Clio among the Muses: Essays on History and the Humanities

6. History and Policy Studies

110 > 111 many disciplines in its effort to study the cause and effect of public policies , conflict, and conflict resolution. It is interdisciplinary, empirical, systematic, and dedicated to the application of information and models to big questions. While many of its concerns are present and future minded, and many of its practitioners regard academic historians and their output as irrelevant, policy analysis perforce includes systematic, goal-oriented historical study of “prior effects” and “past policy performance .” Though plagued by an absence of boundaries and a voracious appetite for theory, it is armed with private and public funding, girded with expertise, and arrayed in a wide variety of institutional settings. No study of history’s companionate disciplines can ignore policy studies.2 Policy makers ask what policy studies can teach them. The essence of policy studies is understanding the lessons of the past and applying them to the present and the future. It is this teaching function that makes policy studies one of history’s companions. Not only does historical study offer lessons, but the capacity of history to tutor present and future generations has long been one of its most potent claims to preeminence in our culture. As the philosopher and political thinker George Santyana wrote many years ago, “[T]hose who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” If the teaching of lessons from the past is the fundamental purpose of policy studies, history and policy studies are surely the closest of companions.3 War in History and Policy Studies Managing world conflict has been the central concern of policy studies since its inception. Indeed, the danger of the Cold War’s turning hot was one reason for government sponsorship of RAND. The military itself connects war studies to policy studies. There are “War Colleges” in the military establishment dedicated to the historical study of war. The U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, for example, has a huge education program for officers and civilians whose purpose is to explore how past military conflicts can tutor us about the nature of war. 112 > 113 total war has been read as a command to use any and all means to achieve victory and, contrariwise, as a concession that in war, man’s essential animal nature triumphs over his higher self. But there can be no disputing how Clausewitz regarded war’s part in history. His dedication to On War revealed that the practical advice he offered was the result of his own “continuous study of the history of war. . . . For it is the study of the history of war that has given us these principles.” What was this lesson? “War is part of the intercourse of the human race.” Military history was the history of mankind. Military history offered countless examples of the principle that “the destruction of the enemy’s armed force appears, therefore, always as the superior and more effectual means to which all others must give way.” While a state could achieve its aims in war simply by its resolve to fight, battle was still the only sure way to gain victory; indeed, it was the only “moral” way to wage war. Morality lay in victory.6 Clausewitz regarded war as a constant of human history, as if the decision to wage war—indeed, every manifestation of human aggression—lay in a realm deeply seated in the human psyche. How did he know this? He read histories. Thus at its very inception policy planning relied upon history , and history’s judgment was a sobering one. Perhaps war was rooted in the very nature of men. In 1966, the Nobel Prize–winning zoologist Konrad Lorenz published a troubling book. Lorenz’s credentials made the argument of the work—that aggression, and its mass expression in war, was instinctive in homo sapiens—even more disturbing. For not only was he famous for his studies of animal territoriality, he had been an open supporter of the Nazi Party before and during World War II. In On Aggression, Lorenz wrote, “[M]ilitary enthusiasm is a specialized form of communal aggression, clearly distinct from yet functionally related to the more primitive forms of petty individual aggression. . . . Militant enthusiasm in a man is a true autonomous instinct, it has its own appetitive behavior, its own releasing mechanisms, and like the sexual urge or any other strong instinct, it engenders a specific feeling of intense satisfaction.” Like the “lower...