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

WHAT IS HISTORY
been established in this university. It would not, I feel sure, occur to any of those engaged
in investigating the causes of crime to suppose that this committed them to a denial of the
moral responsibility of the criminal. Now let us look at the historian. Like the ordinary
man, he believes that human actions have causes which are in principle ascertainable.
History, like everyday life, would be impossible if this assumption were not made. It is the
special function of the historian to investigate these causes. This may be thought to give
him a special interest in the determined aspect of human behaviour: but he does not reject
free will - except on the untenable hypothesis that voluntary actions have no cause. Nor is
he troubled by the question of inevitability. Historians, like other people, sometimes fall
into rhetorical language and speak of an occurrence as 'inevitable' when they mean merely
that the conjunction of factors leading one to expect it was overwhelmingly strong.
Recently I searched my own history for the offending word, and cannot give myself an
entirely clean bill of health: in one passage I wrote that, after the revolution of 1917, a
dash between the Bolsheviks and the Orthodox Church was 'inevitable'. No doubt it would
have been wiser to say 'extremely probable'. But may I be excused for finding the
correction a shade pedantic? In practice, historians do not assume that events are
inevitable before they have taken place. They frequently discuss alternative courses
available to the actors in the story, on the assumption that the option was open, though
they go on quite correctly to explain why one course was eventually chosen rather than the
other. Nothing in history is inevitable, except in the formal sense that, for it to have
happened otherwise, the antecedent causes would have had to be different. As a historian,
I am perfectly prepared to do without 'inevitable', 'unavoidable', 'inescapable', and even
'ineluctable'. Life will be drabber. But let us leave them to poets and metaphysicians.
So barren and pointless does this charge of inevitability appear, and so great the
vehemence with which it has been pursued in recent years, that I think we must look for
the hidden motives behind it. Its principal source is, I suspect, what I may call the 'mighthave-been'
school of thought - or rather of emotion. It attaches itself almost exclusively to
contemporary history. Last term here in Cambridge I saw a talk to some society advertised
under the title 'Was the Russian Revolution Inevitable ?' I am sure it was intended as a
perfectly serious talk. But if you had seen a talk advertised on 'Were the Wars of the Roses
Inevitable?' you would at once have suspected some joke. The historian writes of the
Norman Conquest or the American War of Independence as if what happened was in fact
bound to happen, and as if it was his business simply to explain what happened and why;
and nobody accuses him of being a determinist and of failing to discuss the alternative
possibility that William the Conqueror or the American insurgents might have been
defeated. When, however, I write about the Russian revolution of 1917 in precisely this
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