Ideas are made for man, not man for ideas
Reading David Armtiage’s book on the history of the concept of civil war reminds that ideas are made for man, not man for ideas. It is we who use them, not them us. As a consequence any history of ideas is the history of how they were used, believed, argued, debated etc.
As is common for intellectual history, Armitage begins with reflections on method. Quoting Nietzsche in his introduction “all concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated defy definition; only something which has no history can be defined.” Famously, one must look to the genealogy of an idea; “anything in existence, having somehow come about is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it.” One need not with Nietzsche reduce things to power relations but we may generally wonder about use and dialogical context in shaping our understanding.
Armitage traces civil war’s history specifically from Rome. But its meaning must change over time with changing conceptions of territory, the rise of ideas such as sovereignty in early modernity and nationalism and globalism later. A web of meanings rather than - the history of ideas concept of - a core unit idea that passes through history without intrinsic change.
In his introduction he sums this up as a “history in ideas”:
‘I have called this book a “history in ideas” to distinguish it from long-established strain of intellectual history known as the “history of ideas.” The latter reconstructed the biographies of big concepts — nature; Romanticism; the great chain of being — across the ages, as if the ideas themselves were somehow alive and had existence independent of those who deployed them. But in time, the sense that ideas inhabited some Platonic sphere, far above and beyond the mundane world of human life, came to discredit the history of ideas among more rigorous intellectual historians, to the impoverishment of historical concepts. Only recently have they…regained the courage to construct more subtle and more complex histories in ideas over broader periods, with notions like happiness and genius, toleration and common sense, sovereignty and democracy, among others, now emerging again as central topics of study…The point of origin [the book] proposes is quite particularly Rome, not any earlier setting, such as Greece. Not all roads lead from Rome in the formation of modern political vocabulary but a great many do. Among them are some of the most enduring ideas in the contemporary lexicon, including liberty, empire, property, rights — and civil war.
The “ideas” that lend this kind of history its structure are not disembodied entities, making intermittent entries into the terrestrial world from idealism’s heavenly realm, but rather focal points of arguments shaped and debated episodically across time, each instance being consciously — or at least provably - connected with both earlier and later ones. Even amid changing assumptions, such “ideas” are linked through time by a common name. They also remain connected by the freight of meanings accumulated from their dialogue with the past and, occasionally, the future.’