What Is History?

Citation

Carr, E. H. (2018). What Is History? Penguin Books (Penguin Modern Classics). With an introduction by Richard J. Evans. First published 1961.

Chapter Summary

Context and Argument

What Is History? is the text of the George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures that Carr, then a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and the author of a multi-volume History of Soviet Russia, delivered at Cambridge in 1961; the book first appeared that year. Its six lectures argue that historical facts do not speak for themselves: they become historical facts only when a historian selects them, and the historian is in turn a product of his own society and time. History is therefore, in Carr's best-known phrase, an unending dialogue between the present and the past. The lectures are polemical and witty, addressed against the empiricist tradition of English historians and against contemporaries such as Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper. A second edition (1986), prepared after Carr's death by R. W. Davies, added an introductory note and a section, "From E. H. Carr's Files: Notes towards a Second Edition of What Is History?", drawn from the jottings and drafts Carr left for a revision that he did not complete. The 2018 Penguin Modern Classics edition is introduced by Richard J. Evans; readers using other printings should check which of these supplements their copy contains.

Chapter 1: The Historian and His Facts

Carr attacks the "commonsense" view that facts exist independently, like fish on a fishmonger's slab, waiting to be collected; he associates it with Lord Acton and the nineteenth-century faith in facts. He argues instead that facts are like fish in a vast ocean, and what the historian catches depends on where he chooses to fish. He also considers R. G. Collingwood's idea that the historian re-enacts past thought, accepts its emphasis on the historian's role, but warns that it can slide into treating history as something spun out of the historian's mind. The lecture ends with the definition of history as an unending dialogue between present and past.

Chapter 2: Society and the Individual

The second lecture argues that the individual cannot be separated from society, rejecting what Carr calls the Robinson Crusoe myth of the isolated person. It extends the first lecture's advice: before studying the history, study the historian, and before studying the historian, study his historical and social environment. Carr criticizes the habit of explaining history through the good or bad character of individual rulers, which he labels the "Bad King John" theory.

Chapter 3: History, Science and Morality

Carr asks whether history can be a science. He argues that the natural sciences themselves no longer claim to discover fixed laws of the kind once associated with Newton, so the gap between history and science is smaller than often supposed. On morality, he holds that historians should not sit in judgement on the private lives of individuals and that moral denunciation of individuals can mislead; judgements belong rather to institutions and public actions.

Chapter 4: Causation in History

Asserting that the study of history is a study of causes, Carr discusses determinism and the role of chance against Berlin's and Popper's arguments. He grants that accidents, from Cleopatra's nose to the death of Lenin, modified the course of history, but argues that they do not belong in the historian's hierarchy of significant causes. His illustration is a road accident in which a man called Robinson is killed by a car with defective brakes at a blind corner while crossing the road to buy cigarettes: better brakes or safer roads could reduce traffic deaths, so these are causes from which lessons can be drawn, whereas it would make no sense to try to prevent accidents by stopping people from smoking.

Chapter 5: History as Progress

Carr defends the idea of progress against both the cyclical schemes of writers such as Arnold Toynbee and the scepticism of those who see no meaning in history. Progress, he argues, does not mean equal and simultaneous progress for all, and he asks where the latter-day prophets of decline themselves stand. Returning to Robinson's death, he argues that objectivity depends not on getting the facts right but on distinguishing the significant facts from the accidental, and he describes the objective historian as one able to rise above the limited vision of his own situation.

Chapter 6: The Widening Horizon

The last lecture describes history as a constantly moving process with the historian moving within it. Carr points to the expanding role of reason in human affairs, regrets the waning faith in reason among intellectuals and political thinkers of the English-speaking world, and ends by declaring that he is not convinced that progress in history has come to an end.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–2: Facts, Historians and Society

• Historical fact: a fact about the past that becomes historical only when historians select it as significant.
• Dialogue between present and past: Carr's description of history as a continuing interaction between the historian and the facts.
• Study the historian: the principle that to understand a work of history one must understand the historian and his social setting.

Chapters 3–4: Science, Morality and Causes

• History as science: Carr's claim that, since the natural sciences no longer claim to have established fixed laws, history differs from them less than is often supposed.
• Moral judgement: judgement of institutions and public actions rather than of the private character of individuals.
• Hierarchy of causes: the historian's ordering of causes by significance, from which accidents are excluded.
• Rational versus accidental causes: causes that can be generalized and used to draw lessons, versus chance events that cannot.

Chapters 5–6: Progress and Reason

• Progress: a direction in history judged by the expansion of human capacity and reason, not a uniform improvement for all.
• Objectivity: the historian's capacity to rise above the limits of his own situation and choose the significant facts.
• Widening horizon: Carr's term for history as a moving process in which reason plays a growing part.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A sustained, quotable argument. The six lectures build one thesis about facts, interpretation and the historian's standpoint, and their images (the fishmonger's slab, Robinson's death, Cleopatra's nose) are easy to remember and to test. Penguin's edition quotes Evans's judgement that the book is lively and controversial, full of wit and humour, and that it played a central role in the historiographical revolution of the 1960s.
• Engages with real opponents. Carr argues directly with Acton, Collingwood, Berlin, Popper and Toynbee, which makes the book a good introduction to the debates of mid-century historiography.
• Useful supplementary material. The "Notes towards a Second Edition" show Carr reconsidering accident in history and the empiricism of English-speaking writers, so readers can see how the author's thought developed after 1961.

Limitations

• A product of 1961. The examples and opponents are those of British historical debate around 1960; later approaches such as women's and gender history, postcolonial history and postmodern theory, central to subsequent debates, postdate the lectures. The language assumes the historian is "he".
• Polemical and one-sided. Carr is often sardonic about the positions he attacks (he says Popper and Berlin have flogged the dead horse of determinism back into a semblance of life), and his confidence in progress and reason is asserted as much as argued. The book is best read as an argued position rather than a balanced survey.
• Lectures, not a manual. There is no guidance on archives, sources or writing; the book raises questions about method without teaching techniques.

Where It Fits in the Course

Carr is the classic short text for this course, and it pairs naturally with John Arnold's History: A Very Short Introduction. Arnold, writing in 2000, introduces the history of historiography and the work with sources through concrete cases; Carr instead offers one historian's strong thesis. Reading Arnold first makes it easier to see what Carr is arguing against, and reading both shows how much the field changed between 1961 and 2000. John Tosh's The Pursuit of History is a fuller textbook on sources and approaches that can be used to set Carr's claims in the context of later debates.

Marc Bloch's The Historian's Craft, written two decades earlier, is the obvious comparison: a reflection on method by a founder of the Annales school that is more concerned with the practice of research. Hayden White's Metahistory takes Carr's point about the historian's role much further by analysing the narrative forms of nineteenth-century historical writing, while Iggers, Wang and Mukherjee's A Global History of Modern Historiography places debates like Carr's within a global history of the discipline.

How to Use This Book

No prior study of historical theory is needed, but some reading in history helps; the book suits first-year history students and anyone starting a historiography module.

• Read it whole. The six lectures are short and best read in order, since each builds on the previous one.
• Core chapters: Chapters 1 and 4 contain the central arguments about facts and causes; Chapter 2 complements Chapter 1, and Chapter 5 contains Carr's account of objectivity.
• Read actively. For each lecture, note Carr's main claim, the opponent he is arguing with and one example that could be used against him.
• Use the introduction and notes. Evans's introduction gives a later historian's view of the book; the notes towards a second edition, if included in the copy, show where Carr himself wanted to revise.
• Compare across time. Pair Chapter 1 with Arnold's chapters on sources and silences, and Chapter 4 with a recent discussion of causation, to judge what has dated and what still holds.