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

WHAT IS HISTORY
the rise of British power and prosperity to the development of political institutions
embodying the principles of constitutional liberty. Gibbon and the English nineteenthcentury
historians have an old-fashioned look today, because they ignore the economic
causes which modern historians have moved into the forefront. Every historical argument
revolves round the question of the priority of causes.
Henri Poincare, in the work which I quoted in my last lecture, noted that science was
advancing simultaneously 'towards variety complexity' and ‘towards unity and simplicity',
and that this dual and apparently contradictory process-was a necessary condition of
knowledge. This is no less true of history. The historian, by expanding and deepening his
research, constantly accumulates more and more answers to the question, 'Why?' The
proliferation in recent years of economic, social, cultural, and legal history - not to
mention fresh insights into the complexities of political history, and the new techniques of
psychology and statistics - have enormously increased the number and range of our
answers. When Bertrand Russell observed that 'every advance in a science takes us further
away from the crude uniformities which are first observed into a greater differentiation of
antecedent and consequent, and into a continually wider circle of antecedents recognised
as relevant'," he accurately described the situation in history. But the historian, in virtue of
his urge to understand the past, is simultaneously compelled, like the scientist, to simplify
the multiplicity of his answers, to subordinate one answer to another, and to introduce
some order and unity into the chaos of happenings and the chaos of specific causes. 'One
God, one Law, one Element, and one far-off Divine Event'; or Henry Adams's quest for
'some great generalisation which would finish one's clamour to be educated'' - these read
nowadays like old-fashioned jokes. But the fact remains that the historian must work
through the simplification, as well as through the multiplication, of causes. History, like
science, advances through this dual and apparently contradictory process.
At this point I must reluctantly turn aside to deal with two savoury red herrings which
have been drawn across our path - one labelled 'Determinism in History; or the
Wickedness of Hegel', the other 'Chance in History; or Cleopatra's Nose'. First I must say
a word or two about how they come to be here. Professor Karl Popper, who in the 1930s in
Vienna wrote a weighty work on the new look in science (recently translated into English
under the title The Logic of Scientific Enquiry), published in English during the war two
books of a more popular character: The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Poverty of
Historicism. They were written under the strong emotional influence of the reaction
against Hegel, who was, treated, together with Plato, as the spiritual ancestor of Nazism,
and against the rather shallow Marxism which was the intellectual climate of the British
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