History Bump

Rulers, statesmen, nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history; yet what experience and history teach is this-that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, nor have they acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone. Amid the pressure of great events a general principle gives no help.

It is useless to revert to similar circumstances in the past. The pallid
shades of memory struggle in vain with the life and freedom of the
present. Looked at in this light nothing can be shallower than the
oft-repeated appeal to Greek and Roman examples during the French
Revolution; nothing is more diverse than the genius of those nations and
that of our times.

For me this provides a more concrete definition of the way Hegel was approaching history. One of the things that irritated me about this chapter was that the term history was used to signify everything from a Tradition or collective memory to a series of metaphors that focus and refocus the past.

Here is another quote from Hegel that interested me (particularly because we are trying to write a history).

In speaking of the German approach to history,

instead of writing history, we are always beating our brains to discover how history ought to be written.

(which is sometimes the way I feel reading histories of comp/rhet)
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