ABSTRACT
Much has been written about the uses of history. 1 Understanding of the present and the potential of the future is impossible without a temporal perspective. History is to society what remembered experience is to an individual. Marwick sees it as ‘a social necessity’. There are three practical advantages to society from the study of the past. First, it alerts people to the sheer variety of human mentality and achievement and thus to the range of possibilities people have now. History provides imaginative range but is also an inventory of assets whose value may only be realized by later generations. Second it is a source of precedent and prediction. Though this is primarily a justification for contemporary history, the drawing of historical analogies, often half-consciously, is a habitual and unavoidable dimension of human reasoning. Comparisons across time can illuminate the present by highlighting both what is recurrent and what is new, what is durable, transient and contingent on our present conditions. Finally history provides a critique of the myths that pervade society. It has a crucial corrective function in that by removing myths, it can act as the conscience of society.
