Use History Like a Tool : An Unconventional Guide to Reading the Past and Managing the Future

If you really want to use history like a tool in your day-to-day survival, you must understand the underlying principles of history and how to use those principles. Doing this requires that you see history differently-as something other than names and dates. You need to see history as motion. In other words, people and countries armies and economies move through time toward goals. These goals can be political, philosophical, religious, economic or anything else. In this book, we'll consider the various laws of historical motion. In USE HISTORY LIKE A TOOL, Levi goes on to examine the history of Western Civilization in a non-chronological way. His organizing theme is a series of rules that he believes control the movement of history, including · Motion Looks for Niches · Choices Define Circumstances (Not Vice-versa) · Prohibition Never Works · All Systems Ossify · Economies Are Built from the Bottom Up · Most People Think "What's In It for Me?" · Entertainment Is Important Showing how these rules apply to people and history, Levi combines his versions of well-known historical events (Rome's Fall, the Italian Renaissance, the American Revolution, the Great Migration, the Cold War, etc.) with mundane events from everyday life (dealing with office politics, hiring the right people, making good financial decisions). It's an interesting-and unusual-read.