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What is history?
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What is history?
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How should history be written?
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E.H.
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Carr, the historian, diplomat, journalist, philosopher and author of a 14-volume history on the Soviet Union,
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set out to answer this question in 1961.
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The book is considered a a classic.
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Carr starts by discussing the common sense view of history.
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In essence, that history is about facts and simply collecting as many facts as possible.
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In this view, facts are like fish on a fishmonger's slab, ready to be chosen and cooked.
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There are basic facts, raw materials, but the facts only speak when the historian calls on them.
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Carr compares the fact that the Battle of Hastings happened in 1066,
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with the fact that in 1850 a gingerbread vendor was killed by an angry mob.
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The latter is not well known, it is unimportant.
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One is selected over the other because it's considered useful.
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We use the fact to understand something larger.
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So on the one side we have the historian in the present making a judgement about what facts to select.
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On the other side, there are documents, letters, diaries, treaties, etc. These are facts of a certain kind,
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but tell us no more than what the author thought and are of course invariably one-sided.
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Carr says that the classical liberal view of history, popular across the 19th century, proposes that, like the hidden hand of the market,
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Letting historians pick from this fishmonger's slab of facts would result in a universal harmony.
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The truth would emerge.
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Carr starts to point out a few problems with this view.
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First, the facts of the past are only accessible through the present.
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He says of the historian, the very words which he uses, words like democracy, empire, war,
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have current connotations from which he cannot divorce them.
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A historical event looks very different through the eyes of a 17th century Frenchman than it does to a 21st century American.
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But does this lead to what Carr calls total skepticism?
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If there are different views at different times, how can any of them be the right one?
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Is there no objective position from which to view history?
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To answer the problem of total scepticism, Carr starts with the common view of historical work.
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That is that 1 the facts are collected and 2 they are interpreted and written into a narrative.
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For Carr, though, this isn't accurate.
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It's much more likely that the process is reciprocal.
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Some facts are collected, a tentative interpretation is made, more facts are collected, the interpretation is revised, and so on.
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He says the historian is engaged in a continuous process of moulding his facts to his interpretation, and his interpretation to his facts.
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It is impossible to assign primacy to one over the other.
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This process is a dialogue between facts in the past and the historian contextualised in the present.
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He 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.
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He then goes on to say that the process is not just an individual one.
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The men whose actions the historians studies were not isolated individuals acting in a vacuum,
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they acted in the context and under the impulse of a past society.
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He argues then that this means it's obvious we must look at social forces, class vested interests as well as individuals.
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So as well as history being a dialogue between the past and the present, it's now a dialogue between the individual and society.
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He's painting a picture on multiple axes – past and present, individual and societal.
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But how then do we retain any sense of objectivity?
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How do we know where to look and which facts to pick up?
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To begin to get out of this predicament, Carr moves to compare the process of the historian to the process of the inductive method in science.
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He says scientists no longer really spend their time searching for the laws of nature, but instead come up with a hypothesis,
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test whether it's a fact, then reassess.
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Science is also driven by a back and forth, and by values in the present.
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He explores a number of objections to history being a science, problematising them in turn.
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For example, it is said that science deals with the general and history with the particular, with unique events.
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But he argues that history is also general.
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For example, the historian looks for the causes of the phenomenon of war or revolutions.
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These are general categories.
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Another objection is that history is unable to predict the future.
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But he points out that although science predicts, it only predicts probabilities.
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Gravity might predict how an apple falls from a tree, but it can't predict things getting in the way or someone catching it before it hits the ground.
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He also notes that modern physics after Einstein is also relative, not as universal as was once thought.
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Ultimately, he says that the word science already covers so many different branches of knowledge, employing so many different methods and techniques,
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that the onus seems to rest on those who seek to exclude history rather than on those who seek to include it.
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Carr's view of history as a science is probably the view that would receive the most criticism today.
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He moves on to look at causation.
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For a long time, historians and philosophers looked for universal laws of history, to try and make it more scientific.
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Historians now look for multiple causes.
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The Bolshevik revolution, for example, might be said to be caused by the failure of the Tsar, the impoverished proletariat, Lenin's character,
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etc. Usually a primary cause is given, then maybe a hierarchy of causes.
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Carr draws an analogy.
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Driving back from a party, a man who has drank too much,
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in a a car with defective brakes kills a man crossing the road to get cigarettes at a blind corner.
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What was the cause?
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And what is our motivation in finding out what the cause is?
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To make roads safer?
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To reduce drinking?
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Maybe he was killed because he was desperate for cigarettes, but by intuition we distinguish between rational and accidental causes.
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Carr's point here and he quotes the German historian Friedrich Meineck,
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is that, "...the search for causalities in history is impossible without reference to values.
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Behind the search for causalities there always lies,
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directly or indirectly, the search for values." We are always trying to learn something from history.
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This leads Carr to argue that,
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to avoid total scepticism, the facts and interpretations historians choose should be organised around the idea of progress.
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Maybe not as an unbroken straight line without reverses and deviations, as he says, but progress all the same.
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Ultimately he says that a belief in progress means belief not in any automatic
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or inevitable process but in the progressive development of human potentialities.
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Being objective, choosing the facts and the hierarchy of causes, means considering the future.
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He says when we call a historian objective we mean I think two things.
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First of all we mean
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that he has the capacity to rise above the limited version of his own situation in society and in history.
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Secondly, he means
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that he has the capacity to project his vision into the
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future in such a way as to give him a more profound
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and more lasting insight into the past than can be attained
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by those historians whose outlook is entirely bounded by their own immediate situation.
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In other words, historians should work to transform society as much as other disciplines do.
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Carr has been criticised for having a relativistic view of history.
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That the facts and questions are determined by the present, so that no objective reading of the past is possible.
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But through an optimism about the future, Carr also tries to draw a route back to objectivity,
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picking facts through the value of progress.
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It's a unique argument and many have claimed it doesn't hold today, but the text, both short and rich,
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is still held as a classic introduction to the question, what is history?
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