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Ever since the discussion of Whig history I've been meaning to look for a 
half-remembered quote from Don Herzog's *Happy Slaves*--a book that 
manages to be political theory, social history and intellectual history 
all at once--that pertains. I found a used copy of this great book 
(subtitled "a critique of consent theory") in new orleans, so here it is. 
 
"I tell this story not as a historian of ideas, but as a political 
theorist interested in sorting out our own dilemmas. Some may find my 
approach perplexing and may think it ignores three logical points about 
political theory. The project mixes facts with values, the history of 
political thought with our own political arguments, and the history of 
ideas with social and political history... 
 
"These three divisions....aren't purely logical. Like many other ideas, 
they also serve as crude maps of what generally goes on in the world. For 
it happens to be characteristic of American academic life these days that 
some people study facts, others values; that historians of political 
thought rarely talk shop with political theorists...; that sometimes 
intellectual history, and often history of political thought, are still 
carried on not just apart from but against social history. Each camp has 
its own journals, its own panels at conventions, its own allotted slots 
for departmental hiring... But it is a map of our lives, of our 
community. So debates about these divisions are debates about the current 
academic division of labor. 
 
"it is a division I am unhappy with. Separating the study of facts from 
the study of values was supposed to yield a social science worthy of the 
name. But that project has been dead for some time... Separating the 
history of political thought from our own political theory has threatened 
to make one antiquarian, the other sterile. Separating the history of 
political thought from the history of everything else has created a 
pointless dilemmas..." 
 
Sound familiar? It is interesting that Herzog argues for eliding *both* the 
division between intellectual and social history *and* the division 
between political theory and history of political thought; in our 
discussion, it has seemed to me that the proponents of eliding the former 
division have simultaneously called for underlining and strengthening 
the latter. 
 
Kevin Quinn 
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