Science & Tech Quote by Paul Valery

History, Valery implies, is a discipline forever trying to wear a lab coat while chasing a subject that refuses to sit still. Calling it a "science" is the bait; "things which are not repeated" is the barb. The line needles the 19th-century confidence that society could be studied like chemistry, with reliable laws and predictable outcomes. Valery, writing in a Europe rattled by industrial modernity and then shattered by World War I, had seen how quickly grand theories of progress turn into rubble. If the core data of history is irreproducible, the historian's authority starts to look less like certainty and more like performance: selection, narration, interpretation.

The subtext is not anti-history so much as anti-pretension. History can be rigorous, Valery grants, but it cannot be experimentally verified in the way the hard sciences are. You can't rerun the French Revolution with a different variable; you can't replicate 1914 to test a hypothesis. That makes "science" an aspiration and a problem. Valery's poet's eye matters here: he spots the genre mismatch, the way historical knowledge depends on language, framing, and hindsight-turned-plot.

The line also exposes the seduction of repetition. Politics loves historical analogy because it offers the comfort of patterns, villains, and lessons. Valery warns that the past is not a vending machine of outcomes. What looks like recurrence is often our craving for usable stories, not an actual loop.