David Lewis Schaefer is Professor of Political Science at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches courses on political philosophy and American political thought. Among his books are The Political Philosophy of Montaigne (1990) and Illiberal Justice: John Rawls vs. the American Political Tradition (2007).
One of the hoariest of twentieth-century academic clichés – Harvard philosophy professor George Santayana’s remark that “those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it” – still has bite. As a political scientist and classroom teacher I see evidence of this truth on a regular basis. It was alarming to me to have discovered only recently that practically none of my students had ever heard about the Munich Agreement of 1938, in which British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain “appeased” Hitler’s demand for cession of the Czech Sudetenland and then returned home to announce that he had brought “peace in our time”—while in reality paving the way for what Winston Churchill subsequently called “the unnecessary war”.
Knowing about something isn’t a cure-all. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are old enough that they must at least have learned of Munich in their schoolbooks, but their policy toward Vladimir Putin and his Russia have been one long Munich. And once again an aggressive despot has taken appeasement as a license to acquire his neighbors’ lands. But though Clinton and Obama emulate Chamberlain, my students don’t hear Neville echo in their heads when they look at the daily headlines. Their historical ignorance cripples their ability to judge today’s politics and world affairs.
I also recently found that literally none of the 43 students enrolled in my introductory political philosophy class this semester, or some 20 in American Political Thought II last spring, had ever heard of the 1956 Hungarian uprising against Soviet rule – the 60th anniversary of which we should all be commemorating this week. (I have long had occasion to make reference to the uprising when teaching Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, because, as I learned from the late Harry Jaffa, and as a 1956 refugee who, remarkably, wound up teaching Civil War history at Gettysburg College partly confirms in an op-ed in the October 26 Wall Street Journal, a reading of that address was the last thing listeners could hear on Radio Free Hungary – before the broadcast was ended by the sound of machine-gun bullets as Soviet troops broke into the station. Only once I learned that my students had never heard of the uprising did I realize why my telling them that fact had had so little visible impact on them over the years.)
Since the College of the Holy Cross, where I teach, is highly selective in its admissions policies, I must assume that this lack of historical awareness is typical of my students’ generation – and of its immediate predecessors. It might help explain the appeal of Bernie Sanders’s socialism to the millennial generation – who naively equate it with the welfare-statism of the democratic Scandinavian nations that maintain vigorous systems of private business enterprise. They apparently know nothing of the despotism that socialism has consistently entailed, from the Paris Commune to Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela and the Castro brothers’ Cuba. But how could they know of the political history of socialist states? The decline of the study of political history was the theme of a recent op-ed in the New York Times, while my undergraduate teacher of diplomatic history, Walter LaFeber, lamented in the Chronicle of Higher Education decades ago, late in his career, that that discipline had effectively disappeared from the college curriculum.
