People and societies do in fact learn, and the record shows it

The argument

A second argument against repetition is that learning demonstrably occurs. Proponents point to practices once widespread that are now rare or abolished: public execution as entertainment, the ownership of persons, duelling, the deliberate shunning of plague victims, the exclusion of most of the population from any say in government. In each case the change followed argument, campaigning and the accumulation of experience about consequences, and in each case it has largely held. Proponents argue that a world in which history simply repeated would show these things returning on schedule, and that it does not. The second strand concerns deliberate institution-building. After major failures, societies have constructed machinery specifically to prevent recurrence: deposit guarantees and banking supervision after financial collapse, disease surveillance and reporting obligations after epidemics, written constitutions and courts able to strike down legislation after arbitrary rule, inquiries that publish their findings after disasters. Proponents accept that this machinery is imperfect and is sometimes dismantled, and argue that the relevant observation is how often it has worked: the recurrences it was built to prevent are in general less frequent and less severe than before it existed. Proponents therefore read the claim about repetition as a counsel of fatalism the record does not support. Where failures do recur, they argue, the causes are identifiable and usually local, such as a particular safeguard removed or a particular warning ignored, which is a very different diagnosis from an inescapable cycle. The practical difference matters: one invites a search for the specific failure, the other invites resignation.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Those who hold that history repeats reply that the gains cited are recent, narrow and reversible, and that bondage, arbitrary detention and the suppression of participation have reappeared in new forms rather than ending. They argue that abolishing a particular practice is compatible with the underlying pattern continuing under another name, which is precisely their claim. On the institutional machinery they note that it has been dismantled repeatedly once the memory of what it was for has faded, and that pointing to safeguards still standing describes the quiet part of the cycle rather than refuting it.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Several of the practices cited have reappeared in altered form rather than ending, so abolishing a named practice is compatible with the underlying pattern continuing. [Rejecting P2] The machinery described is recent and has repeatedly been dismantled once the memory of its purpose faded, so pointing to what is still standing describes the quiet part of the cycle. [Rejecting P3] That a particular safeguard was removed or a particular warning ignored is how every recurrence looks from inside, and naming the local cause does not show the pattern is absent. [Rejecting C] The premises establish that specific improvements are possible and have been made, not that recurrence does not happen.