I was given some food for thought by reading a recent article on the relationship between political scientists and politicians. We spend a lot of time on this blog thinking about academic historians, their ideas and whatever influence they may have on the public. But if intellectual history is the study of, as David Hollinger put it, the “discourse of intellectuals,” then there is nothing special about historians as an object of concern. Political scientists confront similar issues, according to graduate student John Balz, whose article appears in the current (Jan/Feb/March) issue of the Washington Monthly. (By the way, in Read more