B quoted Ed Wallace:
> The 19th-century philosopher Hegel observed, "What experience and
> history teach is this – that nations and governments have never
> learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might
> have drawn from it." Hegel was right; this story sounds exactly like
> today’s crisis – but it happened in 1873. And amazingly, we’ve
> repeated the blueprint for that financial disaster, copying it
> almost line for line.
Hegel's point, however, was that modern conditions differ from those in the more or less distant past in ways that make them more or less essentially different. Past conditions, therefore, have fewer lessons to teach the more distant they are.
"Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this – that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone. Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help. It is useless to revert to similar circumstances in the Past. The pallid shades of memory struggle in vain with the life and freedom of the Present. Looked at in this light, nothing can be shallower than the oft-repeated appeal to Greek and Roman examples during the French Revolution. Nothing is more diverse than the genius of those nations and that of our times." <http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/history2.htm>
Marx and Keynes's versions of political economy appropriate the social ontological idea this claim embodies, the idea that social relations are "internal relations". The idea has, however, almost completely disappeared from contemporary economics, including from Marxist and Keynesian economics.
Ted