History is a Discipline

David Remnick over to The New Yorker argues that

[t]he delusions of dictators are never more poignant—or more dangerous—than when they are in their death throes. To watch Hosni Mubarak today in his late-night speech Cairo, as he used every means of rhetorical deflection to delay his inevitable end, was to watch a man so deluded, so deaf to the demands of history, that he was incapable of hearing an entire people screaming in his ear.

It is, I suppose, a literary trope but this use of history as an agent is a kind of pathetic fallacy and really ought to be avoided.