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

WHAT IS HISTORY
Hunger and nakedness and nightmare oppression lying heavy on twenty-five million
hearts: this, not the wounded vanities or contradicted philosophies of philosophical
advocates, rich shopkeepers, rural noblesse, was the prime mover in the French revolution;
as the like will be in all such revolutions, in all countries."
Or, as Lenin said:’ Politics begin where the masses are; not where there are thousands, but
where there are millions, that is where serious politics begin.'' Carlyle's and Lenin's
millions were millions of individuals: there was nothing impersonal about them.
Discussions of this question sometimes confuse anonymity with impersonality. People do
not cease to be people, or individuals - individuals, because we do not know their names.
Mr Eliot's 'vast, impersonal forces' were the individuals whom Clarendon, a bolder and
franker conservative, calls 'dirty people of no name'. These nameless millions were
individuals acting more or less unconsciously, together, and constituting a social force.
The historian will not in ordinary circumstances need to take cognizance of a single
discontented peasant or discontented village. But millions of discontented peasants in
thousands of villages are a factor which no historian will ignore. The reasons which deter
Jones from getting married do not interest the historian unless the same reasons also deter
thousands of other individuals of Jones's generation, and bring about a substantial fall in a
marriage-rate: in that event, they may well be historically significant. Nor need we be
perturbed by the platitude that movements are started by minorities. All effective
movements have few leaders and a multitude of followers; but this does not mean that the
multitude is not essential to their success. Numbers count in history.
My second observation is even better attested. Writers of many different schools of
thought have concurred in remarking that the actions of individual human beings often
have results which were not intended or desired by the actors or indeed by any other
individual. The Christian believes that the individual, acting consciously for his own often
selfish ends, is the unconscious agent of God's purpose. Mandeville's 'private vices -
public benefits' was an early and deliberately paradoxical expression of this discovery.
Adam Smith's hidden hand and Hegel's 'cunning of reason', which sets individuals to work
for it and to serve its purposes, though the individuals believe themselves to be fulfilling
their own personal desires, are too familiar to require quotation. 'In the social production
of their means of production,' wrote 1Marx in the preface to his Critique of Political
Economy, ‘human beings enter into definite and necessary relations which are independent
of their will.' 'Man lives consciously for himself,' wrote Tolstoy in War and Peace,
echoing Adam Smith, ‘but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic
universal aims of humanity.' And here, to round off this anthology, which is already long
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