Lessons of History: An Impossible Equation? Towards New Perspectives on Historical Learning
Journal: The Historical Review/La Revue Historique
Year: 2021

Lessons of history are two-sided cultural products. They serve as activeinstruments of temporal orientation in a society in which historical trajectories seem obsolete and the future open, but they are also passively framed within historical cultures that often have prefigured them. Thus, lessons are seldom arbitrarily constructed. While lessons of history for many centuries were highly esteemed as guides to the future from the viewpoint of a practical past, and still are among economists, polit