================= HES POSTING ================= 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 [log in to unmask] ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]