Foundations of Modern International Thought by David Armitage, and: Global Intellectual History ed. by Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori (review)

It goes without saying that global history has become a popular field among historians around the world in recent decades. Its popularity has also spilled over to the study of intellectual history, a field that has lagged behind the remarkable transformation the discipline of history has witnessed since the post–World War II years. Can this “global turn” resuscitate intellectual history? Or conversely, does intellectual history need this “global turn” to justify its existence? These are the main questions I would like to discuss in this review. Yet before we turn to the questions themselves, I would like first to draw some attention to the observation made by David Armitage in his book. In the chapter entitled “The International Turn in Intellectual History,” Armitage states that the “international turn in the writing of history is perhaps the most transformative historiographical movement since the rise of social history in the 1960s and the linguistic turn of the 1970s” and that “it [the international turn] has taken place simultaneously across so many areas of historical work.” Yet, he hastens to point out, intellectual historians “have not written widely about the internationalisation of their field” (p. 18). Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori also point out at the outset of their book that intellectual history remains “marginal to the historical discipline” and that internationalization has “hardly affected” the practice of intellectual history (p. 1).

Few would challenge their characterization because what they say highlights the general trend of development in worldwide historiography. The French Annales historians, one of the most influential historiographical schools in the twentieth century, for example, first called the historian’s attention to the “immobile factors” in history that tended to exert influences in the longue durée, and then championed the need for sociocultural history that studies history from below. Intellectual history, one that traditionally focuses on the great ideas of great men, has found almost no place in the “historiographical revolution” waged by the Annales School.¹² Could the “global turn” help intellectual historians to reclaim the respectable position they used to have in the field of history? The answer seems both yes and no. Indeed, on the one hand, a global interest seems inherent in the study of intellectual history, for ideas are transferable and transmittable (as readily as, say, material goods) beyond geographical, national, and temporal confines. (Armitage seems quite assertive—more so than Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori—in arguing for the need for internationalizing intellectual history, even though he has not identified his own work as a “global intellectual history.”) On the other hand, intellectual historians still face a serious challenge in examining and analyzing the extent and depth of how and why certain ideas travel in the world whereas others do not. (Samuel Moyn’s discussion of the “nonglobalization of ideas” sheds thoughtful light on this [pp. 187–204].)

More importantly, it seems intellectual historians these days need to accept and articulate a position fundamental to the study of global history, which is to recognize that historical movement in the world has moved, more often than not, along multilinear paths instead of along a unilinear course. That is, when ideas travel outside of the place where they have originated, they are usually appropriated, or “truncated”—to borrow Moyn’s term (p. 188)—but not grafted in their entirety on other traditions. As such, it is often more useful to examine how ideas become transformed in the process of transmission than simply to discuss their international influences.

In so doing, it is somewhat easier to discover and compare parallel patterns in the premodern world than that in modern times. In Global Intellectual History Siep Stuurman’s study of the views of Herodotus, Sima Qian, and Ibn Khaldun about nomadic neighbors...