What is History?

E.H CARR

Edward Hallett Carr's contribution to the study of Soviet history is widely regarded as highly distinguished.
In all probability very few would argue against this assessment of his multi-volume history of Soviet
Russia. For the majority of historians he pretty much got the story straight. However, for several years
there was disagreement about his contribution to the analytical philosophy of history. His ideas were
outlined in What is History? first published in 1961. For many today What is History? is the most influential
book on history thinking published in Britain this century. For many years, however, the methodologically
foundationalist wing of the history profession regarded the book as espousing a dangerous relativism.
This has now all changed. Arguably the central ideas in the book constitute today's mainstream thinking
on British historical practice. Most British commentators, if not that many in America, acknowledge the
significance and influence of the book. In this review I want to establish why it is What is History? now
occupies a central place in British thinking about the relationship between the historian and the past. I
conclude that the important message of What is History? - fundamentally misconceived though I believe it
to be - lies in its rejection of an opportunity to re-think historical practice. This failure has been most
significant in rationalising the epistemologically conservative historical thinking that pervades among
British historians today.

John Tosh, in the most recent edition of his own widely read methodological primer The Pursuit of
History describes Carr's book as "still unsurpassed as a stimulating and provocative statement by a
radically inclined scholar" (Tosh 1991: 234). Keith Jenkins, much less inclined to view Carr as a radical
scholar, nevertheless confirms the consequential nature of What is History? suggesting that, along with
Geoffrey Elton's The Practice of History both texts are still popularly seen as "'essential introductions' to
the 'history question"' (Jenkins 1995: 1-2). Jenkins concludes both Carr and Elton "have long set the
agenda for much if not all of the crucially important preliminary thinking about the question of what is
history" (Jenkins 1995: 3).

So, according to Tosh and Jenkins, we remain, in Britain at least, in a lively dialogue with What is
History?. Why should this be? The reason is, as most British historians know, to be found in the position
Carr took on the nature of historical knowledge. A position that brought him into a long conflict with,
among others, the Tudor historian and senior Ambassador at the Court of 'Proper' Objectivist History
Geoffrey Elton. Again I turn to John Tosh for his comment that "The controversy between Carr and Elton
is the best starting-point for the debate about the standing of historical knowledge" (Tosh 1991: 236). Until
Jenkins' recent re-appraisal of Carr's philosophy of history, Carr had been misconstrued almost univer
among British historians as standing for a very distinctive relativist, if not indeed a sceptical conception of
the functioning of the historian.

Explaining Carr's 'radicalism' the philosopher of history Michael Stanford has claimed Carr "insisted that
the historian cannot divorce himself from the outlook and interests of his age (sic.)" (Stanford 1994: 86).
Stanford quotes Carr's own claim that the historian "is part of history" with a particular "angle of vision
over the past" (Stanford 1994: 86). As Stanford points out, Carr's "first answer...to the question 'What is
History?"' is that it is a continuous "process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending
dialogue between the present and the past". While this was not a fresh insight with Carr, it still carved him
out for a number of years as someone with a novel stance. However, over time, the effect of his argument
(which generated such initial notoriety) was to increasingly balance the excesses of the hard core
empiricists. In What is History? Carr propelled British historiography toward a new equilibrium - one that
pivoted on a new epistemological certitude.

The claim to epistemological radicalism on behalf of Carr does not seem to me especially convincing.
Why? My doubts about the message in What is History? is the product of my present intellectual
situatedness as a historian (a writer about the past). Today, with our greater awareness of the frailties
and failures of representationalism, referentialism, and inductive inference, more and more history writing
is based on the assumption that we can know nothing genuinely truthful about the reality of the past. It
would be tempting, but wholly incorrect, to say that history's pendulum has swung far more to the notion
of history as a construction or fabrication of the historian. Rather, what has happened, is that our
contemporary conditions of existence have created a much deeper uncertainty about the nature of
knowledge-creation and its (mis-)uses in the humanities. It is not about swings in intellectual fashion.

It follows, a growing number of historians believe that we don't 'discover' (the truthful?' 'actual?' 'real?'
'certain?') patterns in apparently contingent events because, instead, we unavoidably impose our own
hierarchies of significance on them (this is what we believe/want to see/read in the past). I do not think
many historians today are naive realists. Few accept there must be given meaning in the evidence. While
we may all agree at the event-level that something happened at a particular time and place in the past, its
significance (its meaning as we narrate it) is provided by the historian. Meaning is not immanent in the
event itself. Moreover, the challenge to the distinction of fact and fiction as we configure our historical
narratives, and further acknowledgments of the cognitive power of rhetoric, style and trope (metaphors
are arguments and explanations) provide not only a formal challenge to traditional empiricism, but forces
us to acknowledge that as historians we are making moral choices as we describe past reality.

Does all this add up to a more fundamental criticism of historical knowing than Carr imagined in What is
History?? I think so. If this catalogue is what historical relativism means today, I believe it provides a
much larger agenda for the contemporary historian than Carr's (apparently radical at the time) acceptance
that the historian is in a dialogue with the facts, or that sources only become evidence when used by the
historian. As Jenkins has pointed out at some length, Carr ultimately accepts the epistemological model
of historical explanation as the definitive mode for generating historical understanding and meaning
(Jenkins 1995: 1-6, 43-63). This fundamentally devalues the currency of what he has to say, as it does of
all reconstructionist empiricists who follow his lead. This judgment is not, of course, widely shared by
them. For illustration, rather misunderstanding the nature of "semiotics - the postmodern?" as he
querulously describes it, it is the claim of the historian of Latin America Alan Knight that Carr remains
significant today precisely because of his warning a generation ago to historians to "interrogate
documents and to display a due scepticism as regards their writer's motives" (Knight 1997: 747). To
maintain, as Knight does, that Carr is thus in some way pre-empting the postmodern challenge to
historical knowing is unhelpful to those who would seriously wish to establish Carr's contribution in What
is History?. It would be an act of substantial historical imagination to proclaim Carr as a precursor of post-
modernist history.

Carr is also not forgotten by political philosopher and critic of post-modernist history Alex Callinicos, who
deploys him somewhat differently. In his defence of theory in interpretation (Marxist constructionism in
this case), Callinicos begins with the contribution of a variety of so called relativist historians of which Carr
is one (others include Croce, Collingwood, Becker and Beard). Acknowledging the "discursive character
of historical facts" (Callinicos 1995: 76) Callinicos quotes Carr's opinion (following Collingwood) that the
facts of history never come to us pure, but are always refracted through the mind of the historian. For
Callinicos this insight signals the problem of the subjectivity of the historian, but doesn't diminish the role
of empirically derived evidence in the process of historical study.

Of course Carr tried to fix the status of evidence with his own objections to what he understood to be the
logic of Collingwood's sceptical position. Collingwood's logic could, claims Carr, lead to the dangerous
idea that there is no certainty or intrinsicality in historical meaning - there are only (what I would call) the
discourses of historians - a situation which Carr refers to as "total scepticism" - a situation where history
ends up as "something spun out of the human brain" suggesting there can be no "objective historical
truth" (Carr 1961: 26). Carr's objectivist anchor is dropped here. He explicitly rejected Nietzsche's notion
that (historical?) truth is effectively defined by fitness for purpose, and the basis for Carr's opinion was his
belief in the power of empiricism to deliver the truth, whether it fits or not (Carr 1961: 27). Historians
ultimately serve the evidence, not vice versa. This guiding precept thus excludes the possibility that "one
interpretation is as good as another" even when we cannot (as we cannot in writing history) guarantee
'objective or truthful interpretation'.
Carr wished to reinforce the notion that he was a radical. As he said in the preface to the 1987 Second
Edition of What is History? "...in recent years I have increasingly come to see myself, and to be seen, as
an intellectual dissident' (Carr 1987: 6). But his contribution really lies in the manner in which he failed to
be an epistemological radical. In the precise manner of his return to the Cartesian and foundationalist fold
lies the importance of What is History? The book's distinction resides in its exploration and rapid rejection
of epistemological scepticism - what I call post-empiricism. From the first chapter Carr accepts relativism
would an unacceptable price to pay for imposing the historian on the past beyond his narrow definition of
dialogue. Dialogue even cast as interrogation is all very well and good, but an intervention that cannot
ultimately become objective is quite another matter. After all, Carr argues, it is quite possible to draw a
convincing line between the two.

While confirming the ever present interaction between the historian and the events she is describing, Carr
was ultimately unwilling to admit that the written history produced by this interaction could possibly be a
fictive enterprise - historians if they do it properly, (their inference isn't faulty and/or they don't choose to
lie about the evidence) will probably get the story straight. This argument still appeals to many historians
today for whom the final defence against the relativism of deconstructionism lies in the technical and
forensic study of the sources through the process of their authentication and verification, comparison and
colligation.

In Britain, most realist-inspired and empiricist historians thus happily accept the logical rationalisation of
Carr's position - that of the provisional nature of historical interpretation. This translates (inevitably and
naturally it is argued) as historical revisionism (re-visionism?). The provisionality of historical interpretation
is a perfectly normal and natural historian's state-of-affairs that depends on discovering new evidence
(and revisiting old evidence for that matter), treating it to fresh modes analysis and conceptualisation, and
constantly re- contextualising it. For illustration, in my working career (since the early 1970s) the omission
of women in history has been 'rectified', and now has moved through several historiographical layers to
reach its present highly sophisticated level of debate about the possibility for a feminist epistemology(ies).
So, new evidence and new theories can always offer new interpretations, but revisionist vistas still
correspond to the real story of the past because they correspond to the found facts.

In fact, with each revision (narrative version?) it is presumed by some that we know better or see more
clearly the nature of the past. So, we are for ever inching our way closer to its truth? Arthur Marwick
makes the claim that by standing on "...the powerful shoulders of our illustrious predecessors" we are
able both to advance "the quality" and "the 'truthfulness' of history" (Marwick 1970: 21). Standing on the
shoulders of other historians is, perhaps, a precarious position not only literally but also in terms of the
philosophy of history. No matter how extensive the revisionary interpretation, the empiricist argument
maintains that the historical facts remain, and thus we cannot destroy the knowability of past reality even
as we re-emphasise or re- configure our descriptions. Marxists and Liberals alike sustain this particular
non sequitur which means they can agree on the facts, legitimately reach divergent interpretations and, it
follows, be objective. The truth of the past actually exists for them only in their own versions. For both,
however, the walls of empiricism remain unbreached. The (empiricist-inspired) Carr- endorsed
epistemological theory of knowledge argues that the past is knowable via the evidence, and remains so
even as it is constituted into the historical narrative. This is because the 'good' historian is midwife to the
facts, and they remain sovereign. They dictate the historian's narrative structure, her form of
argumentation, and ultimately determine her ideological position.

For Carr, as much as for those who will not tarry even for the briefest of moments with the notion of
epistemological scepticism, Hayden White's argument that the historical narrative is (a story) as much
invented as found, is inadmissible because without the existence of a determinate meaning in the
evidence, facts cannot emerge as aspects of the truth. Most historians today, and l think it is reasonable
to argue Carr also endorses this view in What is History?, accept Louis Mink's judgment that "if alternative
emplotments are based only on preference for one poetic trope rather than another, then no way remains
for comparing one narrative structure with another in respect of their truth claims as narratives" (Vann
1993: 1). But Carr's unwillingness to accept the ultimate logic of, in this instance, the narrative
impositionalism of the historian, and his failure to recognise the representational collapse of history
writing, even as he acknowledges that "the use of language forbids him to be neutral" (Carr 1961: 25),
has helped blind many among the present generation of British historians to the problematic
epistemological nature of the historical enterprise.

Take the vexed issue of facts. Carr's answer to the question "What is a historical fact?" is to argue, pace
Collingwood (Collingwood 1994: 245) that facts arise through "...an a priori decision of the historian" (Carr
1961: 11). It is how the historian then arranges the facts as derived from the evidence, and influenced by
her knowledge of the context, that constitutes historical meaning. For Carr a fact is like sack, it will not
stand up until you put 'something' in it. The 'something' is a question addressed to the evidence. As Carr
insists, "The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give
the floor, and in what order or context" (Carr 1961: 11).

It is easy to see why Elton and others like Arthur Marwick misconstrue the (Collingwood-) Carr position
when Carr says such things because, if pushed a little further allows historians to run the risk of
subjectivity through their intervention in the reconstruction of the past. Carr, of course, denies that risk
through his objectivist bottom line. There is clear daylight between this position and that occupied by
Hayden White. It is that while historical events may be taken as given, what Carr calls historical facts are
derived within the process of narrative construction. They are not accurate representations of the story
immanent in the evidence and which have been brought forth (set free?) as a result of the toil, travail, and
exertion of the forensic and juridical historian.

Since the 1960's Carr's arguments have moved to a central place in British thinking and now constitute
the dominant paradigm for moderate reconstructionist historians. This is because, as Keith Jenkins has
demonstrated, Carr pulls back from the relativism which his own logic, as well as that of Collingwood,
pushes him. In the end Carr realises how close to the postempiricist wind he is running, so he rejects
Collingwood's insistence on the empathic and constitutive historian, replacing her with another who, while
accepting the model of a dialogue between past events and future trends, still believes a sort of objectivity
can be achieved. This then is not the crude Eltonian position. It is a claim to objectivity because it is
position leavened by a certain minimum self-reflexivity. This is a conception of the role of the historian
affirmed by the most influential recent American commentators Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret
Jacob who claim there can be no postmodern history by repeating (almost exactly) Carr's fastidious
empiricist position. Carr received only one oblique reference in their book Telling the Truth About History
which may help explain why they re-packed Carr's position as practical realism (Appleby, Hunt and Jacob
1994: 237, 241-309 passim). Is it that his position is so central to the intellectual culture of mainstream
history that it wasn't even necessary to reference him? In the early 1990's the historian Andrew Norman
endorsed the Carr mainstream position more directly by arguing writing history necessitates historians
engaging directly with the evidence "A good historian will interact dialogically with the historical record"
(Norman 1991: 132). Facts in history are thus constituted out of the evidence when the historian selects
sources contextually in order to interpret and explain that to which they refer, rather than in the narrative
about which they describe.

It is because Carr remains at the end of the day a convinced objectivist despite (or because of?) his
dalliance with relativism - that his legacy in What is History? is still so potent among British historians. His
objectivist appeal in What is History? is potent because it is not of the naive variety. We know the Carr
historian cannot stand outside history, cannot be non-ideological, cannot be disinterested, or be
unconnected to her material because she is dispassionate. But she is telling us what actually happened
because she can overcome those obstacles. She knows that the significance of the evidence is not found
solely in the evidence. The historian, as he said, "does not deal in absolutes of this kind" (Carr 1961:
120). There can be no transcendental objective measures of truth. However, while accepting the "facts of
history cannot be purely objective, since they become facts of history only in virtue of the significance
attached to them by the historian" (Carr 1961: 120), Carr was forced by his naked objectivist desire to
underplay the problems of historical form and the situatedness of the historian. he did this by arguing that
the standard for objectivity in history was the historian's "sense of the direction in history" by which he
meant the historian selected facts based not on personal bias, but on the historian's ability to choose "the
right facts, or, in other words, that he applies the right standard of significance" (Carr 1961: 123).
Carr's philosophical sleight-of-hand produced the objective historian who "has a capacity to rise above the
limited vision of his own situation in society and history" and also possesses the capacity to "project his
vision into the future in such a way as to give him a m-ore profound and more lasting insight into the past
than can be attained by those historians whose outlook is entirely bounded by their own immediate
situation" (Carr 1961: 123). The objective historian is also the historian who "penetrates most deeply" into
the reciprocal process of fact and value, who understands that facts and values are not necessarily
opposites with differences in values emerging from differences of historical fact, and vice versa. This
objective historian also recognises the limitations of historical theory. As Carr says a compass "is a
valuable and indeed indispensable guide. But it is not a chart of the route" (Carr 1961: 116).

Social theory historians (constructionists) understand past events through a variety of methods statistical
and/or econometric, and/or by devising deductive covering laws, and/or by making anthropological and
sociological deductive-inductive generalisations. For hard-core reconstructionist-empiricists on the other
hand, the evidence proffers the truth only through the forensic study of its detail without question-begging
theory. These two views are compromised by Carr's insistence that the objective historian reads and
interprets the evidence at the same time and cannot avoid some form of prior conceptualisation - what he
chooses simply (or deliberately loosely?) to call "writing" (Carr 1961: 28). By this I think he means the
rapid movement between context and source which will be influenced by the structures and patterns
(theories/models/concepts of class, race, gender, and so forth) found, or discovered, in the evidence.

For Carr the evidence suggests certain appropriate explanatory models of human behaviour to the
objective historian which will then allow for ever more truthful historical explanation. This sleight-of-hand
still has a certain appeal for a good number of historians today. The American historian James D. Winn
accepts this Carr model of the objective historian when he says that deconstructionist historians "...tend to
flog extremely dead horses" as they accuse other historians of believing history is knowable, that words
reflect reality, and their un-reflexive colleagues still insist on seeing the facts of history objectively. Few
historians today, thanks to Carr, work from these principles in pursuit of, as Winn says "...the illusory Holy
Grail of objective truth" but strive only to ground "...an inevitably subjective interpretation on the best
collection of material facts we can gather" (Winn 1993: 867-68). At the end of the day, this position is not
very much different to the hard line reconstructionist-empiricist.

What Carr is doing then in What is History? is setting up the parameters of the historical method -
conceived on the ground of empiricism as a process of questions suggested to the historian by the
evidence, with answers from the evidence midwifed by the application to the evidence of testable theory
as judged appropriate. The appropriate social theory is a presumption or series of connected
presumptions, of how people in the past acted intentionally and related to their social contexts. For most
objective historians of the Carr variety, his thinking provides a more sympathetic definition of history than
the positivist one it has replaced, simply because it is more conducive to the empirical historical method,
and one which appears to be a reasoned and legitimate riposte to the deconstructive turn.

For such historians Carr also deals most satisfactorily with the tricky problem of why they choose to be
historians and write history. The motivation behind the work of the historian is found in the questions they
ask of the evidence, and it is not, automatically to be associated with any naked ideological self-
indulgence. Any worries of deconstructionists about either ideology, or inductive inference, or failures of
narrative form has little validity so long as historians do not preconceive patterns of interpretation and
order facts to fit those preconceptions. Carr would, I think, eagerly challenge the argument that historians
are incapable of writing down (reasonably) truthful narrative representations of the past. The position that
there is no uninterpreted source would not be a particularly significant argument for Carr because
historians always compare their interpretations with the evidence they have about the subject of their
inquiry. This process it is believed will then generate the (most likely and therefore the most accurate)
interpretation.

So, when we write history (according to the Carr model) our motivation is disinterestedly to re-tell the
events of the past with forms of explanation already in our minds created for us through our prior research
in the archive. 'Naturally' we are not slaves to one theory of social action or philosophy of history - unless
we fall from objectivist grace to write history as an act of faith (presumably very few of us do this? Do you
do this?). Instead we maintain our models are generally no more than 'concepts' which aid our
understanding of the evidence indeed, which grow out of the evidence. We insist our interpretations are
independent of any self-serving theory or master narrative imposed or forced on the evidence. It is the
'common sense' wish of the historian to establish the veracity and accuracy of the evidence, and then put
it all into an interpretative fine focus by employing some organising concepts as we write it. We do it like
this to discover the truth of the past.

To conclude, Carr's legacy, therefore, shades the distinction between reconstructionism and
constructionism by arguing we historians do not go about our task in two separate ways with research in
the sources for the facts, and then offering an interpretation using concepts or models of explanation.
Rather the historian sets off, as Carr says "...on a few of what I take to be the capital sources" and then
"inevitably gets the itch to write". This I take to mean to compose an interpretation and "...thereafter,
reading and writing go on simultaneously" (Carr 1961; 28). For Carr this suggests the "...untenable theory
of history as an objective compilation of facts...and an equally untenable theory of history as the
subjective product of the mind of the historian..." is much less of a problem than any hard-nosed
reconstructionists might fear. It is in fact the way in which human beings operate in everyday life, a
"...reflection of the nature of man" as Carr suggests. (Carr 1961: 29). Historians, like Everywoman and
Everyman work on the evidence and infer its most likely meaning - unlike non-historians we are blessed
with the intellectual capacity to overcome the gravitational pull of our earthly tethers.

The idée fixe of mainstream British historians today is to accept history as this inferential and
interpretative process that can achieve truth through objectivism. Getting the story straight (from the
evidence). The unresolved paradox in this is the dubious legacy of What is History?. I assume a good
number of historians recommend Carr to their students as the starting point of methodological and
philosophical sophistication, and a security vouchsafed by the symmetry between factualism, objectivism
and the dialogic historian. While I am unconvinced by its message, I think this is why What is
History? remains, for the majority of British historians, a comforting bulwark against post- constructive and
post-empirical history.