Book Review: “What Is History?” (1961) by Edward Hallett Carr
It has been slightly more than a year since I first aspired to major in International History at my university. Yet before I truly embark on this journey, I must ask myself, “what actually is history?” I have always deemed it as knowledge and the study of the past but I wanted a firmer basis. Enter esteemed British historian E. H. Carr. According to him, history is “a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past.” (35) Through six fascinating and provocatively-titled chapters: “The Historian and His Facts”, “Society and the Individual”, “History, Science, and Morality”, “Causation in History”, “History as Progress”, and “The Widening Horizon”, Carr engages with the past, present, and future of history as a discipline. In regards to the core question of epistemological history: whether or not it is a subjective or objective science, Carr takes the middle road, decrying both the historical empiricism of 19th-century positivists and the absolute subjectivity of R.G. Collingwood’s hypothesis expressed in The Idea of History. Rather, Carr proposes that history demands the continuous process of molding facts to interpretation and interpretation to facts. The historian must be aware of one’s context and partialities before analyzing and writing about the past: “the historian who is more conscious of his own situation is also more capable of transcending it” (53). According to Carr, modern historians largely select and emphasize certain information beyond “facts of the past” in order to create “facts of history.”
Overall, I found What Is History’s central thesis heavily persuasive, along with its affirmation that there is no definite border-line between the individual and society. Both elements are complementary; instead of an antithetical battle; each creates and influences the other. Nonetheless, there were some elements of What Is History? that I found unclear or even contradictory. An example of this is Carr’s refusal to pass moral judgment onto individuals, the excuse being the impossibility of “erecting an abstract and super-historical standard by which historical standards can be judged.” However, he explicitly says that moral judgments can be placed on events, institutions, and policies. I believe Carr falsely assumes that the historical judgment of individuals is mutually exclusive to the condemnation of grander structures. How often do statues, markers, and popular media praise a certain individual president, prime minister, explorer, or general without acknowledging their complicity or active perpetuation in systems of racial, economic, political, and sexual discrimination? In my opinion, individual condemnation provides a far more concrete assault on nostalgic valorization. I believe that historians should be able to either condemn both individuals and institutions, or neither at all; for there are inseparable, just like the individual and society
As mentioned earlier, an entire chapter of Carr’s book focuses on causation in history. He stresses that there is a hierarchy of causes ranked by their relative importance to an event’s outcome, and it is one of the historian’s chief obligations to sort out this hierarchy. “Causation in History” also discusses Philsopsher of Science Karl Popper’s denouncement of “historicism” such as the Hegelian and Marxist interpretations of history. Although Carr defends historical determinism against allegations of dogmatism, he treats it as an obvious, unexceptional, and self-evident mundanity (how could anything ever go differently than it already had?), which is quite different from Hegelian and Marxism grandiose pronouncements of the historical process.
Carr also writes a brief but essential rundown to different interpretations of historiographic teleology. While the ancient Chinese, Roman, and Greek cultures viewed history as cyclical (14), Jews and Christians introduced a teleological element, which later adopted a secular slant following the Renaissance (146). This triumphant view of history peaked during the Pax Britannia of the 19th-Century as Imperial Europe abounded with technological, developmental, and bureaucratic advancements, which came crashing down upon the outbreak of World War I, the Great Depression, and the rise of European fascism and totalitarianism. Carr blasts this progressivist approach to history as hopelessly naive, classist, and imperialist, a sentiment with which I strongly agree. Francis Fukuyama’s infamous “End of History” thesis best exemplifies the ineptitude of any declaration regarding historical finality. Most especially with the rise of the global populist right, and, its most recent iteration, the mob insurrection of the U.S. Capitol Building, the course of worldwide history has appeared to have taken a gradual turn toward illiberalism. And although historiography is a “gradual, progressive science” (165), it does not necessitate that history itself is progress toward any particular endpoint or goal. Indeed, history is change itself (176). However, with the establishment of clearly disingenuous and propagandistic historiography, such as the Dunning School and Japanese nationalist apologia, I fear that even the study of history sometimes reverts itself to the basest prejudices.
Although there are an additional few of Carr’s points that I disagree with, such as his adamant distaste for all counterfactuals or his assumption that those who do not “achieve” something (most likely a certain cultural milestone, technological or organizational effort) are “primitive savages” that cannot enter history (168), What Is History? will form the bedrock of my approach to history as an epistemology. I fully agree with what Carr regards as the greatest truism in history: “The world of the historian is a working model.”
