Intellectual history advances through uneven breaks, not traditions or clean ruptures

Evidence

In serious, critical intellectual work, there are no “absolute beginnings” and few unbroken continuities. Neither the endless unwinding of “tradition,” so beloved in the History of Ideas, nor the absolutism of the “epistemological rupture,” punctuating Thought into its “false” and “correct” parts, once favored by the Althussereans, will do. What we find, instead, is an untidy but characteristic unevenness of development. What is important are the significant breaks —where old lines of thought are disrupted, older constellations displaced, and elements, old and new, are regrouped around a different set of premises and themes. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 180

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the “problematic” model of intellectual change against both history-of-ideas continuity and Althusserean rupture.
• XREF: Ties to Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge and Kuhn’s paradigm shifts, which likewise reject smooth cumulative progress in thought. — connects to: History is discontinuous hegemonic succession, not teleological advance. — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 446