Santayana’s Law
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana, philosopher, poet, novelist, and critic produced this gem in the first of the five volumes of The Life of Reason (1905-06). Of course, the idea that history is repetitive is not particularly new. Already in the fifth century B.C. Thucydides asserted in his History of the Peloponesian War that events tended to repeat themselves. He would be content, Thucydides told his readers, at the outset if his work were to be “judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it.”
A number of variations on Santayana’s Law have been produced, including:
Darrow’s Observation. History repeats itself. That’s one of the things wrong with history (attributed to Clarence Darrow in Paul Dickson, The Official Rules 1978).
Huxley’s Amendment. That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach (Aldous Huxley ‘Case of Voluntary Ignorance’, Collected Essays 1959). Here, Huxley may also have been partly inspired by Hegel’s assertion: “What experience and history teach is this - that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history or acted on principles deduced from it” (Philosophy of History 1832).
Wolf’s Law of Historical Lessons. Those who don’t study the past will repeat its errors; those who do study it will find other ways to err (Charles Wolf Jr. quoted by Alan L. Otten in the Wall Street Journal, February 26th 1976).
McKernan’s Maxim. Those who are unable to learn from past meetings are condemned to repeat them (in Arthur Block, The Complete Murphy’s Law 1991).
Hollywood’s Rewrite of Santayana’s Law. Unless you remember the past, you can’t possibly repeat it at the box office (film review of The Two Jakes, a belated sequel to Chinatown, in the New York Times, April 10th 1990).
Not everyone agrees that history has much value of course. Notable dissents from the opinions of Santayana Thucydides et. al. include those of Henry Ford who asserted that “History is more or less bunk” (interview, Chicago Tribune, May 25th 1916) and Carl Sandburg who took, if anything, a dimmer view declaring that “the past is a bucket of ashes” (’Prairie’, in Cornhuskers 1918).
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