Culture Cataclysm and Contingency

Abstract
What is the "use" of history? When the turmoil of our ideas and the force of social circumstance make "the conditions in which we think and live both inexplicable and unmanageable" history helps us by allowing to turn these conditions "into a coherent series of events from which we may either abstract a general principle or project a probable future." (473) (Abstract via Allan Megill)