In his early essay On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, Nietzsche identifies three different ways of using history: the monumental, the antiquarian, and the critical.[1] Monumental historiography sees history as the achievements of “great men,” with all the inspiration and indirect (or sometimes not even indirect) suppression such exclusion entails. Antiquarians cherish the past for being past, in all its little details and eccentricities, with a great willingness to obsess over minutiae and hastily dismiss criticisms of what happened as hastily dismissive. Critical history looks into the past so as to critique the present for neglecting positive possibilities of the past. Each approach to history, when practiced in isolation from the others, winds up hamstringing our ability to flourish in time,…
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