I offer three ways of conceiving long-range intellectual history to bring it into dialogue with other fashionable modes of “big” history, to assuage its critics from within the field of intellectual history, and to make intellectual history accessible to a general, non-academic readership. First, I suggest that we theorise it as transtemporal history, a comparative and connective procedure which links discrete moments across large stretches of time in a manner similar to the way in which transnational history joins distinct events or locations over wide expanses of space. Second, I urge a model of serial contextualism which reconstructs selected instances of argument over concepts within self-conscious traditions of reflection on previous usage and debate. And third, I propose we call the result of this inquiry a history in ideas, in which fundamental ideas and the compelling debates around them form the stepping-stones of propulsive narratives rather than, say, the lives of individuals or non-verbal events. To give substance to these calls for a transtemporal, serially contextualist history in ideas, I provide examples from my own attempt at the genre, Civil War: A History in Ideas (forthcoming). This book traces the history of arguments over the meaning and application of the term “civil war” from its Roman invention in the first century BCE to its use in contemporary social science and political discourse. Conflict over its meaning, as well as the meaning of conflict, have characterised the career of this essentially and repeatedly contested concept over the past two thousand years. As a contemporary idea with a near-continuous history in a series of overlapping traditions, “civil war” is a prime subject for a dynamic, long-range history in ideas. The challenges of reconstructing its history may therefore be instructive for the prospect of writing similar intellectual histories over the longue durée.
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