| Summary/Abstract |
“Those who consider the matter for a minute or two,” writes Philip Zelikow, a former official in the George W. Bush State Department and now professor of History at the University of Virginia, “realize that historical reasoning is as common in public affairs as oxygen is in water.” And yet, as the contributors to The Power of the Past agree, in institutional terms, the relationship between history and policy is “intimate but frequently dysfunctional.” The dysfunction is not for lack of awareness or trying. The craft of bringing historical knowledge to bear on contemporary policy problems has long been the aim of astute decision makers and has produced no shortage of corresponding academic volumes. Perhaps, the most notable of these—Ernest May and Richard Neustadt’s Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decisionmakers (1986)—is an explicit influence on the editors and contributors here.
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