In a time when the usefulness of the past as a means to comprehend the present remains the object of skepticism, if not outright attack, inside the academy, Donald Kagan, the former dean of Yale College and a professor of ancient history, has published a book about the necessity of historical analogy for understanding a nation’s security interests. The most common arguments against such a view hold that modernity is so profoundly different from all previous human experience, and the past so particular and irreproducible, that analogies are necessarily anachronistic misreadings and can only mislead us.

But Professor Kagan believes that if we are to understand the world in which we live, we have no surer source, indeed no other source, than the past. Whatever the flaws, whatever the difficulty, there is simply nothing better available.

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