Notes from E. H. Carr’s What is History?
And history, like the natural sciences, is concerned not as is sometimes supposed with unique events but with the interaction between the unique and the general. The historian is committed to generalization, and indeed ‘the historian is not really interested in the unique, but in what is general in the unique. (x)
His file ‘Individual in History’ places the problem in a broad historical context. He suggests that the cult of the individual is ‘an élitist doctrine’, because ‘individualism can only mean setting the individual agent against the background of an impersonal mass.’ (xiii)
Carr broadly shared the approach of Marx and Tocqueville. He noted that ‘Individuals in History have “roles”; in some sense the role is more important than the individual.’ He observed of Ramsay Macdonald that his ‘wobbling was the result not so much of his personal character (significant only in so far as it fitted him for the leadership) as of the basic dilemma of the whole group represented by the Labour Party’. More generally he claimed to be concerned not so much to assess individual politicians as ‘to analyse the group interests and “attitudes which mould their thinking’. The way individual minds work, he wrote, ‘isn’t all that important for a historian’, and it is better to ‘look at history rather less in terms of conscious personal behaviour, and more in terms of subconscious group situations and attitudes’. In this spirit he noted wryly that a book about Hitler ‘begins by attributing everything to Hitler’s personality, and ends by talking of the instability and incapacity of the Weimar regime’. (xvi)
The fundamental enquiry in the study of the past is how a part can relate to the whole: was the Holocaust the result of a mad mind or a complicit, perhaps goading, collective? To study the part without the whole is a type of self mutilation. At the same time, to obsess with the part as indistinguishable from the whole is to relinquish the capacity for personal responsibility in an individual. As always, a satisfactory answer lies in finding a balance.
The narrative and the structural interweave to create the fabric of what we call in the imagination of men and in their productions ‘history’.
To a society which is full of confusion about the present, and has lost faith in the future, the history of the past will seem a meaningless jumble of unrelated events. If our society regains its mastery of the present, and its vision of the future, it will also, in virtue of the same process, renew its insight into the past.
How we see the past is much a reflection of how we see ourselves in the present.
While Shakespeare’s Sonnet No. 98 was a celebration of April, Eliot’s The Waste Land sees April as the cruellest month. (xxii)
There is a two-way traffic between past and present, the present being moulded out of the past, yet constantly recreating the past. If the historian makes history, it is equally true that history has made the historian … The present-day philosopher of history, balancing uneasily on the razor edge between the hazards of objective determinism and the bottomless pit of subjective relativity, conscious that thought and action are inextricably intertwined, and that the nature of causation, in history no less than in science, seems the further to elude his grasp the more firmly he tries to grapple with it, is engaged in asking questions rather than in answering them. (xiv)
As Carr’s biographer Jonathan Haslam has noted, his experience as a diplomat had ‘cut short the sense that there could be a multitude of possible outcomes to any situation; once an event had occurred, whether it was good or bad, the diplomat accepted it and moved on’. And it had ‘underscored his identification with rulers rather than ruled … in writing the History Carr subconsciously transposed his early identification with the ruling class in Britain to the ruling caste in Soviet Russia. (xvi)
Evans on Berlin:
It was the historian’s job to work out what that room for manoeuvre was, to identify possible alternative courses of action to the ones individuals eventually took, and to judge their behaviour accordingly. To insist on the inevitability of what had happened in the past, as Carr did, was to resign moral responsibility for our own actions in the present.
You can still believe in miracles but not judge every alleged a miracle as an actual miracle.
Carr: the job of the historian is not to judge but to explain.
“The annalist is content to say that one thing followed another; what distinguishes the historian is the proposition that one thing led to another. Secondly, while historical events were of course set in motion by the individual wills, whether of ‘great men’ or of ordinary people, the historian must go behind the individual wills and inquire into the reasons which made the individuals will and act as they did, and study the ‘factors’ or ‘forces’ which explain individual behaviour. Thirdly, while history never repeats itself, it presents certain regularities, and permits of certain generalizations, which can serve as a guide to future action.”
Barraclough:
“It seems sometimes as though Mr Carr is perilously near to the doctrine that history exists to fulfil a social need. If so, he is confusing history and myth. What society calls for – and too often gets – is not history but myth, the cement which holds all society together. Precisely because, as Mr Carr urges, history is rational, it is essentially personal and anti-social.”
Back to Evans
Carr might also have realized that when people do learn lessons from history, they often learn the wrong ones. History is a very poor predictor of future developments and future events. In attempting to rescue the notion of history’s predictive capabilities from its detractors, Carr confused historical laws with historical generalizations.
Moreover, the larger the generalization, the more exceptions there are likely to be.
Objectivity, according to Berlin, could be found in the historian’s method; it was not a question of the historian’s interpretation. The test of objective methods was ‘whether their results can be checked by observation, not of one observer but of many, whether the logic of the arguments is internally consistent, whether they are accepted widely enough by those whose own claims to expertise can themselves be tested empirically.
Carr had a more predictive understanding of objectivity in historical studies.
In some key respects, therefore, Carr’s views have not stood the test of time. His teleologically instrumentalized concept of objectivity, his policy-oriented theory of “causation, his Olympian disdain for the history of ordinary people, his unconscious identification with the governing rather than the governed, his sweeping and cavalier rejection of the role of the accidental and the contingent, his confusion of historical laws with historical generalizations, his dogmatic rejection of any element of moral judgement in history at all, his insistence that history had a meaning and a direction – none of these aspects of Carr’s argument in What is History? has found much favour with subsequent historians.”
Rhetorical merit:
“Like many books that were written quickly and originated in lectures, it has a fluent and pungent style that is often missing in more considered works. Unlike many books on the theory and practice of history, it contains numerous concrete examples of real historians and real history books to illustrate the more abstract argument it is propounding. In contrast to the majority of history primers and introductions to history of various kinds, it does not talk down to its readers but addresses them as equals. It is witty, amusing and entertaining even when it tackles the most recondite and intractable theoretical problems. It still retains after forty years its power to provoke.”
Comprehensive role of the historian:
Carr thought, rightly, that it was the job of historians to study whatever part of the past they chose to examine in the context of both what came before and after it, and the interconnections between their subject and its wider context.
wie es eigentlich gewesen was the banner:
In Great Britain, this view of history fitted in perfectly with the empiricist tradition which was the dominant strain in British philosophy from Locke to Bertrand Russell.
Facts as fish:
History consists of a corpus of ascertained facts. The facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions and so on, like fish on the fishmonger’s slab. The historian collects them, takes them home and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him.
“ accuracy is a duty, not a virtue” - Houseman