The comparisons increased when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy invoked the spirit of Churchill and the Blitz when addressing the British Hou

Can history be used to predict the future? Some experts say it can

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2022-05-27 04:00:09

The comparisons increased when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy invoked the spirit of Churchill and the Blitz when addressing the British House of Commons in March, while Vladimir Putin has spoken of the "denazification" of Ukraine as a kind of historic Russian mission.

Yet the Ukrainian conflict could just as easily be read as a stark reminder that historical comparisons aren't always useful when looking to the future.

Despite his brutish nature, Putin isn't Stalin, Ukraine isn't run by Nazis and Russia today isn't the Soviet Union.

Arguments between scholars over the predictive capacity of history are as cyclical as the so-called circles of history they debate.

He has spent the past two decades arguing that history can have a predictive quality and should be reinvented as a science, not just a discipline.

He calls his approach Cliodynamics, and a core premise is that violent events can be anticipated. They occur when the structural conditions within a society mirror those of previous violent times.