The best books on The Lessons of History

We’re talking about books that shed light on how the lessons of history might help us navigate the present. I was very struck in your book by how John F Kennedy, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, was influenced by a book by the historian Barbara Tuchman. Did you come across other examples like that, situations where history really was useful?

The idea of learning lessons from history is of course an ancient one, going back to historical thinkers such as Thucydides, Ibn Khaldun, Machiavelli and Hobbes. In the early 1800s, Goethe declared, ‘He who cannot draw on 3000 years is living from hand to mouth’. His words are a real inspiration to me. I see history not so much as a clairvoyant enabling us to predict the future, but rather as a counselor that – if used wisely – can help us navigate the turbulence of our times, an era of polycrisis ranging from a climate emergency to risks from artificial intelligence.

The story about John F Kennedy is really fascinating. Right in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he kept talking to his advisors about a popular history book, The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman, which argued that Europe had stumbled into the First World War through a series of miscalculations and bungles. He was very aware of not wanting to do the same thing when it came to his relations with Khrushchev in the crisis. The book was a key factor in pushing him towards seeking a diplomatic rather than a military solution to the situation. At one point during the crisis, he turned to his brother, attorney general Robert Kennedy, and said, ‘I am not going to follow a course which will allow anyone to write a comparable book about this time, The Missiles of October’.

Kennedy was obsessed with Tuchman’s book and had already given copies of it to his inner circle. He also asked for it to be sent to military officials at US bases around the world. He really thought history was something that you can learn from. And you can find plenty of examples of political figures who have thought about the lessons of the past. Churchill was a classic one, who talked about learning from history and wrote history books himself.

But, just as often, you see the way that politicians ignore history and historians. One of the most famous cases took place in November 2002 when Britain was considering going to war with Iraq, and Tony Blair invited a group of leading academic experts – including historians and political analysts – to come and talk to him about what they thought about Britain joining the US invasion. I think there were six people who went along to 10 Downing Street and basically said to him, ‘Don’t do it – it will be difficult at best and catastrophic at worst.’ And he totally ignored them. It was a real instance of failing to learn from history.

So some politicians and policymakers do think about history, but most of the time they are too busy dealing with the latest opinion poll, the latest tweet, or they’re crossing their fingers and hoping that the tech bros in Silicon Valley are going to sort out the world’s problems with geoengineering or carbon capture and storage. Most of them are pretty much blind to the past, except occasionally bringing it up as a nostalgic framing they might draw on to justify something like Brexit.

What I am fascinated by is not so much what the politicians and leaders are doing, but history from below. What can we learn from history about how communities, workers, and different social groups have organized to rise to challenges, overcome crises, and tackle injustices? When it comes to learning the lessons of history, I was not focusing on elite politics in History for Tomorrow—there are enough books about the Napoleons and Churchills and Mandelas.

The other thing I was conscious of is that lots of people, when they talk about learning the lessons of history, it’s all about the warnings of history. There’s that famous George Santayana quote – ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ And of course we’ve got to learn from those terrible, dark episodes of colonialism and interwar fascism. But I couldn’t help wondering, ‘What about what’s gone right as well as what’s gone wrong? Can we learn not just from the cautionary tales, but from the more positive examples in a non-romanticized way?’ And that’s what really directed my new book.

Let’s turn to the ones you’re recommending. Let’s start with Howard Zinn’s On History. For people who don’t know him, do you want to tell us a bit about him and the book he’s famous for? And then fill us in on this book, and what it brings to the table in terms of the lessons you’re trying to draw from history.

Howard Zinn was a radical American historian, most famous for writing a book called A People’s History of the United States. It first came out in 1980 and has been a million-copy bestseller. What Zinn did in that book was really important in that he retold the story of American history from Columbus to the present through four different lenses: the stories of working-class people, of women, of Native Americans and of African Americans. All the chapters rotate between those four different lenses. So you get a very different story than the American history of famous presidents or the robber baron tycoons of the 19th century, though they’re all in there.

What Zinn was trying to do was really enact the idea of history from below. This was an important movement in historiography that emerged after the Second World War, the idea of telling the stories that hadn’t been told, of trade unions and social movements and marginalized groups in society. He wanted to put that at the center of the way we told our stories about history. In The People’s History of the United States, he writes: ‘Most histories understate revolt, overemphasize statesmanship, and thus encourage impotency among citizens.’ He was very much a historian-activist. He wanted this kind of history to empower people.

“Can we learn not just from the cautionary tales, but from the more positive examples?”

Earlier he had written a number of essays about the writing of history, and the book I’ve chosen On History, is a collection of these essays. In one of them, called “Historian as Citizen,” he talks explicitly about the way we need to think about history as full of possibilities for learning for the present, and learning from the inspirational moments, not just the warnings.

He writes, ‘The leaps that man has made in social evolution come from those who acted as if.’ What he means is that they acted from the idea that change was possible. It might look like you can never change the system and that the odds are against you, but whether it was those who were fighting for independence in India or the civil rights movement in the US they acted as if they might be able to bring about change. And occasionally it actually does happen. That comes out very clearly in his work.

So Zinn was a beacon for me when writing my book. I wanted to write about hope in apocalyptic times, but not in a naive, nostalgic, romanticized way. I’m well aware of the genocides, the wars, the greed. I wrote my PhD thesis on the legacies of Latin American colonial history and the genocide of indigenous Mayans in Guatemala. I’ve grown up with that kind of history, in a sense. But I wanted to try and bring out these other stories, which I think can inspire us today to take action on a whole range of issues—including the climate crisis, threats to democracy, risks from AI, genetic engineering, migration issues and a whole gamut of existential risks.

You look at ten different challenges in your book. To give us a taste, do you want to give one or two examples of a threat, and how a lesson from history might help us be a bit more empowered and hopeful in dealing with it?

So one example is that we have a global water crisis on the horizon, and wars between states and within states over water have been escalating rapidly since the year 2000. We know that there are going to be huge water shortages in the big cities of the world: Los Angeles, Cairo, Melbourne, São Paulo, Beijing. How are we going to deal with that?

In the chapter of the book about water, I look at something called the ‘Tribunal de las Aguas’ (the ‘tribunal of waters’) in the Spanish city of Valencia. It’s Europe’s oldest legal institution and it’s a water court. There are these eight black-cloaked figures who come out every Thursday at 12 noon and meet outside the west door of the cathedral in Valencia and hold public hearings. They are democratically elected representatives, in charge of the local irrigation canals of the Valencia agricultural hinterland, where we get our juicy Valencia oranges from.

They are elected by local farmers. And if a farmer has been taking more than their fair share of water or not looking after their section of the canal, they might get fined in one of these public hearings, and tourists can watch them. I’ve been there and seen it.

The interesting thing about the Tribunal of Waters is that it’s been meeting outside the cathedral every Thursday at noon for hundreds of years. This is an ancient institution. It’s a piece of living history. In fact, some people say it dates to before the Christian reconquest of Valencia in the mid-13th century. So it’s got deep, deep roots.

I think it’s a wonderful example of questioning the way we look at water today. Take the United Kingdom, where water is controlled by private monopolies. If you were thinking about it from the Valencia perspective, why don’t we have more community ownership of our water? Why don’t we have elected community members on the boards of water companies? How could that Valencia model be used to deal with water conflicts?

And, in fact, other places have drawn on the Valencia model. There is a Latin American tribunal of waters.

It’s one example of what’s sometimes called ‘the commons.’ It’s about how we manage common resources and the ways human communities have developed rules to do that, whether in relation to waterways, forests or fisheries. The Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom wrote a lot about this, and Valencia is a historical example that she herself drew upon.

So that’s one kind of example. I could give you lots and lots of others.

Let’s have one more.

So one of the things we often think about today is the problem of social media and polarization: pro-Trump/anti-Trump, climate change activist/climate change denier, pro-abortion/anti-abortion. We live in an age of polarization where the algorithms online are feeding us the same kind of news stories over and over again and pushing us apart and fragmenting us.

There is a parallel historical story here, which is the story of another communications technology, which emerged about 500 years ago – the printing press. It was picked up by Protestant reformers like Martin Luther, who used it effectively to spread critiques of official Catholic church authority. While it empowered Protestants to challenge the papal hierarchy, it also inflamed and accelerated the wars of religion. Over the next two centuries, tens of millions of people died.

There was also the persecution of women for the alleged crime of witchcraft in Germany in the 16th century, spread by the new printing presses. This was an early instance of fake news. There were clickbait stories of women who had flown on a broomstick along with the devil to burn down a town. This stuff sold like hotcakes. In Britain, around 500 people – mostly women – were murdered for witchcraft between about 1530 and 1680. In Germany, where print culture was more established, it was 25,000.

“I didn’t find enough historians writing books about what we could learn for today from all the research they’ve been doing”

So that is a warning from history. But one of the things that the printing press also did – and this is the more positive example – is that it started spreading new ideals around individual rights and democratic politics. It did that in tandem with the coffee houses that emerged in London in the late 17th and early 18th century. There were thousands of them in London alone. You would walk in, buy yourself a bowl of coffee for a penny, and sit down at one of the communal tables which were covered with the periodicals and pamphlets the printing presses had produced. And you wouldn’t just read but also talk to strangers sitting at the table with you. You might talk about the arts or science or business, but these were above all political talking shops. You might talk about republicanism, about antislavery. This is where Daniel Defoe and Tom Paine spent their time. The coffee houses of London gave birth to what the political philosopher Jürgen Habermas called the ‘public sphere’. In effect, they acted as schools of democracy and citizenship for the emerging (male) bourgeoisie.

That raises a question for today. How do we revive that coffee house culture? Britain has 30,000 coffee shops. Imagine if we reintroduced the communal tables, like in Georgian Britain. If you had just ten conversations between strangers a day in those coffee shops in one year, that would be 100 million conversations. This actually links back to my earlier work. For three years, I worked with a historian of conversation, Theodore Zeldin, running projects at the Oxford Muse foundation focused on how we could revive conversational culture across social divides. We used to put on Conversation Meals, inviting strangers from different walks of life to talk with each other using a specially designed Menu of Conversation. The important role of dialogue in reducing polarisation has of course been recognised far more widely, for instance in grass-roots peace building. I’m hugely inspired by an organization called the Parent’s Circle, which brings together Israelis and Palestinians who share something in common – they have all had family members killed in the conflict – to share their stories and their grief.

With your next book, we’re taking a step back because it’s more formally about how we might approach the lessons of history. It’s by a historian called John Tosh and it’s called Why History Matters.

Since the Second World War, the idea of learning lessons from history – which historians sometimes call ‘applied history’ – has been gradually expanding, although it’s hardly mainstream. There’s a famous book called The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant, which was published in the 1960s. There’s also the Harvard political scientist Graham Allison, who wrote a book called Thinking in Time, about how politicians and statespeople have made decisions in the past and what we can learn from that today. There’s also an academic Journal of Applied of History.

Often, this learning from history idea has been mostly in the field of international relations, diplomacy, and war. How do we prevent wars, or create international cooperation? What John Tosh has done in his book, Why History Matters, is to take that idea of learning from history much further. One of his key points in the book is, ‘Why don’t we learn from the history of public policy when we’re thinking about (say) education reform?’ Or ‘Let’s understand how our health systems have developed in the past: what’s worked, what hasn’t worked, and apply those lessons to today.’

The second really important thing that John Tosh does is emphasize learning from history in terms of the genealogy of our current crises. When we’re looking at something like the war in Iraq or Afghanistan, we should be trying to figure out: ‘What’s the deep story of how we got here?’ That means going back to the history of Western colonialism in the Middle East, because if we don’t understand those earlier episodes, then we’re going to make very poor decisions today.

You could do this genealogical tracing for many different realms. For example, why are we obsessed with consumer culture, particularly in the Western world? Why do we have a ‘I shop, therefore I am’ philosophy? That goes back to the history of public relations industry in the 1920s, and the rise of the department store in the 19th century. All of these things have histories, which I write about in my new book.

The third thing Tosh writes about is making analogies from history, and how we need to be very careful about doing that. That’s why I like his book, because it’s not just about cherry picking any example from the past. Not every war is another Vietnam, not every dictator is another Hitler and not every financial crisis is like the Great Depression of the 1930s. Let’s not just look for similarities but be well aware of the differences.

I learned a lot from Tosh when thinking about my book. For example, I’ve got a chapter on artificial intelligence, which at first glance might seem the kind of thing that you could never really learn about from history, because it’s so modern, so technological, so 21st or even 22nd century. But reading Why History Matters made me think, ‘What is the appropriate analogy here in history, given that we haven’t had anything exactly like AI in the past? Have we ever created large-scale systems which could potentially get out of control, which is one of the potential risks of AI?’

And I reasoned that, yes, we have. We invented the instruments of financial capitalism in the Netherlands in the early 17th century: the first stock exchanges, the first public limited companies, marine insurance. It was a human-created system that very quickly got out of control, with the advent of multiple financial crashes. So, in my book, I draw analogies there. John Tosh’s work has really helped me think about that, and to try and be critical and careful about the way I do it.

That’s really important. I’m thinking of Margaret MacMillan’s book The Uses and Abuses of History. People often use history to do bad rather than good.

Yes, but she’s generally talking about it at the level of leadership: the Stalins, the Maos. What I’m trying to say is, ‘No, wait, let’s try and empower social movements, community organizations, people who are trying to reinvent what our economies look like.’ I haven’t written this book for elite political leaders to have in their back pockets. It’s really for all the other changemakers, the educators and activists in every field.

I like her skepticism, though.

In your book, you talk about cherry picking. I guess that’s my issue with learning from history: you could draw almost any lesson from it.

Absolutely right. And that’s what Margaret MacMillan says too. The way I think about is like this: First, let’s recognize that in any subject area – whether it’s history, economics, politics – researchers and writers are cherry picking all the time. We are not getting objective economics from economists. They are choosing what to measure, how to measure it, over what time periods, in which countries, etc. Historians and history are no different from anyone else. Everybody is having to make choices.

Then one has to decide, ‘How do I cherry pick systematically?’ The first thing I tried to do is be as open as possible about how I’ve chosen the cases I look at. So I started with ten challenges facing society in the 21st century, which I sourced from the academic literature on civilizational collapse and existential risk. Hence you get things like climate change and threats to democracy and AI.

Then I asked myself, ‘Okay, so which episodes in history help inform those issues?’ That cuts out a lot of the past. Also, ‘Which of these episodes are about not just warnings, but possibilities for inspirational change, change for the common good?’ Another layer was, ‘Which of these are about change from below as much as possible, not just change from above?’ By then the number of cherries I could pick were quite radically reduced.

I also focused on a particular time period, which is the last 1000 years. My brain could not stretch further than that, but also if you start going back before the year 1000, the quality of the historical evidence, particularly for the ‘from below’ history, starts disappearing. It’s not nearly what one might hope it would be, particularly if you want to have a wide geographical range.

So I would call what I’ve done a kind of systematic cherry picking with an honesty and transparency to it.

A historian would probably not have written your book, would they? They’d be hesitant to invoke the lessons of history in a broad way.

Yes, as someone trained as a political scientist, I partly wrote this book because I didn’t find enough historians writing books about what we could learn for today from all the research they’ve been doing. Occasionally, you do find historians who have explicitly written books about the lessons of history. For example, Tim Snyder wrote a brilliant book called On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. It’s about the warnings of history, especially in relation to interwar fascism and authoritarianism. He’s an expert in that field, and I wish more historians took their learning and tried to apply it to the present.

I do understand why it doesn’t happen. You don’t really get a lot of academic points for taking what you’ve studied about medieval Germany and applying it to the present. But when I speak to historians – and I spoke to a lot of them when researching this book – very often they do think that their special subjects have a relevance for today. Experts on witchcraft in 16th century Germany, for example, will frequently look at the persecution of immigrant outsiders today or the role of fake news today and draw parallels. It’s just they don’t tend to write about it in their books, though occasionally they do.

What I’ve tried to do is be an ambassador for all these amazing researchers across a range of fields. Obviously, I don’t have expertise in all of these areas. I have certain kinds of expertise, for example, in Latin American colonial history, or the history of consumerism, which I’ve studied a lot over the last 20 or 30 years. But the Islamic kingdom of Al-Andalus in southern Spain from the 9th to the 14th centuries—I’ve had to learn about that. And  about the history of financial capitalism in the Netherlands in the early 17th century. Simon Schama wrote a very nice book on that, The Embarrassment of Riches. There’s some fascinating stuff in that book, although it has become a bit dated.

You mentioned Al-Andalus. Shall we talk about that book and what we can learn from it next?

Yes, so the next book I’ve chosen is The Ornament of The World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. It’s by Maria Rosa Menocal, who was a cultural historian. This book is about the period called the ‘Convivencia’ in Spanish – the coexistence or living together – a period when Muslims, Christians and Jews managed to live together in relative, but not total harmony in the south of Spain under a period of Muslim rule. It lasted roughly from the ninth to the 14th and even the 15th centuries in some places in southern Spain.

What’s so interesting about this book is that it so clearly speaks to today. The story it’s trying to tell is one of relative coexistence of three very different cultures. It’s an antidote to the ‘clash of civilizations’ narrative, which is still very much around today, and the idea that we are under threat from immigrants at the gate. How are we all going to live together in a world where one in 10 people by 2050 might be migrants of some kind due to climate change and other issues forcing people to leave their homelands? What this book shows is that there are ways that people with very different cultures and religious backgrounds, have managed to get along.

One of the reasons I really like this book and the topic is because it’s really complicated. There’s a counter-school of thought that thinks the Convivencia, this idea of Muslims, Christians and Jews all getting on well together, is a bit of a sham, almost an invention of the Spanish tourist board, and overly romanticized.

But the vast evidence about daily life suggests differently. For example, in the 11th century, Córdoba, in the south of Spain, was a city of half a million people. It was a much bigger city than London or Paris at the time. There were everyday frictions and occasional outbreaks of violence, but by and large, Christians, Muslims and Jews managed to get on. They got on because they were mixing in the marketplaces and going to the same public baths together. They might play chess or music together.

It’s one of those examples that so clearly speaks to today but what’s so interesting is that she does not explicitly make that connection, or at least it’s not central to the narrative of the book. It’s almost up to us as a reader to do that. I like that challenge. She’s not trying to be too didactic about it.

And what was the key to the success of the Convivencia, of everyone getting along?

Menocal homes in on three factors. One is the shared language, the lingua franca, of Arabic. You can find synagogues built in Spain, even in the 13th century, which have Arabic script carved on them alongside the Hebrew.

The second thing is the religious tolerance under Islamic law. Christians and Jews were able to worship their own gods, as long as they paid a tax for it.

The third and most fundamental thing was the mixing together of people in cities. It’s about how urban life brought people together and created relative tolerance because of the relationships of mutual dependence – the way that a Muslim shoemaker might need leather from a Christian tanner, for example.

So I think those are the things that helped forge it. Many Jews migrated to Al-Andalus because they saw that they could live a reasonable life in its cities and not be persecuted.

What happened in Spain after this period was the systematic massacres of Jews by Christians, such as in 1391, and there are many other examples as well. This was happening across Europe, including in England, starting from about the 12th century.

Let’s go on to the book about Ibn Khaldun next. This is Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography by Robert Irwin. What does this book bring to the picture?

Ibn Khaldun, the great 14th-century North African historian, was interested in the lessons of history, a little bit like Edward Gibbon. When Gibbon visited Rome and saw the crumbling buildings around him, he wondered what explained the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. Ibn Khaldun did the same thing several hundred years earlier. He noticed these crumbling cities and civilizations in North Africa and wondered what happened to them. He was interested in those big questions of civilizational rise and decline.

You could sit down and try to read the Muqaddimah, his famous treatise of historical sociology. But I think it’s much better to start with this great biography by Robert Irwin, which tells the story of Khaldun as a person. You read how he was a famous juror in southern Spain and in North Africa, how his family were killed in a terrible shipwreck, how in the siege of Damascus, he was lowered in a basket outside the city walls to go and speak to the great conqueror, Tamerlane, who wanted to know about his theories of history.

Ibn Khaldun was an amazing historical thinker. He had a cyclical theory of history, which was quite common at the time, as it was among the ancient Greeks. He thought there were patterns to the ways civilizations come and go. The key to it all in the Muqaddimah – and Robert Irwin talks about it a lot as well – is a concept called asabiya, which is an Arabic term meaning collective solidarity, or group feeling. Khaldun argued that what makes a civilization thrive is this strong asabiya or group feeling, and when that asabiya is eroded – for example, when civilizations become very unequal in terms of wealth – then the civilizations fall apart, and they are prey to outside invaders like nomadic tribes who become the new conquerors.

Khaldun’s questions about what makes civilizations rise and fall are absolutely pertinent today when we are wondering whether we are going to bend or break in the face of the ecological crisis, risks from new technologies and other kinds of turbulence. How do we create asabiya, this social glue or social trust to help us be resilient in the face of change? He’s a really fantastic figure for exploring that. We should be looking to Ibn Khaldun.

Though I don’t really believe in his cyclical theory of history. We should take it all with a pinch of salt. Robert Irwin is very good at pointing out some of those problems of Khaldun’s analysis as well.

Lastly, you’ve chosen Colin Ward’s Anarchy in Action, although I’m not sure if anarchy is really the right word—for me it conjures up someone throwing a Molotov cocktail. The vision Colin Ward lays out is more positive than that. Tell me how this book fits in in terms of learning lessons from history.

Colin Ward was one of Britain’s most famous anarchist writers from the last century – this year is the 100th anniversary of his birth. He was a social historian and an anarchist theorist. What he was very keen to point out is that there are two basic traditions of anarchism. One is the Molotov-cocktail-throwing protester with a balaclava, or a 19th-century young Russian trying to blow up a tsar. That’s not the tradition he’s interested in or supports.

The other, the tradition he’s interested in, is anarchy as a form of social organization. In other words, the way that human communities have managed to organize their lives together, often in local, voluntary, non-hierarchical ways, without the big state, big business or big religion.

One of his favorite examples of this – and this was also a favorite example of the 19th-century anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin in his book, Mutual Aid – was Britain’s Royal National Lifeboat Institution, which still exists today in multiple towns on the coasts of Britain. Its members will go and save people who are being swept out to sea. It’s a voluntary, local organization, linked together into a relatively flat, non-hierarchical federation. For Colin Ward, that was anarchism in its best form.

Ward’s writings have really influenced the way I think about politics, society and economics, especially through a book he wrote called Anarchy in Action, which tries to bring out all these examples in the present and in the past of where we’ve managed to cooperate. So, for example, he wrote a lot about the history of workers’ cooperatives as they emerged in the 19th century in Italy and in Spain. He wrote about the history of tenant-run housing, of cooperative housing movements. He wrote about lots of forms of political organizing, for example, during the Spanish Civil War when anarchist workers took over factories and ran them themselves, or ran the tram system in Barcelona.

What he’s telling us that’s really relevant today is a story of social cooperation and our incredible capacity for it. As we move into an age where we need to leave behind the hyper-individualism of the 20th century – inherited from neoliberal capitalism and self-help culture – we need to be finding more local and communal solutions to our problems.

Ward wrote, for example, about that Valencia Tribunal of Waters, which I mentioned earlier. That’s how I first discovered it, years and years ago. I didn’t clock it at the time, but I’ve now gone back to it and realized that he was thinking about the commons. You can see a lot of economic thinkers today, including my partner Kate Raworth, who works on Doughnut Economics, looking at, ‘How do we create a commons’? How do we expand that part of the economy where we share resources, we communicate, we cooperate together to manage forests or fisheries or waterways?’ There’s also a new emerging movement of cooperative businesses and steward-owned companies that are held in public trust, with a legal duty to look after their workers and the planet – like the clothing company Patagonia.

Colin Ward has been writing about this kind of thing for 50 years, and so I found huge inspiration in his work. I realize that the title of his book, Anarchy in Action, is a bit scary to some people, but it’s all about redefining anarchism as the gentle art of social cooperation. Asabiya, in a way. Ibn Khaldun would have loved Colin Ward.

I like your premise, that there is a lot we can learn from history. A few years ago, I was reading a book called How History Gets Things Wrong by a philosopher at Duke, Alex Rosenberg. He was making the case that there are absolutely no lessons to be learned from history. I think his opening example is the French military after 1870. Despite assiduously studying military history, they were invaded four times in 70 years in the same place and were surprised each time.  

You do hear that. There’s the great podcast, The Rest is History. One of the hosts, Dominic Sandbrook, has often pointed out that there are no clear lessons from history because it’s different each time. Contexts are different and history never repeats itself.

But if you look at what social scientists have been doing for the last century, they’ve been looking for patterns in history – and finding them. Elinor Ostrom, the Nobel Prize-winning theorist of ‘the commons’, came up with eight principles that seem to recur when you look at how communities have sustainably managed their resources, such as having penalties for those who break the agreed rules. There are patterns, even if they’re not patterns that hold across all space and all time. They hold for some periods of history, in some places, rather than the kinds of universal laws of history that Karl Marx thought he had discovered.

One book we didn’t talk about is How to Blow up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm, who looks at the radical flank effect in social movements – the way that successful movements often have a more radical organization operating alongside them that helps to make the mainstream movement look more moderate and reasonable by comparison. Think of the US civil rights movement around Martin Luther King Jr, in comparison to the more radical Black Power Movement involving Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. The radical flank effect is a powerful historical insight but it isn’t a universal theory because mass social movements only really emerged in the 18th century with the centralization of state power in the nation-state. But we can look at the patterns since then. That’s what political scientists and sociologists are doing all the time. They usually don’t call it ‘learning the lessons of history’, but they are trying to find patterns. In effect, they are challenging the idea that all history is contingent.

Ultimately, I think it’s time to take history more seriously as a useful guide to help us navigate the crises of our times. You wouldn’t drive a car without looking in the rearview mirror. Let’s be guided by the Maori proverb Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua – ‘I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on the past.’