Between January and March 1961, a former diplomat and historian, particularly the historian of Russia, Edward Hallett Carr, delivered six lectures as part of the George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures at the University of Cambridge. E.H. Carr’s lectures soon became published as a famous book, What is History?, which discussed and debated history and historical theories of his time.
In these lectures, E.H. Carr asked his listeners what constitutes history. To understand what constitutes history, it is essential to examine how “facts” emerge—and become established—in history, and how they shape historians and their history.
Nineteenth-century historians, such as Ranke in the 1830s, suggest that a historian must “simply show how it really was”—that is, to treat facts as they are, as objects separate from the subject. This view of history was known as the commonsense view of history. Here, the “historian collects [facts], takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to [them]”. But such objectivist history-writing is fundamentally problematic.
The Historian and His Facts
E.H. Carr suggests that “facts speak only when the historian calls on them: he decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context” (pp. 10-11). And in fact, all historians are selective, and all suggestions of historical facts existing objectively, independently of interpretations, are a “preposterous fallacy” (p. 12). There are two ways in which this selection of facts is fundamentally biased.
Say, someone who writes in 18th-century Europe, only writes of things about the French Revolution that he can see, understand, interpret, and deem fit for himself and his audience. Here, there is already a particular selection bias. Now, say a historian picks up this text and wants to write their history of the French Revolution, they again do their own filters with facts—they select and choose, and sometimes even introduce new facts.
Therefore, E.H. Carr writes: “Of course, facts and documents are essential to the historian. But do not make a fetish of them. They do not constitute history by themselves; they provide no ready-made answer to this tiresome question: What is history?” (p. 19).
Now, another school of history challenges the doctrine of primacy and autonomy of facts in history. Here, Benedetto Croce declares, all history is “contemporary history”; the historian seeks to “understand history as consisting of seeing the past through the eyes of the present and in light of its problems, and that the main work of the historian is not to record, but to evaluate” (p. 21).
In his Idea of History, historian R. G. Collingwood elicits this further: “The past which a historian studies is not dead past, but a past which in some senses is still living in the present” (p. 22). In this reading, history is interpretation. Here, history alone is not the subject, but the historian who produces history. However, E.H. Carr argues that this hypothesis might suggest: “the facts of history are nothing, interpretation is everything” (p. 27). Such history-writing can even lead to propaganda or historical fiction.
What, then, is a historian’s obligation to his facts? The duty of a historian is to respect their facts—but not be consumed by them. But a historian must engage in an iterative process of reading and writing. E.H. Carr writes: “The reading is guided and directed and made fruitful by the writing: the more I write, the more I know what I am looking for, the better I understand the significance and relevance of what I find” (p. 28). In the same process, a historian must continually mould their facts to their interpretation and their interpretation to their facts. E.H. Carr writes:
The historian starts with a provisional selection of facts, and a provisional interpretation in the light of which that selection has been made—by others as well as by himself. As he works, both the interpretation and the selection and ordering of facts undergo subtle and perhaps partly conscious changes, through the reciprocal action also involves reciprocity between present and past, since the historian is a part of the present and the facts belong to the past. The historian and the facts of history are necessary to one another. The historian without his facts is rootless and futile; the facts without their historian are dead and meaningless (p. 30).
Society and the Individual
What, then, is history? E.H. Carr writes: History is a “continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past” (p. 30). If history is a dialogue between past and present, what is the relation between the historian and his society? How far is the historian an individual, and is embedded in the society that produces them?
Considering that historians are deeply implicated in the lives and times of their society, one must begin by examining the historians who make history, even before reading history as it is. “The historian, before he begins to write history, is the product of history” (p. 40).
So, E.H. Carr suggests: “Before you study the historian, study his historical and social environment. The historian, being an individual, is also a product of history and society” (p. 44). E.H. Carr adds:
History, then, in both senses of the word—meaning both the inquiry conducted by the historian and the facts of the past into which he inquires—is a social process, in which individuals are engaged as social beings; and the imaginary antithesis between society and the individual is no more than a red herring drawn across our path to confuse our thinking. 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 society of yesterday (p. 55).
History, Science and Morality
Now, E.H. Carr asks, how far is history moralistic and scientific? There are a few things that history as a subject has been accused of—that it deals with the exclusive and science with the general; that it teaches no lessons; that it is unable to predict; that it is subjective because humans themselves write them; and that it deals with morality and religion.
Here, E.H. Carr refutes each of the following propositions about history. E.H. Carr shows that history is objective, because the language historian commits to is a generalised one—one that everyone else also uses—and a historian is a chronic generaliser.
History is concerned with the unique and general, and there cannot exist any separation between them for historians. History also teaches us things. Based on past events, historians tend to predict a form of behaviour in the present too. No demarcation persists between history and other sciences because each is enmeshed in human society.
Although historians tend to deal with moral judgements every once in a while, amoralistic treatment itself can be dangerous to historical scholarship. Because historians, like any scientist, ask “why”—why does something occur? And under what conditions did such a thing happen?
Causation in History
In the chapter on “Causation in History”, E.H. Carr seeks to engage with how historians document the ” why ” question. A historian preliminarily accounts for all the known causes of an event and then seeks to hierarchise them in terms of importance.
However, there are two red herrings attributed to history. “Determinism in History; or the Wickedness of Hegel”—that is, everything has a purpose, everything happens for a reason, and there is a pattern to how things occur in history. “Chance in History; or Cleopatra’s Nose”— what if something did not exist, what would have happened? Say, “Cleopatra had a shorter nose, Rome would not have burnt”.
Both these red herrings are loosely associated with Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies and Isaiah Berlin’s Historical Inevitability. However, all human actions are both free and determined. While historians must seek answers as to why something happened, they must also not reject the free will of actors in that historical event.
Similarly, historians cannot attribute all actions to chance, considering that other things often occur simultaneously. Moreover, E.H. Carr writes: “We have still to discover exactly what Cleopatra’s nose is doing in the pages of history” (p. 101). History, therefore, is a “process of selection in terms of historical significance” (p. 105).
History as Progress
E.H. Carr suggests that history must avoid its movement towards theology or an ahistorical cynicism. That is, history is neither moving towards a progressive end—as Hegel would declare it, nor as Fukuyama proposes in 1991 in The End of History and the Last Man, nor can one suppose there is no progress at all, nor reject all historical movement as pure cynicism.
E.H. Carr details how these two traditions emerged and were sustained in historical writings. More explicitly, the historian of the text complicates our understanding of the past as just past events, but as things that drive the present and future. In this sense, the past is not just a point of existence in time, but as something that interacts and engages with the present and future.
E.H. Carr writes that historians must strive for a “coherent relation between past and future” and that “objectivity in history—if we are still to use the conventional term—cannot be an objectivity of fact, but only of relation, of the relation between fact and interpretation, between past, present, and future” (p. 120). He adds:
“History properly so-called can be written only by those who find and accept a sense of direction in history itself. The belief that we have come from somewhere is closely linked with the belief that we are going somewhere. A society which has lost belief in its capacity to progress in the future will cease to concern itself with its progress in the past” (p. 132).
The Widening Horizon
In the final chapter titled “The Widening Horizon”, E.H. Carr seeks to look at the direction of the past and the future in relation to one another. He writes: “History is a constantly moving process, with the historian moving with it”. He writes about how, with dramatic changes in the 20th century, the realm of history itself expanded, including, presumably, those peasants, farmers, women, and non-European societies, which were footnotes in historical writings until then.
E.H. Carr’s reading of history is of the middle path between the traditional objectivist logic and that of a rejection of rationality. His work pushes students of history to think beyond the binaries. To engage with history, not in terms of a past they point to, but in terms of how they are in turn shaped by the present articulation of the past. And to read, optimistically perhaps, how historical writing could have both an objective and a subjective lens in it.
E.H. Carr’s short book on what history is compellingly shows us that historical writing provides a dull and sombre cut-and-paste history of facts without a provocative examination of the historian.