditions in the history of ideas: synchronicity, diachronicity, and a pragmatic corrective

This paper looks at how intellectual traditions have been studied in the history of ideas, with a particular focus on the work of David Armitage. While the effort of charting ideas across time is taken to be a valuable analytical aim, what is criticised is the tendency to forget the inherent contingency of thought. Armitage’s work, which has inspired many scholars, is found to rely on an implicit appeal to structures of thought: ideas exist beyond the specificity of individual human minds. In response to Armitage’s long-range intellectual history, this paper gestures at a method for accounting for ideas diachronically without prescinding from the strict historicity of the contextualist method. To do so, pragmatics as a general theory of meaning is reaffirmed. Moreover, the paper, in looking at long-range studies of ideas, strengthens the distinction between political theory and historical research; while the former may assume and often requires abstraction, the latter is inherently antithetical to it.