Waving the historian’s magic wand: Temporal comparisons and analogies in the writing of history

Word, concept and history: underlying comparisons

First of all, I would say that comparison and analogy are integral to the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) of our traditions in relation to language and historiography, conceptual history included. To illustrate this, I shall offer three brief reflections: the first, on the word, the second, on the concept and the third, on history.

The Spanish words palabra (‘word’) and hablar (‘to speak’), like their equivalents in other Romance languages, come from the Latin roots parabolare and fabulari, which mean to make comparisons or allegories, in other words, speak about one thing in terms of another. Therefore, when using language, the Spanish, the French and the Italians are implicitly acknowledging that fabular (to fable) – communicating via parables and comparisons – is something consubstantial to language. As Aristotle suggested in his Poetics (XXII, 1459a8), the fundamental metaphoricity of language is based on the intuitive perception of the similar and the dissimilar.

With regard to concepts, several well-known authors have addressed the difference between word and concept, observing for example, as did Koselleck (2004: 85), that a word only becomes a concept if it is capable of condensing many similar but not identical experiences. A century earlier, Nietzsche had written in aphoristic fashion (1982: 879–880) that ‘every concept emerges by setting equal that which is unequal’, that is making comparisons that tend to simplify situations by means of abstraction and generalisation. ¹ Spanish writer Sánchez Ferlosio (2016) expressed the same idea with the following metaphor: words are keys and concepts are lock picks. While a word, every time it is used in a particular context, opens only one door, the corresponding concept enables us to open many (similar) doors. In this sense, we could say that the attempt to reduce irreducible reality to concepts inevitably involves, as Ortega y Gasset noted (1963: II, 649), a schematisation, ‘exaggeration’ or ‘falsification’ of the real, rather like a map in relation to the territory it represents. But with regard to what is of interest here, the important thing is to indicate that both words and concepts, each in their own way, have comparison at their very core and are inherently comparative.

If we move from language to history, it is worth mentioning once again that Thucydides, in his History of the Peloponnesian War (I, 1), was already addressing those readers who not only wished to learn about past events but also to shed light on those ‘events of the future that, by reason of the human character they betray may present similarities or analogies with them’. The evidence is that, in the writing of history too, comparison and analogy have been there since the beginning. And many historians over the centuries have assumed that ‘historical thinking is inherently analogical and lives on confrontations and comparisons’ (Schiavone, 2002: 123).

A powerful magic wand

If we focus more specifically on temporal analogies and comparisons, it should be recalled that over two centuries ago, during a critical phase of European history, Novalis advised his contemporaries to seek in history ‘parallel points of time and learn to use the magic wand of analogy’ (1981 [1799]). Much later, in his famous lecture in Oslo, Marc Bloch appeared for a moment to have taken Novalis’s advice. Bloch (1928: 23) admitted to having made very effective use of the historian’s divining rod, in other words, the comparative method (Hill and Hill, 1980).

Beyond the anecdote, the partial coincidence of the German poet and the French medievalist in employing such a metaphor to emphasise the heuristic power of comparison and analogy seems to me to be revealing of the insight shared by both to the effect that these analytical resources are not wholly alien to the world of magic and divination. What those images suggest is that, by means of comparison and analogy, historians have reason to expect results from their research into the past that without those exceptional means would be unachievable.

But let us make no mistake. The metaphorical link between Novalis and Bloch conceals a fundamental difference between the two ‘magic wands’. The former’s Zauberstab [wand] is the analogy, by means of which the historian would attempt to establish parallels and similarities between different moments in time. The baguette de sourcier [divining rod] employed by the founder of the Annales, on the other hand, is comparison and responds to the analytical desire to detect differences between neighbouring roughly contemporary societies. ² In what follows, however, I shall devote far more attention to analogies and historical parallelisms than to the comparative method in the technical sense of this expression. One should not forget, however, that both historical parallels and analogies presuppose a relationship of similarity or correspondence between two eras, individuals or contexts and, in that sense, both can be regarded as tacit comparisons.

Two repositories of historical analogies: the Bible and classical antiquity

It is no secret that for centuries, in the Western culture, the two great deposits of topoi and historical analogies were certain pre-eminent works from Greco-Roman antiquity and the Holy Scriptures. As we know, both the historia magistra vitae and biblical stories and parables functioned principally and respectively on the basis of exempla and figurae; both were in turn based on trans-temporal analogies or, rather, pseudo-analogies (Flood, 2002: 127–128). The final premise behind this way of reasoning is that cases repeatedly resemble and correspond to one another because, ultimately, history repeats itself. In the words of the famous verse of Ecclesiastes (1:9), ‘nothing is new under the sun’ (nihil novum sub sole). ³

As far as the classical world is concerned, the history and the myth of Rome have provided countless moral and political examples from the Middle Ages until the present. Think of the reception of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives since the Renaissance. His method of comparative juxtaposition (σύγκρισις), in particular, systematically pairing the biographies of an ancient Greek and another more recent Roman hero, provided a lasting model with which to contrast and compare historical figures that are more or less distant in time (Duff, 2000). ⁴ And of course, for Christians, at least in the wake of Orosius’s Historiae and Augustine of Hippo’s De civitate Dei, the parallelism between Rome and Babylon and, later, the theories of translatio, renovatio and restauratio imperii and many other explicit or implicit temporal comparisons, would become commonplaces, if not irrefutable proof of divine providence.

Even if we leave to one side the reference points to be found in the legacy of Greece to concentrate only on the motifs originating in the Roman Republic and Empire, it is hard to exaggerate the long shadow of Rome in European and American history. The models and analogies taken from Latin historiographers have been employed to underpin all kinds of objectives and purposes. Whether to assert and glorify the power of a strong man or, on the contrary, to extol republican virtue, to praise popular government, even to advocate tyrannicide – think of the multiple discordant uses of made of the apocryphal expression sic semper tyrannis (‘thus always to tyrants’) – in the writings of Caesar, Sallust, Livy, Tacitus, Suetonius e tutti quanti; there are plenty to choose from. What would remain of the reflections of the most celebrated 18th-century literati, philosophes and revolutionaries on the grandeur and decadence of empires, on virtue, patriotism and corruption if we were to eliminate from all of them what they owe to Roman narratives?

As regards the rhetorical uses of certain stories and characters from the Bible, there is a similar wealth of examples. To begin with, Christian exegesis has always been based on the methodical search for parallelisms between the Old and the New Testament. The latter, in fact, is presented as the fulfilment of many things announced in the former. As we read in Luke (21:22), ‘all things which are written may be fulfilled’. Thus, according to various interpreters and Fathers of the Church, both Adam and Moses are figurae Christi – and conversely, Jesus can be seen as a ‘second Adam’ – Cain’s fate after killing Abel resembles that of the Jews after the crucifixion of Jesus, Noah’s ark prefigures the Church, and so on (some examples in Nirenberg (2014): 129, 251, 364, 369, 370, 378). In a well-known work, Erich Auerbach demonstrated that the method of ‘figural interpretation’ is a specific form of temporal comparison – completely different from ‘allegorical interpretation’ – by virtue of which a connection is established between ‘two events or persons’ separated in time – figura and veritas – ‘the first of which signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second encompasses or fulfils the first’ (Auerbach, 1984: 53; 2003: ch. 1; Blumenberg, 2014; Schildgen, and Hexter, 2016: 8–9). ⁵ Auerbach pointed to the semantic similarity acquired in Latin patristics by the words praefiguratio, figura, similitudo and exemplum, although in this case, the strictly historical/trans-temporal intersects with the timeless and eternal, since, as Tertullian writes, for God there is no differentia temporis (Auerbach, 1984: 42 and 48).

However, beyond the theological depths of figural interpretation and of the underlying teleological narrative, which endowed Christianity with a new awareness of historicity (a narrative structure that attains its maximum rationalisation in Hegel’s philosophy of history, which he himself describes as theodicy), insofar as we are speaking of real historical events, the interpretative technique of explaining certain processes by means of other previous ones would be applied time and time again by numerous agents in very different circumstances. And, as Blumenberg suggested, this prefigurative heuristic – which creates ‘the expectation that an identical effect might be connected with the expressive act of a re-enactment’ – does not seem very far removed from the principles of sympathetic magic (Blumenberg, 2014: 9; Leutzsch, 2019: 1). ⁶ And it goes without saying that these retrospective readings gradually transformed the original meaning of the texts that inspired them, adapting their meaning to the interpreter’s requirements at any given time. Moreover, from the European late medieval period onwards, we find an increasing number of texts and images – as this phenomenon also has an iconographic aspect (some examples in Corvera Poiré (2018): 16–26 and Réau (2000): 230–239) – in which biblical references are mixed with certain heroes and eminent individuals from profane histories (Curtius, 2013: 219–220, 476, 544–555; Huizinga, 1987: 195 and 198). ⁷ In the case of the Divina Commedia, for instance, Dante does not hesitate to make use of the poet Virgil or the figure of Cato, thus pairing Latin poetry with divine justice and Roman political virtue with Christian freedom (Auerbach, 1984: 64ff; Curtius, 2013: 362–370).

The tremendous plasticity of biblical stories and characters has been evidenced on countless occasions. During the times of the Atlantic Revolutions, for example preachers and political leaders north and south of the Río Grande would liken American patriots – both Anglo-Americans and Ibero-Americans – fighting against their respective mother countries to the Israelites seeking to free themselves from Babylonian captivity or to their exodus from Egypt under Moses’ leadership. In Andean America, the rebellious clergy came to identify the revolutionary caudillos with the Maccabees and Bolívar with Moses or with Jesus Christ himself (but also with Washington or Napoleon) (Fernández-Sebastián, 2020: 238ff; Lienesch, 1988: 30 and 42). ⁸

Meanwhile, in Europe, Spaniards brandished the same rhetorical weapons, holy and profane, to legitimate their uprising against Napoleon and reiterate against all odds the immemorial historical continuity of the Spanish nation (Fernández-Sebastián, 2019: 81–84). Years later, some mid–19th-century German liberals, like Karl Bollman, ‘used a mixture of biblical images to express the same desires: Germany, he claimed, needed an “armed redeemer who will lead it to the promised land of national unity and independence, even if we must go through the Red Sea of an all-out war”’ (Sheehan, 1983: 117 and 322). This last image, like so many other Old Testament stories, returns over and over again, in historiography and also in political and literary language. After all, we all spontaneously establish mental associations between situations that strike us as vaguely similar. A character in the novel Vor der Sturm (1878), by Theodor Fontane, while listening, in the winter of 1812–1813, a sermon describing the havoc wreaked by Yahweh upon the Pharaoh’s cavalry in its pursuit of the children of Israel as they fled Egypt (Ex. 14) cannot help but recall the remnants of the defeated Grande Armée returning from Russia (Fontane, 1973: 44–45). ⁹

The fact is that, in dramatic circumstances, the imagination of those involved tends to draw upon all kinds of resources – Christian and pagan and ancient and modern – capable of shedding some light on the situation. Which is why temporal parallelisms – which are sometimes refracted into double, even triple, mirrored reflections – abound in times of revolution. Thus, one of the leaders of the independence movement in the Río de la Plata, Dean Gregorio Funes, in a historic essay published in 1817, when explaining the infighting among the Argentine revolutionaries of his day, mentions a text from the French Revolution whose author, in turn, interprets what is happening in France, quoting the Roman classics at every step. ‘When we consider our differences’, concludes Funes, ‘it is as if Cicero, Tacitus and Sallust wrote for our sake’ (Funes, 1817: III, 492). Words that recall those of St Paul in his First Epistle to the Corinthians, in which the apostle says that a certain passage from the Law of Moses ‘was written for our sake’ (I Cor. 9:10). As we can see, Paul of Tarsus could see himself in the mirror of Moses, the French revolutionaries in the mirror of Cicero and Tacitus, and the Hispanic revolutionaries in all the above.

Funes’s words show once again that, in Western historical imagination, Athens and Jerusalem were never far apart. The echoes of primitive Christianity and of the classical world could overlap in the discourses of modern times, and in fact, often resonate therein without producing a cacophony.

Historical analogies and their critics: two key moments

In the history of modern Europe (and of its American projections), I believe that it is possible to identify two mutations of historical consciousness that affected the way of approaching temporal comparisons. The first of those transitional periods occurred in the 16th and 17th centuries. The second occurred around the turn and the early decades of the 19th century.

The Renaissance as concept and as historical period is based on a supposed correspondence between the ancient and the modern world, a complex relationship construed as return, recovery and connection with a classical world somewhat idealised by humanists. In addition, Michel Foucault famously observed in The Order of Things (1966) that the Renaissance episteme revolves around similarity: ‘to search for a meaning is to bring to light a resemblance. To search for the law governing signs is to discover the things that are alike’ (Foucault, 2005: 29). And that analogical reasoning facilitates generalisation. It has been pointed out on many occasions that law in medieval and early modern Europe gradually developed and spread by dint of comparison and analogy; in the absence of a general rule and a codifying legal technique, each new situation constituted a challenge, and it was necessary to find a precedent that made it possible to fill the gaps by means of parallelisms and similarities. There has been less emphasis on the fact that historiography and political treatises were often woven according to a logic that was not very different. Many of the historical–political texts from the early Modern Age are full of comparisons and analogies. After all, for centuries, the historical literature was basically at the service of rhetoric (Kempshall, 2011), and two of rhetoric’s most powerful weapons are, without question, metaphor and analogy.

That was also when the notion appeared – essential to this theme – that politics and history are not only closely related but are coextensive concepts. The ideas of a ‘useful past’ and of history as the soul of politics are associated with figures such as Machiavelli or Lipsius among others. The clichés that describe history as experimental politics and politics as history in fieri are no more than an elaboration of those ideas.

At the same time, as Maravall (1966) demonstrated, by the 16th century, the more or less systematic comparison of ancients and moderns – dating back to the 12th century or before and reactivated in the 14th century (Courtenay, 1987; Stock, 1979; Zimmermann, 1974) – to evaluate their respective merits began to concern once again a certain number of European authors, among these a handful of Spaniards (e.g. De Villalón (1539)), very aware of having surpassed the ancients in certain aspects (such as exploration and the art of navigation). Almost two hundred years later, the famous Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes (Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns) resolved the issue for a while at least. Elsewhere, I have drawn attention to the fact that the preference for Tacitus rather than Livy expressed by 16th- and 17th-century Spanish political writers appears to have been due above all to the so-called similitudo temporum, in other words, to the fact that the situations of that time dominated by an allegedly universal monarchy in decline like Spain’s were more reminiscent of the days of the crisis of the Roman Empire that informs the work of Tacitus than of the Roman republic described by Livy (Antón, 2000: 285–295; Fernández-Sebastián, 2019: 81).

However, as the flow of historical comparisons and analogies increased, so did the number of their critics. The growing intolerance of anachronisms is a good indicator with which to measure the progress of an increasingly subtle historical sensibility unwilling to tolerate the abuse of analogies. Guicciardini was one of the earliest critics. ‘It is most fallacious’, writes the Florencian diplomat, ‘to judge by examples because unless these be in all respects parallel, they are of no use, the least divergence in the circumstances giving rise to the widest possible divergence in the conclusions’ (Guicciardini, 1970: 762, quoted by Breisach (2007): 158). Two centuries later, Herder protested even more forcefully against parallelisms and analogies on account of the fact that most of them lacked genuine sensus historicus (Contreras, 2004: 74–75 and 112).

Paradoxically, revolutions, major crises and new beginnings are usually accompanied by the rediscovery of the past, which includes not only rhetoric of rupture with a recent past redescribed as despotic and intolerable but also invocations of imagined pasts ad hoc that there was an attempt to recover, mirror pasts in which to seek inspiration in order to confront the future. Thus, in the so-called age of revolutions, we find, almost simultaneously, a movement of return to the classical world of Rome and Sparta and fierce criticism of the abuse of analogies, and even – as is the case of Benjamin Constant – rejection of the extemporary application to the modern world of obsolete concepts, typical of a bygone age. Anyway, the disorientation of those living in a revolutionary era could be defined as a loss of bearings, in other words, the absence of analogies and parallelisms with which to make sense of what is happening. The standards of past experiences are no longer valid. This is the famous divorce between experience and expectation theorised by Koselleck, and nowhere better expressed than by Joseph de Maistre in a letter in 1804, ‘nothing resembles this epoch, and history does not provide any datum or analogy as an aid to judgment’ (letter from Joseph de Maistre to Chevalier de Rossi, Saint Petersburg, 26 April 1804, in De Maistre (1884–1886): X, 106).

Amidst the uncertainty of those turbulent times, discourse sometimes becomes cluttered and contradictory. By way of illustration, let us consider some of de Tocqueville thoughts in this respect. Three decades after de Maistre, in an oft-quoted passage, de Tocqueville complained (1889: II, 303) that when there is greater need than ever to access accumulated experience, people look to the past in search of a guide but find no analogy ‘as the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity’. In L’ancien régime et la révolution (1856), however, he multiplied the comparisons between pre- and post-revolutionary France to stress the essential continuity on both sides of the great caesura. This does not preclude him from energetically condemning analogies ‘there is nothing more misleading than historical analogies’, he writes in 1857, and all the while acknowledging that the continuity of history is largely woven with only a few patterns. ‘One can see that history is a picture gallery where there are few originals and many copies’. ¹⁰

Dissimilitudo temporum ¹¹

I have said that, before Sattelzeit, knowledge of what Vico called mondo civile was organised around the search for similarities between things, including historical figures, situations and entire eras. Insofar as time was basically conceived of as a diaphanous and homogenous medium and the past, therefore, as essentially no different from the present, these kinds of comparisons and parallels posed no epistemological problems. However, with the development of a more acute and rigorous historical consciousness – the so-called ‘historicist revolution’ – some discovered the ‘pastness’ of the past: the past began to be seen as a qualitatively different time from the present. Every age, they said, has its Zeitgeist and possesses its own logic and distinctive values. Moreover, historical events are unique and unrepeatable. (To say it with the last, conclusive words of Blumenberg’s book on the legitimacy of the Modern Age (1983: 596): ‘History knows no repetitions of the same; “renaissances” are its contradiction’).

One could say then that if the Renaissance had (re)discovered the similitudo temporum, 19th-century historicism discovered the dissimilitudo temporum. And that disparity between tempora made it necessary to exercise utmost caution when making comparisons between different eras. Great trans-temporal analogies that fail sufficiently to take into account the enormous differences between the contexts of the cases compared, argue the new critics, are incompatible with historicity. This did not, of course, stem the flow of analogies throughout the historiographical literature. For, though it is true that from the final decades of the 18th century onwards there was growing criticism of anachronisms and the abuse of temporal analogies, paradoxically, the 19th century is the golden age of parallelisms, correspondences and historical homologies. They are omnipresent in both highbrow and popular literature, in the cases made by political and social agents, in the debates over the advantages and disadvantages of the aesthetic preferences of present-day and past society (Carlyle, 1843; Lowenthal, 2015: 174; Pugin, 1836; Rosenberg, 2005: 8, 16–21, 75, 222), ¹² in the attempts to make sense of revolutions, and even in the foundations of the most respected and influential social theories, such as positivism, evolutionism and nascent sociology (Karsenti, 2006: 308ff; Oehler, 2017: 112–116). ¹³

In any case, the first professionals of history as an academic discipline would focus more and more on learning about the ‘historical past’ to a certain extent placing between brackets the political uses of this knowledge, despite the frequent biases of historical nationalist narratives at that time. This formed the basis for the development of more sophisticated reflection upon and criticism of the usefulness and limitations of analogies, comparisons and parallelisms in history. So, some historians express their reservations vis-à-vis simple correlations based on superficial similarities pointing out – along the lines of Guicciardini’s reasoning (see earlier) – that minor nuances in the circumstances surrounding each case can give rise to clearly divergent results and conclusions. The devil, as they say, is in the details.

My overall impression is that, with the advent of historicism, from the early decades of the 19th century onwards, there was considerably more distrust of hasty temporal analogies, but at the same time, growing interest in drawing more informed comparisons between societies, revolutions and moments that were more or less separated in time. Moreover, on many occasions, those who made these comparisons were intent above all on underlining the contrasts, rather than the similarities, between the cases under study. ¹⁴ And this change certainly represents a decisive shift in the historical approach to the question.

The emphasis on contrasts, ruptures and discontinuities that characterises our era has recently rendered temporal comparisons even more hazardous but no less necessary. Behind all this, one perceives two recurrent and controversial historiographical issues: the repeatability and continuity of history. Given that the tendency to look for meaningful patterns – that is the quest to detect identity in difference – in the study of any phenomenon is undoubtedly intrinsic to any cognitive process, the eclipse of the Ciceronian model of history as magistra vitae could not represent a complete refusal to compare the past with the present or certain eras with others, or even to attempt somehow to learn lessons from history (Bouton, 2019). In fact, the great theorists of discontinuity in the intellectual historiography of the second half of the 20th century do not seem to have completely abandoned this ambition. Michel Foucault acknowledged (1972: 181) that his ‘archaeological’ method was largely based on comparison and analogy. And Koselleck’s insistence (2011), particularly during his later years, on the importance of structures of repetition was perhaps a response to this aspiration.

Concluding remarks

It could be said today that, among historians, wariness, if not distrust, of historical analogies is the rule rather than the exception. ¹⁵ Many contemporary historians, following in the footsteps of certain illustrious past masters – who, like Droysen, issued stern warnings in this respect – believe that these analogies are often misleading (Sewell, 2005: 88–90, 96–97). Furthermore, they are usually employed to simplify excessively complex situations, as well as to justify risky political decisions, to manipulate public opinion, to strengthen the unity of action groups and for other equally unacademic purposes (Khong, 1992: 262; Kornprobst, 2007; Schama, 1991; Towle, 2018: 4). Some of today’s historians would probably willingly subscribe to James Bryce’s words late in the 19th century ‘the chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies’ (Bryce, 1888: I, 8). Other authors suggest, with more moderation, that we should be careful to distinguish between appropriate and unsuitable analogies (Hodgson, 1993: 267). On the other side, there is no shortage of essayists, historians and diplomats – from Barbara Tuchman to Niall Ferguson, including Henry Kissinger and many others ¹⁶ – who continue to win public acclaim via their continued use of analogical approaches and grandiose comparisons. No wonder supposedly ‘serious’ books are written nowadays in order to demonstrate, with a wealth of data, that the United States is not a new Rome (Smil, 2010).

The main danger of analogical reasoning lies in assuming similarity to be identity, thinking that certain superficial similarities suffice in order to justify the transfer of conclusions between very different contexts (Collier and Mazzuca, 2008; Sewell, 2005: 88ff). As if it were possible to invent universal recipes capable of explaining all kinds of historical vicissitudes on the basis of a handful of archetypal events and clichéd historical processes! And to end up putting forward the same explanations or very similar solutions for very different problems. ¹⁷

That said, in my opinion, it would be unwise for us as historians to forego a heuristic tool that, used correctly, can considerably enhance our research. Ultimately, comparing is not the same as equating or conflating, and our profession presumably consists in more than simply establishing particular facts and describing specific processes; we should also, as far as is possible, ‘draw parallels to compare particular cases and to assess structural similarities’ (Pataut, 2009: 195). On the occasion of the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic that devastated the entire world during the first half of 2020, for example would it not be foolish to abandon analysis of the pandemics that have blighted humanity or, in broader terms, comparison of this case with other catastrophes, plagues and natural disasters that have occurred at other moments in history? And, incidentally, among the many modalities of parallelisms and iterations, including replications, reproductions and recurrences, arguably the most studied are those that refer to dramatic moments and events, such as crises, wars and revolutions (but almost everything has been compared, including post-war phases: (Levy and Roseman, 2002)). Among the heuristically rewarding comparisons referring to critical periods, I will cite by way of example an essay in which José Ortega y Gasset compared three fundamental crises in Western history, namely: the one that gave rise to the birth of Christianity (1st century BC – 1st century AD), the 15th-century crisis that resulted in modernity and the crisis in the 1930s, when Ortega was writing his essay, and which the philosopher identified with the end of modernity and the beginning of a new historical stage (Ortega y Gasset, 1958 [1933]). ¹⁸

The comparative study of revolutions lato sensu could be traced back to Thucydides, given that the Athenian historian suggested that the uprisings or civil wars in the cities (στάσεις) were bound to take place again in the future and it would therefore make sense to compare them (Momigliano, 1966: 11–12). In the modern world, there have been comparisons between, first, ancient and modern revolutions (as did the abbé de Vertot and the viscount de Chateaubriand, among others, at the beginning and at the end of the 18th century, respectively) and later between various modern revolutions. ¹⁹ But before Crane Brinton, Barrington Moore, Bayley Stone, Theda Skocpol (Sewell, 2005: 91–93) and other theorists and historians turned to the ‘comparative anatomy’ of revolutions (Baker and Edelstein, 2015), some protagonists of the latter had already established all kinds of parallels between different revolutions. The Chinese communists, for example attempted to learn from the Bolsheviks and the French revolutionaries, and in this sense, one could say that each revolution casts its shadow upon those that follow.

The game of mirrors between the French and Russian Revolutions is in this respect one of the best-known examples. During the former, diverse actors pointed to surprising similarities between Lenin and Robespierre, the Bolsheviks and the Jacobins, the Mensheviks and the Girondins and so on; but the meaning of these parallelisms varied considerably depending on the interpreter’s views. Trotsky, for instance, saw Russia’s shift towards Stalinism not as the climax of Jacobinism, but rather, on the contrary, as the Thermidorian Reaction (Nygaard, 2013:182–184 and 190; Shlapentokh, 1997). And with regard to academic approaches, Sewell (2005: 99 and 120–121) highlighted the fact that, although comparison is usually based on analogy, on occasions, the opposite occurs with a view to reinforcing a theory. Thus, Michael Mann, in The Sources of Social Power, ‘employed comparison not to establish causal laws that hold across a variety of supposedly equivalent cases but to find analogies that help him to better theorise and explain the historical developments in each case’.

In any case, our daily experiences during what are once again very tough times for many human beings show us how difficult it is to resist the temptation to look back in search of a guiding light. For years now, the European press has been making comparisons between the difficulties we endure and the interwar crisis. Of course, as opposed to that traditional attitude of an anxious quest for precedents to be included in a process-based and continuist vision of historical time, in a world subjected to drastic transformations, some theoretical proposals are no less disruptive. According to Simon (2019), new historiography should relinquish most forms of continuism and opt for ‘a dissociative approach to the past’, an approach that focuses on the epiphany of the event and on radical contingency.

Halfway between both perspectives, David Runciman recently observed (2018) that ‘in tumultuous times, there are twin temptations in how we think about what’s happening. The first is to look for historical precedents that will map where we are heading. The second is to assume that no one has ever lived through anything like this before and that what we are facing is a future that is entirely new’. If we chose the second option, the historian’s magic wand would cease to be effective. Either way, it might be a good idea to start looking for new tools.

(translated by Mark Hounsell)