The jury is still out

 

What Is History? by E.H. Carr
Palgrave.
151 pages

If there's anything we've learned from observing how the press covers Israel, it is that the facts don't speak for themselves and that a picture isn't always worth 1,000 words. The same is true for history.

The first thing to know about this book - a 40th anniversary edition of the original published in 2001 - is that its author wasn't a historian. The second thing to know is that What Is History remains required reading for anyone who takes history seriously. There is simply no point in talking about the principles and methodology of historical research without referring to E.H. Carr's seminal work.

Edward Hallet Carr (1892-1982) is famous mostly for his 14-volume sympathetic history of the Bolshevik Revolution. Consequently, it isn't for his politics that Carr is still admired. While not a card-carrying communist, he was enamored with the much-vaunted Bolshevik utopia - and to be fair, he comes off sounding more like a misguided liberal than a Marxist. In fact, those elements in this book that fail the test of time all involve Carr's "progressive" outlook, in which he expresses belief in "the expansion of reason." Like most liberals, he was an optimist.

Carr didn't start out as a historian. He read classics, worked in the British Foreign Office, wrote political and literary biographies, taught international relations, was a broadcaster, and even did a stint as assistant editor at The Times of London. Finally, in 1955, he became a Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge - where, as historian Richard Evans writes in the introduction to this new edition, Carr remained until his death at age 90.

At his now-famous Macaulay Trevelyan lectures (the book is basically a transcript of his talks), which were given between January and March, 1961, Carr grappled with history's Big Questions: objectivity, truth, causation, the role of the individual, and morality.

HISTORIANS such as John Acton (1834-1902) believed that everything worth knowing about modern history would at some stage become known. Others argued there was no such thing as "objective historical truth." Carr was convinced that both these viewpoints were wrong.

"Facts speak only when the historian calls on them," he said. "It is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context. Study the historian before you begin to study the facts."

This led him to conclude that history "is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts - an unending dialogue between the present and the past."

Carr concludes, then, that history involves moulding facts to interpretation and interpretation to facts.

He grappled with whether people matter, or if we are simply swept up in the changes that result from an ongoing conflict between opposing historical forces - what Marxists call dialectics. Of course, where communists see the hidden hand of Marx, religious true believers understand history to be determined by a Creator. To both these camps, Carr retorted - surprisingly - with one of Marx's witty asides: "History does nothing, it possesses no immense wealth, fights no battles. It is rather man, real living man who does everything, who possesses and fights."

What that means, said Carr, is that people are both products and agents of changing social processes.

NEXT, CARR turned to the "lessons of history." Should Munich's lessons about conflict resolution in 1938 have headed off Yitzhak Rabin's 1993 embrace of Oslo? That's asking too much, Carr would say. "To learn about the present in the light of the past means also to learn about the past in light of the present. The function of history is to promote a profound understanding of both past and present through the interrelation between them." Bottom line: the goal of history isn't to predict, but to garner useful inferences.

What about morality? Should it matter to historians that Bill Clinton or John Kennedy were serial adulterers, or that Stalin was nasty to his second wife? As Carr saw it, "the historian does not turn aside to pronounce moral judgments on the private lives of individuals who appear in his pages. He has other things to do. He will not pass judgment on the individual slave owner. But this does not prevent him from condemning a slave-owning society."

Take the Industrial Revolution: it caused much suffering [as does globalization today], wrote Carr, but he never found a historian "who said that, in view of the cost, it would have been better to stay the hand of progress and not industrialize."

He assumed that the same would one day be said for forced collectivization in the Soviet Union. To be fair, Carr could not have known in 1961 what we know today - that between 1929 and 1933, some 14 million people died in the "dekulakization" and collectivization of agriculture - what historian Robert Conquest called the Soviet "harvest of sorrow."

WHAT ABOUT causation? Does history "just happen," or is everything more or less predetermined - by Marxist dialectics or the interventionist hand of God?

For Edward Gibbon (1737-94), the Roman empire declined because of the triumph of barbarism on the one hand and the rise of a new religion on the other. Gibbon said: "History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind."

As Carr saw it, "the historian deals in a multiplicity of causes." Events don't have to happen, though they do have antecedents. Moreover, historians need to look ahead and imagine how the past will be perceived in the future. Accidents - which teach no grand lessons - also happen. Carr could be droll: "When King Alexander of Greece died in the autumn of 1920 from the bite of a pet monkey, this accident touched off a train of events which led Sir Winston Churchill to remark that 'a quarter of a million persons died of this monkey's bite.' "

WHERE IS history heading? Toward "progress?" Toward a messianic era?

"It was the Jews," said Carr, "and after them the Christians, who introduced an entirely new element by postulating a goal toward which the historical process is moving - the teleological view of history. History thus acquired a meaning and purpose."

But for Carr, there is no master plan. Nonetheless, as a liberal, he believed in "the progressive development of human potentialities."

Carr's approach strives to find a balance between ideologically - or theologically - driven determinism and relativism, between history as mysticism and history as cynicism, between a history that offers an infinite number of possible explanations and a history that is without discernible pattern.

The more we think about it, the more we realize that glib aphorisms about history - that it is a march of progress, that it repeats itself, that it unfolds inexorably, that it follows a discernible moral purpose, that it is linear - don't take us anywhere. We are left with the realization that even a historian who sets out to get the facts straight before offering interpretation remains incapable of producing anything but a work flawed by human frailty and bias.