"The American philosopher George Santayana once wrote that '[t]hose who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it'--implying, perhaps, that if we educate ourselves, we can escape the destinies that our ancestors have woven for
us. This is not true, of course. If only it were. Life would be easier if we could use the lessons of history to predict the future, and thus to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. But as the humorist Samuel Clemens (better known as Mark Twain) once observed: "History doesn't repeat itself-at best it sometimes rhymes." Like poetry, history is enigmatic: it asks more questions than it answers. Is 2006 likely to resemble 1976, with a guerrilla war behind us but economic misery ahead in the forms of high inflation (or more likely, a declining dollar), high energy prices, and stagnating wages? What about 1926--the height of that experiment in public morality known as 'Prohibition'--when our enchantment with 'borrow and spend' paved the way for the crash and the depression to come? Or are we living in the midst of another Gilded Age, as in 1896, when businesses were consolidating, labor unions were flexing their muscles, and wealth was becoming more concentrated in the hands of a few? Might the answer be 'all of the above'?"
Sara K. Stadler, The Bulls and Bears of Law Teaching, 63 W&L L. Rev.25, 43 (2006).
I'm always happy to see law professors delving into history, and some really good history has been written by law professors, but the problem is that most law professors believe in themselves so much that they think they can write about history as capably, or more so, than historians. Even in legal history, that is not correct, in my view. The historian's education and methods are frequently better suited to finding and explaining the past than the training and methods of a teacher of law.
I will have more to say about Santayana, whose quotation above I like, and about this apocryphal Twain "saying."