Criticism for the proposal by Graham Allison and Niall Ferguson for the creation of a White House Council of Historical Advisers

by Jeremy Adelman

Jeremy Adelman is a professor of history and director of the Global History Lab at Princeton University. His next book, "The Opening of the Global Mind," is forthcoming next year from Princeton University Press.

In an article in the September issue of The Atlantic, Graham Allison and Niall Ferguson call for the creation of a White House Council of Historical Advisers.

It’s a sensible idea. The world within the Beltway has shown an aptitude for forgetting or exaggerating its successes while repeating failures of grand strategy. Amnesia, argue Allison and Ferguson, is in ample supply. They retell a story about George W. Bush — that he didn’t know there was a difference between Shiites and Sunnis when he sent troops to Iraq.

Not surprisingly, especially when it comes to the Middle East, presidents and advisers seem especially prone to remind us of George Santayana’s saw that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," recycled ominously by Winston Churchill in 1935 after Britain, France, and Italy pledged to uphold Austria’s independence at the Stresa Conference: "It falls into that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind."

But who needs who? Is it the state that needs the historian, or the historian the state? For some time now, injunctions for what Allison and Ferguson describe as a "new and rigorous ‘applied history’" have been aimed less at the republic than at the historical profession. A couple of years ago, another Ivy League pair, David Armitage and Jo Guldi, called upon colleagues to man up: Ditch the micro, embrace the macro, think big, and get relevant. Their summons, The History Manifesto, was a clarion call for historians to get with the digital age and pivot to policy makers, activists, and entrepreneurs who need help. Armitage and Guldi tapped into some collective anxiety about the future of historians. It’s not just Beltway amnesia that’s at stake. The crusade for relevance could also save a profession that has seen dwindling undergraduate majors and course enrollments year after year.

The ailment and alternative don’t stop with history. In 2013 the American Academy of Arts & Sciences blueprinted a vision for the humanities and social sciences to help make America a "vibrant, competitive, and secure nation." (To make America great, again?) ...

Read entire article at The Chronicle of Higher Education