In a lecture in 2018, former U.S. Secretary of Defense and former Belfer Center director Ash Carter said, “The dominant mental methodology of real policymakers is historical reasoning,” not economics or political science or philosophy. It’s a striking assertion, but not one that should surprise us; after all, much of the thought that leads to decisions of public policy is inevitably historical, implying a guess about the future derived from the experience of the past.
Hence the importance of policymakers having the capacity to think historically, to transcend assumptions common to their age and rise above what the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called the “flux of temporal events.” They should aim to develop a historical sensibility, or what Eliot Cohen has termed “a historical mind”—a familiarity with the past, a feel for its rhythms and unpredictability, a comfort with the long view.
This course will consider how historical knowledge and historical skills can be used to better understand the policymaking process. It’s not so much a history course, however, as a course about historical reasoning—inference from experience. Such reasoning can take many forms, and it can be misused and abused. Along the way during the semester, we will therefore call attention to some common fallacies in reasoning from history and discuss ways to avoid them.
Also offered by the History Department as HIST 84.