[PEN-L:29364] learning from history

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Title: learning from history

RE: [PEN-L:29362] Re: Re: Max Elbaum To Speak In Sacramento On  SocialMovementHistory

Carrol: >Actually, analogies don't help much. "Learn from History" is a
capitalist not a marxist slogan. What one learns from history is best
represented by what the French General Staff in the 1930s learned from
World War 1. To put it another way, it is profoundly unhistorical to
believe that one can learn from the "mistakes" of the past.<

Just because the future can never be exactly the same as the past doesn't mean that we can learn _nothing_ from the past. Among other things, you are telling us that we can learn from the mistakes of the French General Staff during the 1930s. The problem was that they learned in the _wrong way_.

It's okay to "learn from the past" as long as the fallacy of argument by analogy is remembered: that is, the future is like the past in some ways -- but it's also different. The say applies to "learning from a theory." Concrete reality can be understood by using theory, but no theory corresponds to reality completely.

The main point of learning from the past or learning from theory is not as a substitute for "concrete analysis of concrete conditions" but in order to gain perspective that is lost if one gets mired in the details of concrete analysis.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine