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

WHAT IS HISTORY
ascertainable to build up in the human mind a pattern of past and present sufficiently
coherent to serve as a guide to action. Everyday life would be impossible unless one
assumed that human behaviour was determined by causes which are in principle
ascertainable. Once upon a time some people thought it blasphemous to inquire into the
causes of natural phenomena, since these were obviously governed by the divine will. Sir
Isaiah Berlin's objection to our explaining why human beings acted as they did, on the
ground that these actions ate governed by the human will, belongs to the same order of
ideas, and perhaps indicates that the social sciences are in the same stage of development
today as were the natural sciences when this kind of argument was directed against them.
Let us see how we handle this problem in everyday life. As you go about your daily
affairs, you are in the habit of meeting Smith. You greet him with an amiable, but
pointless, remark about the weather, or about the state of college or university business; he
replies with an equally amiable and pointless remark about the weather or the state of
business. But supposing that one morning Smith, instead of answering your remark in his
usual way, were to break into a violent diatribe against your personal appearance or
character. Would you shrug your shoulders, and treat this as a convincing demonstration
of the freedom of Smith's will and of the fact that everything is possible in human affairs ?
I suspect that you would not. On the contrary, you would probably say something like:’
Poor Smith! You know, of course, his father died in a mental hospital,' or 'Poor Smith! He
must have been having more trouble with his wife.' In other words, you would attempt to
diagnose the cause of Smith's apparently causeless behaviour, in the conviction that some
cause there must be. By so doing you would, I fear, incur the wrath of Sir Isaiah Berlin,
who would bitterly complain that, by providing a causal explanation of Smith's behaviour,
you had swallowed Hegel's and Marx's deterministic assumption, and shirked your
obligation to denounce Smith as a cad. But nobody in ordinary life takes this view, or
supposes that either determinism or moral responsibility is at stake. The logical dilemma
about free will and determinism does not arise in real life. It is not that some human
actions are free and others determined. The fact is that all human actions are both free and
determined, according to the point of view from which one considers them. The practical
question is different again. Smith's action had a cause, or a number of causes; but in so far
as it was caused not by some external compulsion but by the compulsion of his own
personality, he was morally responsible, since it is a condition of social life that normal
adult human beings are morally responsible for their own personality. Whether to hold
him responsible in this particular case is a matter for your practical judgement. But, if you
do, this does not mean that you regard his action as having no cause: cause and moral
responsibility are different categories. An Institute and Chair of Criminology have recently
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