The history of political ideas and the engagement with it face the accusation of being detached from practice and thus dispensable. Not least due to the pressure on political theory and the history of ideas from the growing demands of other areas of political science, which actually produce relevant, application-oriented (empirical-analytical) theoretical work, the history of ideas is increasingly marginalized. This harms the entire field—not only in terms of the contributions of the history of ideas as a historical discipline but also regarding its often underestimated theoretical potential. Political theorists are usually divided into those who discuss what is and those who discuss what ought to be (although both are hardly separable)—however, the history of ideas opens up another mode of theorizing.