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

WHAT IS HISTORY
Trevor-Roper, 'historical problems were always, and only, problems -of individual
behaviour and individual eccentricity. ... Historical problems, the problems of politics and
society, he never sought to answer, or even to ask.'" Nobody is obliged to write or read
history; and excellent books can be written about the past which are not history. But I
think we are entitled by convention - as I propose to do in these lectures - to reserve the
word 'history' for the process of inquiry into the past of man in society.
The second point, i.e. that history is concerned to inquire why individuals 'in their own
estimation, acted as they did', seems at first sight extremely odd; and I suspect that Miss
Wedgwood like other sensible people, does not practise what she preaches. If she does,
she must write some very queer history. Everyone knows today that human beings do not
always, or perhaps even habitually, act from motives of which they are fully conscious or
which they are willing to avow; and to exclude insight into unconscious or unavowed
motives is surely a way of going about one's work with one eye wilfully shut. This ~s,
however, what, according to some people, historians ought to do. The point is this. So long
as you are content to say that the badness of King John consisted in his greed or stupidity
or ambition to play the tyrant, you are speaking in terms of individual qualities which are
comprehensible even at the level of nursery history. But, once you begin to say that Ring
John was the unconscious tool of vested interests opposed to the rise to power of the
feudal barons, you not only introduce a more complicated and sophisticated view of Ring
John's badness, but you appear to suggest that historical events are determined not by the
conscious actions of individuals, but by some extraneous and all-powerful forces guiding
their unconscious will. This is, of course, nonsense. So far as I am concerned, I have no
belief in Divine Providence, World Spirit, Manifest Destiny, History with a capital H, or
any other of the abstractions which have sometimes been sup- posed to guide the course of
events; and I should endorse without qualification the comment of Marx:
History does nothing, it possesses no immense wealth, fights no battles. It is rather man,
real living man who does everything, who possesses and fights.
The two remarks which I have to make on this question have nothing to do with any
abstract view of history, and are based on purely empirical observation.
The first is that history is to a considerable extent a matter of numbers. Carlyle was
responsible for the unfortunate assertion that 'history is the biography of great men'. But
listen to him at his most eloquent and in his greatest historical work:
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