Amy Lamboley, at Crescat Sententia, has a post (What You Should Be Reading) referring to a Timothy Burke post on Cliopatria about some proposed ground-rules for using historical analogies when talking about current events and the legitimacy of the whole enterprise.
Naturally, what caught my eye isn't the substance of the post itself, but Amy's passing reference to an essay she wrote on Nietzche's On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life which she called On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Sixteenth Century Women Religious Mystics in Brittany for Life. It's short, well worth reading, but I think she takes a wrong turn towards the conclusion.
However, the effectiveness of his argument that scientific history is actually dangerous rests on an unwarranted conflation of individuals and societies. Consider our much maligned specialist in women religious mystics in sixteenth century Brittany. From the point of society as a whole, she is at worst an eccentric, her occupation harmful only insofar as it prevents her from potentially doing something more productive, at best shedding light on a neglected corner of the past that may even turn out to hold a few useful fragments. She only becomes dangerous when one takes this hapless historian, multiplies her by a factor of ten or a hundred, and turns her into a vast academic conspiracy dedicated to substituting tedious accounts of the lives of women about whom few have heard and fewer even care for the monumental, inspiring biographies of men such as Napoleon and Louis XIV.
I think that it's Amy who has made the unwarranted conflation between individuals and society. From the point of view of the herd, it may be a harmless eccentricity for smart scholars to turn to recording history as a series of "indigestible knowledge stones", but Nietzche wasn't interested in the good of the herd. Merely phrasing the question of danger as danger to society is to stand Nietzche on his head. For Nietzche, the danger of the practice, which makes it worth denouncing in the strongest terms, is the danger that it will seduce a scholar capable of higher work into "harmless" puttering and collecting facts; what is "harmless" to the herd is a mortal danger to the (potentially) great individual--a squandering of that individual's life and power. The "mere presence of scientific history as an occupation" is more harmful than "the presence of auto repair or cooking or other highly useful, highly mundane occupations", because it is among the intellectuals and scholars that Nietzche expects to find the potentially great. Remember that the canonical great figures in Nietzche's mind were people like Goethe, Plato, Epicurus, not mere politicians like Bismarck.
It is precisely because the potentially great are so rare that squandering even one is a horrific tragedy, and the fact that "the historicist German society against which Nietzsche railed" threw up a Bismarck is hardly the kind of thing that would have assuaged Nietzche's fears (apropos of which, after he went mad, Nietzche wrote a letter to Meta von Salis in which he remarked "I have just seized possession of my kingdom, am throwing the pope into prison, and having Wilhelm, Bismarck, and Stocker shot").