From Charles Maier's "Wargames: 1914-1919" (250-251)

"The non-deducive knowledge derived from history must depend upon history being understood as a process of complex development, not just as a warehouse of examples. It may thus offer insights akin to the mental enhancement provided by good literature or successful psychoanalysis. History provides awareness of layered complexity, warnings of pitfalls, and a fall for the contextual determinants of outcomes; it fills in a sense of human community. At its best, this knowledge can be emancipatory, but not pragmatic.

Does this limitation condemn history to uselessness for policymakers? Only if they approach it as engineers, seeking technological guidance; otherwise, it is indispensable. As Croce summarized history's contribution: "We are products of the past and we live immersed in the past which presses on us all around... Historical thought reduces the past to its own raw material, transforms it into its own object, and history writing liberates us from history."

...How does written history "liberate" us from being blindly caught up in a stream of events? Accept that it cannot deliver simple, straightforward lessons; how does it provide insight? It does so primarily by virtue of the historian's laying bare its counterfactual implications. The good historian is distinguished by an awareness, which is communicated to his or her readers, that what has come to pass is intensely problematic. Describing what has actually happened, wie es eigentlich gewesen, should be like walking on thin ice...it must explain why other outcomes did not prevail- not in the sense that they could not, but in the sense that they might well have...Exploring what conditions would have been needed for alternative outcomes to materialize, history can assume a heuristic role."