ABSTRACT
None of the issues discussed in this book has drawn a greater variety of answers than the question ‘What can we learn from history?’ The answers have ranged from Henry Ford’s celebrated aphorism ‘history is bunk’ to the belief that history holds the clue to human destiny. The fact that historians themselves give very different responses suggests that this is an open-ended question which cannot be reduced to a tidy solution. But anyone proposing to spend several years – and in some cases a lifetime – studying the subject must reect on what purpose it serves. And one cannot get very far in understanding how historians set about their work, or in evaluating its outcome, without rst considering the rationale of historical enquiry.
