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

WHAT IS HISTORY
In the same way, one can read, or even write, about the events of the past without wanting
to know why they happened, or be content to say that the Second World War occurred
because Hitler wanted war, which is true enough but explains nothing. But one should not
then commit the solecism of calling oneself a student of history or a historian. The study
of history is a study of causes. The historian, as I said at the end of my last lecture,
continuously asks the question 'Why?'; and so long as he hopes for an answer, he cannot
rest. The great historian - or perhaps I should say more broadly, the great thinker - is the
man who asks the question 'Why?' about new things or in new contexts.
Herodotus, the father of history, defined his purpose in the opening of his work: to
preserve a memory of the deeds of the Greeks and the barbarians, ‘and in particular,
beyond everything else, to give the cause of their fighting one another'. He found few
disciples in the ancient world: even Thucydides has been accused of having no clear
conception of causation. But when in the eighteenth century the foundations of modern
historiography began to be laid, Montesquieu, in his Considerations on the Causes of the
Greatness of the Romans and a their Rise and Decline, took as his starting-point the
principles that 'there are general causes, moral or physical, which operate in every
monarchy, raise it, maintain it, or overthrow it', and that 'all that occurs is subject to these
causes'. A few years later in the Esprit des lois he developed and generalised this idea. It
was absurd to suppose that 'blind fate has produced all the effects which we see in the
world'. Men were 'not governed uniquely by their fantasies'; their behaviour followed
certain laws or principles derived from 'the nature of things'.' For nearly zoo years after
that, historians and philosophers of history were busily engaged in an attempt to organise
the past experience of mankind by discovering the causes of historical events and the laws
which governed them. Sometimes the causes and the laws were thought of in mechanical,
sometimes in biological, terms, sometimes as metaphysical, sometimes as economic,
sometimes as psychological. But it was accepted doctrine that history consisted in
marshalling the events of the past in an orderly sequence of cause and effect. 'If you have
nothing to tell us', wrote Voltaire in his article on history for the Encyclopaedia, 'except
that one barbarian succeeded another on the banks of the Oxus and Jaxartes, what is that to
us?' In the last years the picture has been somewhat modified. Nowadays, for reasons
discussed in my last lecture, we no longer speak of historical 'laws'; and even the word
'cause' has gone out of fashion, partly owing to certain philosophical ambiguities into
which I need not enter, and partly owing to its supposed association with determinism, to
which I will come presently. Some people therefore speak not of ‘cause' in history, but of
‘explanation' or 'interpretation', or of ‘the logic of the situation', or of ‘the inner logic of
events' (this comes from Dicey), or reject the causal approach (why it happened) in favour
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