From After Virtue by Alisdair MacIntyre:
Abstract changes in moral concepts are always embodied in real, particular events. There is a history yet to be written in which the Medici princes, Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell, Frederick the Great and Napoleon, Walpole and Wilberforce, Jefferson and Robespierre are understood as expressing in their actions, often partially and in a variety of different ways, the very same conceptual changes which as the level of philosophical theory are articulated by Machiavelli and Hobbes, by Dederot and Condorcet, by Hume and Adam Smith and Kant. There ought not to be two histories, one of political and moral action and one of political and moral theorizing, because there were not two pasts, one populated only by actions, the other only by theories. Every action is the bearer and expression of more of less theory-laden beliefs and concepts; every piece of theorizing and every expression of belief is a political and moral action…
It is because the habits of mind engendered by our modern academic curriculum separate out the history of political and social change (studied under one set of rubrics in history departments by one set of scholars) from the history of philosophy (studied under quite a different set of rubrics in philosophy departments by quite another set of scholars) that ideas are endowed with a falsely independent life of their own on the one hand and political and social action is presented as peculiarly mindless on the other. This academic dualism is of course itself the expression of an idea at home almost everywhere in the modern world; so much so indeed, that Marxism, the most influential adversary theory of modern culture, presents what is just one more version of this same dualism in the distinction between basis and ideological superstructure.
This chimes very well with my thoughts on history while studying it. As Francis Schaeffer said, “ideas have legs”, and don’t just remain in the abstract but shape our actions, our society, our culture. I argued in my recent exam that the Chinese revolutions between 1911-1949 are best understood as the transition from the dominance of one controlling worldview, Confucianism, to another, Communism. I like Lucien Bianco’s book The Origins of the Chinese Revolution because it carefully considers the role of ideas in the historical events.