Turning International: Foundations of Modern International Thought and New Paradigms for Intellectual History

Summary

This essay provides an overview of the disciplinary and analytical significance of David Armitage's Foundations of Modern International Thought in the context of the new international history, and the so-called ‘international turn’. It then goes on to discuss the significance of the absence of women in this new sub-field of intellectual history.     

The Diffusion of Sovereignty

Summary

The transmission of ideas about sovereignty and its related practices from one time, place, or intellectual context to another is sometimes characterised as a process of ‘diffusion’ or even ‘contagion’. Intellectual historians may use such metaphors but the explanations they provide are historical, not scientific. Sovereignty was transmitted when European states brought their forms of government to other peoples and when those peoples embraced such forms in declaring their independence from imperial rule. It was also transmitted when the idea of sovereignty was itself transformed in the course of these and other historical passages. In Foundations of Modern International Thought, David Armitage explores some of these historical passages, the outcome of which he sees as the world of sovereign states that defines the modern period and the disappearance of which would signal its end. In doing so, he illuminates the larger enterprise of writing the history of international thought or, as he prefers to call it, international intellectual history, inviting reflection on its relationship to other kinds of historical inquiry and the opportunities and dangers it poses.     

Landscapes of Time: Building Long-Term Perspectives in Animal Behavior*

In the 1960s, scientists fascinated by the behavior of free-living animals founded research projects that expanded into multi-generation investigations. This paper charts the history of three scientists’ projects to uncover the varied reasons for investing in a “long-term” perspective when studying animal behavior: Kenneth Armitage's study of marmots in the Rocky Mountains, Jeanne Altmann's analysis of baboons in Kenya, and Timothy Hugh Clutton-Brock's studies (among others) of red deer on the island of Rhum and meerkats in the Kalahari. The desire to study the behavior of the same group of animals over extended periods of time, I argue, came from different methodological traditions – population biology, primatology, and sociobiology – even as each saw themselves as contributing to the legacy of ethology. As scientists embraced and combined these approaches, a small number of long-running behavioral ecology projects like these grew from short pilot projects into decades-long centers of intellectual gravity within behavioral ecology as a discipline. By attending to time as well as place, we can see how this long-term perspective was crucial to their success; they measured evolutionary changes over generations of animals and their data provided insights into how the animals they studied were adapting (or not) to changing local and global environmental factors.