I tell myself before I go to sleep.”
— Neil Finn, 1981
Well, that’s reassuring. We’d never want a
second Black Plague, a second Holocaust or even a second Hurricane Katrina,
would we? But if Finn is right, we should perhaps ask ourselves the obvious
question: Why study history?
After all, if it never repeats, then
knowledge of the past is useless to guide us for the future. What use is it to
think about the South Sea Bubble or the Cold War when we know that the unique
circumstances that made each possible will never exist again?