ABSTRACT
Historians are not the only people to have recognised history’s importance: we’ve already seen how theologians have put it to use, but it’s politicians and political theorists who have always particularly appreciated history’s enormous power. That’s why they have often sought to control it for their own purposes – to use it (or abuse it, as we say when we disagree with them) as underpinning for their own position, or (yet more dramatically) actually to remove it, when traditions and old versions of the past inhibit their own revolutionary ambitions. So when outlining the principles of his ideal state, Plato took care to propose the insertion of a new (and admittedly false) history that would convince his utopia’s citizens that their present situation had indeed been determined by the past; Aristotle presented an historical account of political development that culminated in the ideal ‘end’ of Athenian-style democracy; seventeenth-century political theorists such as Hobbes inserted an earlier, unappetising historical period, when life was ‘nasty, brutish, and short’, into their advocacy of a strong government which would prevent reversion to those primitive beginnings; eighteenth-century French and twentieth-century Chinese revolutionaries did their best to eliminate a past that no longer seemed to have relevance to their visions for the future; and politicians generally are prone to emphasise (and de-emphasise) the importance of those aspects of the past that confirm (or deny) the validity of their own agendas.
