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

WHAT IS HISTORY
enough, is Professor Butterfield: 'There is something in the nature of historical events
which twists the course of history in a direction that no man ever intended.’ Since 1914,
after a hundred years of only minor local wars, we have had two major world wars. It
would not be a plausible explanation of this phenomenon to maintain that more
individuals wanted war, or fewer wanted peace, in the first half of the twentieth century
than in the last three quarters of the nineteenth. It is difficult to believe that any individual
willed or desired the great economic depression of the 1930s. Yet it was indubitably
brought about by the actions of individuals, each consciously pursuing some totally
different aim. Nor does the diagnosis of a discrepancy between the intentions of the
individual and the results of his action always have to wait for the retrospective historian.
'He does not mean to go to war,' wrote Lodge of Woodrow Wilson in March 1917, 'but I
think he will be carried away by events.' It defies all the evidence, to suggest that history
can be written on the basis of 'explanations in terms of human intentions" or of accounts of
their motives given by the actors themselves, of why 'in their own estimation, they acted
as they did'. The facts of history are indeed facts about individuals, but not about actions
of individuals performed in isolation, and not about the motives, real or imaginary, from
which individuals suppose themselves to have acted. They are facts about the relations of
individuals to one another in society and about the social forces which produce from the
actions of individuals results often at variance with, and sometimes opposite to, the results
which they themselves intended.
One of the serious errors of Collingwood's view of history which I discussed in my low
lecture was to assume that the thought behind the act, which the historian was called on to
investigate, was the thought of the individual actor. This is a false assumption. What the
historian is called on to investigate is what lies behind the act; and to this the conscious
thought or motive of the individual actor may be quite irrelevant.
Here I should say something about the role of the rebel or dissident in history. To set up
the popular picture of the individual in revolt against society is to reintroduce the false
anti- thesis between society and the individual. No society is fully homogeneous. Every
society is an arena of social conflicts, and those individuals who range themselves against
existing authority are no less products and reflexions of the society than those who uphold
it. Richard II and Catherine the Great represented powerful social forces in the England of
the fourteenth century and in the Russia of the eighteenth century: but so also did Wat
Tyler and Pugachev, the leader of the great serf rebellion. Monarchs and rebels alike were
the product of the specific conditions of their age and country. To describe Wat Tyler and
Pugachev as individuals in revolt against society is a misleading simplification. If they had
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