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

WHAT IS HISTORY
way - the only proper way to the historian I find myself under attack from my critics for
having by implication depicted what happened as something that was bound to happen,
and failed to examine all the other things that might have happened. Suppose, it is said,
that Stolypin had had time to complete his agrarian reform, or that Russia had not gone to
war, perhaps the revolution would not have occurred; or suppose that the Kerensky
government had made good, and that the leadership of the revolution had been assumed by
the Mensheviks or the Social Revolutionaries instead of by the Bolsheviks. These
suppositions are theoretically conceivable; and one can always play a parlour game with
the might-have-beens of history. But they have nothing to do with determinism; for the
determinist will only reply that, for these things to have happened, the causes would also
have had to be different. Nor have they anything to do with history. The point is that today
nobody seriously wishes to reverse the results of the Norman Conquest or of American
independence, or to express a passionate protest against these events; and nobody objects
when the - historian treats them as a closed chapter. But plenty of people, who have
suffered directly or vicariously from the results of the Bolshevik victory, or still fear its
remoter consequences, desire To register their protest against it; and this takes the form,
when they read history, of letting their imagination run riot on all the more agreeable
things that might have happened, and of being indignant with the historian who goes on
quietly with his job of explaining what did happen and why their agreeable wish-dreams
remain unfulfilled. The trouble about contemporary history is that people remember the
time when all the options were still open, and find it difficult to adopt the attitude of the
historian for whom they have been closed by the fait accompli. This is a purely emotional
and unhistorical reaction. But it has furnished most of the fuel for the recent campaign
against the supposed doctrine of ‘historical inevitability'. Let us get rid of this red herring
once and for all.
The other source of the attack is the famous crux of Cleopatra's nose. This is the theory
that history is, by and large, a chapter of accidents, a series of events determined by
chance coincidences, and attributable only to the most casual causes. The result of the
Battle of Actium was due not to the sort of causes commonly postulated by historians, but
to Antony's infatuation with Cleopatra. When Bajazet was deterred by an attack of gout
from marching into central Europe, Gibbon observed that 'an acrimonious humour falling
on a single fibre of one man may prevent or suspend the misery of nations' When King
Alexander of Greece died in the autumn of 1920 from the bite of a pet monkey, this
accident touched off a train of events which led Sir Winston Churchill to remark that 'a
quarter of a million persons died of this monkey's bite'. Or take again Trotsky's comment
on the fever contracted while shooting ducks which put him out of action at a critical point
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