ABSTRACT
AG O O D M A N Y P E O P L E can see no virtue in history (except perhaps mereenjoyment) unless knowledge of it offers directly usable guidance to the present in its confrontation with the future. As the phrase goes, they wish to learn from history, a desire in which they have too often been encouraged by historians themselves. And they wish this learning to be precise and reliable – like the lessons of science. For them it is not enough to gain some understanding of how people may act and react in given circumstances; they call for behavioural laws to be extracted from an inspection of the past. They like such laws as that the repression of a sector of society that is rising in wealth will lead to subversion and revolution; or that the accumulation of armaments will lead to war; or that only perfect democracy will ensure peaceful relations within society; or that ideological differences will always give way before economic interests (or the other way round). We can certainly find historical examples to illustrate all such generalizations, as well as
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investigations, must have a normative function – must precisely predict what will happen – and this is where they go wrong. I remember once encountering the statement that when people have exhausted the lands they live on they will move to new lands: in effect that there is a law compelling them to do so. But there is no such law, and they do not always obey its nonexistent force. Generalizations based upon a study of past events may be convincing or contrived; what they can never be is a law of human behaviour. The trouble is that historians cannot make predictions by virtue of their science, though like anybody else they can try to prophesy as human beings, with a barely better chance of success than other people. They cannot claim powers of prediction because the secret of their success as historians lies in hindsight and argument backwards. Historians do not even know what it is they wish to analyse and understand until after it has happened; of necessity, they always reason from the situation they study to its prehistory – from what is to how it came about, not from what is to what may come of it. Thus the hunt for predictive laws contradicts the very essence of our enterprise; we leave such things to the social scientists whose scientifically based ordinances find themselves regularly ignored by disobedient mankind.
