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Comment by emodendroket | Hacker News Reader

I doubt anyone would really be happy returning to feudalism, but I imagine the goal of highlighting this stuff is to expand the sense of what is possible. It's easy to start thinking of the current state of affairs as some kind of immutable law of the universe and not a carefully negotiated political arrangement that can be altered as we see fit.

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Returning to farming without the terrible pompous inhumane feudal lords sounds good

It sounds profoundly unappealing to me but the leisure time has its charms.

Again, this is exactly my point. This isn't history. This is specifically not what history is for. History does not inform that process because the past is not like the present. They are orthogonal. Attempting to inform your view of the present using the past is like trying to play baseball like football...it just doesn't make any sense.

Absurd. "History" is not some kind of science done by weights and measures but the job of interpreting various things about the past into some sort of cohesive narrative. Of course the result of trying to recapture something about the past is often not very much alike -- I don't think the American Republic is really that much like the Roman Republic, despite consciously attempting to recreate it -- but the idea that that's "not what history for" is just not true as a descriptive statement. Perhaps you believe it should not be used that way, but if your only lens to look at things is the present, your imagination will be incredibly constrained.

You have missed the point totally.

The "cohesive narrative" stands alone. History exists only on its own terms. You cannot look at something that happened in history and say: we can do this because it happened then. It is not absurd, it is the basic aspect of how histography is taught in university (and btw, if you study politics...you will find the same idea, "path dependence"...you see parallels in every social science because it is a fairly common mistake made by people who haven't thought about the issue deeply...the "why don't you be like Denmark" meme is a classic of comparative politics).

I am not saying that the present is the only lens (again, you haven't even started to understand what I wrote). The point is that the present is the only present. The past can only be understood in it's own terms. You are not constrained in any way because the past provides only information about the past, not the present.

The past leads directly into the present, so how could that possibly be? When do you think it’s cut off? Does yesterday not suggest anything about today?

It can possibly be because that is what history is. It is the study of things which are not the present.

It is irrelevant whether yesterday is like today because history is not about yesterday. Again, if you are interested about this subject, I would read some books about historiography (EH Carr and Elton are two of the most important books of this last hundred years...but, again, I don't think you will find anyone arguing for the position you are taking because it so clearly is an attempt to justify a political position today...this isn't what history is, any political position today has to be justified in the terms of today...historical relativists do not take your line, no-one does, it makes no sense unless you have no idea what history is).

I can agree as far as the point that the past must be understood on its own terms and not in terms of contemporary categories, but if EH Carr and Elton truly believe the past has absolutely nothing to tell us about the present, they're about the only people on Earth, including academic historians, who think so. Looking them up suggests their ideas are rather controversial and not simply accepted as consensus ones either (and indeed rejecting the concept of "contingency" would put him out of step with pretty much every working historian I've listened to).

Isn’t history supposed to repeat itself and in that way tell us about the future? And isn’t history an insight into human nature and in that way illuminate modern issues?

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