Abstract:Responding to the recent exhortation by the historian David Armitage to return to a history of "big ideas" traced over long periods of time, this paper examines reasons for the resistance to his advice voiced by both textualist and contextualist intellectual historians. Discussing the alternatives to traditional history of ideas in "conceptual history" and "metaphorology," it argues for the virtues of a method that acknowledges, even welcomes semantic ambiguity and the dynamic force field of relations in which ideas are historically embedded. Rather than settling for the smoothing out of differences entailed in "distant reading" techniques based on the digital retrieval of long-duration tendencies, it argues for attentiveness to the ruptures in meaning and unanticipated innovations that prevent the history of idea being an exercise in meta-narratives of growth, development and dissemination.

中文翻译：

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“嘿！最大的主意是什么？”：关于思想史上规模问题的反思

摘要：响应历史学家戴维·阿米蒂奇（David Armitage）最近的敦促，以追溯到历史悠久的“大思想”历史，本文研究了文本主义者和情境主义知识史学家对他的建议产生抵制的原因。在“概念史”和“隐喻论”中讨论传统观念史的替代方法时，它主张一种方法的优点，这种方法承认甚至欢迎语义上的歧义和历史上嵌入观念的关系的动态力场。与其解决基于长期趋势的数字检索的“远程阅读”技术带来的差异，