“WRITING history,” Gustave Flaubert once remarked, “is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.” Historians don’t just list everything that has ever happened, but try to string together selected events that hopefully give some insight into the process of history. History is, or should be, about learning from the past to understand the future.
Are there “laws of history”, patterns or regularities that would let us make predictions? Karl Marx thought he saw a steady progression in history, leading inevitably to a future of world government by the workers. British historian Arnold Toynbee saw cyclic patterns in the rise and fall of civilisations. But most historians today think that Marx and…
