Name-drop-kick

Here is the penultimate paragraph from the current draft on my paper, 'Founding Mythologies: Historiography and the U.S. Constitution,' for a conference in two weeks' time. I feel it may signify that the paper went a little off the rails towards the end there... but, clearly, I have affection enough for it that I want to post it here.

As Gordon Wood has written, following in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s and Quentin Skinner’s footsteps, ‘we can do only what we can conceive of.’ In this sense history in our time serves the same goal as it did in Plutarch’s, or Machiavelli’s: encouragement by example. In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the idea of a world without Big Brother was erased by the party’s control of information and therefore of history. ‘Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.’ Similarly, it was once suggested that the fall of the USSR and the apparent triumph of American liberal capitalism at the end of the twentieth century signified ‘the end of history,’ the end of substantial political change. A world with history, conversely, is a world replete with knowledge of the possibility of change, and of alternatives to what currently exists.