What is History / by Edward Hallett Carr - Universal History Library

WHAT IS HISTORY
- were each of them cast, so to speak, in a single social and political mould; no marked
change of outlook occurs between their earlier and later work. But some historians in
periods of rapid change have reflected in their writings not one society and one social
order, but a succession of different orders. The best example known to me of this is the
great German historian Meinecke, whose span of life and work was unusually long, and
covered a series of revolutionary and catastrophic changes in the fortunes of his country.
Here we have in effect three different Meineckes, each the spokesman; of a different
historical epoch, and each speaking through one of his three major works. The Meinecke
of Weltburgetthum and Nationalstaat, published in 1907, confidently sees the realization
of German national ideals in the Bismarckian Reich and - like many nineteenth-century
thinkers, from Mazzini onwards - identities nationalism with the highest form of
universalism: this is the product of the baroque Wilhelmine sequel to the age of Bismarck.
The Meinecke of Die idee der Staatsrason, published in 1925 speaks with the divided and
bewildered mind of the Weimar Republic: the world of politics has become an arena of
unresolved conflict between raison d'etat and a morality which is external to politics, but
which cannot in the last resort override the life and security of the state. Finally the
Meinecke of Die Entstehung des Historismus, published in 1936 when he had been swept
from his academic honours by the Nazi flood, utters a cry of despair, rejecting a
historicism which appears to recognize that 'Whatever is, is right' and tossing uneasily
between the historical relative and a super-rational absolute. Last of all, when Meinecke in
his old age had seen his country succumb to a military defeat more crushing than that of
1918, he relapsed helplessly in Die Deutsche Katastrophe of 1946 into the belief in a
history at the mercy ofblind, inexorable chance.' The psychologist or the biographer would
be interested here in Meinecke's development as an individual: what interests the historian
is the way in which Meinecke reflects back three - or even four - successive, and sharply
contrasted, periods of present time into the historical past.
Or let us take a distinguished example nearer home. In the iconoclastic 1930s, when the
Liberal Party had just been snuffed out as an effective force in British politics, Professor
Butterfield wrote a book called The Whig Interpretation of History, which enjoyed a great
and deserved success. It was a remarkable book in many ways - not least because, though
it denounced the Whig Interpretation over some 130 pages, it did not (so far as I can
discover without the help of an index) name a single Whig except Fox, who was no
historian, or a single historian save Acton, who was no Whig But anything that the book
lacked in detail and precision it made up for in sparkling invective. The reader was left in
no doubt that the Whig interpretation was a bad thing; and one of the charges brought
against it was that it 'studies the past with reference to the present'. On this point Professor
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