Michael Howard - A Historical Sensibility: Sir Michael Howard and the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1958-2019

The International Institute for Strategic Studies

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First published January 2020 by Routledge
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2020 The International Institute for Strategic Studies

DIRECTOR-GENERAL AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE Dr John Chipman
EDITOR Dr Benjamin Rhode
ASSOCIATE EDITOR Nicholas Payne
EDITORIAL Vivien Antwi, Gabriel Everington, Jill Lally, Michael Marsden, Jack May, Catherine OConnor, Bao-Chau Pham
COVER/PRODUCTION John Buck, Carolina Vargas, Kelly Verity
COVER IMAGE: Getty

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

ADELPHI series
ISSN 1944-5571

ADELPHI 472474
ISBN 978-0-367-49562-6

Professor Sir Michael Howards death in November 2019 left The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) bereft of not only its president emeritus but the last of its founders and intellectual parents. Yet he bequeathed to us a magnificent legacy of scholarship and commentary. In tribute to Sir Michael and in celebration of his life and work, this volume collects a selection of his remarks and writings for IISS publications over six decades.

Combat in the Second World War had already equipped Sir Michael with a first-hand appreciation of conflicts realities by the time of the conferences and conversations that led to the Institutes foundation in 1958. His academic specialism, however, lay not in area studies, political science or the emerging field of strategic studies. Rather, it lay in history; initially, in fact, the history of England in the early seventeenth century. While he would go on to re-establish the Department of War Studies at nearby Kings College London, he had believed that early modern England would be the focus of the assistant lectureship that first brought him there in the 1940s. Moreover, at the outset of his career, he was not in the least interested in current events, as he said in a 2017 interview published for the first time here. He was and remained wary of facile lessons derived from the past, remarking in a 1966 book review in Survival that if history teaches us anything, it is that men fall into quite as many errors in trying to learn from the past as they do trying to ignore it.1 Requesting that historians divine the future, he suggested at an IISS conference some years later, was just as futile: to ask a historian to look into and prescribe for the future is to invite a presentation consisting of as much past history as the author thinks he can get away with and as little prophecy and prescription as he thinks his audience will accept. Historians have seen too many confident prophets fall flat on their faces to lay themselves open to more humiliation than they can help.2

Yet Sir Michael argued and demonstrated that while history provides few answers, it may shape our attitudes, engendering a scepticism, a humility, and an appreciation of the role of the contingent and the unforeseen in human affairs of a kind not always developed by a more positivist approach.3 His deep and broad historical learning brought with it a historical sensibility: the ability to see the present through the eyes of a historian; to be aware both of historys contingencies and its recurrent patterns; to be suspicious of immutable laws of international relations; to be alive to the power of ideas in human events; and to locate contemporary developments within the longue dure for, as he put it, there is little point in considering where we should be going if we do not first decide where we are starting from.4 This sensibility entails an awareness of the subjective nature of an individual or nations historical narrative and its determinative effect on their contemporary actions for, as he observed elsewhere, all we believe about the present depends on what we believe about the past.5