Abstract
Historical analogies are amongst the most important tools in applied history. On the one hand, they are applauded as decision-making tools, on the other hand they are criticised by the historical discipline. In the discipline of applied history, historical analogies remain deconceptualised. This article defines and classifies the various forms of historical analogy. Classification is based on people and events, on how history is learned and on the depth of the lessons learned from historical analogies. The functions of historical analogies in policymaking and decision-making are discussed and clarified by means of historical examples. The article then reflects on the limitations of historical analogies and, to conclude, suggests ways to encourage the correct use of historical analogies.
1 Introduction
Historical analogies, comparisons between a contemporary situation and a historical situation, are essential tools of applied history.1 In their Applied History Manifesto, Graham Allison and Niall Ferguson even go so far as to define applied history as “the explicit attempt to illuminate current challenges and choices by analyzing historical precedents and analogues”, thus describing it as the foremost important tool “to do” applied history.2 They are certainly not alone in this. Two pioneers of applied history, Ernest May and Richard Neustadt, also view analogy as one of applied history’s principal tools. Other influential authors in the field likewise stress historical analogy as one of the most important tools of applied history.3 It is easy to see why. Analogical reasoning is one of the foundations of human and even animal reasoning. It is seen as one of the most important and convincing heuristic tools, one that is used in countless fields and settings.4 Historical analogies are persuasive and popular reasoning tools. They have the benefit of effortlessly making the past accessible, can convincingly validate policies and decisions and are therefore often used in policy-making.5
However, applied history is not uncontested in the larger historical field. One of the focal points of the criticism is aimed directly at historical uses of historical analogy.6 It has to be said that proponents of historical analogies such as Ernest May were also amongst the first to point out that “policy-makers ordinarily use history badly”.7 Later scholars, such as Yuen Foong Khong, have also pointed out that decision-makers use historical analogies “not very well”.8
We know from both qualitative and quantitative analysis that decision-makers indeed actively use historical analogies during crises.9 As they often do so unwittingly, a better understanding of the correct use of analogy in decision-making is very relevant to society.10
It is therefore surprising that although historical analogy is one of the showpieces of applied history and given that history has its foundations in the assumption that you can learn from the past,11 the methodological assumptions of historical analogies are largely understudied.12 This is particularly true in the field of applied history, where Ferguson and other promoters of the method rarely reflect on its theoretical pitfalls.13 Two theorists of history, Ludmilla Jordanova and John Tosh, have both pointed out that public history, including applied history, is “underconceptualized”. Historians of historical theory, who are perhaps best suited to deliver theoretical insights into applied history, are increasingly forming their own distinct subdiscipline and are thus less inclined to theoretically underpin other historical subdisciplines.14 This article tries to bring these fields together. Historians who study applied history are therefore its main audience. It focuses on correct uses and limitations of analogies within history. As the discipline is aimed at the actual application of history to contemporary events by historians and decisionmakers and their aides, the article also aims to be relevant for professionals working in public administration.
This article seeks to bridge the gaps by reflecting on the definition, functions, uses and limitations of historical analogies in applied history. Thinking about historical analogies has been developed chiefly in international relations, with a lot of emphasis on policy-making in the context of international crises and wars. The historiography of this kind of applied history is written predominantly by American and British authors.15 To a lesser extent, this article is influenced by the uses of historical analogies in common law and memory studies. This study also profits from insights derived from philosophical work on analogies.
The first section provides a definition and classification of historical analogies. The second explains the functions of historical analogies in decision-making and the third discusses the limitations on the correct use of historical analogies. The final section suggests ways to encourage the correct use of historical analogies.
2 Definition and Classification of Historical Analogies
This section first defines and then classifies historical analogies. The classification brings together the work of applied history and neighboring fields, such as international relations, public policy studies and memory studies. Examples are provided to illustrate the functions of historical analogies.
Although many authors of applied history promote the critical use of historical analogy, perhaps because it is such a logical way of reasoning for humans, they do not define it.16 Khong was the first to publish a comprehensive international relations study on historical analogies. His definition is widely used but he overlooks historical analogies based on persons when he defines historical analogies as “an inference that if two or more events separated in time agree in one respect, then they may also agree in another”.17 The act of comparison, which is an important aspect of analogical reasoning, is also underdeveloped in the definitions given by Khong and Neustadt and May. This form of reasoning is well studied within the philosophy of science, for example by Paul Bartha, who studied analogies from a philosophical perspective.18
By combining all these elements we can define historical analogy as a comparison of a known past event or person with a contemporary but unfamiliar event or person in order to identify common aspects between the two. It follows the same logic as an analogical argument. Accepted similarities between two historical systems are used to support the conclusion that some further similarity exists in the present. Historical analogies and historical analogical arguments are difficult to separate. This is also true of history writing in general. The philosopher of history Frank Ankersmit pointed out that a historical account is both a selection, interpretation and connection of evidence from the historical facts presented in the sources, and a rhetorical tool to create a new coherent and persuasive narrative.19
The military historian Scot MacDonald was the first to provide a classification of historical analogies. His three-way system classifies historical analogies and makes a distinction between events and people (the source domain), how people learn history and what kind of lessons people draw from historical analogies.20 More research into the use of historical analogies has been done since MacDonald presented his classification. These insights provide more rigor to the classification. It has been further enhanced with insights from political scientists Peter Feaver and William Inboden and from memory studies by Djouaria Ghilani et al.
Firstly, historical analogies can draw on events or people. This distinction is only a classification difference, it makes no difference for the substance of comparison. Both events and persons in the source domain can be used to make a similar analogical argument and explain the present problem (the target domain). For example, in the build-up to the 1990 Gulf War both UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and US President George Bush repeatedly employed the analogy of Germany in the 1930s, Munich 1938 and the danger of appeasement with regard to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. In doing so, they compared Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, to Adolf Hitler to justify their intervention.21
3 Forms of Learning from Historical Analogies
A second classification is based on the work of Feaver and Inboden, who showed how people learn and use history. This can be by study, tradition, memory or experience.22 All four ways are evident in the use of history in historical analogies.
Learned historical analogies are based on the study of historical events before a person’s lifetime, from books or from tradition. A classic example of this is Machiavelli’s sixteenth century book, The Prince. In it, the prince is advised to act like both a fox and a lion, lessons that are based on the reign of Roman emperor Septimius Severus (145–211). The lessons learned can be deep, as they are based on the historical awareness and basic premises of true history writing.23
Historical analogies with a strong tradition are easily employed in the diagnostic phase when trying to make sense of a situation by identifying historical references, or when historical analogies are used as justification.24 Decision-makers then tend to employ what Fischer calls historical metaphors. These are abridged forms of historical analogies, in which historical analogies and historical lessons are compressed into single words such as Munich, Dien Bien Phu, or comparisons with Hitler. It should be remembered that these metaphors are not truisms in themselves, but can have a different meaning in different national contexts. “Dunkirk”, for instance, can be seen as a logistical success in Great Britain, but can embody betrayal in France.25 Metaphors are not necessarily a bad thing. Historians use them all the time, for instance in periodization such as the Industrial Revolution or the Renaissance. Metaphors are a part of the conceptualization of history. The problem is that they are often used unwittingly because of their familiarity and banality.26
Historical analogies from memory are based on active memory of events that happened during a person’s lifetime, but in which the narrator of the analogy played no active role.27 President Barack Obama’s preparations to get the Affordable Healthcare Act (Obamacare) through Congress drew on the lessons learned from the Clinton administration’s failed attempt to introduce the health care plan of 1993, which for Obama’s aides “became a blueprint for what not to do in health reform”. Obama launched his legislative initiative in the first weeks of his presidency at a bipartisan meeting with a wide range of stakeholders, from doctors and Republican senators to health insurers. He remarked, “Each of us must accept that none of us will get everything we want, and that no proposal for reform will be perfect.” One participant, Bill Gradison, former head of the Health Insurance Association of America and a very vocal campaigner against the Clinton health care plan, told the Washington Post: “My impression is that there’s been a real openness to reach out to diverse interests, not leaving anyone out—which is how a lot of people felt back in the 1990s … They [the Obama administration] seem to have learned the lessons of what not to do this time.”28
Personally experienced historical analogies are based on events in which a person was actively involved. The documentary film The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara is a good example of this. In it, former US Secretary of Defense and World Bank President Robert McNamara shares his life lessons. Lessons like “empathize with your enemy” were drawn from his dealings with Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis. Here McNamara illustrates how personal experiences of a past event, in this case the experiences of Ambassador Llewellyn “Tommy” Thompson, are used to make inferences about a new event. At the height of the crisis, President Kennedy received two messages. The first one “had been dictated by a man who was either drunk or under tremendous stress. Basically, he said, ‘If you’ll guarantee you won’t invade Cuba, we’ll take the missiles out.’ Then before we could respond, we had a second message that had been dictated by a bunch of hardliners. And it said, in effect, ‘If you attack, we’re prepared to confront you with masses of military power.’ Kennedy had to decide how to react. The former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, Tommy Thompson, who knew Khrushchev personally urged Kennedy to respond to the first letter, since he believed that Khrushchev could successfully convince the Soviet people that ‘Kennedy was going to destroy Castro and I prevented it.’ Thompson, knowing Khrushchev as he did, thought Khrushchev will accept that. And Thompson was right. That’s what I call empathy. We must try to put ourselves inside their skin and look at us through their eyes, just to understand the thoughts that lie behind their decisions and their actions.”29
4 Width and Depth of Lessons Learned from Historical Analogies
The third classification of historical analogies is based on the width and depth of the lessons learned from the analogies. They can be micro, macro or nostalgic.30 Micro lessons are directly relevant to policy. Micro lessons are derived from direct comparison of historical events with a contemporary situation. Here history is used prescriptively (more on this in the functions’ section), by searching the past for alternatives and the possibilities of success by applying those alternatives. When faced with the recession of 2008–2009, policy-makers turned to the economic and historical lessons of the Great Depression of the 1930s, which were evident in the European Central Bank’s initial responses to the 2008–2009 recession.31
Historical analogies that function as macro lesson mostly do not come from a single event and are not used descriptively, but are primarily inspirational or forms of justification (more on the latter in the functions section). Political historian Annelien de Dijn defines this as “usable past” where the past is not used as a technical repository for future actions but acts as inspiration and motivation and highlights forgotten traditions.32 Macro lessons support more general lessons. In the midst of the corona pandemic, De Dijn argued that instead of providing prescriptive measures to deal with the corona pandemic, the past could provide more general lessons. For example, that a pandemic can be a catalyst for societal and political change. She illustrates this with social historian Richard Evans’s Death in Hamburg, in which he describes how the ruling merchant oligarchy’s poor response to Europe’s last cholera pandemic in 1892 led to many deaths among Hamburg’s poorest inhabitants. The resultant outrage led to a series of fundamental societal changes, not least to an extension of voting rights for educated workers.33 Simon Szreter, a historian of population, provided an interesting example of a macro lesson. He wrote an article on the development of poor laws in pre-industrial Great Britain. It earned him invitations to development cooperation conferences in Africa. “They told me that what they found helpful and inspirational in my presentation was simply the fact that history showed that complex, large-scale welfare systems were not solely the property of rich nations, the luxurious fruit of achieved development.”34
Historical analogies can also appeal to ideological, nostalgic or nationalistic feelings, rather than provide lessons.35 A clear recent example is the Russian media and government’s consistent framing of the Ukraine crisis and war in terms of the Great Patriotic War and the Ukrainian adversaries as Nazis in an orchestrated effort of identity construction. In his Crimea speech (2014), President Vladimir Putin perfectly conflated the Second World War with the present “military intervention” when he defended the annexation of Crimea with the words “but it was already pretty clear to everyone what the ideological heirs to [Ukrainian Insurgent Army UPA leader] Stepan Bandera, Hitler’s helper during World War Two, intended to do in the future”.36
5 The Functions of Historical Analogies in Policy-Making and Decision-Making
Historical analogies play an important role in decision-making. Both policy-making and decision-making take place in a series of steps. A widely used model to describe the decision-making steps is that of Herbert Simons, who identified 4 steps.37 Although Simons used other labels for those steps (i.e. intelligence, design, choice, review) they coincide fully with the labels proposed here, which are derived from a review of the literature on applied history, international relations, military history, public administration and memory studies. Our review of the use of historical analogies in decision-making found four articles that described most of the functions of historical analogies and a series of articles on particular aspects of decision-making.38 Based on this we can identify four different, often sequential functions of historical analogies in decision-making and policy-making: diagnosis, prescription, decision-making and justification. These functions are not mutually exclusive.39
Table 1
The functions of historical analogies in policy-making and decision-making
|
Functions of historical analogies in policy/decision-making (MacDonald, Rolling the Iron Dice) |
Type of analogical argument typically used in this decision-making phase (Bartha, By Parallel Reasoning) |
Functions of historical analogies according to Ghilani et al., “Looking Forward to the Past” |
Functions of historical analogies according to Khong, Analogies at War |
Functions of historical analogies according to Vertzberger, “Foreign Policy Decisionmakers” |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Diagnosis |
Explanatory |
– Representing a contemporary situation – Defining the roles of contemporary actors |
– Helping define the nature of the situation facing the policy-maker – Helping assess the stakes |
– Defining the situation by structuring and interpreting information – Circumscribing role—the recognition of roles and status appropriate for the actor |
|
Prescription |
Predictive |
This function is not identified by Ghilani et al. |
– Providing prescriptive measures to help assess alternative options – Predicting their chances of success |
Determining strategy—the search for ideas and orientations regarding the most effective range of policies to cope with acute problems facing the actor and the choice among the policy alternatives. |
|
Decision-making |
Functional |
Making decisions |
– Evaluating the moral rightness of the decision – Warning about dangers associated with the options |
N/A |
|
Justification |
Functional |
Persuading others of a message |
N/A |
Justifying strategy—the process of convincing other relevant participants, domestic or foreign, that a particular policy is the most logical, practical and normatively acceptable. |
The first step in decision-making is a diagnosis to define the nature of a situation. Second, the prescriptive step weighs and compares alternative solutions. The decision is taken in the third step, after which the chosen decision has to be justified in the fourth and final step.40 The four steps and their respective functions are presented in the table below in the words of the four articles. As MacDonald has hardly elaborated on the steps in his classification of decision-making, we draw on all the literature we reviewed to explain them.
That the decision-making steps coincide with the different types of analogy is justified by contrasting the four functions of historical analogies with the work of philosopher of science Paul Bartha. He developed standards for the classification and evaluation of analogical arguments in science and mathematics and identified four functions of analogical arguments. They are distinguished by the direction of the historical event (H) and the new event (N). In predictive analogies, the historical event predicts the situation for the new event (H→N). Explanatory analogies are used to test the plausibility of an explanatory hypothesis. It tests whether the alternatives for a new event (the hypothesis) can be explained by the success of past events (N→H). Functional analogies run in both directions in which the historical event is explained by the new and vice versa (N←→ H). This form is used in archaeology and anthropology where the function of an artefact or ritual is compared to a similar artefact or ritual in a different culture or time. Here past and future are in conjunction. The fourth and final analogy is the correlative. Here both events are correlated, but neither event can explain the other. This analogical form exists in logic, but it cannot be a historical analogy because there is no causal or explanatory relationship between the two.41
5.1 Diagnosis
All the literature on the use of historical analogies in decision-making notes that the process starts with a diagnosis. In this phase, the nature of the situation confronting the policy-maker is defined by means of familiar and comparable historical situations. The direction generally runs from the contemporary situation to historical precedents. This has the form of an explanatory analogy, which is used to make sense of a situation by checking the plausibility of explanations of the present situation by looking to examples in the past.42 In this phase, policy-makers also use historical analogies to assess a problem’s significance.
Since the diagnosis phase is often unexpected, it is sometimes carried out under great pressure and history is often used unwittingly. Decision-makers tend to focus on historical examples from tradition, memory or experience.43 These spring to mind more readily than learned analogies. In this phase a wide range of historical analogies are floated. It is important to realize their limitations and to evaluate them critically.
This mechanism was clearly demonstrated in two quantitative studies of the use of historical analogies in crises. Anselm Küsters looked into the historical lessons that the European Bank referenced in its speeches during the 2009–2011 banking crisis.44 Bram de Ridder studied historical referencing by news media in Flanders at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.45 Both authors found that the use of historical analogies rose sharply at the start of the crises. It is clear, particularly in De Ridder’s article, that there was “extreme variety in historical references” at the start of the crisis, as people were still searching “for the best point of comparison”. The analogies ranged from world wars, silk roads and the Chernobyl disaster to a raft of other epidemics. Later in the crisis—and in the later phases of decision-making—only a few analogies remained in use as many others had lost relevance because they did not make meaningful comparisons. Only the worst epidemics, such as HIV/AID s, the Black Death and Spanish flu, continued to be used.46 The same process is clearly visible in Robert Axelrod and Larissa Forester’s study of the use of historical analogies in five countries after major events such as 9/11: in the immediate aftermath, all media employ a wide variety of historical analogies to make sense of an event and use different analogies to clarify its various features.47
5.2 Prescription
The second phase of the use of historical analogies in decision-making is prescription. In this phase, history is used to formulate alternative policy options and assess their effectiveness and likely success. The historical analogies are thinned out to bring the most meaningful to the fore. They are scrutinized by means of predictive analogies. The historical event (the source domain) is compared to test whether historical actions can be transferred to the new event.48
A classic example is Roy Porter’s 1986 editorial in the British Medical Journal in the midst of the AIDS epidemic. With no vaccine or cure in sight, policy-makers in the United Kingdom, following those in New South Wales, asked whether transmission of AIDS should become a punishable offence. Porter’s essay compared the policy options of quarantine and criminalization with education, and favored the latter. Britain still had plague and cholera laws dating from the 19th century that could be used to quarantine AIDS patients. Quarantine had served well at the time, although there had also been mass protests against the curtailment of civil liberties and compulsory mass burials. Criminalization had been used in the late 19th century to control syphilis, which was rampant among soldiers at the time. In British ports and garrison towns, any woman suspected of having syphilis could be forced to undergo medical examination. This made any woman who spoke to a soldier suspect, which prompted a broad protest movement by feminists and doctors who feared that double standards and secrecy would push the issue even further out of sight. Doctors were made compulsory “snitches”. The legislation backfired and was repealed due to the pleas of doctors in particular. From 1913 onwards, education, in the form of public information about diseases, became the norm. A Royal Commission found that secretiveness, punishment and coercion only caused more problems. Openness was therefore called for.49 Porter presented a very persuasive argument to trust in education and not to treat the transmission of AIDS as a punishable offence.50
5.3 Decision-Making
After comparing the alternatives, the third phase in the use of historical analogies is decision-making. The analogies are used for two purposes. Firstly, to make a moral judgement on whether the decision is correct and secondly to warn of the dangers associated with other options. This is backed by discussions on decision taking in (common) law, were precisely this distinction is also found. Within law there is a wide agreement that justification of the use of an analogy is essential. Either there is a justification in the form of a meaningful similarity to apply an earlier decision to the case at hand, or the case is too unfamiliar to apply it to the case under ruling.51 According to common law scholar Levi justification of analogy lies at the heart of the court system: “The determination of similarity or difference is the function of each judge”.52
Clarifying the (moral) judgement and warning against other options is often done with the aid of functional analogies in which the new event is compared with historical events and vice versa. In ethno-archeology these analogies play an important role of linking historical cultures directly to modern peoples (H→N) and as proof that similar challenges have to be tackled in a similar way (N→H).53 Since the functions and the arguments used within the decision-making steps are iterative, the analogical arguments are not mutually exclusive.
This mechanism is clearly visible in the response of US President George W. Bush and his security advisors to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. They “deliberately looked to history to help them interpret this attack and to identify key parameters to the new world”. After considering the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Oklahoma City Bombing (1995), they settled on the Cold War as an analogy to underpin their decisions. Referencing the Cold War supported the argument that it would take a long time to defeat a terrorist enemy. Moral justification was also found in the analogy. Democracy and the free market had “trumped the allure of communism, so too would the war against terror be won”. This line of reasoning effortlessly discredited alternatives to the Bush administration’s actions.54 An illustrative example of this is George W. Bush’s inaugural address of 2005, in which the Cold War analogy served as a moral judgement on the rightness, to use Khong’s terminology, of his interventions in the Middle East and his war on terror. By employing a functional analogy, Bush first alerted his audience to the history of Cold War America (N→H) and then presented the historical solution as a means to tackle a similar challenge in a similar way.
At this second gathering, our duties are defined not by the words I use but by the history we have seen together. For a half a century, America defended our own freedom by standing watch on distant borders. After the shipwreck of communism came years of relative quiet, years of repose, years of sabbatical, and then there came a day of fire.
We have seen our vulnerability, and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny, prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder, violence will gather and multiply in destructive power and cross the most defended borders and raise a mortal threat. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment and expose the pretensions of tyrants and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.
We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.55
5.4 Justification
The functions of moral judgement and warnings about other options are hard to distinguish from the fourth phase in the use of historical analogies: justification. In this phase, history is used to convince disparate audiences of the chosen option in logical, practical and/or moral and normative terms. Historical analogies can be very powerful and persuasive because they combine legitimacy, by referencing a shared historical truth, with feasibility, by referencing precedents.56 Functional analogies are frequently used in this phase, too. A good example is President Clinton’s television address of March 24, 1999 in which he announced airstrikes against Serbia in the Kosovo conflict. His speech confronted US citizens directly with the moral obligation arising out of the United States’ late response to both World Wars (H→N). Clinton justified one of many possible solutions to the current crisis (diplomacy, ground troops, air strikes) by recalling the Bosnian air strikes of 1995 (N→H).
“Sarajevo, the capital of neighboring Bosnia, is where World War I began. World War II and the Holocaust engulfed this region. In both wars, Europe was slow to recognize the dangers, and the United States waited even longer to enter the conflicts. Just imagine if leaders back then had acted wisely and early enough, how many lives could have been saved, how many Americans would not have had to die. We learned some of the same lessons in Bosnia just a few years ago. The world did not act early enough to stop that war either. And let’s not forget what happened (…) This was genocide in the heart of Europe.”57
6 The Limitations of Historical Analogies
Historical analogies are important applied history tools. But they are also heavily criticized within the historical discipline. According to John Tosh, the critics hold two main objections: “firstly that analogy contradicts the central principle of historicism, namely the unique character of every succeeding age; and secondly that an analogy tending in one direction can usually be countered by one tending to the opposite, the choice being determined by the prejudices of the writer.”58
The first objection can be countered by historical awareness, which rests on the recognition that there is a gap between past and present and that the past cannot be truly understood without historical contextual knowledge. Difference, context and process are the three principles of historical awareness. This historical way of thinking is a product of historicism.59 The most distinctive characteristic of history writing is its contemplative nature, which also accounts for its anti-positivistic methodology.60
This sets history apart from individual memory or collective memory in the form of traditions and nostalgia, which are easily distorted. History is more detached and can be checked for the three principles of historical awareness.61 This is much more difficult for memory, which is described by memory studies scholar Jay Winter as: “Memory is history seen through affect. And since affect is subjective, it is difficult to examine the claims of memory in the same way as we examine the claims of history”. The lack of historical distance and thus of difference is less important for memory claims, and should be checked for using the principles of historical awareness.62
It remains to be seen whether the second objection to historical analogies—that they can be countered by analogies that favor an opposite direction—is a real one. This reasoning seems to suggest that a perfect analogy is possible. In history, a perfect analogy is ruled out by the difference between the past and present. But this is not the purpose of a historical analogy, according to Tosh. “What historical analogy typically reveals is both contrast and convergence. Provided we are open to both, the effect is to liberate our thinking from the rigidities of current discourse, not by prescribing a course of action, but by expanding our sense of the options.”63
Since the similarities between past and present will always be limited, analogies can be challenged by confronting them with opposite analogies. But this should not be confused with prejudice. It should be seen as a form of historical debate. Historical debate is an intrinsic element of history writing and helps counter the use of history for political ends. Challenging and debating historical analogies is a fundamental and theoretically sound principle of history writing. There is a dividing line between the past, which is hidden in sources and artefacts, and the interpretation and use of rhetorical tools such as analogy by historians to create a coherent historical narrative.64 This does not mean that any narrative—and thus any analogy—can be used; even post-modern historians such as Hayden White accept that narratives are always based on analyses of sources and cannot be created out of nothing.65 The selected historical events, the historical facts and historical sources can be verified or falsified, while the causality within the historical narrative can be checked for logic. History writing and historical arguments can use different concepts of causation (e.g. counterfactuals, process theories and mechanisms), either separately or in combination with each other.66 This makes a meaningful debate on the quality, significance and acceptability of historical analogies perfectly possible.67
It follows that historical analogies have limitations. The historian David Hackett Fischer suggested four limitations—or, in his words, fallacies—to historical analogies.68 First the unintended analogical inference, the unconscious use of a historical analogy which is frequently embedded in language, especially in the language of historians. This is particularly true of the use of historical metaphors, the condensed historical lesson in a term such as “Munich 1938”, but also in terms such as “Industrial Revolution”. They can—unintentionally—distort the meaning we attach to the understanding of a historical period. The second limitation is that a historical analogy cannot be perfect, as the past is always different. Some aspects will be the same, but certainly not all. This fallacy was clearly visible in the comparisons made with Vietnam in American policy-making. The Republican opposition to the bombing campaign in Serbia and the subsequent UN peacekeeping operation in Kosovo under President Clinton, for instance, used the Vietnam analogy. In the words of Representative Stephen Horn: “a quagmire of ethnic and religious rivalries that we cannot solve alone. Let us remember Dien Bien Phu.” In 2007, Democrats used the same lesson against further US troop involvement in Iraq. Senator Edward Kennedy, for instance, said: “Injecting more troops into a civil war is not the answer”.69 Closely related to this are historical analogies that are based on comparisons of similar but irrelevant aspects or factors of a contemporary situation.
The third limitation concerns the transposition of distinctive elements of a historical analogy to a different case. Analogical terms are sometimes shifted from one analogy to another. But every comparison refers to a specific event or person. Transposition can be very persuasive and often goes unnoticed. This is illustrated by an experiment in which participants were first presented with lessons learned from previous approaches to a crisis, i.e. the Versailles Treaty of 1919 versus the Munich Agreement of 1938. The lessons learned were studied and then transposed to a contemporary problem—the negotiation of the Iranian nuclear deal—and so influenced the proposed solutions.70 A final limitation of historical analogies is that they are a mode of comparison and of understanding. The existence of similarities between two situations should not be mistakenly used to justify a decision. “Any intelligent use of analogy must begin with a sense of its limits,” according to the historian Hackett Fischer, only then can historical analogies be used correctly in applied history.71 The correct use of historical analogies should start with the three limitations discussed in the previous section. They can be countered by historical thinking and historical debate of the chosen historical analogies. This makes policy-makers and decision-makers more aware of caveats and fallacious arguments.
7 Ways to Encourage the Correct Use of Analogies in Applied History
Luckily, there are several checks to challenge historical analogies and encourage their correct use. May, Neustadt, Vertzberger and other authors argue that it is important to be wary of the first analogy that springs to mind, because memory often has a distorted view of history.72 The analogy should therefore be questioned, that is why historical debate is so important. Questioning can be encouraged by inviting others to come up with their own historical analogies without revealing your own and then challenging each other’s analogies.
One can foster the debate on historical analogies in multiple ways. First, the analogies’ similarities and differences must be identified.73 Kornprobst has put forward four approaches to identify these systematically. They follow the three principles of historical awareness: process, context and difference. By establishing the range of the various analogies, they can be used to explain a contemporary situation, i.e. process. Once selected, an analogy can be interpreted in different ways. The different interpretations, intervening events and similarities that the different interpretations clarify or reveal should be taken into account, i.e. context. The third step is to systematically identify the similarities and differences between the contemporary situation and past events, i.e. difference. Finally, the novel insights the analogy provides into a contemporary situation should be reflected upon and it should be asked whether the analogy really helps explain the present.74
The “big six” historical thinking concepts can strengthen critical literacy skills amongst students and enhance their ability to assess historical comparisons. First, establish the historical significance of the selected event. Second, is there primary source material to back up the claim? Third, identify continuity and change. Fourth, analyze an event’s causes and effects, and establish whether the same forces are at play if the period under consideration changes. This in itself is a historical perspective. This fifth step draws attention to the importance of the otherness explained by the historical, social and cultural context. The sixth step is to understand the ethical dimension of historical interpretations, which implies that every story or historical analogy we consider meaningful is an ethical judgement:75 using history is never neutral.76
Vertzberger proposes that the equivalent of a control group in a natural experiment (i.e. a group of disinterested persons) should be set up to challenge an analogy’s assumptions. The challenge could take multiple forms, either by prolonging the period under scrutiny to see if the same similarities remain relevant, or by looking for additional or comparable events to see if they lead to the same conclusions. Alternatively, you could pull a group together to repeat the historical debate and scrutinize the analogy and see if it comes to the same conclusions. A final way is to use other reasoning tools—such as deductive reasoning.77
Finally, an important way to encourage correct analogical thinking is to come up with analogies that are not monocausal—such as the famous Munich 1938 example—but are more open ended.78 This is more easily done over a longer period of time in which change is seen as a process and not as a singular moment. It is therefore not surprising that most of the papers on the British History & Policy website are open-ended analogies.79 As monocausal historical metaphors, they too can be challenged. David Chuter illustrated that even this “most powerful and influential political myth” can be challenged: first by looking not only at the history of the Munich 1938 meeting itself, for instance by extending the period to include events like the Spanish Civil War or the German Anschluss of Austria, or by taking actors other than Neville Chamberlain into account, for example by including the views as the president of Czechoslovakia Edvard Beneš. A second way to challenge historical metaphors is to take another national viewpoint that gives greater prominence to other elements of the same event.80
8 Conclusion
Historical analogies are a persuasive and popular reasoning tool and play an important role in decision-making. We saw that a great variety of historical analogies is floated when politicians or their aides try to make sense of a new situation. Since this is often done unwittingly and people tend to latch on to the first analogy that comes to mind—be it from tradition, memory or experience—historical analogies must be challenged, not only by looking at their classification, but also by recognizing their limitations. The basic premises of historical thinking are the most important tools to help reflect on historical analogies. Historical awareness, wariness of nostalgia, a historical debate on historical analogies, changes in the period of the analogy and the actors’ viewpoints, and challenges to the historical analogy are helpful sources of reflection. In the diagnosis and prescription phases, this can be a liberating experience, which will help decision-makers make better decisions and justify them. Sometimes this can lead to directly applicable micro lessons and sometimes history can act as motivation or inspiration in the form of macro lessons. By applying these ways to scrutinize historical analogies, history can contribute to decision-making and policy-making. It is good to remember the words of applied historian Philip Zelikow: “Analogies are neither good nor bad, neither helpful nor harmful. It is how they are used—and how rigorously they are examined—that makes all the difference.”81
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G. Allison and N. Ferguson, “Applied History Manifesto.”
W.A. Achenbaum, “The Making of an Applied Historian: Stage Two.” The Public Historian 5 (2) (1983), 20–46, 27–41; Y.Y.I. Vertzberger, “Foreign Policy Decisionmakers As Practical-Intuitive Historians: Applied History and Its Shortcomings.” International Studies Quarterly 30 (2) (1986), 223–247; A.R. Green, History, Policy and Public Purpose: Historians and Historical Thinking in Government (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 75–79.
P. Bartha, “Analogy and Analogical Reasoning.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, eds. E.N. Zalta (Summer 2022 Edition),
J. Tosh, Why History Matters (London: MacMillan Education, 2008) 61.
H. Rousso, “Applied History, or the Historian as Miracle-Worker.” The Public Historian 6 (4) (1984), 65–85; I. de Haan, “De pandemie in historisch perspectief: De lockdown als onderduik.” De Groene Amsterdammer 31 (2020),
E.R. May, “Lessons” of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), xi; R.E. Neustadt and E. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses Of History For Decisionmakers (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988) 34–91.
Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 9.
B. De Ridder, “When the Analogy Breaks: Historical References in Flemish News Media at the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Journal of Applied History 2 (1–2) (2020), 1–16; A. Küsters, “Applying Lessons from the Past? Exploring Historical Analogies in ECB Speeches through Text Mining, 1997–2019.” International Journal of Central Banking 18 (1) (2022), 277–329; May, “Lessons”; Vertzberger, “Foreign Policy Decisionmakers”; N. Ferguson, “Applying history in real time: a tale of two crises.” Journal of Applied History 3 (1–2) (2022), 1–18.
A. Brändström, F. Bynander, and P. ’T Hart, “Governing by looking back: Historical analogies and crisis management.” Public Administration 82 (1) (2004), 191–210.
H. Kaal and J. van Lottum, “Applied History: Past, Present, and Future.” Journal of Applied History 3 (1–2) (2021), 135–154, 136.
M. Kornprobst, “Comparing apples and oranges? Leading and misleading uses of historical analogies.” Millennium 36 (1) (2007), 29–49, 31.
See for example: Ferguson, “Applying history in real time”.
L. Jordanova, “Public History—A Provocation”, RHS Public History Workshop 2015.
Kaal and Van Lottum, “Applied History”, 144–147.
May, “Lessons”; Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time; Allison and Ferguson, “Applied History Manifesto”; Kornprobst, “Comparing apples and oranges?” do not provide a definition of historical analogy.
Khong, Analogies at War¸ 6, 7; Ghilani et al., “Looking forward to the past”, 275.
P. Bartha, “Analogy and Analogical Reasoning”; P.F.A. Bartha, By Parallel Reasoning: The Construction and Evaluation of Analogical Arguments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
F.R. Ankersmit, Narrative logic: A semantic analysis of the historian’s language (Groningen: Martinus Nijhof, 1983); A. Munslow, The new history (London: Routledge, 2003); S. Keulen and R. Kroeze. “Understanding management gurus and historical narratives: The benefits of a historic turn in management and organization studies.” Management & Organizational History 7 (2) (2012), 171–189.
S. MacDonald, Rolling the Iron Dice: Historical Analogies and Decisions to Use Military Force in Regional Contingencies (Westport: Praeger, 2000), 5, 6.
S. MacDonald, “Hitler’s shadow: Historical analogies and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.” Diplomacy and Statecraft, 13(4) (2002), 29–59.
P. Feaver and W. Inboden, “Looking Forward through the Past: The Role of History in Bush White House National Security Policymaking.” In The Power of the Past: History and Statecraft, eds. H. Brands and J. Suri (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2016), 253–280, 255.
J. Tosh, The Pursuit of History: Aim, Methods and New Directions in the Study of Modern History (Harlow: Longman 2010), 1–25.
Ghilani et al., “Looking forward to the past”, 280, 282; Roland Paris, “Kosovo and the Metaphor War”, Political Science Quarterly 117 (3) (2002), 423–450.
C. Buffet and B. Heuser, “Conclusions: Historical myths and the denial of change.” In Haunted by History: Myths in International Relations, eds. C. Buffet and B. Heuser (New York: Berghahn, 1998), 259–275, 262.
D.H. Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 244, 245.
MacDonald, Rolling the Iron Dice, 5, 6; Vertzberger, “Foreign Policy Decisionmakers”, 242.
K.P. Donnelly and D.A. Rochefort, “The lessons of “lesson drawing”: How the Obama administration attempted to learn from failure of the Clinton health plan.” Journal of Policy History 24(2) (2012), 184–223, 185, quotes: 197, 198.
E. Morris, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (Sony Pictures, 2003) 10–13.00 minutes.
MacDonald, Rolling the Iron Dice, 5, 6.
B. Eichengreen, Hall of mirrors: The great depression, the great recession, and the uses-and misuses-of history (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2014), 377; Küsters, “Applying Lessons from the Past?”, 323.
A. de Dijn, “Een bruikbaar verleden”,
R.J. Evans, Death In Hamburg. Society And Politics In The Cholera Years, 1830–1910 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
S. Szreter, “History and public policy.” In The public value of the humanities, eds. J. Bate (London: Bloomsbury, 2011) 219–232, 227.
MacDonald, Rolling the Iron Dice, 5, 6.
J. McGlynn, “Historical framing of the Ukraine Crisis through the Great Patriotic War: Performativity, cultural consciousness and shared remembering.” Memory Studies 13 (6) (2020), 1058–1080.
H.A. Simon, The New Science of Management Decision (New York: Prentice Hall, 1977).
MacDonald, Rolling the Iron Dice; Ghilani et al., “Looking Forward to the Past”; Khong, Analogies at War; Vertzberger, “Foreign Policy Decisionmakers”.
MacDonald, Rolling the Iron Dice, 10.
The four steps were taken from MacDonald, Rolling the Iron Dice, 10. However, MacDonald does not elaborate on them.
Bartha, By Parallel Reasoning, 95–98, 133.
Bartha, By Parallel Reasoning, 96, 122–133.
Feaver and Inboden, “Looking Forward through the Past”, 255; Brändström, Bynander and ‘t Hart, “Governing by looking back”, 191–210.
Küsters, “Applying Lessons from the Past?”.
De Ridder, “When the Analogy Breaks”.
Ibid., 7, 8, 15, 16.
R. Axelrod and L. Forster, “How historical analogies in newspapers of five countries make sense of major events: 9/11, Mumbai and Tahrir Square.” Research in Economics 71 (1) (2017), 8–19.
Bartha, By Parallel Reasoning, 112–115.
R. Porter, “History says no to the policeman’s response to AIDS.” British Medical Journal 293 (6562) (1986), 1589–1590.
V. Berridge, “Public or policy understanding of history?” Social History of Medicine 16 (3) (2003), 511–523, there 514.
M. Golding, “Argument by analogy in the law.” In Analogy and exemplary reasoning in Legal discourse, eds. B. van der Velden and H. Kaptein (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018) 123–136.
E.H. Levi, “An Introduction to Legal Reasoning.” University of Chicago Law Review 15 (3) (1948), 501–574, 502.
Bartha, By Parallel Reasoning, 134.
Feaver and Inboden, “Looking Forward through the Past” ’, 260, 261.
G.W. Bush, “Inaugural address.”
Ghilani et al., “Looking forward to the past”; Vertzberger, “Foreign Policy Decisionmakers”; MacDonald, Rolling the Iron Dice.
Paris, “Kosovo and the Metaphor War”, 436; Transcript: “Clinton addresses nation on Yugoslavia strike.”
John Tosh, “In defence of applied history: the History and Policy website.”
Tosh, Why History Matters, chapters 2 & 3; Tosh, The Pursuit of History, 7–10.
C. Lorenz, “Narrativism, Positivism and the “Metaphorical Turn”.” History and Theory 37 (3) (1998), 309–329.
Tosh, The pursuit of history, 1.
C. Lorenz, “Blurred Lines: History, Memory and the Experience of Time”, International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity 2(1) (2014), 43–63, 53–55. Quote by Winter: 54.
Tosh, Why history Matters, 62.
Ankersmit, Narrative logic, 64–75.
C. Lorenz, “History and Theory” In The Oxford History of Historical Writing, eds. A. Schneider and D. Woolf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) 13–35, 22–26; Munslow, The new history, 150–156.
A. Froeyman, “Concepts of Causation in Historiography.” Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History 42 (3) (2009), 116–128.
H. Paul, Key Issues in Historical Theory (London: Routledge, 2015), chapter 9.
Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies, 243–259.
M.A. Lawrence, “Policymaking and the Uses of the Vietnam War.” In The Power of the Past: History and Statecraft, eds. H. Brands and J. Suri (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2016), 49–72, 55.
D. Ghilani, O. Luminet and O. Klein, “When History Seems to Repeat Itself: Exposure to Perceived Lessons of the Past Influences Predictions About Current Political Events.” Psychologica Belgica 62 (1) (2022), 89–107.
Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies, 258–259.
Vertzberger, “Foreign Policy Decisionmakers”, 244; Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time, 34–58.
Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time, 273.
Kornprobst, “Comparing Apples and Oranges?”, 36–40.
P. Seixas and T. Morton, The big six historical thinking concepts (Toronto: Nelson Education, 2012).
See: M. MacMillan, The uses and abuses of history (London: Profile Books, 2010).
Vertzberger, “Foreign Policy Decisionmakers”, 244.
Tosh, Why history matters, 67.
Tosh, “In defense of applied history”;
Buffet and Heuser, “Conclusions”, 263, 264.
H. Brands and J. Suri, “Introduction: Thinking about History and Foreign Policy”, in The Power of the Past: History and Statecraft, eds. H. Brands and J. Suri (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2016) 1–27, 13.
