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.
The function of history is to promote a profounder understanding of both past and present through the interrelation between them.
There are no laws but probabilities.
“The historian, as we have seen, is bound to generalize; and, in so doing, he provides general guides for future action which, though not specific predictions, are both valid and useful. But he cannot predict specific events, because the specific is unique and because the element of accident enters into it. This distinction, which worries philosophers, is perfectly clear to the ordinary man. If two or three children in a school develop measles, you will conclude that the epidemic will spread; and this prediction, if you care to call it such, is based on a generalization from past experience, and is a valid and useful guide to action. But you cannot make the specific prediction that Charles or Mary will catch measles. The historian proceeds in the same way.”
Social science is a study of man by man: subject is object; object is subject. There is no independent species to study man.
The point of view of the historian enters irrevocably into every observation which he makes; history is shot through and through with relativity.
There is no Salafi historian.
“The Bolsheviks knew that the French revolution had ended in a Napoleon, and feared that their own revolution might end in the same way. They therefore mistrusted Trotsky, who among their leaders looked most like a Napoleon, and trusted Stalin, who looked least like a Napoleon. But this process may work in a converse direction. The economist who, by a scientific analysis of existing economic conditions, predicts an approaching boom or slump may, if his authority is great and his arguments cogent, contribute by the very fact of his prediction to the occurrence of the phenomenon predicted.”
“He will not pass judgment on the individual slave-owner. But this does not prevent him from condemning a slave-owning society. Historical facts, as we saw, presuppose some measure of interpretation; and historical interpretations always involve moral judgments – or, if you prefer a more neutral-sounding term, value judgments.”
Carr states that history can be seen as a study of causes.
the historian is known by the causes which he invokes
“The nightmare quality of Kafka’s novels lies in the fact that nothing that happens has any apparent cause, or any cause that can be ascertained: this leads to the total disintegration of the human personality, which is based on the assumption that events have causes, and that enough of these causes are ascertainable to build up in the human mind a pattern of past and present sufficiently coherent to serve as a guide to action. Everyday life would be impossible unless one assumed that human behaviour was determined by causes which are in principle ascertainable.”
historical law is realized through the natural selection of accidents
Trotsky^
“The relation of the historian to his causes has the same dual and reciprocal character as the relation of the historian to his facts. The causes determine his interpretation of the historical process, and his interpretation determines his selection and marshalling of the causes. The hierarchy of causes, the relative significance of one cause or set of causes or of another, is the essence of his interpretation. And this furnishes the clue to the problem of the accidental in history.”
“we distinguish between rational and accidental causes. The former, since they are potentially applicable to other countries, other periods and other conditions, lead to fruitful generalizations and lessons can be learned from them; they serve the end of broadening and deepening our understanding.27 Accidental causes cannot be generalized; and, since they are in the fullest sense of the word unique, they teach no lessons and lead to no conclusions. But here I must make another point. It is precisely this notion of an end in view which provides the key to our treatment of causation in history; and this necessarily involves value judgments. Interpretation in history is, as we saw in the last lecture, always bound up with value judgments, and causality is bound up with interpretation.”
“the present has no more than a notional existence as an imaginary dividing line between the past and the future. In speaking of the present, I have already smuggled another time dimension into the argument. It would, I think, be easy to show that, since past and future are part of the same time-span, interest in the past and interest in the future are interconnected. The line of demarcation between pre-historic and historical times is crossed when people cease to live only in the present, and become consciously interested both in their past and in their future. History begins with the handing down of tradition; and tradition means the carrying of the habits and lessons of the past into the future. Records of the past begin to be kept for the benefit of future generations.”
The craving for an interpretation of history is so deep-rooted that, unless we have a constructive outlook over the past, we are drawn either to mysticism or to cynicism.
^Carr will try to explain what a “constructive outlook“ looks like
Apparently, ancient Greeks did not have the same sense of the past and future before Abraham teleological understanding.
The rationalists of the Enlightenment, who were the founders of modern historiography, retained the Jewish-Christian teleological view, but secularized the goal; they were thus enabled to restore the rational character of the historical process itself.
All this talk about the decline of civilization, he writes, ‘means only that university professors used to have domestic servants and now do their own washing up’.
^A J P Taylor
History is progress through the transmission of acquired skills from one generation to another.
I.e. language, not biology without finite beginning nor end
the presumption of an end of history has an eschatological ring more appropriate to the theologian than to the historian
For some people, the end of evolution is where we have evolved currently.
But they are symptomatic of the observed fact that the effort which is needed to drive civilization forward dies away in one place and is later resumed at another, so that whatever progress we can observe in history is certainly not continuous either in time or in place.
arguably, this is Quranic. God replaces one people with another if the former fails in their duty.
“Elderly people in our culture are frequently oriented towards the past, the time of their vigour and power, and resist the future as a threat. It is probable that a whole culture in an advanced stage of loss of relative power and disintegration may thus have a dominant orientation towards a lost golden age, while life is lived sluggishly along in the present.”
Belief in progress means belief not in any automatic or inevitable process, but in the progressive development of human potentialities.
To say that the Russian revolution was due to the stupidity of Nicholas II or to the genius of Lenin is altogether inadequate – so inadequate as to be altogether misleading. But it cannot be called absolutely false. The historian does not deal in absolutes of this kind.
“the only absolute is change.’17 The absolute in history is not something in the past from which we start; it is not something in the present, since all present thinking is necessarily relative. It is something still incomplete and in process of becoming – something in the future towards which we move, which begins to take shape only as we move towards it, and in the light of which, as we move forward, we gradually shape our “interpretation of the past. This is the secular truth behind the religious myth that the meaning of history will be revealed in the Day of Judgment. Our criterion is not an absolute in the static sense of something that is the same yesterday, today and for ever: such an absolute is incompatible with the nature of history. But it is an absolute in respect of our interpretation of the past. It rejects the relativist view that one interpretation is as good as another, or that every interpretation is true in its own time and place, and it provides the touchstone by which our interpretation of the past will ultimately be judged. It is this sense of direction in history which alone enables us to order and interpret the events of the past – the task of the historian – and to liberate and organize human energies in the present with a view to the future – the task of the statesman, the economist and the social reformer. But the process itself remains progressive and dynamic. Our sense of direction, and our interpretation of the past, are subject to constant modification and evolution as we proceed.”
But this accumulation of experience does not necessarily mean that future generations improve upon the mistakes of their forebears.
Only the future can provide the key to the interpretation of the past
The objective historian is one who recognises that he can never be objective, instead he selects for quality facts and interpretations. He also thinks about the past with an eye to the future. That is he interrogates his own understanding of the past in the present moment by seeing how durable it will be for future historians.
In that case, history is less a dialogue between the past and the present, but rather the past and ever emerging future.
When eras are on the decline, all tendencies are subjective; but on the other hand when matters are ripening for a new epoch, all tendencies are objective.
^Goethe
With optimism, the past is the realm of scientists. With pessimism, the past is the realm of mystics and nihilists.
“when the Founding Fathers of the United States in the Declaration of Independence referred to the self-evident truth that all men are created equal, you may feel that the value content of the statement predominates over the factual content, and may on that account challenge its right to be regarded as a truth.”
History begins when men begin to think of the passage of time in terms not of natural processes – the cycle of the seasons, the human life-span – but of a series of specific events in which men are consciously involved and which they can consciously influence.
Hegel’s equivalent for Smith’s ‘hidden hand’ was the famous ‘cunning of reason’ which sets men to work to fulfil purposes of which they are not conscious.
In the 1930s, people began to talk of ‘the end of economic man’, meaning the man who consistently pursued his economic interests in accordance with economic laws; and since then nobody, except a few Rip Van Winkles of the nineteenth century, believes in economic laws in this sense. Today economics has become either a series of theoretical mathematical equations, or a practical study of how some people push others around. The change is mainly a product of the transition from individual to large-scale capitalism. So long as the individual entrepreneur and merchant predominated, nobody seemed in control of the economy or capable of influencing it in any significant way; and the illusion of impersonal laws and processes was preserved. Even the Bank of England, in the days of its greatest power, was thought of not as a skilful operator and manipulator, but as an objective and quasi-automatic registrar of economic trends. But with the transition from a laissez-faire economy to a managed economy (whether a managed capitalist economy or a socialist economy, whether the management is done by large-scale capitalist, and nominally private, concerns or by the state), this illusion is dissolved. It becomes clear that certain people are taking certain decisions for certain ends; and that these decisions set our economic course for us. Everyone knows today that the price of oil or soap does not vary in response to some objective law of supply and demand. Everyone knows, or thinks he knows, that slumps and unemployment are man-made: governments admit, indeed claim, that they know how to cure them.
^probably most telling passage. Awareness of a change disappears with time.
I have a duty to truth and the future by writing my mind and observations.
Let me quote from the last volume of the first Cambridge Modern History, published in 1910, a highly perceptive comment from a writer who was anything but a Marxist and had probably never heard of Lenin:
The belief in the possibility of social reform by conscious effort is the dominant current of the European mind; it has superseded the belief in liberty as the one panacea … Its currency in the present is as significant and as pregnant as the belief in the rights of man about the time of the French revolution.
Today, fifty years after this passage was written, more than forty years after the Russian revolution, and thirty years after the great depression, this belief has become a commonplace; and the transition from submission to objective economic laws which, though supposedly rational, were beyond man’s control to belief in the capacity of man to control his economic destiny by conscious action seems to me to represent an advance in the application of reason to human affairs, an increased capacity in man to understand and master himself and his environment, which I should be prepared, if necessary, to call by the old-fashioned name of progress.
“The primary function of reason, as applied to man in society, is no longer merely to investigate, but to transform; and this heightened consciousness of the power of man to improve the management of his social, economic and political affairs by the application of rational processes seems to me one of the major aspects of the twentieth-century revolution.”
Primitive men cannot be put into complicated machines.
Corn spread through the Americas through human intervention, as I read in Polan, perhaps there are these forces controlling us despite our illusion of controlling them.
“Perhaps the most far-reaching social consequence of the industrial revolution has been the progressive increase in the numbers of those who learn to think, to use their reason. In Great Britain our passion for gradualism is such that the movement is sometimes scarcely perceptible. We have rested on the laurels of universal elementary education for the best part of a century, and have still not advanced very far or very quickly towards universal higher education. This did not matter so much when we led the world. It matters more when we are being overtaken by others in a greater hurry than ourselves, and when the pace has everywhere been speeded up by technological change. For the social revolution and the technological revolution and the scientific revolution are part and parcel of the same process. If you want an academic example of the process of individualization, consider the immense diversification over the past fifty or sixty years of history, or of science, or of any particular science, and the enormously increased variety of individual specializations which it offers.”
“In an earlier lecture I pointed out that increasing individualization in the sense described did not imply any weakening of social pressures for conformity and uniformity. This is indeed one of the paradoxes of our complex modern society. Education, which is a necessary and powerful instrument in promoting the expansion of individual capacities and opportunities, and therefore of increasing individualization, is also a powerful instrument in the hands of interested groups for promoting social uniformity. Pleas frequently heard for more responsible broadcasting and television, or for a more responsible press, are directed in the first instance against certain negative phenomena which it is easy to condemn. But they quickly become pleas to use these powerful instruments of mass persuasion in order to inculcate desirable tastes and desirable opinions”
I do not know how long it was after the invention of printing before critics began to point out that it facilitated the spread of erroneous opinions.
The joy reading books written a few decades before one’s birth!
“What we have learned of the techniques and potentialities of mass propaganda cannot be simply obliterated. It is no more possible to return to the small-scale individualist democracy of Lockeian or liberal theory, partially realized in Great Britain in the middle years of the nineteenth century, than it is possible to return to the horse and buggy or to early laissez-faire capitalism. But the true answer is that these evils also carry with them their own corrective. The remedy lies not in a cult of irrationalism or a renunciation of the extended role of reason in modern society, but in a growing consciousness from below as well as from above of the role which reason can play.”
It is by no means clear that the world centre of gravity now resides, or will continue for long to reside, in the English-speaking world with its western European annex.
“The French revolutions of 1789 and 1848 had found their imitators in Europe. The first Russian revolution of 1905 awakened no echo in Europe, but found its imitators in Asia: in the next few years revolutions occurred in Persia, in Turkey and in China. The First World War was not precisely a world war, but a European civil war – assuming that such an entity as Europe existed – with world-wide consequences: these included the stimulation of industrial development in many Asian countries, of anti-foreign feeling in China and of Indian nationalism, and the birth of Arab nationalism. The Russian revolution of 1917 provided a further and decisive impulse. What was significant here was that its leaders looked persistently, but in vain, for imitators in Europe, and finally found them in Asia. It was Europe that had become ‘unchanging’, Asia that was on the move. I need not continue this familiar story down to the present time. The historian is hardly yet in a position to assess the scope and significance of the Asian and African revolution.”
“The mass of people belonged, like pre-historic peoples, to nature rather than to history. Modern history begins when more and more people emerge into social and political consciousness, become aware of their respective groups as historical entities having a past and a future, and enter fully into history. It is only within the last 200 years at most, even in a few advanced countries, that social, political and historical consciousness have begun to spread to anything like a majority of the population.”
How do we see change? Do we see it as opportunity, achievement, or a source of fear?
Alhamdulillah Quite happy I read that