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
“To praise a historian for his accuracy is like praising an architect for using well-seasoned timber or properly mixed concrete in his building. It is a necessary condition of his work, but not his essential function. It is precisely for matters of this kind that the historian is entitled to rely on what have been called the ‘auxiliary sciences’ of history – archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics, chronology, and so forth.”
Facts are not enough:
“It was, I think, one of Pirandello’s characters who said that a fact is like a sack – it won’t stand up till you’ve put something in it. The only reason why we are interested to know that the battle was fought at Hastings in 1066 is that historians regard it as a major historical event.”
History has been called an enormous jig-saw with a lot of missing parts.
There are no historical facts. There are only perspectives.
As Lytton Strachey said in his mischievous way, ‘ignorance is the first requisite of the historian, ignorance which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits’.
Voltaire apparently was the first person to use the term “philosophy history”.
“The liberal nineteenth-century view of history had a close affinity with the economic doctrine of laissez-faire – also the product of a serene and self-confident outlook on the world. Let everyone get on with his particular job, and the hidden hand would take care of the universal harmony. The facts of history were themselves a demonstration of the supreme fact of a beneficent and apparently infinite progress towards higher things.”
Oakeshott: to write history is the only way of making it.
This is why I’m wary of “protecting the Muslim identity“. It creates a silo.
It follows that when we take up a work of history, our first concern should be not with the facts which it contains but with the historian who wrote it… Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.
“The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger’s slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use – these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation.”
imagination is a historian’s tool
“It was extremely difficult for a nineteenth-century liberal historian, brought up to believe that it is right and praiseworthy to kill in defence of one’s country, but wicked and wrong-headed to kill in defence of one’s religion, to enter into the state of mind of those who fought the Thirty Years’ War.”
History cannot be written unless the historian can achieve some kind of contact with the mind of those about whom he is writing.
Bukhari?
“The historian belongs not to the past but to the present. Professor Trevor-Roper tells us that the historian ‘ought to love the past’.22 This is a dubious injunction. To love the past may easily be an expression of the nostalgic romanticism of old men and old societies, a symptom of loss of faith and interest in the present or future.”
history is ‘a child’s box of letters with which we can spell any word we please’
The balance is between copy and paste and propaganda.
Isn’t this feng shui?
Man, except perhaps in earliest infancy and in extreme old age, is not totally involved in his environment and unconditionally subject to it… The relation of man to his environment is the relation of the historian to his theme. The historian is neither the humble slave, nor the tyrannical master, of his facts. The relation between the historian and his facts is one of equality, of give-and-take.
Theory of relativity:
The historian without his facts is rootless and futile; the facts without their historian are dead and meaningless.
Individualisation is a phenomenon of all societies at some point and not unique to Europe.
History is the result of a historian filtering facts. A historian is both an independent individual and a son of circumstances, conscious or unconscious.
The historian is part of history. The point in the procession at which he finds himself determines his angle of vision over the past.
Study the historian before his history. The historian being a member of a society is influenced by it, so study the historian’s society before his history.
Few people have reacted more violently and more radically against the society of their day and country than Nietzsche. Yet Nietzsche was a direct product of European, and more specifically of German, society – a phenomenon which could not have occurred in China or Peru.
‘It is an obvious truth’, observed Gibbon, ‘that the times must be suited to extraordinary characters, and that the genius of Cromwell or Retz might now expire in obscurity.
‘labels giving names to events’
Tolstoy
The great man of the age is the one who can put into words the will of his age, tell his age what its will is, and accomplish it. What he does is the heart and essence of his age; he actualizes his age.
Hegel
Sounds like Kurt Cobain
“The reciprocal process of interaction between the historian and his facts, what I have called the dialogue between present and past, is a dialogue not between abstract and isolated individuals, but between the society of today and the society of yesterday. History, in Burckhardt’s words, is ‘the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another’.35 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. To enable man to understand the society of the past and to increase his mastery over the society of the present is the dual function of history.”
3. History, Science and Morality
In every other European language, the equivalent word to ‘science’ includes history without hesitation. But in the English-speaking world this question has a long past behind it, and the issues raised by it are a convenient introduction to the problems of method in history.
But the real importance of the Darwinian revolution was that Darwin, completing what Lyell had already begun in geology, brought history into science. Science was concerned no longer with something “static and timeless,2 but with a process of change and development. Evolution in science confirmed and complemented progress in history. Nothing, however, occurred to alter the inductive view of historical method which I described in my first lecture: first collect your facts, then interpret them. It was assumed without question that this was also the method of science.”
Historians deal with hypotheses as well. They start with presuppositions and refine with new data. There are no “rules” per se. All empirical knowledge is probalistic, and history is such a knowledge.
“The controversy about periodization in history falls into this category. The division of history into periods is not a fact, but a necessary hypothesis or tool of thought, valid in so far as it is illuminating, and dependent for its validity on interpretation. Historians who differ on the question when the Middle Ages ended differ in their interpretation of certain events. The question is not a question of fact; but it is also not meaningless. The division of history into geographical sectors is equally not a fact, but a hypothesis:”
history was ‘not factual at all, but a series of accepted judgments’
“Analogies are, however, a notorious trap for the unwary: and I want to consider respectfully the arguments for believing that, great as are the differences between the mathematical and the natural sciences, or between different sciences within these categories, a fundamental distinction can be drawn between these sciences and history, and that this distinction makes it misleading to call history – and perhaps also the other so-called social sciences – by the name of science. These objections – some of them more convincing than others – are in brief: (1) that history deals exclusively with the unique, science with the general, (2) that history teaches no lessons, (3) that history is unable to predict, (4) that history is necessarily subjective, since man is observing himself, and (5) that history, unlike science, involves issues of religion and morality. I will try to examine each of these points in turn.”
what distinguishes the historian from the collector of historical facts is generalization… But do not suppose that generalization permits us to construct some vast scheme of history into which specific events must be fitted.
The Balance for “History” is between the General and Specific. The Balance for the “Study of Society” is between Ultra-Theoretical and the Ultra-Empirical.
There may not be Lessons per se from History, but movements are inspired by a sense of the Past to shape the future: French on Russian Revolution; Israel on Puritans and African Americans, etc
But the Present is doing the Lesson Taking rather than the Past doing the Lesson Giving.