Usefulness of History

Contemplation of any question about the usefulness of history can, and perhaps should, begin from George SantayanaÆs well-known dictum, ôThose who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.ö There has been debate, of course, over exactly what Santayana meant by this aphorism, and in what senses it might be true. Santayana did not believe in, and was not promoting, a cyclic view of history nor a fatalistic attitude. Rather, his concern was with how individuals make meaningful choices in life, and especially with how wiser individuals can learn from the mistakes of others and not repeat them. To benefit in this way, one must know what mistakes others have made. To push the envelope, to advance the state of the art in any field, one must know what has already been done; that is, one must know history.

It seems plausible that most peopleÆs disdain for history results from such factors as bad teaching and partisan interpretations. To impart the history of anything to another person is to tell its story; when the chronological narrative is forgotten, then the details of history lack obvious significance. This is why the old-fashioned ôkings and battlesö approach to the teaching of history was so deadly for students. The memorizing of dates, regnal lists, names of famous military vi

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it, are patently obvious to any objective observer. However, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels must be counted among the founders of modern social science, because of their insistence that history must be understood in terms of social and economic forces, and that the kind of history told to justify the privileges of a ruling class is inherently untrustworthy as a description of the forces that actually shape societies. It was a hurricane of fresh air in the mid-nineteenth century to see history from the viewpoint of the ordinary man, not from that of the wealthy and powerful. Such a viewpoint has become so normal in historical and social-scientific research that its revolutionary impact in the 1840s has been almost forgottenùexcept, perhaps, by historians. An intellectually more respectable reason for doubting the utility of history is to point out that current circumstances are so utterly different from those in the past that facts and data from the past can have almost no relevance for understanding and solving current problems. The error in this viewpoint is that, if taken to this extreme of saying that past facts have no relevance, it is simply untrue. The present has obviously evolved out of the past; the forces that sha
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Approximate Word count = 1246
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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