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

WHAT IS HISTORY
trodden ground. When Sir Isaiah Berlin published a few years ago a sparkling and popular
essay entitled Historical Inevitability - to the main thesis of which I shall return later in
these lectures - he headed it with a motto, culled from the works of Mr T. S. Eliot, 'Vast
impersonal forces'; and throughout the essay he pokes fun at people who believe in 'vast
impersonal forces' rather than individuals as the decisive factor in history. What I will call
the Bad King John theory of history - the view that what matters in history is the character
and behaviour of individuals - has a long pedigree. The desire to postulate individual
genius as the creative force in history is characteristic of the primitive stages of historical
consciousness. The ancient Greeks liked to label the achievements of the past with the
names of eponymous heroes supposedly responsible for them, to attribute their epics to a
bard called Homer, and their laws and institutions to a Lycurgus or a Solon. The same
inclination reappears at the Renaissance, when Plutarch, the biographer- moralist, was
much more popular and influential a figure in the classical revival than the historians of
antiquity. In this country, in particular, we all learned this theory, so to speak, at our
mother's knee; and today we should probably recognize that there is something childish, or
at any rate childlike, about it. It had some plausibility in days when society was simpler,
and public affairs appeared to be run by a handful of known individuals. It clearly does not
fit the more complex society of our times; and the birth in the nineteenth century of the
new science of sociology was a response to this growing complexity. Yet the old tradition
dies hard. At the beginning of this century, 'history Is the biography of great men' was still
a reputable dictum. Only ten years ago a distinguished American historian accused his
colleagues, perhaps not too seriously, of the 'mass murder of historical characters) by
treating them as 'puppets of social and economic forces'. Addicts of this theory tend
nowadays to be shy about it; but, after some searching, I found an excellent contemporary
statement of it in the introduction to one of Miss Wedgwood's books.
The behaviour of men as individuals [she writes] is more interesting to me than their
behaviour as groups or classes. History can be written with this bias as well as another; it
is neither more, nor less, misleading.... This book.., is an attempt to understand how these
men felt and why, in their own estimation, they acted as they did.'
This statement is precise; and, since Miss Wedgwood is a popular writer, many people, I
am sure, think as she does. Dr Rowse tells us, for instance, that the Elizabethan system
broke down because James I was incapable of understanding it, and that the English
revolution of the seventeenth century was an 'accidental' event due to the stupidity of the
two first Stuart kings. Even Sir James Neale, a more austere historian than Dr Rowse,
sometimes seems more eager to express his admiration for Queen Elizabeth than to
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