Most everyone is familiar with Spanish philosopher George Santayana’s aphorism that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  You can find it in his 1905 book called Reason in Common Sense.

As a history professor, I get asked pretty regularly what I think of this.  My usual response is to admit I’m not comfortable simply saying that history repeats itself because it never does really. I will say that people are prone to making the same mistakes over and over again:  mistakes that are built on inclinations that written into our human nature, perhaps.  The working out of this doesn’t amount to “history repeating itself” as much as it says that human nature is dependable, both in a good way and in a bad way. Human nature is something that a lot of contemporary historians don’t really think about too much, especially those who are in love with quantitative data.  (Among the classical historians, Plutarch was especially good at incorporating this into his writings, often at the expense of historical fact, however.  Thucydides was also good at it in his analysis of the Peloponnesian War.)

Quantitatively, human nature is something hard to account for, but wherever humans are, there it will be governing their actions.  This is why I think novelists make very good historians, and why, therefore, I like to assign novels in my history classes.  (The Red Badge of Courage is one I find especially good to teach.  Lots of World History classes used to assign Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart.  There’s actually a historical novel society, which is something I’ve recently discovered and intend to learn more about.)

If you want to say something insightful about history but wisely don’t want to follow the legions who go around quoting Santayana, go with a poet instead: “History, with all her volumes vast, hath but one page.”  It’s Lord Byron, from his 1812 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.  Poets and novelists understand human nature; historians need to do a better job of it.