The hyperspecialization of historical studies is not inevitable. For David Armitage, professor at Harvard, it is urgent that intellectual history rediscovers the meaning and taste of the longue longue duration. Otherwise, naturalist approaches will dominate what we now call big history.
David Armitage, born in 1965, is a British historian, specialist in intellectual, international and imperial history. Professor at Harvard since 2004, he holds the Lloyd C. Blankfein Chair there. His first book, published in 2000, was on the intellectual history of British imperialism in the modern era (The Ideological Origins of British EmpireCambridge University Press). Since 2007 and the publication of a book devoted to the global history of the American Declaration of Independence (The Declaration of Independence: a Global HistoryHarvard University Press), he strives, alone or in collaboration, to promote a spatio-temporal expansion of the usual frameworks of intellectual history. He thus co-edited, at Palgrave MacMillan, two volumes on the global history of the revolutions of the end of the XVIIIe century (The Age of Revolutions in Global Context2010, in co-direction with Sanjay Subrahmanyam) and on peaceful history (Pacific Histories. Ocean, Land, Peopleco-edited with Alison Bashford, 2014). He also explored the international dimension of the political thought of classical authors such as Locke, Hobbes and Bentham (Foundations of Modern Intellectual ThoughtCambridge University Press, 2012).
More recently, David Armitage pleads in favor of a renewed consideration of the longue durée in historical work, particularly in intellectual history. His reflection is based on the observation that although we have more and more specialized research on regions or limited periods, history struggles to provide answers to the major questions of our time. At a time when calls are increasing in the United States to promote big or the deep historyArmitage is concerned about the possible disconnect between an environmental, biological or genetic history, capable of covering several centuries or millennia of history, and the much more micro and temporally reduced approaches of political, social or intellectual history. Opening up chronological horizons would also be a condition for strengthening the distended links between historians and their readership.
These ideas, which Armitage outlined in an article published in the journal History of European Ideas and in an article to be published in French, on 1er semester 2015, in the Annales. History, Social Sciences, are discussed in this brief interview carried out in Paris in May 2014. The historian responds in particular to the questions that his project raises on the possibility of combining long-term and taking into account experiences, emotions and representations carried by the historical actors, or even on the pitfalls to avoid in order not to resurrect a strongly decontextualized history of ideas.
To display the French subtitles, click on the “ cc » at the top right of the video, once it has started.
An Interview with David Armitage by laviedesidees