What is history? How should history be written? E.H. Carr, the historian, diplomat, journalist, philosopher and author of a fourteen volume history of the Soviet Union set out to answer this question in 1961. The resulting book is considered a classic.
Carr starts by discussing the ‘common sense’ view of history. In essence, that history is about facts and simply collecting as many facts as possible.
In this view, facts are ‘like fish on the fish mongers slab’. Ready to be chosen and cooked.
There are basic facts – raw materials.
But, ‘the facts, speak only when the historian calls on them’.
Carr compares the fact that the Battle of Hastings happened in 1066 with the fact that in 1850 a gingerbread vendor was killed by an angry mob.
The latter is not well known. It is unimportant.
One is selected over the other because it is considered useful. We use the fact to understand something larger.
So on one side, we have a historian in the present making a judgement about what facts to select.
On the other side, there are documents, letters, diaries, treatises etc. These are facts of a certain kind, but tell us no more than what the author thought, and are, of course, invariably one sided.
Carr says that the classical liberal view of history, popular across the 19th century, proposes that, like the hidden hand of the market, letting historians pick from this fishmonger’s slab of facts would result in ‘universal harmony’ – the truth would emerge.
Carr points out a few problems with this view.
First, the ‘facts’ of the past are only accessible through the present.
Carr says, referring to the historian, ‘The very words which he uses – words like democracy, empire, war, revolution – have current connotations from which he cannot divorce them’.
A historical event looks different through the eyes of a 17th century Frenchman than it does to a 21st century American.
But does this lead to what Carr calls total scepticism? If there are different views at different times how can any of them be the right one? Is there no objective position from which to view history?
To address the problem of ‘total’ scepticism, Carr starts with the common view of historical work. That firstly, the facts are collected, and secondly, that they are interpreted and written into a narrative.
For Carr this isn’t accurate. It is much more likely that the process is reciprocal. Some facts are collected, a tentative interpretation is made, more facts are collected, the interpretation is revised, and so on.
He says, ‘the historian is engaged on a continuous process of moulding his facts to his interpretation and his interpretation to his facts. It is impossible to assign primacy to one over the other’.
This process is a dialogue between facts in the past and the historian, who is contextualised in the present.
Carr says, ‘The past is intelligible to us only in the light of the present; and we can fully understand the present only in the light of the past’.
Carr then says that the process is not just an individual one. ‘The men whose actions the historian studies were not isolated individuals acting in a vacuum: they acted in the context, and under the impulse, of a past society’.
He argues that it is obvious that we must look at social forces – class, vested interests, as well as individuals.
So as well as history being a dialogue between the past and the present, it’s a dialogue between the individual and society.
Carr paints a picture on multiple axes. Past and present, individual and societal. How then do we retain any sense of objectivity?
Carr moves on to compare this process to the inductive method in science. He says scientists no longer spend their time searching for laws of nature, but instead come up with a hypothesis, test whether it is a fact, then reassess. Science is also driven by values in the present.
He explores a number of objections to history being a science, problematising them in turn.
It is said that science deals with the general and history with particular, unique events. But he argues that history is also general – the causes of wars or revolutions.
It is also said that history is unable to predict the future. But Carr points out that although science predicts, it only predicts probabilities. An apple is certain to fall from a tree but someone might catch it before it hits the ground. He also notes that modern physics after Einstein is also relative – not as universal as was once thought.
Ultimately, Carr says that, ‘The word science already covers so many different branches of knowledge, employing so many different methods and techniques, that the onus seems to rest on those who seek to exclude history rather than on those who seek to include it’.
This leads to Carr looking at how historians have understood causation in history. For a long time, historians and philosophers looked for universal laws of history – to make it more scientific.
Historians now look for multiple causes. The Bolshevik revolution might be said to be caused by the failure of the Tsar, the impoverished proletariat, Lenin’s character etc. A primary cause is usually then given, or a hierarchy of causes.
Carr draws an analogy.
Driving back from a party a man who has drank too much, in a car with defective brakes, kills a man crossing the road to get cigarettes at a blind corner. What was the cause? And what is our motivation in finding out? To make roads safer? To reduce drinking?
Maybe he was killed because he was desperate for cigarettes, but by intuition we distinguish between rational and accidental causes.
Carr’s point here, and he quotes the German historian Friedrich Meinecke, is that, ‘the search for causalities in history is impossible without reference to values… behind the search for causalities there always lies, directly or indirectly, the search for values’.
We are always trying to learn something from history.
This leads to Carr arguing that, to avoid scepticism, the facts and interpretations historians choose should be organised around the idea of progress.
Maybe not as an ‘unbroken straight line without reverses and deviations’, but progress all the same.
Ultimately, he says, a ‘Belief in progress means belief not in any automatic or inevitable process, but in the progressive development of human Potentialities’.
For Carr, being objective, choosing the facts and the hierarchy of causes, means considering the future.
He says: ‘When we call a historian objective, we mean I think two things. First of all, we mean that he has a capacity to rise above the limited vision of his own situation in society and in history’.
‘Secondly, we mean that he has the capacity to project his vision into the future in such a way as to give him a more profound and more lasting insight into the past than can be attained by those historians whose outlook is entirely bounded by their own immediate situation’.
In other words, historians should work to transform society as much as those in other disciplines do.
Carr has been criticised for having a relativistic view of history. That the facts and questions are determined by the present so that no objective reading of the past is possible. But, through an optimism about the future, Carr also tries to draw a route back to ‘objectively’ picking facts through the value of progress.
It’s a unique argument, and many have claimed it doesn’t hold today, but the text – both short and rich – is still held as a classic introduction to the question it addresses: what is history?
