John Potts. Ideas in Time: the longue durée in intellectual history

In this short but dense and ambitious book, John Potts seeks to bring to the history of ideas “some of the ‘rigour and stability’” Michel Foucault famously declared it to be lacking (Potts 2019, 16). Indeed, spearheading the epistemological turn in intellectual history of the 1960s and 1970s, the Frenchman, along with scholars such as Quentin Skinner, Hayden White and Thomas Kuhn, took a sledgehammer to the methods and assumptions of a previous generation of pioneering historians of ideas, mo...