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James Henderson's editorial is excellent. I want to share some disquiet, 
though, with the apparent implication that work that looks at the "internal 
logic of ideas" is ipso facto "Whig History". I hope that the sociologizing 
and contextualizing that I agree needs to be done doesn't crowd out good 
work that focuses on internal logic. Whiggishness amounts to the practice 
of treating all earlier thought as culminating in whatever passes for the 
"state of the art" in the analyst's time. It also refers to the way victors 
rewrite history to make their own victory appear inevitable, and their 
opponents despicable and puny. Generally, whiggish intellectual history, 
therefore, does a *bad* job of reconstructing the internal logic of the 
ideas it claims to be studying. 
 
For example, despite its lack of sociologizing and contextualizing, 
Leijonhufvud's *On Keynesian Economics...* is a brilliant reconstruction of 
Keynes (one possible interpretation among many--there is no *single* 
internal logic to be found); it is concerned with internal logic, but not 
at all whiggish, as I understand the term. I would not want a conception of 
what the history of economic thought *should* be that would discourage 
future Leijonhufvuds from attempting the sort of thing he attempted. There 
are many other examples, of course (how about Mill's *On Bentham and 
Coleridge*?), but the one can suffice to make the point, I hope. 
 
Kevin Quinn 
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