Revitalizing History

“The historical act is essentially one of reconstitution of past thought. . . . You’re juxtaposing that past thought with your own thought, the thought of your own time  in order to be informed by it. You’re not studying it for its own sake; you’re interested in its implications, in the light that it sheds on your own predicament.”

—Milbank Family Senior Fellow Niall Ferguson quoting historian R. G. Collingwood in an interview with Tyler Cowen, Mercatus Center, George Mason University, July 28, 2021

“Russia is a great power, but not the great power….In trying to match the West or at least manage the differential between Russia and the West, they resort to coercion.... The worst part of this dynamic in Russian history is the conflation of the Russian state with a personal ruler. Instead of getting the strong state that they want, to manage the gulf with the West and push and force Russia up to the highest level, they instead get a personalist regime. They get a dictatorship, which usually becomes a despotism. They’ve been in this bind for a while because they cannot relinquish that sense of exceptionalism, that aspiration to be the greatest power, but they cannot match that in reality.”

—Senior Fellow Stephen Kotkin in the New Yorker, March 11, 2022

“Until recently, classical education served as the foundation of the wider liberal arts curriculum, which in turn defined the mission of the traditional university. Classical learning dedicated itself to turning out literate citizens who could read and write well, express themselves, and make sense of the confusion of the present by drawing on the wisdom of the past. Students grounded in the classics appreciated the history of their civilization and understood the rights and responsibilities of their unique citizenship. Universities, then, acted as cultural custodians, helping students understand our present values in the context of a 2,500-year tradition that began with the ancient Greeks.”

—Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson in City Journal, Autumn 2008