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

WHAT IS HISTORY
This terminological question is an eccentricity of the English language. In every other
European language, the equivalent word to 'science' includes history without hesitation.
But in the English-speaking world this question has a long past behind it, and the issues
raised by it are a convenient introduction to the problems of method in history.
At the end of the eighteenth century, when science had contributed so triumphantly both to
man's knowledge of the world and to man's knowledge of his own physical attributes, it
began to be asked whether science could not also further man's knowledge of society. The
conception of the social sciences, and of history among them, gradually developed
throughout the nineteenth century; and the method by which science studied the world of
nature was applied to the study of human affairs. In the first part of this period the
Newtonian tradition prevailed. Society, like the world of nature, was thought of as a
mechanism; the title of a work by Herbert Spencer, Social Statics, published in 1951, is
still remembered. Bertrand Russell, reared in this tradition, later recalled the period when
he hoped that in time there would be 'a mathematics of human behaviour as precise as the
mathematics of machines'.' Then Darwin made another scientific revolution; and social
scientists, taking their cue from biology, began to think of society as an organism. But the
real importance of the Darwinian revolution was that Darwin, completing what Lyell had
already begun in geology, brought history into science. Science was concerned no longer
with some- thing static and timeless, but with a process of change and development.
Evolution in science confirmed and complemented progress in history. Nothing, however,
occurred to alter the inductive view of historical method which I described in my first
lecture: First collect your facts, then interpret them. It was assumed without question that
this was also the method of science. This was the view which Bury evidently had in mind
when, in the closing words of his inaugural lecture of January 1903, he described history
as 'a science, no more and no less'. The fifty years after Bury's inaugural lecture witnessed
a strong reaction against this view of history. Collingwood, when he wrote in the 1930s,
was particularly anxious to draw a sharp line between the world of nature, which was the
object of scientific inquiry, and the world of history; and during this period Bury's dictum
was rarely quoted except in terms of derision. But what historians failed to notice at the
time was that science itself had undergone a profound revolution, which makes it seem
that Bury may have been more nearly right than we had supposed, though for the wrong
reason. What Lyell did for geology and Darwin for biology has now been done for
astronomy, which has become a science of how the universe came to be what it is; and
modern physicists constantly tell us that what they investigate are not facts, but events.
The historian has some excuse for feeling him- self more at home in the world of science
today than he could have done a hundred years ago.
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