The Historian and His Facts
Edward Hallett Carr
[An excerpt from the book, What Is History?
1961]
Edward Hallett Carr (28 June
1892 5 November 1982) was a British historian,
international relations theorist, and fierce opponent of
empiricism within historiography. He was educated at the
Merchant Taylors' School in London, and Trinity College,
Cambridge. He joined the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office
(diplomatic service) in 1916, resigning in 1936. He became the
Wilson Professor of International Politics at the University of
Wales Aberystwyth. His famous work, The Twenty Years' Crisis was
published in 1939. He later served as assistant editor of The
Times from 1941 to 1946. He was a tutor in Politics at
Balliol College, Oxford from 1953 to 1955 when he became a
fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Carr is most famous today
for his examination of historiography, What is History?
(1961).
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What is history? Lest anyone think the question meaningless or
superfluous, I will take as my text two passages relating respectively
to the first and second incarnations of The Cambridge Modern
History. Here is Acton in his report of October 1896 to the
Syndics of the Cambridge University Press on the work which he had
undertaken to edit:
It is a unique opportunity of recording, in the way most
useful to the greatest number, the fullness of the knowledge which
the nineteenth century is about to bequeath. ...By the judicious
division of labor we should be able to do it, and to bring home to
every man the last document, and the ripest conclusions of
international research.
Ultimate history we cannot have in this generation; but we can
dispose of conventional history, and show the point we have reached
on the road from one to the other, now that all information is
within reach, and every problem has become capable of solution.[2]
And almost exactly sixty years later Professor Sir George Clark, in
his general introduction to the second Cambridge Modern History,
commented on this belief of Acton and his collaborators that it would
one day be possible to produce "ultimate history," and went
on:
Historians of a later generation do not look forward to
any such prospect. They expect their work to be superseded again and
again. They consider that knowledge of the past has come down
through one or more human minds, has been "processed" by
them, and therefore cannot consist of elemental and impersonal atoms
which nothing can alter. ...The exploration seems to be endless, and
some impatient scholars take refuge in scepticism, or at least in
the doctrine that, since all historical judgments involve persons
and points of view, one is as good as another and there is no "objective"
historical truth.[3]
Where the pundits contradict each other so flagrantly the field is
open to enquiry. I hope that I am sufficiently up-to-date to recognize
that anything written in the 1890's must be nonsense. But I am not yet
advanced enough to be committed to the view that anything written in
the 1950's necessarily makes sense, Indeed, it may already have
occurred to you that this enquiry is liable to stray into something
even broader than the nature of history. The clash between Acton and
Sir George Clark is a reflection of the change in our total outlook on
society over the interval between these two pronouncements. Acton
speaks out of the positive belief, the clear-eyed self-confidence of
the later Victorian age; Sir George Clark echoes the bewilderment and
distracted scepticism of the beat generation. When we attempt to
answer the question, What is history?, our answer, consciously or
unconsciously, reflects our own position in time, and forms part of
our answer to the broader question, what view we take of the society
in which we live. I have no fear that my subject may, on closer
inspection, seem trivial. I am afraid only that I may seem
presumptuous to have broached a question so vast and so important.
The nineteenth century was a great age for facts. "What I want,"
said Mr. Gradgrind in Hard Times, "is Facts.
Facts alone
are wanted in life." Nineteenth-century historians on the whole
agreed with him. When Ranke in the 1830's, in legitimate protest
against moralizing history, remarked that the task of the historian
was "simply to show how it really was [wie es eigentlich
gewesen]" this not very profound aphorism had an astonishing
success. Three generations of German, British, and even French
historians marched into battle intoning the magic words, "Wie es
eigentlich gewesen" like an incantation - designed, like most
incantations, to save them from the tiresome obligation to think for
themselves. The Positivists, anxious to stake out their claim for
history as a science, contributed the weight of their influence to
this cult of facts. First ascertain the facts, said the positivists,
then draw your conclusions from them. 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. The empirical theory of knowledge presupposes a complete
separation between subject and object. Facts, like sense-impressions,
impinge on the observer from outside, and are independent, of his
consciousness. The process of reception is passive: having received
the data, he then acts on them. The Shorter Oxford English
Dictionary, a useful but tendentious work of the empirical school,
clearly marks the separateness of the two processes by defining a fact
as "a datum of experience as distinct from conclusions."
This is what may be called the common-sense view of history. 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. Acton, whose
culinary tastes were austere, wanted them served plain. In his letter
of instructions to contributors to the first Cambridge Modern
History, he announced the requirement "that our Waterloo must
be one that satisfies French and English, German and Dutch alike; that
nobody can tell, without examining the list of authors where the
Bishop of Oxford laid down the pen, and whether Fairbaim or Gasquet,
Liebermann or Harrison took it up."[4] Even Sir George Clark,
critical as be was of Acton's attitude, himself contrasted the "hard
core of facts" in history with the "surrounding pulp of
disputable interpretation"[5] -- forgetting perhaps that the
pulpy part of the fruit is more rewarding than the hard core. Fust get
your facts straight, then plunge at your peril into the shifting sands
of interpretation-that is the ultimate wisdom of the empirical,
common-sense school of history. It recalls the favorite dictum of the
great liberal journalist C. P. Scott: "Facts are sacred, opinion
is free."
Now this clearly will not do. I shall not embark on a philosophical
discussion of the nature of our knowledge of the past. Let us assume
for present purposes that the fact that Caesar crossed the Rubicon and
the fact that there is a table in the middle of the room are facts of
the same or of a comparable order, that both these facts enter our
consciousness in the same or in a comparable manner, and that both
have the same objective character in relation to the person who knows
them. But, even on this bold and not very plausible assumption, our
argument at once runs into the difficulty that not all facts about the
past are historical facts, or are treated as such by the historian.
What is the criterion which distinguishes the facts of history from
other facts about the past?
What is a historical fact? This is a crucial question into which we
must look a little more closely. According to the common-sense view,
there are certain basic facts which are the same for all historians
and which form, so to speak, the backbone of history - the fact, for
example, that the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066. But this view
calls for two observations. In the first place, it is not with facts
like these that the historian is primarily concerned. It is no doubt
important to know that the great battle was fought in 1066 and not in
1065 or 1067, and that it was fought at Hastings and not at Eastbourne
or Brighton. The historian must not get these things wrong. Bat when
points of this kind are raised, I am reminded of Housman's remark that
"accuracy is a duty, not a virtue."[6] 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. The
historian is not required to have the special skills which enable the
expert to determine the origin and period of a fragment of pottery or
marble, or decipher an obscure inscription, or to make the elaborate
astronomical calculations necessary to establish a precise date. These
so-called basic facts which are the same for all historians commonly
belong to the category of the raw materials of the historian rather
than of history itself. The second observation is that the necessity
to establish these basic facts rests not on any quality in the facts
themselves, but on an a priori decision of the historian. In
spite of C. P. Scott's motto, every journalist knows today that the
most effective way to influence opinion is by the selection and
arrangement of the appropriate facts. It used to be said that facts
speak for themselves. This is, of course, untrue. The facts speak only
when the historian calls on them: It is he who decides to which facts
to give the floor, and in what order or context. 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. It is the
historian who has decided for his own reasons that Caesar's crossing
of that petty stream, the Rubicon, is a fact of history, whereas the
crossing of the Rubicon by millions of other people before or since
interests nobody at all. The fact that you arrived in this building
half an hour ago on foot, or on a bicycle, or in a car, is just as
much a fact about the past as the fact that Caesar crossed the
Rubicon. But it will probably be ignored by historians. Professor
Talcott Parsons once called science "a selective system of
cognitive orientations to reality."[7] It might perhaps have been
put more simply. But history is, among other things, that. The
historian is necessarily selective. The belief in a hard core of
historical facts existing objectively and independently of the
interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fallacy, but one
which it is very hard to eradicate. Let us take a look at the process
by which a mere fact about the past is transformed into a fact of
history. At Stalybridge Wakes in 1850, a vendor of gingerbread, as the
result of some petty dispute, was deliberately kicked to death by an
angry mob. Is this a fact of history? A year ago I should
unhesitatingly have said "no." It was recorded by an
eyewitness in some little-known memoirs;[8] but I had never seen it
judged worthy of mention by any historian. A year ago Dr. Kitson Clark
cited it in his Ford lectures in Oxford.[9] Does this make it into a
historical fact? Not, I think, yet. Its present status, I suggest, is
that it has been proposed for membership of the select club of
historical facts. It now awaits a seconder and sponsors. It may be
that in the course of the next few years we shall see this fact
appearing first in footnotes, then in the text, of articles and books
about nineteenth-century England, and that in twenty or thirty years'
time it may be a well established historical fact. Alternatively,
nobody may take it up, in which case it will relapse into the limbo of
unhistorical facts about the past from which Dr. Kitson Clark has
gallantly attempted to rescue it. What will decide which of these two
things will happen? It will depend, I think, on whether the thesis or
interpretation in support of which Dr. Kitson Clark cited this
incident is accepted by other historians as valid and significant. Its
status as a historical fact will turn on a question of interpretation.
This element of interpretation enters into every fact of history.
May I be allowed a personal reminiscence? When I studied ancient
history in this university many years ago, I had as a special subject
"Greece in the period of the Persian Wars." I collected
fifteen or twenty volumes on my shelves and took it for granted that
there, recorded in these volumes, I had all the facts relating to my
subject. Let us assume - it was very nearly true - that those volumes
contained all the facts about it that were then known, or could be
known. It never occurred to me to enquire by what accident or process
of attrition that minute selection of facts, out of all the myriad
facts 'that must have once been known to somebody, had survived to
become the facts of history. I suspect that even today one of the
fascinations of ancient and mediaeval history is that it gives us the
illusion of having all the facts at our disposal within a manageable
compass: the nagging distinction between the facts of history and
other facts about the past vanishes because the few known facts are
all facts of history. As Bury, who had worked in both periods, said "the
records of ancient and mediaeval history are starred with lacunae."[10]
History has been called an enormous jig-saw with a lot of missing
parts. But the main trouble does not consist of the lacunae. Our
picture of Greece in the fifth century B.C. is defective not primarily
because so many of the fits have been accidentally lost, but because
it is, by and large, the picture formed by a tiny group of people in
the city of Athens. We know a lot about what fifth-century Greece
looked like to an Athenian citizen; but hardly anything about what it
looked like to a Spartan, a Corinthian, or a Theban - not to mention a
Persian, or a slave or other non-citizen resident in Athens. Our
picture has been preselected and predetermined for us, not so much by
accident as by people who were consciously or unconsciously imbued
with a particular view and thought the facts which supported that view
worth preserving. In the same way, when I read in a modern history of
the Middle Ages that the people of the Middle Ages were deeply
concerned with religion, I wonder how we know this, and whether it is
true. What we know as the facts of mediaeval history have almost all
been selected for us by generations of chroniclers who were
professionally occupied in the theory and practice of religion, and
who therefore thought it supremely important, and recorded everything
relating to it, and not much else. The picture of the Russian peasant
as devoutly religious was destroyed by the revolution of 1917. The
picture of mediaeval man as devoutly religious, whether true or not,
is indestructible, because nearly all the known facts about him were
preselected for us by people who believed it, and wanted others to
believe it, and a mass of other facts, in which we might possibly have
found evidence to the contrary, has been lost beyond recall. The dead
hand of vanished generations of historians, scribes, and chroniclers
has determined beyond the possibility of appeal the pattern of the
past. "The history we read," writes Professor Barraclough,
himself trained as a mediaevalist, "though based on facts, is,
strictly speaking, not factual at all, but a series of accepted
judgments."[11] But let us turn to the different, but equally
grave, plight of the modern historian. The ancient or mediaeval
historian may be grateful for the vast winnowing process which, over
the years, has put at his disposal a manageable corpus of historical
facts. 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."[12] When I am tempted,
as I sometimes am, to envy the extreme competence of colleagues
engaged in writing ancient or mediaeval history, I find consolation in
the reflection that they are so competent mainly because they are so
ignorant of their subject. The modern historian enjoys none of the
advantages of this built-in ignorance. He must cultivate this
necessary ignorance for himself - the more so the nearer he comes to
his own times. He has the dual task of discovering the few significant
facts and turning them into facts of history, and of discarding the
many insignificant facts as unhistorical. But this is the very
converse of the nineteenth-century heresy that history consists of the
compilation of a maximum number of irrefutable and objective facts.
Anyone who succumbs to this heresy will either have to give up history
as a bad job, and take to stamp-collecting or some other form of
anti-quarianism, or end in a madhouse. It is this heresy, which during
the past hundred years has had such devastating effects on the modern
historian, producing in Germany, in Great Britain, and in the United
States a vast and growing mass of dry-as-dust factual histories, of
minutely specialized monographs, of would-be historians knowing more
and more about less and less, sunk without trace in an ocean of facts.
It was, I suspect, this heresy - rather than the alleged conflict
between liberal and Catholic loyalties - which frustrated Acton as a
historian. In an early essay he said of his teacher Dollinger: "He
would not write with imperfect materials, and to him the materials
were always imperfect."[13] Acton was surely here pronouncing an
anticipatory verdict on himself, on that strange phenomenon of a
historian whom many would regard as the most distinguished occupant
the Regius Chair of Modern History in this university has ever had -
but who wrote no history. And Acton wrote his own epitaph in the
introductory note to the first volume of the Cambridge Modern
History, published just after his death, when he lamented that the
requirements pressing on the historian "threaten to turn him from
a man of letters into the compiler of an encyclopedia."[14]
Something had gone wrong. What had gone wrong was the belief in this
untiring and unending accumulation of hard facts as the foundation of
history, the belief that facts speak for themselves and that we cannot
have too many facts, a belief at that time so unquestioning that few
historians then thought it necessary - and some still think it
unnecessary today - to ask themselves the question: What is history?
The nineteenth-century fetishism of facts was completed and justified
by a fetishism of documents. The documents were the Ark of the
Covenant in the temple of facts. The reverent historian approached
them with bowed head and spoke of them in awed tones. If you find it
in the documents, it is so. But what, when we get down to it, do these
documents - the decrees, the treaties, the rent-rolls, the blue books,
the official correspondence, the private letters and diaries - tell
us? No document can tell us more than what the author of the document
thought - what he thought had happened, what he thought ought to
happen or would happen, or perhaps only what he wanted others to think
he thought, or even only what he himself thought he thought. None of
this means anything until the historian has got to work on it and
deciphered it. The facts, whether found in documents or not, have
still to be processed by the historian before he can make any use of
them: the use he makes of them is, if I may put it that way, the
processing process.
Let me illustrate what I am trying to say by an example which I
happen to know well. When Gustav Stresemann, the Foreign Minister of
the Weimar Republic, died in 1929, he left behind him an enormous mass
- 300 boxes full - of papers, official, semiofficial, and private,
nearly all relating to the six years of his tenure of office as
Foreign Minister. His friends and relatives naturally thought that a
monument should be raised to the memory of so great a man. His
faithful secretary Bernhardt got to work; and within three years there
appeared three massive volumes, of some 600 pages each, of selected
documents from the 300 boxes, with the impressive title Stresemanns
Vermachtnis.[15] In the ordinary way the documents themselves
would have moldered away in some cellar or attic and disappeared for
ever; or perhaps in a hundred years or so some curious scholar would
have come upon them and set out to compare them with Bemhardt's text.
What happened was far more dramatic. In 1945 the documents fell into
the hands of the British and the American governments, who
photographed the lot and put the photostats at the disposal of
scholars in the Public Record Office in London and in the National
Archives in Washington, so that, if we have sufficient patience and
curiosity, we can discover exactly what Bernhardt did. What he did was
neither very unusual nor very shocking. When Stresemann died, his
Western policy seemed to have been crowned with a series of brilliant
successes - Locarno, the admission of Germany to the League of
Nations, the Dawes and Young plans and the American loans, the
withdrawal of allied occupation armies from the Rhineland. This seemed
the important and rewarding part of Stresemann's foreign policy; and
it was not unnatural that it should have been over-represented in
Bernhardt's selection of documents. Stresemann's Eastern policy, on
the other hand, his relations with the Soviet Union, seemed to have
led nowhere in particular; and, since masses of documents about
negotiations which yielded only trivial results were not very
interesting and added nothing to Stresemann's reputation, the process
of selection could be more rigorous. Stresemann in fact devoted a far
more constant and anxious attention to relations with the Soviet
Union, and they played a far larger part in his foreign policy as a
whole, than the reader of the Bernhardt selection would surmise. But
the Bernhardt volumes compare favorably, I suspect, with many
published collections of documents on which the ordinary historian
implicitly relies.
This is not the end of my story. Shortly after the publication of
Bernhardt's volumes, Hitler came into power. Stresemann's name was
consigned to oblivion in Germany, and the volumes disappeared from
circulation: many, perhaps most, of the copies must have been
destroyed. Today Stresemanns Vermachtnis is a rather rare
book. But in the West Stresemann's reputation stood high. In 1935 an
English publisher brought out an abbreviated translation of
Bernhardt's work - a selection from Bemhardt's selection; perhaps one
third of the original was omitted. Sutton, a well-known translator
from the German, did his job competently and well. The English
version, he explained in the preface, was "slightly condensed,
but only by the omission of a certain amount of what, it was felt, was
more ephemeral matter ... of little interest to English readers or
students,"[16] This again is natural enough. But the result is
that Stresemann's Eastern policy, already under-represented in
Bernhardt, recedes still further from view, and the Soviet Union
appears in Sutton's volumes merely as an occasional and rather
unwelcome intruder in Stresemann's predominantly Western foreign
policy. Yet it is safe to say that, for all except a few specialists,
Sutton and not Bernhardt - and still less the documents themselves -
represents for the Western world the authentic voice of Stresemann.
Had the documents perished in 1945 in the bombing, and had the
remaining Bernhardt volumes disappeared, the authenticity and
authority of Sutton would never have been questioned. Many printed
collections of documents gratefully accepted by historians in default
of the originals rest on no securer basis than this.
But I want to carry the story one step further. Let us forget about
Bernhardt and Sutton, and be thankful that we can, if we choose,
consult the authentic papers of a leading participant in some
important events in recent European history. What do the papers tell
us? Among other things they contain records of some hundreds of
Stresemann's conversations with the Soviet ambassador in Berlin and of
a score or so with Chicherin.[17] These records have one feature in
common. They depict Stresemann as having the lion's share of the
conversations and reveal his arguments as invariably well put and
cogent, while those of his partner are for the most part scanty,
confused, and unconvincing. This is a familiar characteristic of all
records of diplomatic conversations. The documents do not tell us what
happened, but only what Stresemann thought had happened. It was not
Sutton or Bernhardt, but Stresemann himself, who started the process
of selection. And, if we had, say, Chicherin's records of these same
conversations, we should still learn from them only what Chicherin
thought, and what really happened would still have to be reconstructed
in the mind of the historian. Of course, facts and documents are
essential to the historian. But do not make a fetish of them. They do
not by themselves constitute history; they provide in themselves no
ready-made answer to this tiresome question: What is history?
At this point I should like to say a few words on the question of why
nineteenth-century historians were generally indifferent to the
philosophy of history. The term was invented by Voltaire, and has
since been used in different senses; but I shall take it to mean, if I
use it at all, our answer to the question: What is history? The
nineteenth century was, for the intellectuals of Western Europe, a
comfortable period exuding confidence and optimism. The facts were on
the whole satisfactory; and the inclination to ask and answer awkward
questions about them was correspondingly weak. Ranke piously believed
that divine providence would take care of the meaning of history if he
took care of the facts; and Burckhardt with a more modem touch of
cynicism observed that "we are not initiated into the purposes of
the eternal wisdom." Professor Butterfield as late as 1931 noted
with apparent satisfaction that "historians have reflected little
upon the nature of things and even the nature of their own subject."[18]
But my predecessor in these lectures, Dr. A. L. Rowse, more justly
critical, wrote of Sir Winston Churchill's The World Crisis --
his book about the First World War -- that, while it matched Trotsky's
History of the Russian Revolution in personality, vividness,
and vitality, it was inferior in one respect: it had "no
philosophy of history behind it."[19] British historians refused
to be drawn, not because they believed that history had no meaning,
but because they believed that its meaning was implicit and
self-evident. 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. This was the age
of innocence, and historians walked in the Garden of Eden, without a
scrap of philosophy to cover them, naked and unashamed before the god
of history. Since then, we have known Sin and experienced a Fall; and
those historians who today pretend to dispense with a philosophy of
history are merely trying, vainly and self-consciously, like members
of a nudist colony, to recreate the Garden of Eden in their garden
suburb. Today the awkward question can no longer be evaded.
During the past fifty years a good deal of serious work has been done
on the question: What is history? It was from Germany, the country
which was to do so much to upset the comfortable reign of
nineteenth-century liberalism, that the first challenge came in the
i88o's and 1890'$ to the doctrine of the primacy and autonomy of facts
in history. The philosophers who made the challenge are now little
more than names: Dilthey is the only one of them who has recently
received some belated recognition in Great Britain. Before the turn of
the century, prosperity and confidence were still too great in this
country for any attention to be paid to heretics who attacked the cult
of facts. But early in the new century, the torch passed to Italy,
where Croce began to propound a philosophy of history which obviously
owed much to German masters. All history is "contemporary
history," declared Croce,[20] meaning that history consists
essentially in seeing the past through the eyes of the present and in
the light of its problems, and that the main work of the historian is
not to record, but to evaluate; for, if he does not evaluate, how can
he know what is worth recording? In 1910 the American philosopher,
Carl Becker, argued in deliberately provocative language that "the
facts of history do not exist for any historian till he creates them."[21]
These challenges were for the moment little noticed. It was only after
1920 that Croce began to have a considerable vogue in France and Great
Britain. This was not perhaps because Croce was a subtler thinker or a
better stylist than his German predecessors, but because, after the
First World War, the facts seemed to smile on us less propitiously
than in the years before 1914, and we were therefore more accessible
to a philosophy which sought to diminish their prestige. Croce was an
important influence on the Oxford philosopher and historian
Collingwood, the only British thinker in the present century who has
made a serious contribution to the philosophy of history. He did not
live to write the systematic treatise he had planned; but his
published and unpublished papers on the subject were collected after
his death in a volume entitled The Idea of History, which
appeared in 1945.
The views of Collingwood can be summarized as follows. The philosophy
of history is concerned neither with "the past by itself"
nor with "the historian's thought about it by itself," but
with "the two things in their mutual relations." (This
dictum reflects the two current meanings of the word "history"
- the enquiry conducted by the historian and the series of past events
into which he enquires.) "The past which a historian studies is
not a dead past, but a past which in some sense is still living in the
present." But a past act is dead, i.e. meaningless to the
historian, unless he can understand the thought that lay behind it.
Hence "all history is the history of thought," and "history
is the re-enactment in the historian's mind of the thought whose
history he is studying." The reconstitution of the past in the
historian's mind is dependent on empirical evidence. But it is not in
itself an empirical process, and cannot consist in a mere recital of
facts. On the contrary, the process of reconstitution governs the
selection and interpretation of the facts: this, indeed, is what makes
them historical facts. "History," says Professor Oakeshott,
who on this point stands near to Collingwood, "is the historian's
experience. It is 'made by nobody save the historian: to write history
is the only way of making it."[22]
This searching critique, though it may call for some serious
reservations, brings to light certain neglected truths.
In the first place, the facts of history never come to us "pure,"
since they do not and cannot exist in a pure form: they are always
refracted through the mind of the recorder. It follows that when we
take up a work of history, oar first concern should be not with the
facts which it contains but with the historian who wrote it. Let me
take as an example the great historian in whose honor and in whose
name these lectures were founded. Trevelyan, as he tells us in his
autobiography, was "brought up at home on a somewhat exuberantly
Whig tradition"[23]; and he would not, I hope, disclaim the tide
if I described him as the last and not the least of the great English
liberal historians of the Whig tradition. It is not for nothing that
he traces back his family tree, through the great Whig historian
George Otto Trevelyan, to Macaulay, incomparably the greatest of the
Whig historians. Dr. Trevelyan's finest and maturest work England
under Queen Anne was written against that background, and will
yield its full meaning and significance to the reader only when read
against that background. The author, indeed, leaves the reader with no
excuse for failing to do so. For if, following the technique of
connoisseurs of detective novels, you read the end first, you will
find on the last few pages of the third volume the best summary known
to me of what is nowadays called the Whig interpretation of history;
and you will see that what Trevelyan is trying to do is to investigate
the origin and development of the Whig tradition, and to roof it
fairly and squarely in the years after the death of its founder,
William III. Though this is not, perhaps, the only conceivable
interpretation of the events of Queen Anne's reign, it is a valid and,
in Trevelyan's hands, a fruitful interpretation. But, in order to
appreciate it at its full value, you have to understand what the
historian is doing. For if, as Collingwood says, the historian must
re-enact in thought what has gone on in the mind of his dramatis
personae, so the reader in his turn must re-enact what goes on in
the mind of the historian. Study the historian before you begin to
study the facts. This is, after all, not very abstruse. It is what is
already done by the intelligent undergraduate who, when recommended to
read a work by that great scholar Jones of St. Jude's, goes round to a
friend at St. Jude's to ask what sort of chap Jones is, and what bees
he has in his bonnet. When you read a work of history, always listen
out for the buzzing. If you can detect none, either you are tone deaf
or your historian is a dull dog. 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. Indeed, if, standing Sir George
Clark on his head, I were to call history "a hard core of
interpretation surrounded by a pulp of disputable facts," my
statement would, no doubt, be one-sided and misleading, but no more
so, I venture to think, than the original dictum.
The second point is the more familiar one of the historian's need of
imaginative understanding for the minds of the people with whom he is
dealing, for the thought behind their acts: I say "imaginative
understanding," not "sympathy," lest sympathy should be
supposed to imply agreement. The nineteenth century wa6 weak in
mediaeval history, because it was too much repelled by the
superstitious beliefs of the Middle Ages and by the barbarities which
they inspired, to have any imaginative understanding of mediaeval
people. Or take Burckhardt's censorious remark about the Thirty Years'
War: "It is scandalous for a creed, no matter whether it is
Catholic or Protestant, to place its salvation above the integrity of
the nation."[24] It was extremely difficult for a
nineteenth-century liberal historian, brought up to believe that it is
right and praiseworthy to kill in defense of one's country, but wicked
and wrong-headed to-kill in defense of one's religion, to enter into
the state of mind of those who fought the Thirty Years' War. This
difficulty is particularly acute in the field in which I am now
working. Much of what has been written in English-speaking countries
in the last ten years about the Soviet Union, and in the Soviet Union
about the English-speaking countries, has been vitiated by this
inability to achieve even the most elementary measure of imaginative
understanding of what goes on in the mind of the other party, so that
the words and actions of the other are always made to appear malign,
senseless, or hypocritical. History cannot be written unless the
historian can achieve some kind of contact with the mind of those
about whom he is writing.
The third point is that we can view the past, and achieve our
understanding of the past, only through the eyes of the present. The
historian is of his own age, and is bound to it by the conditions of
human existence. The very words which he uses - words like democracy,
empire, war, revolution - have current connotations from which he
cannot divorce them. Ancient historians have taken to using words like
polis and plebs in the original, just in order to show
that they have not fallen into this trap. This does not help them.
They, too, live in the present, and cannot cheat themselves into the
past by using unfamiliar or obsolete words, any more than they would
become better Greek or Roman historians if they delivered their
lectures in a chlamys or a toga. The names by which
successive French historians have described the Parisian crowds which
played so prominent a role in the French revolution - les
sansculottes, le people, la canaille, les
brasnus, -- are all, for those who know the rules of the game,
manifestos of a political affiliation and of a particular
interpretation. Yet the historian is obliged to choose: the use of
language forbids him to be neutral. Nor is it a matter of words alone.
Over the past hundred years the changed balance of power in Europe has
reversed the attitude of British historians to Frederick the Great.
The changed balance of power within the Christian churches between
Catholicism and Protestantism has profoundly altered their attitude to
such figures as Loyola, Luther, and Cromwell. It requires only a
superficial knowledge of the work of French historians of the last
forty years on the French revolution to recognize how deeply it has
been affected by the Russian revolution of 1917. The historian belongs
not to the past but to the present. Professor Trevor-Roper tells us
that the historian "ought to love the past."[25] 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.[26] Client for
client, I should prefer the one about freeing oneself from "the
dead hand of the past." The function of the historian is neither
to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to
master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the
present.
If, however, these are some of the sights of what I may call the
Collingwood view of history, it is time to consider some of the
dangers. The emphasis on the role of the historian in the making of
history tends, if pressed to its logical conclusion, to rule out any
objective history at all: history is what the historian makes.
Collingwood seems indeed, at one moment, in an unpublished note quoted
by his editor, to have reached this conclusion:
St. Augustine looked at history from the point of view of
the early Christian; Tillemont, from that of a seventeenth-century
Frenchman; Gibbon, from that of an eighteenth-century Englishman;
Mommsen, from that of a nineteenth-century German. There is no point
in asking which was the right point of view. Each was the only one
possible for the man who adopted it.[27]
This amounts to total scepticism, like Froude's remark that history
is "a child's box of letters with which we can spell any word we
please."[28] Collingwood, in his reaction against "scissors-and-paste
history," against the view of history as a mere compilation of
facts, comes perilously near to treating history as something spun out
of the human brain, and leads back to the conclusion referred to by
Sir George Clark in the passage which I quoted earlier, that "there
is no 'objective' historical truth." In place of the theory that
history has no meaning, we are offered here the theory of an infinity
of meanings, none any more right than any other - which comes to much
the same thing. The second theory is surely as untenable as the first.
It does not follow that, because a mountain appears to take on
different shapes from different angles of vision, it has objectively
either no shape at all or an infinity of shapes. It does not follow
that, because interpretation plays a necessary part in establishing
the facts of history, and because no existing interpretation is wholly
objective, one interpretation is as good as another, and the facts of
history are in principle not amenable to objective interpretation. I
shall have to consider at a later stage what exactly is meant by
objectivity in history.
But a still greater danger lurks in the Collingwood hypothesis. If
the historian necessarily looks at his period of history through the
eyes of his own time, and studies the problems of the past as a key to
those of the present, will he not fall into a purely pragmatic view of
the facts, and maintain that the criterion of a right interpretation
is its suitability to some present purpose? On this hypothesis, the
facts of history are nothing, interpretation is everything. Nietzsche
had already enunciated the principle: "The falseness of an
opinion is not for us any objection to it. ... The question is how far
it is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps
species-creating."[29] The American pragmatists moved, less
explicitly and less wholeheartedly, along the same line. Knowledge is
knowledge for some purpose. The validity of the knowledge depends on
the validity of the purpose. But, even where no such theory has been
363 professed, the practice has often been no less disquieting. In my
own field of study, I have seen too many examples of extravagant
interpretation riding roughshod over facts, not to be impressed with
the reality of this danger. It is not surprising that perusal of some
of the more extreme products of Soviet and anti-Soviet schools of
historiography should sometimes breed a certain nostalgia for that
illusory nineteenth-century heaven of purely factual history.
How then, in the middle of the twentieth century, are we to define
the obligation of the historian to his facts? I trust that I have
spent a sufficient number of hours in recent years chasing and
perusing documents, and stuffing my historical narrative with properly
footnoted facts, to escape the imputation of treating facts and
documents too cavalierly. "The duty of the historian to respect
his facts is not exhausted by the obligation to see that his facts are
accurate. He must seek to bring into the picture all known or knowable
facts relevant, in one sense or another, to the theme on which he is
engaged and to the interpretation proposed. If he seeks to depict the
Victorian Englishman as a moral and rational being, he must not forget
what happened at Stalybridge Wakes in 1850. But this, in turn, does
not mean that he can eliminate interpretation, which is the life-blood
of history. Laymen - that is to say, non-academic friends or friends
from other academic disciplines - sometimes ask me how the historian
goes to work when he writes history. The commonest assumption appears
to be that the historian divides his work into two sharply
distinguishable phases or periods. First, he spends a long preliminary
period reading his source and filling his notebooks with facts: then,
when this is over, he puts away his sources, takes out his notebooks,
and writes his book from beginning to end. This is to me an
unconvincing and unplausible picture. For myself, as soon as I have
got going on a few of what I take to be the capital sources, the itch
becomes too strong and I begin to write - not necessarily at the
beginning, but somewhere, anywhere. Thereafter, reading and writing go
on simultaneously. The writing is added to, subtracted from,
re-shaped, cancelled, as I go on reading. 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. Some historians probably do all this
preliminary writing in their head without using pen, paper, or
typewriter, just as some people play chess in their heads without
recourse to board and chess-men: this is a talent which I envy, but
cannot emulate. But I am convinced that, for any historian worth the
name, the two processes of what economists call "input" and "output"
go on simultaneously and are, in practice, parts of a single process.
If you try to separate them, or to give one priority over the other,
you fall into one of two heresies. Either you write scissors-and-paste
history without meaning or significance; or you write propaganda or
historical fiction, and merely use facts of the past to embroider a
kind of writing which has nothing to do with history.
Our examination of the relation of the historian to the facts of
history finds us, therefore, in an apparently precarious situation,
navigating delicately between the Scylla of an untenable theory of
history as an objective compilation of facts, of the unqualified
primacy of fact over interpretation, and the Charybdis of an equally
untenable theory of history as the subjective product of the mind of
the historian who establishes the facts of history and masters them
through the process of interpretation, between a view of history
having the center of gravity in the past and the view having the
center of gravity in the present. But our situation is less precarious
than it seems. We shall encounter the same dichotomy of fact and
interpretation again in these lectures in other guises - the
particular and the general, the empirical and the theoretical, the
objective and the subjective. The predicament of the historian is a
reflection of the nature of man. Man, except perhaps in earliest
infancy and in extreme old age, is not totally involved in his
environment and unconditionally subject to it. On the other hand, he
is never totally independent of it and its unconditional master. 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. As any working
historian knows, if he stops to reflect what he is doing as he thinks
and writes, the historian is engaged on a continuous process of
molding his facts to his interpretation and his interpretation to his
facts. It is impossible to assign primacy to one over the other.
The historian starts with the 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 unconscious changes through the reciprocal action
of one or the other. And this reciprocal action also involves
reciprocity between present and past, since the historian is 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. My first answer therefore to the question,
What is history?, is that it is a continuous process of interaction
between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the
present and the past.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
- Chapter I of What is
History?, 1961.
- The Cambridge Modern
History: Its Origin, Authorship and Production (Cambridge
University Press, 1907), pp. 10-12 [This and the following
footnotes are Carr's].
- The New Cambridge Modern
History, I (Cambridge University Presss, 1957), pp. xxiv-xxv.
- Acton: Lectures in Modern
History (London: Macmillan & Co., 1906), p.318.
- Quoted in The Listener
(June 19, 1952), p. 992.
- M. Manilius: Astronomicon:
Liber Primus, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1937),
p.87.
- Talcott Parsons and Edward A.
Shils: Toward a General Theory of Action, 3rd ed.
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954), p.167.
- Lord George Sanger: Seventy
Years a Showman (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1926), pp.
188-9.
- These will shortly be
published under the title The Making of Victorian England.
- John Bagnell Bury: Selected
Essays (Cambridge University Press, 1930, p.52.)
- Geoffrey Barraclough: History
in a Changing World (London: Basil Blackwell & Mott,
19550, p.14.
- Lytton Strachey: Preface
to Eminent Victorians.
- Quoted in George P. Gooch:
History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (London:
Longmans, Green & Company, 1952), p.385. Later Acton said of
Dollinger that "it was given him to form his philosophy of
history on the largest induction ever available to man" (History
of Freedom and Other Essays [London: Macmillan & Co.,
1907], p.435).
- The Cambridge Modern
History, I (1902), p.4.
- Streseman's Legacy.
- Gustav Stresemann: His
Dairies, Letters, and Papers (London: Macmillan & Co.;
1935), I.
- Soviet foreign minister
1918-28 [Editor's note].
- Herbert Butterfield: The
Whig Interpretation of History (London: George Bell &
Sons, 1931), p.67.
- Alfred L. Rowse: The End
of an Epoch (London: Macmillan & Co., 1947), pp. 282-3.
- The context of this celebrated
aphorism is as follows: "The practical requirements which
underlie every historical judgment give to all history, because,
however remote in time events thus recounted may seem to be, the
history in reality refers to present needs and present situations
where in those events vibrate" (Benedetto Croce: History
as the Story of Liberty [London: George Allen & Unwin,
1941], p.19).
- Atlantic Monthly
(October 1928), p.528.
- Michael Oakeshott: Experience
and its Modes (Cambridge University Press, 1933), p.99.
- G. M. Trevelyna: An
Autobiography (London: Longmans, Green & Company, 1949),
p.11.
- Jacob Burckhardt: Judgments
on History and Historians (London: S.J. Reginald Saunders &
Company, 1958), p.179.
- Introduction to Burkhardt:
Judgments on History and Historians, p.17.
- Compare Nietzsche's view of
history: "To old age belongs the old man's business of
looking back and casting up his accounts, of seeking consolation
in the memories of the past, in historical culture" (Thoughts
Out of Season [London: Macmillan & Co., 1909], II, pp.
65-6).
- Robin G. Collingwood: The
Idea of History (London; Oxford University Press; 1946), p.
xii.
- James Anthony Froude: Short
Studies on Great Subjects (1894), I, p.21.
- Nietzsche: Beyond Good and
Evil, Chapter 1.
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