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

WHAT IS HISTORY
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The great man of the age is the one who can put into words the will of his age, tell his age
what its will is, and accomplish it. What he does is the heart and essence of his age; he
actualizes his age.
Dr Leavis means something like this when he says that great writers are 'significant in
terms of the human awareness they promote'. The great man is always representative
either of existing forces or of forces which he helps to create by way of challenge to
existing authority. But the higher degree of creativity may perhaps be assigned to those
great men who, like Cromwell or Lenin, helped to mould the forces which carried them to
greatness, rather than to those who, like Napoleon or Bismarck, rode to greatness on the
back of already existing forces. Nor should we forget those great men who stood so far in
advance of their own time that their greatness was recognized only by succeeding
generations. What seems to me essential is to recognize in the great man an outstanding
individual who is at once a product and an agent of the historical process, at once the
representative and the creator of social forces which change the shape of the world and the
thoughts of men.
History, then, in both senses of the word - meaning both the inquiry conducted by the
historian and the facts of the past into which he inquires - is a social process, in which
individuals are engaged as social beings; and the imaginary antithesis between society and
the individual is no more than a red herring drawn across our path to confuse our thinking.
The reciprocal process of interaction between-the historian and his facts, what I have
called the dialogue between present and past, is a dialogue not between abstract and
isolated individuals, but between the society of today and the society of yesterday.
History, in Burckhardt's words, is 'the record of what one age finds worthy of note in
another'.' The past is intelligible to us only in the light of the present; and we can fully
understand the present only in the light of the past. To enable man to understand the
society of the past, and to increase his mastery over the society of the present, is the dual
function of history.
3. History, Science, and Morality
WHEN I was very young, I was suitably impressed to learn that, appearances
notwithstanding, the whale is not a fish. Nowadays these questions of classification move
me less; and it does not worry me unduly when I am assured that history is not a science.
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