The Lessons of History
Does History provide any guidance for the present? A dozen historians disagree amicably.
It is true that no precedent is perfect, that each side will claim as the analogy that most pleasing to its argument, and that ultimately the issue will be decided without recourse to History. Does this obviate the useful role of history in public discourse? If it is meant to persuade and polemicize than, yes, it does.
But does that then make the study of history useless? No, I think not, because history alone, in one's own imagining of the world, provides depth, nuance, and wide-ranging scenarios. Even if it thus not useful as a tool in the Agora, it retains its vitality in the development of a properly-molded mind.
