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If you want to understand politics read, learn and write history. It’s a far better guide to politics than political science. 1/
2/ History teaches about power, and the people who use it. It uncovers the importance of luck, contingency and the individual will of people who hold it.
3/ It doesn’t offer rules and laws, because there aren’t any. At best there are tendencies and if we’re lucky guidelines.
4/ It teaches you to respect sources and their agendas. Few political interventions are wholly objective. But nor is everything purely partisan or the reflection of a social class or other perspective. Learn history to understand where on this spectrum things can be found.
5/ History’s exciting. It’s what’s made us, good and bad. The world’s complex and always has been. Embrace it.
