Edward Carr And History Essay, Research Paper
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. (l ) 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, never-the-less 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 universally 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