INTELLECTUAL HISTORY CONFRONTS THE LONGUE DURÉE.

This review of John Potts's Ideas in Time: The Longue Durée in Intellectual History discusses the advantages and disadvantages of writing intellectual histories that embrace the longue durée. It applauds Potts's concise account of historiographical discussions of continuity and discontinuity in the history of ideas in the last seventy‐five years but laments his failure to discuss the contributions of historians of science and scholarship to the practices of knowledge‐making and to the transmission of ideas. It suggests that the study of discontinuities can also be rich and revealing, and it proposes one approach to understanding the ways in which ideas go out of fashion. It concludes by noting, first, that the models that contemporary historians of ideas adopt also have to do with book‐market opportunities and pressures and, second, that we have work to do to engage our contemporaries and students in whatever form of intellectual history we choose to write. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]