Kevin Quinn's comments lead me to what is true, I think, in political science (my field). Part of studying the history is to discover why we are asking today the questions we are asking in the way that we are asking them; and, reciprocally, is to discern what questions and answers are being ignored (and perhaps to ask, why?) At a most superficial level, I -- who frequently teach Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in a modern political philosophy course -- am struck by how Smith, who recognizes the need for government and the role it plays in structuring the market and taking care of market failures (such as grinding poverty, ignorance, and dissension), seems to have no theoretical sense of how to link what he says about government to what he says about human action (human nature? human propensities?) in the social and economic realm. (I am also, obviously, struck by how many of Smith's concerns in Book V seem to have been ignored by many later economists who claim him as a forebear.) Peter G. Stillman