Americans view themselves as the vanguard of democracy, the last stand for liberty, and the superpower that ties together all other nations. Or so the American historical community would have you believe. For better or worse, Americans have a unique view of their own history because of how it has developed into a global player. This view consists of three components. Primarily, the United States has been viewed as the experiment in the practical applications of democracy from its very inception. Developing from this is the interventionist philosophy that as the quintessential democracy, Americans must spread out globally to protect the ideals of freedom and equality. In order to maintain these two components, Americans media and history seek to praise American victories politically and militarily, as a rallying cry for further democratic intervention. This does not mean that critics do not exist among historians and reporters in the United States; these dissenters, however, are a significant minority and are typically discounted as radicals.
Having defined what American history is to the American public, it becomes obvious that a divisive work that criticizes traditional theories of knowledge would be unacceptable in the doctrine of American historiography. E.H. Carr’s What is History? is such a work, questioning the obsessive, fact-based nature of history and substituting an interpretative, interdisciplinary theorizing on history. Carr’s work is not only ignored by American historians, but also is forgotten in America in general for several reasons. Carr, in short, is a relic and a curmudgeon from the Cold War era that sought to destroy the fetish-like collection of historical facts and encourage that the historian mold the facts into a work useful for contemporaries. This simply does not hold up to the standards that Americans have set forth for historical study. I will present briefly Carr’s lectures and then describe the criticisms of Carr and his place in modern historiography.
Carr’s first chapter, “The Historian and his Facts,” laid out the question of what defines history and the role of facts in writing history. Carr laid out the opposition viewpoint that “the facts speak for themselves” and that facts lay out directly how history should be written. Carr, however, felt that such a means of writing history was ineffective because values cannot be drawn directly from facts. History must be written with “imaginative understanding” and with an eye to the past and an eye to the present. This is best presented in Carr’s first answer to the titular question, which is that history is a continuous dialogue between the past and the present and an everlasting interaction between the historian and his facts.
The second and third chapters compliment each other especially well because they deal with the historian’s role in society and within academic discourse. In “Society and the Individual,” Carr described the historian within society and how history should be reconciled with a historian’s particular bias. His opinion was that the influences of society would always surround the historian, so it was necessary to address this effect on history. The more a historian comes to terms with his own biases, the better able that historiana will be able to surpass social influences to write an accurate history. This relates to Carr’s message in Chapter Three, “History, Science, and Morality,” which was that history is not a one way process and is not a singular study, but an interdisciplinary study requiring interaction between the historian and historical study. The historian necessarily becomes aware of society’s influence and an awareness of his place in history. This requires knowledge in other academic fields, such as psychology and sociology. The historian becomes a worldly writer, not an insulated fact-grubbing hermit.
As will be mentioned later in this chapter, Carr addressed significantly the nature of time and historical procession. In Chapters Four and Five, entitled “Causation in History” and “History as Progress” respectively, Carr spoke of determinism, accidents, and progress in history. In terms of whether actions are determined or not, Carr said that indeed human actions are determined by historical considerations at the social and individual level. Accidents in history, consequently, are rarely catalysts for notable historical moments. Major changes and historical events are not caused by accidents, but by circumstances that take form well in advance of any aberration within human interaction. Finally, Carr argued that progress is an integral part to understanding history because no events take place in a vacuum. There is a purpose and a consequence of all actions and that is what forms history. From this, we see history as an ever-developing study of events, changed era by era because of new understandings and new influences.
Carr’s final chapter, “History as Progress,” puts all of Carr’s worries and hopes into a tidy summary. Carr first talked at length about Hegel, Fraud and their influences on history, which were generally to force historians to look at social trends and inward to themselves to understand problems in history. He also discussed the problem of education as a means to manipulate public opinion and commercial trends. The problem was and is that the means to educate the American public lay not in the hands of actual educators but those in advertising and political circles. Finally, Carr dealt with the changing shape of the world and the isolation of the English-speaking world. Essentially, Carr was sounding the hopeful horn for a rise of the disadvantaged East and a humbling of Western elites.
To address the first criticism of Carr, it is important to understand that Carr gave the lectures for which this book is written in early 1961. Carr was lecturing in the midst of the Cold War, during a time of redevelopment within Europe, and in a world that dealt entirely in a black and white dichotomy. The apparent threat of Communism drove the capitalist West (mostly in the United States) to play up the dangers of leaning too far left and divided nations between “Reds” and those who loved their country. This dichotomy between the dangerous left and the patriotic middle found its way into all aspects of society, including history and literature.
Such was the influence of the Cold War on E.H. Carr. Carr argued vehemently that a historian should know his biases and role in society. Yet, Carr was a product of his time period and unknowingly his particular internal influences are laid out in this work. He wrote about history as a battle between those who strictly wanted to use facts and those who strictly wanted to use interpretation, and proposed a middle path. In reality, he stayed intimate with his idea that interpretation was key to history’s importance. Carr, while preaching a moderate approach to history, stayed within the prevalent dichotomy of his time period and self destructs his own argument of moderation.
Carr should then be seen as a relic of an era long faded away. The Communist-capitalist dichotomy no longer exists in the way that we understood it during the Cold War. Capitalism still remains strong and its influence grows throughout the world, but the new opponents of capitalism are fundamentalism and moderate socialism. The battle lines have been redefined and Carr is left behind a distant echo of what the world was like a relatively short time ago. Keith Jenkins, a critic of Carr’s work, made an excellent point when he asked how many discourses on method rely on a thirty year old work to discuss current standards. The answer, obviously, should be none because a constant reevaluation should be taking place on how we study history and other areas of academia. Carr is left in the dust of the postmodern world.
Carr’s old-fashioned notions of the world could have been forgiven if not for his parochial concerns in presenting poignant issues. Carr, a product of decades of journalism and international relations, went after professional historians for their rigid formulation of history from their high positions in British universities. The most notable feud to this point was Carr’s ongoing imbroglio with Isaiah Berlin, a British historian of great renown and ability. This was built mostly on misrepresentation of each other’s position. It is difficult to draw out what exactly Carr believed on many of the prevalent issues because he personalized many of his comments in lecture. The essential battle line between Carr and other British historians seemed to have been the issue of causation and determination.
Carr presented the viewpoint that all actions by individuals were determined by the historical traditions of that particular individual and, more importantly, that individual’s society. In this sense, individual actions were determined at some length by the actions of all other people. Any arguments to the contrary, according to Carr, ignored the influences of history on individuals. Berlin, among others, argued that determinism denied the ability of human free will to wrest free from prevalent social trends and start countercultural movements. This inability left humans impotent of the potential for growth and Berlin felt this was an inaccurate analysis. This dichotomy is often difficult to discern from all of the personal jabs that both historians took at each other, but it shows why such criticisms were inevitable. Carr, however, was hurt by this personal battle with Berlin, because it took a significant amount of momentum away from his most lucid moments. Carr was paralyzed by his own pride and inability to accept criticism from his peers and makes for an unattractive intellectual figure.
One final comment on why Carr does not play a role in American historiography deals more in the American reliance on experts than the integrity of Carr’s arguments. Briefly, Americans have grown accustomed to accepting advice and valuing the judgement of experts, those who have done the hard work in a particular field at a high level. As I have mentioned before, E.H. Carr developed into a historian later in life, after working for The London Times as a reporter and in his capacity within the Foreign Office. He never received a PhD or any other higher recognition of historical study, which made him a unique figure in an academic area reliant on accuracy and consistency. This background became a source of criticism for many of Carr’s peers, because Carr proved to be at times inconsistent and naive. This would prove his undoing later in historical circles.
The problem was that Carr started his lectures with a pessimistic note on the state of historical affairs at Cambridge and Oxford, dealing with the reliance on facts and the criticism of those who relied extensively on interpretation to write history. Carr seemed to point at the hopelessness of these historians to break past their own biases and the standards of their society to write a newly accurate history. Carr was not lecturing because he felt compelled to correct the epistemology of history in an uninterested way; rather, he was an interested party who wanted to change theories of history in order to create a more useful historical standard. This was not a hopeful lecture but was an attempt to frame the ideological mire that was taking place at the university level of study.
Later in the lectures, Carr stated optimism for the role of the forgotten Eastern world in the course of history and social sciences. The era of the Western world was soon to end as the end of colonialism and Western dominance came about. The English-speaking world would soon realize that they could not sit idly by and talk amongst themselves; they would soon have to address the issue of the rest of the world and were ill-prepared to do that. Carr’s hope was that the rise of the Eastern world would force British historians and their American counterparts to reexamine their means of studying history and sociology. This “Victorian” optimism was in direct conflict with the pessimism he showed toward his peers earlier, showing an inconsistency in language. Carr was also naive to think that years of Western domination over Africa and Asia would suddenly give way to Eastern dominance. This should surprise many considering his knowledge of international affairs and shows a problem in Carr’s style of argument.
It would appear that I am only presenting the one side of the argument, that Carr was some doddering iconoclast that is mashing his hand on the keyboard of his computer. This is not true, and I think that on a certain level Carr is acceptable to those in the mainstream. Matthew Dodd discusses Carr’s effect on history as entertainment in England. Dodd describes What is History? as an enticement to the idea that history is not a laundry list of dates and people, but a “malleable process actually cooked up by the historians.” The study of history, Dodd says, is becoming the “new rock’n’roll,” popular amongst the public in identifiable forms. A reference is made to popular history growing in patronage in England and to the realization by the public that history is important and there is a means to learning without being immersed in a university atmosphere.
The reference to BBC presenting history in minseries and other visual forms is something that should be recognizable to Americans. The proliferation of popular history in the United States has been going on since the mid-20th century, with tomes that put the American heroes of combat at the forefront. The United States relishes itself historically as a triumphant procurer of democracy, liberty, and individual will. This is done in film, television, periodicals, and literature that seem to be unmatched globally in volume. The American identity is a fusion of the historical identity and its ability to communicate such an identity to the masses.
But without further digression, this form of popular approval and mass reading does not seem to fit in with Carr’s historical interests. Despite a style that seems to allow for the public a window into history, Carr was never interested in the masses as historical subjects. To the contrary, Carr wrote mostly about the victors in the Russian Revolution and on other occasions of Russian history. Carr actually neglected in many cases to even address significantly the lower classes that were always the losers in such cases. Carr, despite his strike against the elitism of fellow historians, was not a social historian in the sense of a Karl Marx. Rather, he portrayed history from the victor’s point of view because the sentiments and sources of the upper class were much clearer and more worthy of explanation.
Despite the hopeful tone of a few who have read Carr’s work as revolutionary, What is History? remains to American historians and the American public an artifact of Cold War thinking. It is a work to be read in order to understand the development of historical theory, but not as a set of standards to use in current history. Carr suffers from being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong qualifications. The American historical identity thrives on our understanding of the United States as the democratic vanguard that sweeps away those things damaging to liberty and equality. It would seem that E.H. Carr’s What is History? seeks to rid the United States and its Western counterparts of this status. Carr is a non-professional historian who seeks to provide remedies to historical problems. In the post-modern world, Carr’s amateur historical analysis is seen as interesting at best, and at worst is an affront to the integrity of the historical profession and academics. It is easy to see what academics fear from a regular reading of E.H. Carr, but with questions of integrity in journalism and academic improprieties abound in today’s society, it seems odd to discount What is History? so vehemently. America needs to find a fusion between E.H. Carr and the average American historian, so that history is both accurate and effective in creating an emotional response to American history and a reevaluation of our role in the world. What Carr does effectively is show the need for history to be not a list of dates and names, but a story of the past and how it fits into the present. This is the right direction; we just need to remember the facts are just as important.
