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