What Is History? PDF

VJL PELICAN BOOKS WHAT IS HISTORY? Edward Hallett Carr was born in 1892 and educated at the Merchant Taylors' School, London, and Trinity C...

VJL PELICAN BOOKS WHAT IS HISTORY? Edward Hallett Carr was born in 1892 and educated at the Merchant Taylors' School, London, and Trinity College, IDDH mmn Cambridge, where he was Craven scholar and took a double first in classics. He joined the Foreign Office in 1916 and after numerous jobs in and connected with the F.O. at home and abroad he resigned in 1936 and became Wilson Professor of International Politics at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. He was Assistant Editor of The Times from 1941 to 1946, Tutor in Politics at Balliol College, Oxford, from 1953 to 1955, and became a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge^ in 1955 and an Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, in 1966. He received the C.B.E. in 1920. ""As a historian he is best known for his monumental History of Soviet Russia, which the Guardian referred to as 'among the most important works by a British historian this century' and The Times called 'an outstanding historical achievement'. He began his History in 1945 and worked at it for nearly thirty years. It occupies fourteen volumes plus a summary, The Russian Revolution: Lenin to Stalin, and a further volume is forthcoming entitled The Twilight of the Comintern. Several parts of the History are published in Penguins: The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923 (in three volumes); The Interregnum, 1923-1924; Socialism in One Country, 1924-1926 (in three volumes); and Foundations of a Planned Economy 1926-1929 (in two volumes, volume one co-authored by R. W Davies). His other publications include 901 CAR w2 The Romantic Exiles (1933), The Twenty Years' Crisis, Carr, Edward Hallett, 1892- 1919-1939 (1939), Conditions of Peace (1942), The Soviet Impact on the Western World (1946) and The New Society What is history? (1951). E. H. Carr died in 1982 and in his obituary The 188 p. Times wrote, 'His writings were for the most part as incisive as his manner. With the unimpassioned skill of a surgeon, he B9 0129215 000 001 laid bare the anatomy of the recent p a s t... beyond doubt he left a strong mark on successive generations of historians and social thinkers.' 012 921 505 076 R. W. Davies, who was born in 1925, is Professor of Soviet Economic Studies at the University of Birmingham in the E. H. CARR Centre for Russian and East European Studies, of which he was Director between 1963 and 1978. He graduated from the University of London, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham. He collaborated with E. H. Can- on Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1926-1929, vol. 1 (Penguin, 1974), and has since been working on a multi- What is History: volume history of Soviet industrialization, the first two THE GEORGE MACAULAY TREVELYAN volumes of which appeared in 1980. He has also written and LECTURES DELIVERED IN edited several studies of the contemporary Soviet Union. THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE JANUARY-MARCH I961 SECOND EDITION EDITED BY R. W. DAVIES 1 lil'J U UNBOOKS r Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England Viking Penguin Inc., 40 West 23rd Street, New York, New York 10010, U.S.A. Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 2801 John Street, Markham, Ontario, Canada L3R 1B4 Contents Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand First published by Macmillan 1961 Published in Penguin Books 1964 Reprinted 1965,1967,1968,1970,1971,1972,1973,1974,1975, 1976,1977,1978,1980,1981 (twice), 1982,1983,1984,1986 Second edition 1987 Introductory Note 1 Copyright © Edward Hallett Carr, 1961 Copyright © the Estate of Edward Hallett Carr, 1987 Editorial matter copyright © R. W. Davies, 1987 Preface to Second Edition 3 All rights reserved New matter set in Linotron Plantin by 1. The Historian and His Facts 7 Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk Printed and bound in Great Britain by 2. Society and the Individual 31 Cox and Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berks 3. History, Science and Morality 56 4. Causation in History 87 5. History as Progress 109 6. The Widening Horizon 133 From E. H. Can's Files: Notes towards a Second Edition of What is History? by R. W. Davies 157 Index 185 \ mitt? Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser  Ifc Introductory Note 1 OFTEN THINK IT ODD E. H. CARR collected a great deal of material for the second THAT IT SHOULD BE SO DULL, edition of What is History?, but by the time of his death in FOR A GREAT DEAL OF IT November 1982 only the preface to this new edition had been MUST BE INVENTION. written up. The present posthumous edition begins with this preface, Catherine Morland on History followed by the unrevised text of the first edition. This is then (Northanger Abbey, ch. xiv) followed by a new chapter, 'From E. H. Carr's Files: Notes towards a Second Edition of What is History?', in which I have endeavoured to present some of the material and conclusions contained in Carr's large box of jottings, drafts and notes. Phrases placed in square brackets within quotations in the new chapter were inserted by myself. I am grateful to Catherine Merridale for carefully checking Carr's references, and to Jonathan Haslam and Tamara Deutscher for their comments. Carr's notes towards the second edition of What is History? are to be deposited with the E. H. Carr Papers in the Library of the University of Birmingham. November 1984 R.W. DAVIES  Preface to the Second Edition WHEN in 1960 I completed the first draft of my six lectures, What is History?, the western world was still reeling from the blows of two world wars and two major revolutions, the Russian and the Chinese. The Victorian age of innocent self-confidence and automatic belief in progress lay far behind. The world was a disturbed, even menacing, place. Nevertheless signs had begun to accumulate that we were beginning to emerge from some of our troubles. The world economic crisis, widely predicted as a sequel to the war, had not occurred. We had quietly dissolved the British Empire, almost without noticing it. The crisis of Hungary and Suez had been surmounted, or lived down. De- Stalinization in the USSR, and de-McCarthyization in the USA, were making laudable progress. Germany and Japan had recovered rapidly from the total ruin of 1945, and were making spectacular economic advances. France under De Gaulle was renewing her strength. In the United States the Eisenhower blight was ending; the Kennedy era of hope was about to dawn. Black spots - South Africa, Ireland, Vietnam - could still be kept at arm's length. Stock exchanges round the world were booming. These conditions provided, at any rate, a superficial justifica- tion for the expression of optimism and belief in the future with which I ended my lectures in 1961. The succeeding twenty years frustrated these hopes and this complacency. The cold war has been resumed with redoubled intensity, bringing with it the threat of nuclear extinction. The delayed economic crisis has set in with a vengeance, ravaging the industrial countries and spreading the cancer of unemployment throughout western society. Scarcely a country is now free from the antagonism of J 4 WHAT IS HISTORY? PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION 5 violence and terrorism. The revolt of the oil-producing states of barbarian darkness. An age which increasingly challenges and the Middle East has brought a significant shift in power to the rejects this claim must surely build disaster. It is equally unsur- disadvantage of the western industrial nations. The 'third world' prising that the epicentre of the disturbance, the seat of the most has been transformed from a passive into a positive and disturb- profound intellectual pessimism, is to be found in Britain; for ing factor in world affairs. In these conditions any expression of nowhere else is the contrast between nineteenth-century splen- optimism has come to seem absurd. The prophets of woe have dour and twentieth-century drabness, between nineteenth- everything on their side. The picture of impending doom, century supremacy and twentieth-century inferiority, so sedulously drawn by sensational writers and journalists and marked and so painful. The mood has spread over western transmitted through the media, has penetrated the vocabulary of Europe and - perhaps to a lesser degree - north America. All everyday speech. Not for centuries has the once popular predic- these countries participated actively in the great expansionist era tion of the end of the world seemed so apposite. of the nineteenth century. But I have no reason to suspect that Yet at this point common sense prompts two important this mood prevails elsewhere in the world. The erection of reservations. In the first place, the diagnosis of hopelessness for insurmountable barriers to communication on one side, and the the future, though it purports to be based on irrefutable facts, is incessant flow of cold war propaganda on the other, render an abstract theoretical construct. The vast majority of people difficult any sensible assessment of the situation in the USSR. simply do not believe in it; and this disbelief is made evident by But one can scarcely believe that, in a country where a vast their behaviour. People make love, conceive, bear and rear majority of the population must be aware that, whatever their children with great devotion. Immense attention, private and current complaints, things are far better than they were twenty- public, is given to health and education in order to promote the five or fifty or a hundred years ago, widespread despair about the well-being of the next generation. New sources of energy are future has taken hold. In Asia both Japan and China in their constantly explored. New inventions increase the efficiency of different ways are in a forward-looking position. In the Middle production. Multitudes of 'small savers' invest in national sav- East and Africa, even in areas which are at present in a state of ings bonds, in building societies and in unit trusts. Widespread turmoil, emergent nations are struggling towards a future in enthusiasm is shown for the preservation of the national herit- which, however blindly, they believe. age, architectural and artistic, for the benefit of future genera- My conclusion is that the current wave of scepticism and tions. It is tempting to conclude that belief in early annihilation despair, which looks ahead to nothing but destruction and is confined to a group of disgruntled intellectuals who are decay, and dismisses as absurd any belief in progress or any , responsible for the lion's share of current publicity. prospect of a further advance by the human race, is a form of My second reservation relates to the geographical sources of elitism - the product of elite social groups whose security and these predictions of universal disaster, which emanate predomi- whose privileges have been most conspicuously eroded by the nantly -1 should be tempted to say, exclusively - from western crisis, and of elite countries whose once undisputed domination Europe and its overseas offshoots. This is not surprising. For over the rest of the world has been shattered. Of this movement five centuries these countries had been the undisputed masters the main standard-bearers are the intellectuals, the purveyors of of the world. They could claim with some plausibility to repre- the ideas of the ruling social group which they serve ('The ideas sent the light of civilization in the midst of an outer world of of a society are the ideas of its ruling class'). It is irrelevant that 6 WHAT IS HISTORY? some of the intellectuals in question may have belonged by origin to other social groups; for, in becoming intellectuals, they are automatically assimilated into the intellectual elite. Intellec- I The Historian and His Facts tuals by definition form an elite group. What is, however, more important in the present context is that all groups in a society, however cohesive (and the historian is often justified in treating them as such), throw up a certain WHAT is history ? Lest anyone think the question meaningless number of freaks or dissidents. This is particularly liable to or superfluous, I will take as my text two passages relating re- happen among intellectuals. I do not refer to the routine argu- spectively to the first and second incarnations of the Cambridge ments between intellectuals conducted on the basis of common Modern History. Here is Acton in his report of October 1896 to acceptance of main presuppositions of the society, but of chal- the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press on the work lenges to these presuppositions. In western democratic societies which he had undertaken to edit: such challenges, so long as they are confined to a handful of It is a unique opportunity of recording, in the way most useful dissidents, are tolerated, and those who present them can find to the greatest number, the fullness of the knowledge which the readers and an audience. The cynic might say that they are nineteenth century is about to bequeath.... By the judicious tolerated because they are neither numerous nor influential division of labour we should be able to do it, and to bring home enough to be dangerous. For more than forty years I have carried to every man the last document, and the ripest conclusions of the label of an 'intellectual'; and in recent years I have in- international research. creasingly come to see myself, and to be seen, as an intellectual Ultimate history we cannot have in this generation; but we dissident. An explanation is ready to hand. I must be one of the can dispose of conventional history, and show the point we have very few intellectuals still writing who grew up, not in the high reached on the road from one to the other, now that all informa- noon, but in the afterglow of the great Victorian age of faith and tion is within reach, and every problem has become capable of optimism, and it is difficult for me 6#en today to think in terms solution.1 of a world in permanent and irretrievable decline. In the follow- And almost exactly sixty years later Professor Sir George Clark, ing pages I shall try to distance myself from prevailing trends in his general introduction to the second Cambridge Modern among western intellectuals, and especially those of this country History, commented on this belief of Acton and his collabor- today, to show how and why I think they have gone astray and to ators that it would one day be possible to produce' ultimate his- strike out a claim, if not for an optimistic, at any rate for a saner tory ', and went on: and more balanced outlook on the future. Historians of a later generation do not look forward to any such prospect. They expect their work to be superseded again E. H. CARR 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 I. The Cambridge Modern History: Its Origin, Authorship and Pro- duction (1907), pp. 10-12. 8 WHAT IS HISTORY? THE HISTORIAN AND HIS FACTS 9 impersonal atoms which nothing can alter The exploration success. Three generations of German, British, and even French seems to be endless, and some impatient scholars take refuge historians marched into battle intoning the magic words 'Wiees in scepticism, or at least in the doctrine that, since all eigentlich gewesen* like an incantation - designed, like most in- historical judgements involve persons and points of view, cantations, to save them from the tiresome obligation to think one is as good as another and there is no 'objective' historical for themselves. The Positivists, anxious to stake out their claim truth.1 for history as a science, contributed the weight of their influence Where the pundits contradict each other so flagrantly, the field to this cult of facts. First ascertain the facts, said the Positivists, is open to inquiry. I hope that I am sufficiently up-to-date to then draw your conclusions from them. In Great Britain, this recognize that anything written in the 1890s must be nonsense. view of history fitted in perfectly with the empiricist tradition But I am not yet advanced enough to be committed to the view which was the dominant strain in British philosophy from Locke that anything written in the 1950s necessarily makes sense. to Bertrand Russell. The empirical theory of knowledge pre- Indeed, it may already have occurred to you that this inquiry is supposes a complete separation between subject and object. liable to stray into something even broader than the nature of Facts, like sense-impressions, impinge on the observer from out- history. The clash between Acton and Sir George Clark is a side and are independent of his consjdousness. The process of reflection of the change in our total outlook on society over the reception is passive: having received the data, he then acts on interval between these two pronouncements. Acton speaks out them. The Oxford Shorter English Dictionary, a useful but ten- of the positive belief, the dear-eyed self-confidence, of the later dentious work of the empirical school, clearly marks the separ- Victorian age; Sir George Clark echoes the bewilderment and ateness of the two processes by defining a fact as 'a datum of distracted scepticism of the beat generation. When we attempt experience as distinct from conclusions'. This is what may be to answer the question 'What is history?' our answer, con- called the commonsense view of history. History consists of a sciously or unconsciously, reflects our own position in time, and corpus of ascertained facts. The facts are available to the his- forms part of our answer to the broader question what view we torian in documents, inscriptions and so on, like fish on the fish- take of the society in which we live. I have no fear that my sub- monger's slab. The historian collects them, takes them home, ject may, on closer inspection, seem trivial. I am afraid only that and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him. I may seem presumptuous to have broached a question so vast Acton, whose culinary tastes were austere, wanted them served and so important. plain. In his letter of instructions to contributors to the first Cambridge Modem History he announced the requirement 'that our Waterloo must be one that satisfies French and English, The nineteenth century was a great age for facts. 'What I German and Dutch alike; that nobody can tell, without exam- want', said Mr Gradgrind in Hard Times, 'is F a c t s.... Facts ining the list of authors, where the Bishop of Oxford laid down alone are wanted in life.' Nineteenth-century historians on the the pen, and whether Fairbairn or Gasquet, Liebermann or whole agreed with him. When Ranke in the 1830s, in legitimate Harrison took it up'. 1 Even Sir George Clark, critical as he was protest against moralizing history, remarked that the task of the of Acton's attitude, himself contrasted the 'hard core of historian was' simply to show how it really was (wie es eigentlich facts' in history with the 'surrounding pulp of disputable gezoesen)', this not very profound aphorism had an astonishing 1. Acton, Lectures on Modern History (1906), p. 318. I. The New Cambridge Modern History, i (1957). PP- xxiv-xxv. 10 WHAT IS HISTORY? THE HISTORIAN AND HIS FACTS II interpretation'1 - forgetting perhaps that the pulpy part of accuracy is like praising an architect for using well-seasoned the fruit is more rewarding than the hard core. First get your timber or properly mixed concrete in his building. It is a neces- facts straight, then plunge at your peril into the shifting sands sary condition of his work, but not bis essential function. It is of interpretation - that is the ultimate wisdom of the em- precisely for matters of this kind that the historian is entitled to pirical, commonsense school of history. It recalls the favourite rely on what have been called t h e ' auxiliary sciences' of history dictum of the great liberal journalist C. P. Scott: 'Facts are - archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics, chronology, and so sacred, opinion is free.' forth. The historian is not required to have the special skills Now this clearly will not do. I shall not embark on a philo- which enable the expert to determine the origin and period of a sophical discussion of the nature of our knowledge of the past. fragment of pottery or marble, to decipher an obscure inscrip- Let us assume for present purposes that the fact that Caesar tion, or to make the elaborate astronomical calculations neces- crossed the Rubicon and the fact there is a table in the middle of sary to establish a precise date. These so-called basic facts, the room are facts of the same or of a comparable order, that which are the same for all historians, commonly belong to the both these facts enter our consciousness in the same or in a category of the raw materials of the historian rather than of comparable manner, and that both have the same objective history itself. The second observation is that the necessity to character in relation to the person who knows them. But, even establish these basic facts rests not on any quality in the facts on this bold and not very plausible assumption, our argument at themselves, but on an a priori decision of the historian. In spite once runs into the difficulty that not all facts about the past are of C. P. Scott's motto, every journalist knows today that the historical facts, or are treated as such by the historian. What is most effective way to influence opinion is by the selection and the criterion which distinguishes the facts of history from other arrangement of the appropriate facts. It used to be said that facts about the past ? facts speak for themselves. This is, of course, untrue. The facts What is a historical fact ? This is a crucial question into which speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides we must look a little more closely. According to the common- to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context. It sense view, there are certain basic facts which are the same for was, I think, one of Pirandello's characters who said that a fact all historians and which form, so to speak, the backbone of is like a sack - it won't stand up till you've put something in it. history - the fact, for example, that the Battle of Hastings was The only reason why we are interested to know that the battle fought in 1066. But this view calls for two observations. In the was fought at Hastings in 1066 is that historians regard it as a first place, it is not with facts like these that the historian is major historical event. It is the historian who has decided for primarily concerned. It is no doubt important to know that the his own reasons that Caesar's crossing of that petty stream, the great battle was fought in 1066 and not in 1065 or 1067, and that Rubicon, is a fact of history, whereas the crossing of the Rubicon it was fought at Hastings and not at Eastbourne or Brighton. by millions of other people before or since interests nobody at The historian must not get these things wrong. But when points all. The fact that you arrived in this building half an hour ago of this kind are raised, I am reminded of Housman's remark that on foot, or on a bicycle, or in a car, is just as much a fact about 'accuracy is a duty, not a virtue'. 2 To praise a historian for his the past as the fact that Caesar crossed the Rubicon. But it will 1. Quoted in the Listener, 19 June 1952, p. 992. probably be ignored by historians. Professor Talcott Parsons 2. M. Manilii Astronomicon: Liber Primus (2nd ed., 1937)5 p. 87. once called science 'a selective system of cognitive orientations Jk 12 WHAT IS HISTORY? THE HISTORIAN AND HIS FACTS 13 to reality'.1 It might perhaps have been put more simply. But a question of interpretation. This element of interpretation history is, among other things, that. The historian is necessarily enters into every fart of history. selective. The belief in a hard core of historical facts existing May I be allowed a personal reminiscence ? When I studied objectively and independently of the interpretation of the ancient history in this university many years ago, I had as a historian is a preposterous fallacy, but one which it is very hard special subject 'Greece in the period of the Persian Wars'. I to eradicate. collected fifteen or twenty volumes on my shelves and took it for Let us take a look at the process by which a mere fact about granted that there, recorded in these volumes, I had all the facts the past is transformed into a fact of history. At Stalybridge relating to my subject. Let us assume - it was very nearly true - Wakes in 1850, a vendor of gingerbread, as the result of some that those volumes contained all the farts about it that were then petty dispute, was deliberately kicked to death by an angry known, or could be known. It never occurred to me to inquire mob. Is this a fact of history ? A year ago I should unhesitatingly by what accident or process of attrition that minute selection of have said' no \ It was recorded by an eye-witness in some little- farts, out of all the myriad farts that must once have been known memoirs2; but I had never seen it judged worthy of known to somebody, had survived to become the farts of history. mention by any historian. A year ago Dr Kitson Clark cited it in I suspect that even today one of the fascinations of ancient and his Ford lectures in Oxford.3 Does this make it into a historical medieval history is that it gives us the illusion of having all the fart ? Not, I think, yet. Its present status, I suggest, is that it has farts at our disposal within a manageable compass: the nagging been proposed for membership of the select club of historical distinction between the facts of history and other farts about the farts. It now awaits a seconder and sponsors. It may be that in past vanishes, because the few known farts are all farts of history. the course of the next few years we shall see this fart appearing As Bury, who had worked in both periods, said, 'the records of first in footnotes, then in the text, of articles and books about ancient and medieval history are starred with lacunae. n History nineteenth-century England, and that in twenty or thirty years' has been called an enormous jig-saw with a lot of missing parts. time it may be a well-established historical fart. Alternatively, But the main trouble does not consist in the lacunae. Our picture nobody may take it up, in which case it will relapse into the of Greece in the fifth century B.C. is defective not primarily be- limbo of unhistorical farts about the past from which Dr Kitson cause so many of the bits have been accidentally lost, but because Clark has gallantly attempted to rescue it. What will decide it is, by and large, the picture formed by a tiny group of people which of these two things will happen ? It will depend, I think, in the city of Athens. We know a lot about what fifth-century on whether the thesis or interpretation in support of which Dr Greece looked like to an Athenian citizen; but hardly anything Kitson Clark cited this incident is accepted by other historians about what it looked like to a Spartan, a Corinthian, or a Theban as valid and significant. Its status as a historical fart will turn on - not to mention a Persian, or a slave or other non-citizen resi- dent in Athens. Our picture has been preselected and predeter- mined for us, not so much by accident as by people who were 1. T. Parsons and E. Shils, Towards a General Theory of Action (3rd consciously or unconsciously imbued with a particular view and ed., 1954), p. 167. thought the farts which supported that view worth preserving. 2. Lord George Sanger, SeventyYears a Showman (2nd e d o 1926), In the same way, when I read in a modern history of the Middle pp. 188-9. 1. J. B. Bury, Selected Essays (1930), p. 52. 3. Dr. Kitson Clark, The Making of Victorian England (1962). 14 WHAT IS HISTORY? THE HISTORIAN AND HIS FACTS 15 Ages that the people of the Middle Ages were deeply concerned discovering the few significant facts and turning them into facts with religion, I wonder how we know this, and whether it is true. of history, and of discarding the many insignificant facts as What we know as the facts of medieval history have almost all unhistorical. But this is the very converse of the nineteenth- been selected for us by generations of chroniclers who were century heresy that history consists of the compilation of a professionally occupied in the theory and practice of religion, maximum number of irrefutable and objective facts. Anyone and who therefore thought it supremely important, and recorded who succumbs to this heresy will either have to give up history everything relating to it, and not much else. The picture of the as a bad job, and take to stamp-collecting or some other form of Russian peasant as devoutly religious was destroyed by the antiquarianism, or end in a madhouse. It is this heresy which revolution of 1917. The picture of medieval man as devoutly during the past hundred years has had such devastating effects religious, whether true or not, is indestructible, because nearly on the modern historian, producing in Germany, in Great all the known facts about him were preselected for us by people Britain, and in the United States, a vast and growing mass of who believed it, and wanted others to believe it, and a mass of dry-as-dust factual histories, of minutely specialized mono- other facts, in which we might possibly have found evidence to graphs of would-be historians knowing more and more about the contrary, has been lost beyond recall. The dead hand of less and less, sunk without trace in an ocean of facts. It was, I vanished generations of historians, scribes, and chroniclers has suspect, this heresy - rather than the alleged conflict between determined beyond the possibility of appeal the pattern of the liberal and Catholic loyalties - which frustrated Acton as a his- past. 'The history we read,' writes Professor Barraclough, him- torian. In an early essay he said of his teacher Dollinger: 'He self trained as a medievalist, 'though based on facts, is, strictly would not write with imperfect materials, and to him the speaking, not factual at all, but a series of accepted judgements.'1 materials were always imperfect.'1 Acton was surely here pro- But let us turn to the different, but equally grave, plight of the nouncing an anticipatory verdict on himself, on that strange modern historian. The ancient or medieval historian may be phenomenon of a historian whom many would regard as the most grateful for the vast winnowing process which, over the years, distinguished occupant the Regius Chair of Modern History has put at his disposal a manageable corpus of historical facts. in this university has ever had - but who wrote no history. And As Lytton Strachey said, in his mischievous way, 'ignorance is Acton wrote his own epitaph, in the introductory note to the the first requisite of the historian, ignorance which simplifies first volume of the Cambridge Modern History published just and clarifies, which selects and omits.'2 When I am tempted, as after his death, when he lamented that the requirements press- I sometimes am, to envy the extreme competence of colleagues ing on the historian 'threaten to turn him from a man of letters engaged in writing ancient or medieval history, I find consola- into the compiler of an encyclopedia'.2 Something had gone tion in the reflexion that they are so competent mainly because wrong. What had gone wrong was the belief in this untiring and they are so ignorant of their subject. The modern historian unending accumulation of hard facts as the foundation of enjoys none of the advantages of this built-in ignorance. He must cultivate this necessary ignorance for himself - the more 1. Quoted in G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century, p. 385; later Acton said of Dollinger that' it was given him to so the nearer he comes to his own times. He has the dual task of form his philosophy of history on the largest induction ever available to man' (History of Freedom and Other Essays, 1907, p. 435). 1. G. Barraclough, History in a Changing World (1955)3 p. 14. 2. Lytton Strachey, Preface to Eminent Victorians. 2. Cambridge Modern History, i (1902), p. 4. 16 WHAT IS HISTORY? THE HISTORIAN AND HIS FACTS 17 history, the belief that facts speak for themselves and that we ever; or perhaps in a hundred years or so some curious scholar cannot have too many facts, a belief at that time-so unquestion- would have come upon them and set out to compare them with ing that few historians then thought it necessary - and some still , JJernhard's text. What happened was far more dramatic. In 1945 think it Unnecessary\oday - to ask themselves the question the documents fell into the hands of the British and American 'What is history?' Governments, who photographed the lot and put the photostats The nineteenth-century fetishism of facts was completed and at the disposal of scholars in the Public Record Office in London justified by a fetishism of documents. The documents were the and in the National Archives in Washington, so that, if we have Ark of the Covenant in the temple of facts. The reverent his- sufficient patience and curiosity, we can discover exactly what torian approached them with bowed head and spoke of them in Bernhard did. What he did was neither very unusual nor very awed tones. If you find it in the documents, it is so. But what, shocking. When Stresemann died, his western policy seemed to when we get down to it, do these documents - the decrees, the have been crowned with a series of brilliant successes - Locarno, treaties, the rent-rolls, the blue books, the official correspon- the admission of Germany to the League of Nations, the Dawes dence, the private letters and diaries - tell us ? No document and Young plans and the American loans, the withdrawal of can tell us more than what the author of the document thought - allied occupation armies from the Rhineland. This seemed the what he thought had happened, what he thought ought to hap- important and rewarding part of Stresemann's foreign policy; pen or would happen, or perhaps only what he wanted others to and it was not unnatural that it should have been over-repre- think he thought, or even only what he himself thought he sented in Bernhard's selection of documents. Stresemann's thought. None of this means anything until the historian has got eastern policy, on the other hand, his relations with the Soviet to work on it and deciphered it. The facts, whether found in Union, seemed to have led nowhere in particular; and, since documents or not, have still to be processed by the historian masses of documents about negotiations which yielded only before he can make any use of them: the use he makes of them trivial results were not very interesting and added nothing to is, if I may put it that way, the processing process. Stresemann's reputation, the process of selection could be more Let me illustrate what I am trying to say by an example which rigorous. Stresemann in fact devoted a far more constant and I happen to know well. When Gustav Stresemann, the Foreign anxious attention to relations with the Soviet Union, and they Minister of the Weimar Republic, died in 1929, he left behind fdayed a far larger part in his foreign policy as a whole, than the him an enormous mass - 300 boxes full - of papers, official, reader of the Bernhard selection would surmise. But the Bern- semi-official, and private, nearly all relating to the six years of hard volumes compare favourably, I suspect, with many pub- his tenure of office as Foreign Minister. His friends and relatives lished collections of documents on which the ordinary historian naturally thought that a monument should be raised to the implicitly relies. memory of so great a man. His faithful secretary Bernhard got This is not the end of my story. Shortly after the publication to work; and within three years there appeared three massive of Bernhard's volumes, Hitler came into power. Stresemann's volumes, of some 600 pages each, of selected documents from name was consigned to oblivion in Germany, and the volumes the 300 boxes, with the impressive title Stresemams Vermdchtnis. disappeared from circulation: many, perhaps most, of the copies In the ordinary way the documents themselves would have must have been destroyed. Today Stresemanns Vermdchtnis is a mouldered away in some cellar or attic and disappeared for rather rare book. But in the west Stresemann's reputation stood 18 WHAT IS HISTORY? THE HISTORIAN AND HIS FACTS 19 high. In 1935 an English publisher brought out an abbreviated ing. This is a familiar characteristic of all records of diplomatic translation of Bernhard's work - a selection from Bernhard's conversations. The documents do not tell us what happened, selection; perhaps one-third of the original was omitted. Sutton, but only what Stresemann thought had happened, or what he a well-known translator from the German, did his job compe- wanted others to think, or perhaps what he wanted himself to tently and well. The English version, he explained in the preface, think, had happened. It was not Sutton or Bernhard, but was 'slightly condensed, but only by the omission of a certain Stresemann himself, who started the process of selection. And amount of what, it was felt, was more ephemeral m a t t e r... of if we had, say, Chicherin's records of these same conversations, little interest to English readers or students'. 1 This again is we should still learn from them only what Chicherin thought, natural enough. But the result is that Stresemann's eastern and what really happened would still have to be reconstructed policy, already under-represented in Bernhard, recedes still in the mind of the historian. Of course, farts and documents are further from view, and the Soviet Union appears in Sutton's essential to the historian. But do not make a fetish of them. volumes merely as an occasional and rather unwelcome intruder They do not by themselves constitute history; they provide in in Stresemann's predominantly western foreign policy. Yet it themselves no ready-made answer to this tiresome question is safe to say that, for all except a few specialists, Sutton and not 'What is history?' Bernhard - and still less the documents themselves - represents At this point I should like to say a few words on the question for the western world the authentic voice of Stresemann. Had why nineteenth-century historians were generally indifferent to the documents perished in 1945 in the bombing, and had the the philosophy of history. The term was invented by Voltaire, remaining Bernhard volumes disappeared, the authenticity and and has since been used in different senses; but 1 shall take it to authority of Sutton would never have been questioned. Many mean, if I use it at all, our answer to the question, 'What is printed collections of documents, gratefully accepted by his- history?' The nineteenth century was, for the intellectuals of torians in default of the originals, rest on no securer basis than western Europe, a comfortable period exuding confidence and this. optimism. The farts were on the whole satisfactory; and the But I want to carry the story one step further. Let us forget inclination to ask and answer awkward questions about them ut Bernhard and Sutton, and be thankful that we can, if we was correspondingly weak. Ranke piously believed that divine choose, consult the authentic papers of a leading participant in providence would take care of the meaning of history, if he took some important events of recent European history. What do the care of the farts; and Burckhardt, with a more modern touch of paperVtell us ? Among other things they contain records of some cynicism, observed that 'we are not initiated into the purposes hundreds of Stresemann's conversations with the Soviet Ambas- of the eternal wisdom'. Professor Butterfield as late as 1931 sador in Berlin and of a score or so with Chicherin. These noted with apparent satisfaction that 'historians have reflected records have one feature in common. They depict Stresemann little upon the nature of things, and even the nature of their own as having the lion's share of the conversations and reveal his subject \1 But my predecessor in these lectures, Dr A. L. Rowse, arguments as invariably well put and cogent, while those of his more justly critical, wrote of Sir Winston Churchill's WorldCrisis partner are for the most part scanty, confused, and unconvinc- - his book about the First World War - that, while it matched 1. Gustav Stresemann, His Diaries, Letters and Papers, i (i935)> Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution in personality, Editor's Note. I. H. Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931)1 P- History as the Story of Liberty, Engl. transl. which obviously owed much to German masters. All history is 1941, p. 19). I. A. L. Rowse5 The End of an Epoch (1947), pp. 282-3. 2. Atlantic Monthly, October 1910, p. 528. 22 WHAT IS HISTORY? THE HISTORIAN AND HIS FACTS 23 into which he inquires.) 'The past which a historian studies is its full meaning and significance to the reader only when read not a dead past, but a past which in some sense is still living in against that background. The author, indeed, leaves the reader the present.' But a past act is dead, i.e. meaningless to the his- with no excuse for failing to do so. For, if following the technique torian, unless he can understand the thought that lay behind it. ©f connoisseurs of detective novels, you read the end first, you Hence 'all history is the history of thought', and 'history is the will find on the last few pages of the third volume the best sum- re-enactment in the historian's mind of the thought whose his- mary known to me of what is nowadays called the Whig inter- tory he is studying'. The reconstitution of the past in the his- pretation of history; and you will see that what Trevelyan is torian's mind is dependent on empirical evidence. But it is not trying to do is to investigate the origin and development of the in itself an empirical process, and cannot consist in a mere recital Whig tradition, and to root it fairly and squarely in the years of facts. On t i e contrary, the process of reconstitution governs after the death of its founder, William III. Though this is not, the selection and interpretation of the facts: this, indeed, is what perhaps, the only conceivable interpretation of the events of makes them historical facts.' History', says Professor Oakeshott, Queen Anne's reign, it is a valid and, in Trevelyan's hands, a who on this point stands near to Collingwood,' is the historian's fruitful interpretation. But, in order to appreciate it at its full experience. It is " made " by nobody save the historian: to write value, you have to understand what the historian is doing.' For history is the only way of making it.' 1 if, as Collingwood says, the historian must re-enact in thought This searching critique, though it may call for some serious what has gone on in the mind of his dramatis personae, so the reservations, brings to light certain neglected truths. reader in his turn must re-enact what goes on in the mind of In the first place, the facts of history never come to u s ' pure', the historian. Study the historian before you begin to study the since they do not and cannot exist in a pure form: they are facts. This is, after all, not very abstruse. It is what is already always refracted through the mind of the recorder. It follows done by the intelligent undergraduate who, when recommended that when we take up a work of history, our first concern should to read a work by that great scholar Jones of St Jude's, goes round be not with the facts which it contains but with the historian who to a friend at St Jude's to ask what sort of chap Jones is, and what wrote it. Let me take as an example the great historian in whose bees he has in his bonnet. When you read a work of history, honour and in whose name these lectures were founded. G. M. always listen out for the buzzing. If you can detect none, either Trevelyan, as he tells us in his autobiography, was 'brought up you are tone deaf or your historian is a dull dog. The facts are at home on a somewhat exuberantly Whig tradition'; 2 and he really not at all like fish on the fishmonger's slab. They are like would not, I hope, disclaim the title if I described him as the last fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and not the least of the great English liberal historians of the and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, Whig tradition. It is not for nothing that he traces back bis fam- but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and ily tree, through the great Whig historian George Otto Trevel- what tackle he chooses to use - these two factors being, of yan, to Macaulay, incomparably the greatest of the Whig course, determined by the kind offish he wants to catch. By and historians. Trevelyan's finest and maturest work, England under large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History Queen Anne, was written against that background, and will yield 4neans interpretation. Indeed, if, standing" Sir George Qark on 1. M. Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes (1933), p. 99. his head, I were to call history' a hard core of interpretation sur- 2. G. M. Trevelyan, An Autobiography (1949)5 p. n. rounded by a pulp of disputable facts', my statement would, no 24 WHAT IS HISTORY? 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 f THE HISTORIAN AND HIS FACTS words like democracy, empire, war, revolution - have current 25 *f4' connotations from which he cannot divorce them. Ancient need of imaginative understanding for the minds of the people ^ historians have taken to using words like polis and plebs in the with whom he is dealing, for the thought behind their acts: I # original, just in order to show that they have not fallen into this say 'imaginative understanding', not 'sympathy', lest sym- 'I, trap. This does not help them. They, too, live in the present, and pathy should be supposed to imply agreement. The nineteenth & cannot cheat themselves into the past by using unfamiliar or century was weak in medieval history, because it was too much 'i, obsolete words, any more than they would become better Greek repelled by the superstitious beliefs of the Middle Ages, and by or Roman historians if they delivered their lectures in a chlamys the barbarities which they inspired, to have any imaginative i or a toga. The names by which successive French historians have understanding of medieval people. Or take Burckhardt's cen- : described the Parisian crowds which played so prominent a role sorious remark about the Thirty Years War: 'It is scandalous in the French revolution - les sans-culottes, le peuple, la canaille, for a creed, no matter whether it is Catholic or Protestant, to , les bras-nus - are all, for those who know the rules of the game, place its salvation above the integrity of the nation.'1 It was manifestos of a political affiliation and of a particular interpreta- extremely difficult for a nineteenth-century liberal historian, /».". tion. Yet the historian is obliged to choose: the use of language brought up to believe that it is right and praiseworthy to kill in i forbids him to be neutral. Nor is it a matter of words alone. Over defence of one's country, but wicked and wrong-headed to kill the past hundred years the changed balance of power in Europe in defence of one's religion, to enter into the state of mind of '>t has reversed the attitude of British historians to Frederick the those who fought the Thirty Years War. This difficulty is par- C Great. The changed balance of power within the Christian ticularly acute in the field in which I am now working. Much of churches between Catholicism and Protestantism has pro- what has been written in English-speaking countries in the last foundly altered their attitude to such figures as Loyola, Luther, ten years about the Soviet Union, and in the Soviet Union about and Cromwell. It requires only a superficial knowledge of the the English-speaking countries, has been vitiated by this in- work of French historians of the last forty years on the French ability to achieve even the most elementary measure of imagina- revolution to recognize how deeply it has been affected by tive understanding of what goes on in the mind of the other the Russian revolution of 1917. The historian belongs not to the party, so that the words and actions of the other are always made f>ast but to the present. Professor Trevor-Roper tells us that the to appear malign, senseless, or hypocritical. History cannot be ,,, historian' ought to love the past V This is a dubious injunction. written unless the historian can achieve some kind of contact ! To love the past may easily be an expression of the nostalgic with the mind of those about whom he is writing. romanticism of old men and old societies, a symptom of loss of The third point is that we can view the past, and achieve our faith and interest in the present or future.2 Cliche for cliche, I understanding of the past, only through the eyes of the present. 1. Introduction to J. Burckhardt, Judgements on History and His- The historian is of his own age, and is bound to it by the con- torians (i959)> P- 17- ditions of human existence. The very words which he uses - 2. Compare Nietzsche's view of history: 'To old age belongs the old man's business of looking back and casting up his accounts, of i. J. Burckhardt, Judgements on History and Historians (i959)> P- **' seeking consolation in the memories of the past, in historical culture' 179. (Thoughts Out of Season, Engl. transl., 1909, ii, pp. 65-6). 26 WHAT IS HISTORY? THE HISTORIAN AND HIS FACTS 2^ should prefer the one about freeing oneself from 'the dead hand shapes from different angles of vision, it has objectively either of the past'. The function of the historian is neither to love the no shape at all or an infinity of shapes. It does not follow that, past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and because interpretation plays a necessary part in establishing understand it as the key to the understanding of the present. tibe fects of history, and because no existing interpretation is wholly objective, one interpretation is as good as another, and If, however, these are some of the insights of what I may call die facts of history are in principle not amenable to objective the Collingwood view of history, it is time to consider some of interpretation. I shall have to consider at a later stage what the dangers. The emphasis on the role of the historian in the exactly is meant by objectivity in history. making of history tends, if pressed to its logical conclusion, to But a still greater danger lurks in the Collingwood hypothesis. rule out any objective history at all: history is what the historian If the historian necessarily looks at his period of history through makes. Collingwood seems indeed, at one moment, in an un- the eyes of his own time, and studies the problems of the past as published note quoted by his editor, to have reached this con- a key to those of the present, will he not fall into a purely prag- clusion: matic view of the facts, and maintain that the criterion of a right St Augustine looked at history from the point of view of the interpretation is its suitability to some present purpose? On early Christian; Tillamont, from that of a seventeenth-century this hypothesis, the facts of history are nothing, interpretation Frenchman; Gibbon, from that of an eighteenth-century is everything. Nietzsche had already enunciated the principle: Englishman; Mommsen from that of a nineteenth-century Ger- 'The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to i t.... man. There is no point in asking which was the right point of The question is how far it is life-furthering, life-preserving, view. Each was the only one possible for the man who adopted species-preserving, perhaps species-creating.'1 The American it.1 pragmatists moved, less explicitly and less wholeheartedly, This amounts to total scepticism, like Froude's remark that along the same line. Knowledge is knowledge for some purpose. history is 'a child's box of letters with which we can spell any IJlie validity of theknowledge depends on the validity of the word we please '.2 Collingwood, in his reaction against' scissors- purpose. But, even where no such theory has been professed, and-paste history', against the view of history as a mere com- the practice has often been no less disquieting. In my own field pilation of farts, comes perilously near to treating history as %fstudy I have seen too many examples of extravagant interpre- something spun out of the human brain, and leads back to the tation riding roughshod over facts not to be impressed with the conclusion referred to by Sir George Clark in the passage which reality of this danger. It is not surprising that perusal of some of n I quoted earlier, that 'there is no "objective" historical truth'. M&& more extreme products of Soviet and anti-Soviet schools of In place of the theory that history has no meaning, we are offered \,. historiography should sometimes breed a certain nostalgia for here the theory of an infinity of meanings, none any more right that illusory nineteenth-century haven of purely factual history. than any other - which comes to much the same thing. The * How then, in the middle of the twentieth century, are we to second theory is surely as untenable as the first. It does not define the obligation of the historian to his facts ? I trust that I follow that, because a mountain appears to take on different have spent a sufficient number of hours in recent years chasing 1. R. Collingwood, The Idea of History (1946), p. xii. € andperusingdocuments,andstuffingmyhistoricalnarrativewith 2. A. Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects, i (1894), p. 21. I. Beyond Good and Evil, ch. i. 28 WHAT IS HISTORY? THE HISTORIAN AND HIS FACTS 29 properly footnoted facts, to escape the imputation of treating jf to give one priority over the other, you fall into one of two facts and documents too cavalierly. The duty of the historian heresies. Either you write scissors-and-paste history without to respect his facts is not exhausted by the obligation to see that meaning or significance; or you write propaganda or historical his facts are accurate. He must seek to bring into the picture all fiction, and merely use facts of the past to embroider a kind of known or knowable facts relevant, in one sense or another, to , wiring which has nothing to do with history. the theme on which he is engaged and to the interpretation pro- Our examination of the relation of the historian to the facts of posed. If he seeks to depict the Victorian Englishman as a moral history finds us, therefore, in an apparently precarious situation, and rational being, he must not forget what happened at Staly- navigating delicately between the Scylla of an untenable theory bridge Wakes in 1850. But this, in turn, does not mean that he «f history as an objective compilation of facts, of the unqualified can eliminate interpretation, which is the life-blood of history. primacy of fact over interpretation, and the Charybdis of an Laymen - that is to say, non-academic friends or friends from equally untenable theory of history as the subjective product other academic disciplines - sometimes ask me how the historian of the mind of the historian who establishes the facts of history goes to work when he writes history. The commonest assump- and masters them through the process of interpretation, be- tion appears to be that the historian divides his work into two tween a view of history having the centre of gravity in the past sharply distinguishable phases or periods. First, he spends a and a view having the centre of gravity in the present. But our long preliminary period reading his sources and filling his note- situation is less precarious than it seems. We shall encounter books with facts: then, when this is over, he puts away his the same dichotomy of fact and interpretation again in these sources, takes out his notebooks and writes his book from begin- lectures in other guises - the particular and the general, the ning to end. This is to me an unconvincing and unplausible empirical and the theoretical, the objective and the subjective. picture. For myself, as soon as I have got going on a few of what The predicament of the historian is a reflexion of the nature of I take to be the capital sources, the itch becomes too strong and man. Man, except perhaps in earliest infancy and in extreme old I begin to write - not necessarily at the beginning, but some- age, is not totally involved in his environment and unconditfon- where, anywhere. Thereafter, reading and writing go on simul- 0y subject to it. On the other hand, he is never totally indepen- taneously. The writing is added to, subtracted from, re-shaped, llent of it and its unconditional master. The relation of man to cancelled, as I go on reading. The reading is guided and directed Ms environment is the relation of the historian to his theme. The and made fruitful by the writing: the more I write, the more I historian is neither the humble slave nor the tyrannical master of know what I am looking for, the better I understand the signi- ids facts. The relation between the historian and his facts is one ficance and relevance of what I find. Some historians probably rf equality, of give-and-take. As any working historian knows, do all this preliminary writing in their head without using pen, if he stops to reflect what he is doing as he thinks and writes, the paper, or typewriter, just as some people play chess in then- historian is engaged on a continuous process of moulding his heads without recourse to board and chessmen: this is a talent facts to his interpretation and his interpretation to his facts. It which I envy, but cannot emulate. But I am convinced that, for is impossible to assign primacy to one over the other. any historian worth the name, the two processes of what econo- The historian starts with a provisional selection of facts, and mists call' input' and' output' go on simultaneously and are, in a provisional interpretation in the light of which that selection practice, parts of a single process. If you try to separate them, has been made - by others as well as by himself. As he works, 30 WHAT IS HISTORY? 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 2 Society and the Individual 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 _1: HE question which comes first - society or the individual - is futile; the facts without their historian are dead and meaning- like the question about the hen and the egg. Whether you treat it less. My first answer therefore to the question' What is history ?' a logical or as a historical question, you can make no statement is that it is a continuous process of interaction between the about it, one way or the other, which does not have to be cor- historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the by an opposite, and equally one-sided, statement. Society present and the past. and the individual are inseparable; they are necessary and com- plementary to each other, not opposites. 'No man is an island, entire of itself,' in Donne's famous words:' every man is a piece oi the continent, a part of the main.'1 That is an aspect of the ' jtfttth. On the other hand, take the dictum of J. S. Mill, the classical individualist: 'Men are not, when brought together, 'Converted into another kind of substance.'2 Of course not. But the fallacy is to suppose that they existed, or had any kind of > paSjstance, before being 'brought together'. As soon as we are born, the world gets to work on us and transforms us from H Hifcrely biological into social units. Every human being at every | flfegge of history or pre-history is born into a society and from his $ fiirliest years is moulded by that society. The language which »; ie speaks is not an individual inheritance, but a social acquisition % from the group in which he grows up. Both language and en- l^^tfconment help to determine the character of his thought; his pf earliest ideas come to him from others. As has been well said, *?>$l*fc individual apart from society would be both speechless and , mindless. The lasting fascination of the Robinson Crusoe myth / js due to its attempt to imagine an individual independent of Society. The attempt breaks down. Robinson is not an abstract individual, but an Englishman from York; he carries his Bible 1. Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, No. xvii. 2. J. S. Mill, A System of Logic, vn, 1. 31 86 WHAT IS HISTORY? historians - belong to this category of 'literary intellectuals'. They are so busy telling us that history is not a science, and ex- plaining what it cannot and should not be or do, that they have 4 Causation in History no time for its achievements and its potentialities. The other way to heal the rift is to promote a profounder under- standing of the identity of aim between scientists and historians; and this is the main value of the new and growing interest in the IF milk is set to boil in a saucepan, it boils over. I do not know, history and philosophy of science. Scientists, social scientists, and have never wanted to know, why this happens; if pressed, I and historians are all engaged in different branches of the same should probably attribute it to a propensity in milk to boil over, study: the study of man and his environment, of the effects of which is true enough but explains nothing. But then I am not a man on his environment and of his environment on man. The natural scientist. In the same way, one can read, or even write, object of the study is the same: to increase man's understanding about the events of the past without wanting to know why they of, and mastery over, his environment. The presuppositions happened, or be content to say that the Second World War and the methods of the physicist, the geologist, the psychologist, occurred because Hitler wanted war, which is true enough but and the historian differ widely in detail; nor do I wish to commit explains nothing. But one should not then commit the solecism myself to the proposition that, in order to be more scientific, the of calling oneself a student of history or a historian. The study historian must follow more closely the methods of physical of history is a study of causes. The historian, as I said at the science. But historian and physical scientist are united in the end of my last lecture, continuously asks the question' Why ?'; fundamental purpose of seeking to explain, and in the funda- and so long as he hopes for an answer, he cannot rest. The great mental procedure of question and answer. The historian, like historian - or perhaps I should say more broadly, the great any other scientist, is an animal who incessantly asks the thinker - is the man who asks the question ' Why ?' about new question 'Why ?' In my next lecture I shall examine the ways things or in new contexts. in which he puts the question and in which he attempts to Herodotus, the father of history, defined his purpose in the answer it. opening of his work: to preserve a memory of the deeds of the Greeks and the barbarians, 'and in particular, beyond every- thing else, to give the cause of their fighting one another'. He found few disciples in the ancient world: even Thucydides has been accused of having no clear conception of causation.1 But when in the eighteenth century the foundations of modern historiography began to be laid, Montesquieu, in his Consider- ations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and of their Rise and Decline, took as his starting-point the principles that 'there are general causes, moral or physical, which operate in every monarchy, raise it, maintain it, or overthrow it', and that I. F. M. Cornford, Thucydides Mythistoncus, passim. 88 WHAT IS HISTORY? CAUSATION IN HISTORY 89 'all that occurs is subject to these causes'. A few years later in more profitable for present purposes to stress what is common the Esprit des his he developed and generalized this idea. It was to all kinds of cause rather than what separates them. For myself, absurd to suppose that 'blind fate has produced all the effects I shall be content to use the word 'cause' in the popular sense which we see in the world'. Men were 'not governed uniquely and neglect these particular refinements. by their fantasies'; their behaviour followed certain laws or Let us begin by asking what the historian in practice does principles derived from 'the nature of things'. 1 For nearly 200 when he is confronted by the necessity of assigning causes to years after that, historians and philosophers of history were events. The first characteristic of the historian's approach to the busily engaged in an attempt to organize the past experience of problem of cause is that he will commonly assign several causes mankind by discovering the causes of historical events and the to the same event. Marshall the economist once wrote that laws which governed them. Sometimes the causes and the laws 'people must be warned off by every possible means from con- were thought of in mechanical, sometimes in biological, terms, sidering the action of any one cause... without taking account sometimes as metaphysical, sometimes as economic, sometimes of the others whose effects are commingled with it '.* The exam- as psychological. But it was accepted doctrine that history con- ination candidate who, in answering the question 'Why did sisted in marshalling the events of the past in an orderly sequence revolution break out in Russia in 1917 ?', offered only one cause, of cause and effect.' If you have nothing to tell us', wrote Vol- would be lucky to get a third class. The historian deals in a taire in his article on history for the Encyclopaedia, 'except that multiplicity of causes. If he were required to consider the causes one barbarian succeeded another on the banks of the Oxus and of the Bolshevik revolution, he might name Russia's successive Jaxartes, what is that to us ?' In the last years the picture has military defeats, the collapse of the Russian economy under been somewhat modified. Nowadays, for reasons discussed in pressure of war, the effective propaganda of the Bolsheviks, the my last lecture, we no longer speak of historical 'laws'; and failure of the Tsarist government to solve the agrarian problem, even the word 'cause' has gone out of fashion, partly owing to the concentration of an impoverished and exploited proletariat certain philosophical ambiguities into which I need not enter, in the factories of Petrograd, the fact that Lenin knew his own and partly owing to its supposed association with determinism, mind and nobody on the other side did - in short, a random to which I will come presently. Some people therefore speak not jumble of economic, political, ideological, and personal causes, of' cause' in history, but of' explanation' or' interpretation', or of long-term and short-term causes. of 'the logic of the situation', or of 'the inner logic of events' But this brings us at once to the second characteristic of the (this comes from Dicey), or reject the causal approach (why it historian's approach. The candidate who, in reply to our ques- happened) in favour of the functional approach (how it hap- tion, was content to set out one after the other a dozen causes of pened), though this seems inevitably to involve the question the Russian revolution and leave it at that, might get a second how it came to happen, and so leads us back to the question class, but scarcely a first; 'well-informed, but unimaginative' 'Why?' Other people distinguish between different kinds of would probably be the verdict of the examiners. The true cause - mechanical, biological, psychological, and so forth - historian, confronted with this list of causes of his own com- and regard historical cause as a category of its own. Though piling, would feel a professional compulsion to reduce it to some of these distinctions are in some degree valid, it may be order, to establish some hierarchy of causes which would fix 1. De I'esprit des bis, Preface and ch. I. I. Memorials of Alfred Marshall, ed. A. C. Pigou (1925), p. 428. 90 WHAT IS HISTORY? CAUSATION IN HISTORY 91 their relation to one another, perhaps to decide which cause, or compelled, like the scientist, to simplify the multiplicity of his which category of causes, should be regarded' in the last resort' answers, to subordinate one answer to another, and to introduce or 'in the final analysis' (favourite phrases of historians) as the some order and unity into the chaos of happenings and the chaos ultimate cause, the cause of all causes. This is his interpretation of specific causes. 'One God, one Law, one Element, and one of his theme; the historian is known by the causes which he far-off Divine Event'; or Henry Adams's quest for 'some great invokes. Gibbon attributed the decline and fall of the Roman generalization which would finish one's clamour to be edu- empire to the triumph of barbarism and religion. The English cated'1 - these read nowadays like old-fashioned jokes. But the Whig historians of the nineteenth century attributed the rise of fact remains that the historian must work through the simpli- British power and prosperity to the development of political fication, as well as through the multiplication, of causes. History, institutions embodying the principles of constitutional liberty. like science, advances through this dual and apparently con- Gibbon and the English nineteenth-century historians have an tradictory process. old-fashioned look today, because they ignore the economic At this point I must reluctantly turn aside to deal with two causes which modern historians have moved into the forefront. savoury red herrings which have been drawn across our path - Every historical argument revolves round the question of the one labelled 'Determinism in History; or the Wickedness of priority of causes. Hegel', the other 'Chance in History; or Cleopatra's Nose'. Henri Poincare, in the work which I quoted in my last lecture, First I must say a word or two about how they come to be here. noted that science was advancing simultaneously 'towards Professor Karl Popper, who in the 1930s in Vienna wrote a variety and complexity' and 'towards unity and simplicity', weighty work on the new look in science (recently translated and that this dual and apparently contradictory process was a into English under the title The Logic of Scientific Enquiry), pub- necessary condition of knowledge.1 This is no less true of his- lished in English during the war two books of a more popular tory. The historian, by expanding and deepening his research, character: The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Poverty of constantly accumulates more and more answers to the question, Historicism.2 They were written under the strong emotional 'Why?' The proliferation in recent years of economic, social, influence of the reaction against Hegel, who was treated, to- cultural, and legal history - not to mention fresh insights into gether with Plato, as the spiritual ancestor of Nazism, and the complexities of political history, and the new techniques of against the rather shallow Marxism which was the intellectual psychology and statistics - have enormously increased the num- climate of the British Left in the 1930s. The principal targets ber and range of our answers. When Bertrand Russell observed were the allegedly determinist philosophies of history of Hegel that 'every advance in a science takes us further away from the and Marx grouped together under the opprobrious name of crude uniformities which are first observed into a greater 'Historicism'.3 In 1954 Sir Isaiah Berlin published his essay on differentiation of antecedent and consequent, and into a con- tinually wider circle of antecedents recognized as relevant',2 he 1. The Education of Henry Adams (Boston, 1928), p. 224. accurately described the situation in history. But the historian, 2. The Poverty of Historicism was first published in book form in in virtue of his urge to understand the past, is simultaneously I957J but consists of articles originally published in 1944 and 1945. 3. I have avoided the word ' historicism', except in one or two 1. H. Poincare, La Science et Vhypothese (1902), pp. 202-3. places where precision was not required, since Professor Popper's 2. B. Russell, Mysticism and Logic (1918), p. 188. widely read writings on the subject have emptied the term of precise 92 WHAT IS HISTORY? CAUSATION IN HISTORY 93 Historical Inevitability. He dropped the attack on Plato, perhaps failing to recognize the role of accident in history. It is perhaps out of some lingering respect for that ancient pillar of the Oxford unfair to hold Sir Isaiah responsible for his disciples. Even when Establishment1; and he added to the indictment the argument, he talks nonsense, he earns our indulgence by talking it in an not found in Popper, that the 'historicism' of Hegel and Marx engaging and attractive way. The disciples repeat the nonsense, is objectionable because, by explaining human actions in causal and fail to make it attractive. In any case, there is nothing new terms, it implies* a denial of human free will, and encourages in all this. Charles Kingsley, not the most distinguished of our historians to evade their supposed obligation (of which I spoke Regius Professors of Modern History, who had probably never in my last lecture) to pronounce moral condemnation on the read Hegel or heard of Marx, spoke in his inaugural lecture in Charlemagnes, Napoleons, and Stalins of history. Otherwise i860 of man's 'mysterious power of breaking the laws of his not much has changed. But Sir Isaiah Berlin is a deservedly own being' as proof that no 'inevitable sequence' could exist popular and widely-read writer. During the past five or six in history.1 But fortunately we have forgotten Kingsley. It is years, almost everyone in this country or in the United States Professor Popper and Sir Isaiah Berlin who between them who has written an article about history, or even a serious have flogged this very dead horse back into a semblance of review of a historical work, has cocked a knowing snook at Hegel life; and some patience will be required to clear up the and Marx and determinism, and pointed out the absurdity of muddle. I. The attack on Plato as the first Fascist originated, however, in a series of broadcasts by an Oxford man, R. H. Grossman, Plato Today First then let me take determinism, which I will define - I (1937). hope, uncontroversially - as the belief that everything that hap- pens has a cause or causes, and could not have happened differ- meaning. Constant insistence on the definition of terms is pedantic. ently unless something in the cause or causes had also been But one must know what one is talking about, and Professor Popper different.2 Determinism is a problem not of history, but of all uses 'historicism' as a catch-all for any opinion about history which human behaviour. The human being whose actions have no he dislikes, including some which seem to me sound and others which cause and are therefore undetermined is as much an abstraction are, I suspect, held by no serious writer today. As he admits (The Poverty of Historicism, p. 3), he invents 'historicist' arguments which as the individual outside society whom we discussed in a previ- have never been used by any known 'historicist'. In his writing, ous lecture. Professor Popper's assertion that 'everything is historicism covers both doctrines which assimilate history to science, possible in human affairs'3 is either meaningless or false. No- and doctrines which sharply differentiate the two. In The Open Society, body in ordinary life believes or can believe this. The axiom that Hegel, who avoided prediction, is treated as the high-priest of his- everything has a cause is a condition of our capacity to under- toricism; in the introduction to The Poverty of Historicism, historicism is described a s ' an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their principal aim'. Hitherto 'historicism' has 1. C. Kingsley, The Limits of Exact Science as Applied to History been commonly used as the English version of the German 'Historis- (i860), p. 22. mus'; now Professor Popper distinguishes 'historicism' from 'histor- 2. 'Determinism... means... that, the data being what they are, ism', thus adding a further element of confusion to the already whatever happens happens definitely and could not be different. To confused usage of the term. M. C. D'Arcy, The Sense of History: hold that it could, means only that it would if the data were different' Secular and Sacred (1959), p. H, uses the word 'historicism' as (S. W. Alexander in Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, 1936, p. 18). 'identical with a philosophy of history'. 3. K. R. Popper, The Open Soae'y (2nd ed., 1952), ii, p. 197. 94 WHAT IS HISTORY? CAUSATION IN HISTORY 95 stand what is going on around us. 1 The nightmare quality of human affairs ? I suspect that you would not. On the contrary, Kafka's novels lies in the fact that nothing that happens has any you would probably say something like: 'Poor Smith! You apparent cause, or any cause that can be ascertained: this leads know, of course, his father died in a mental hospital,' or 'Poor to the total disintegration of the human personality, which is Smith! He must have been having more trouble with his wife.' based on the assumption that events have causes, and that In other words, you would attempt to diagnose the cause of enough of these causes are ascertainable to build up in the Smith's apparently causeless behaviour, in the firm conviction human mind a pattern of past and present sufficiently coherent that some cause there must be. By so doing you would, I fear, to serve as a guide to action. Everyday life would be impossible incur the wrath of Sir Isaiah Berlin, who would bitterly com- unless one assumed that human behaviour was determined by plain that, by providing a causal explanation of Smith's be- causes which are in principle ascertainable. Once upon a time haviour, you had swallowed Hegel's and Marx's deterministic some people thought it blasphemous to inquire into the causes assumption, and shirked your obligation to denounce Smith as of natural phenomena, since these were obviously governed by a cad. But nobody in ordinary life takes this view, or supposes the divine will. Sir Isaiah Berlin's objection to our explaining that either determinism or moral responsibility is at stake. The why human beings acted as they did, on the ground that these logical dilemma about free will and determinism does not arise actions are governed by the human will, belongs to the same in real life. It is not that some human actions are free and others order of ideas, and perhaps indicates that the social sciences are determined. The fact is that all human actions are both free and in the same stage of development today as were the natural determined, according to the point of view from which one con- sciences when this kind of argument was directed against them. siders them. The practical question is different again. Smith's Let us see how we handle this problem in everyday life. As action had a cause, or a number of causes; but in so far as it was you go about your daily affairs, you are in the habit of meeting caused not by some external compulsion, but by the compulsion Smith. You greet him with an amiable, but pointless, remark of his own personality, he was morally responsible, since it is a about the weather, or about the state of college or university condition of social life that normal adult human beings are business; he replies with an equally amiable and pointless morally responsible for their own personality. Whether to hold remark about the weather or the state of business. But supposing him responsible in this particular case is a matter for your that one morning Smith, instead of answering your remark in practical judgement. But, if you do, this does not mean that you his usual way, were to break into a violent diatribe against your regard his action as having no cause: cause and moral responsi- personal appearance or character. Would you shrug your shoul- bility are different categories. An Institute and Chair of Crim- ders, and treat this as a convincing demonstration of the free- inology have recently been established in this university. It dom of Smith's will and of the fact that everything is possible in would not, I feel sure, occur to any of those engaged in investi- gating the causes of crime to suppose that this committed them i. c The Law of Causality is not imposed upon us by the world', but to a denial of the moral responsibility of the criminal. 'is perhaps for us the most convenient method of adapting ourselves to Now let us look at the historian. Like the ordinary man, he the world' (J. Rueff, From the Physical to the Social Sciences, Baltimore, believes that human actions have causes which are in principle 1929, p. 52). Professor Popper himself (The Logic of Scientific Enquir