Despite the difference between the past and the future, between what has happened and what is to come, it can be suggested, that our sense of the past has always been influenced by our view of the future. Revolutionaries have always looked to the past to frame their future cause, as is amply illustrated by examples from nationalism to communism. The future has often been seen as variously a recovery of a lost time, as a replication of what is established, or as a model bequeathed by a heroic age long gone. The writing of history is based on understanding or explaining future outcomes that were not known to contemporaries, since the historian has the benefit of hindsight and the past is nothing more than the accumulation of futures that are now our past. So, rather than see the hand of the past always shaping the future, perhaps it can be seen in reverse, with the past ─ in the sense of our understanding of it ─ being shaped by our orientation to the future.