Science & Tech Quote by Marc Bloch

Bloch is swatting away history-as-comfort-blanket: the lazy habit of treating the past like a drawer of ready-made analogies. Calling history "the science of change" is a provocation aimed at both the armchair moralist and the bureaucrat hunting precedents. He’s insisting that the historian’s job isn’t to certify that "this has happened before", but to map how and why the same human impulses recombine under different pressures, institutions, technologies, and beliefs. The line lands because it flatters no one. It denies the neatness politicians crave and the certainty pundits sell.

The subtext is methodological, even moral. Bloch’s "impossible to find two events that are ever exactly alike" isn’t a plea for relativism; it’s a demand for rigor. If conditions are never identical, then explanation has to be contextual: causation becomes a web, not a single chain. The real target is simplistic determinism, the idea that history runs on repeat if you just squint hard enough. Bloch is arguing for comparison without copy-pasting.

Context sharpens the stakes. Writing as a founder of the Annales school, Bloch fought against narrow event-chasing and championed deep structures: geography, economy, mentalities. As a French Jew, a soldier in World War I, and later a Resistance member executed by the Gestapo, he lived through moments when false historical analogies became lethal political tools. In that light, his warning reads less like academic housekeeping and more like a civic defense: if you mistake resemblance for identity, you misjudge your present - and you give power to people who profit from easy parallels.