World into Globe IV: History as a Tool of Foresight

Revisiting Bruce Mazlish’s The Railroad and the Space Program (1965), a pioneering study of history as a tool of foresight, this contribution to World into Globe asks: Why is learning from history not the main objective of professional historiography? Recalling the Ciceronian dictum of history as the teacher of life, the opposition to this earlier status of history is traced back to Leopold von Ranke. In turn, Ranke’s anti-Ciceronian stance is explained with recourse to Reinhart Koselleck’s theory of the Sattelzeit. Koselleck’s “saddle time” posits an epochal transition between 1750 and 1850 in which a new temporality privileging the future supplanted the traditional temporality that had elevated the past. The essay concludes with a renewal of the question that prompted it.