Unexpected Paths: On Political Theory and History

This essay sketches some ways of practicing historical contextualization, and of pursuing questions about authorial intention, that do not depend on the anti-presentist separation of the history of political theory from the critical study of contemporary politics, but actually help integrate them; and it proposes that these approaches, though dissimilar in style, have important affinities in spirit with Sheldon Wolin’s own way of doing political theory, and with the account of the relation of theory to politics he expressed in work from “Political Theory as a Vocation” to his contribution to the inaugural issue of this journal.