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

WHAT IS HISTORY
requires acceptance of certain presuppositions based on observation, which make
scientific thinking possible but are subject to revision in the light of that thinking. These
hypotheses may well be valid in some contexts or for some purposes, though they turn out
to be invalid in others. The test in all cases is the empirical one whether they are in fact
effective in promoting fresh insights and adding to our knowledge. The methods of
Rutherford were recently described by one of his most distinguished pupils and fellowworkers
:
He had a driving urge to know how nuclear phenomena worked, in the sense in which one
could speak of knowing what went on in the kitchen. I do not believe that he searched for
an explanation in the classical manner of a theory using certain basic laws; as long as he
knew what was happening he was content."
This description equally fits the historian, who has abandoned the search for basic laws,
and is content to inquire how things work.
The status of the hypotheses used by the historian in the process of his inquiry seems
remarkably similar to that of the hypotheses used by the scientist. Take, for example, Mm
Weber's famous diagnosis of a relation between Protestantism and capitalism. Nobody
today would call this a law, though it might have been hailed as such in an earlier period.
It is a hypothesis which, though modified to some extent in the course of the inquiries
which it inspired, has beyond doubt enlarged our understanding of both these movements.
Or take a statement like that of Marx: 'The hand-mill gives us a society with a feudal lord;
the steam-mill gives us a society with an industrial capitalist.'' This is not in modern
terminology a law, though Marx would probably have claimed it as such, but a fruitful
hypothesis pointing the way to further inquiry and fresh understanding. Such hypotheses
are indispensable tools of thought. The well-known German economist of the early 1900s,
Werner ; Sombart, confessed to a 'troubled feeling' which overtook those who had
abandoned Marxism.
When [he wrote] we lose the comfortable formulas that have hitherto been our guides
amid the complexities of existence ... we feel like drowning in the ocean of facts until we
find a new foothold or learn to swim."
The controversy about periodization in history falls into this category. The division of
history into periods is not a fact, but 8 necessary hypothesis or tool of thought, valid in so
far as it is illuminating, and dependent for its validity on interpretation. Historians who
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