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

WHAT IS HISTORY
Butterfield was categorical and severe:
The study of the past with one eye, so to speak, upon the present is the source of all sins
and sophistries in history. is the essence of what we mean by the word 'unhistorical’.
Twelve years elapsed. The fashion for iconoclasm went out. Professor Butterfield's
country was engaged in a war often said to be fought in defence of the constitutional
liberties embodied in the Whig tradition, under a great leader who constantly invoked the
past 'with one eye, so to speak, upon the present'. In a small book called The Englishman
and His History published in 1944, Professor Butterfield not only decided that the Whig
interpretation of history was the 'English' interpretation, but spoke enthusiastically of ‘the
Englishman's alliance with his history' and of the 'marriage between the present and the
past'. To draw attention to these reversals of outlook is not an unfriendly criticism. It is not
my purpose to refute the proto-Butterfield with the deutero-Butterfield, or to confront
Professor Butterfield drunk with Professor Butterfield sober. I am fully aware that, if
anyone took the trouble to peruse some of the things I wrote before, during, and after the
war, he would have no difficulty at all in convincing me of contradictions and
inconsistencies at least as glaring as any I have detected in others. Indeed, I am not sure
that I should envy any historian who could honestly claim to have lived through the earthshaking
events of the past fifty years without some radical modifications of his outlook.
My purpose is merely to show how closely the work of the historian mirrors the society in
which he works. It is not merely the events that are in flux. The historian himself is in
flux. When you take up a historical work, it is not enough to look for the author's name on
the title-page: look also for the date of publication or writing - it is sometimes even more
revealing. If the philosopher is right in telling us that we cannot step into the same river
twice, it is perhaps equally true, and for the same reason, that two books cannot be written
by the same historian.
And, if we move for a moment from the individual historian to what may be called broad
trends in historical writing, the extent to which the historian is the product of his society
becomes all the more apparent. In the nineteenth century, British historians with scarcely
an exception regarded the course of history as a demonstration of the principle of progress:
they expressed the ideology of a society in a condition of remarkably rapid progress.
History was full of meaning for British historians, so long as it seemed to be going our
way; now that it has taken a wrong turning, belief in the meaning of history has become a
heresy. After the First World War, Toynbee made a desperate attempt to replace a linear
view of history by a cyclical theory - the characteristic ideology of a society in decline.
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