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

WHAT IS HISTORY
meaningless and futile. Well, what do we do ? As soon as we can break into the flow of
eloquence, we edge our two visitors gently but firmly towards the door, we instruct the
janitor on no account to admit them again, and we get on with our inquiry. But what
answer have we to the interrupters? Of course, Robinson was killed because he was a
cigarette-smoker. Everything that the devotees of chance and contingency in history say is
perfectly true and perfectly logical. It has the kind of remorseless logic which we find in
Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. But, while I yield to none in my
admiration for these ripe examples of Oxford scholarship, I prefer to keep my different
modes of logic in separate compartments. The Dodgsonian mode is not the mode of
history.
History therefore is a process of selection in terms of historical significance. To borrow
Talcott Parson's phrase once more, history is 'a selective system ' not only of cognitive, but
of causal, orientations to reality. Just as from the infinite ocean of facts the historian
selects those which are significant for his purpose, so from the multiplicity of sequences of
cause and effect he extracts those, and only those, which are historically significant; and
the standard of historical significance is his ability to get them into his pattern of rational
explanation and interpretation. Other sequences of cause and effect have to be rejected as
accidental, not because the relation between cause and effect is different, but because the
sequence itself is irrelevant. The historian can do nothing with it; it is not amenable to
rational interpretation, and has no meaning either for the past or the present. It is true that
Cleopatra's nose, or Bajazet's gout, or Alexander's monkey- bite, or Lenin's death, or
Robinson's cigarette-smoking, had results. But it makes no sense as a general proposition
to say that generals lose battles because they are infatuated with beautiful queens, or that
wars occur because kings keep pet monkeys, or that people get run over and killed on the
roads because they smoke cigarettes. If on the other hand you tell the ordinary man that
Robinson was killed because the driver was drunk, or because the brakes did not work, or
because there was a blind corner on the road, this will seem to him a perfectly sensible and
rational explanation; if he chooses to discriminate, he may even say that this, and not
Robinson's desire for cigarettes, was the 'real' cause of Robinson's death. Similarly, if you
tell the student of history that the struggles in the Soviet Union in the 1920s were due to
discussions about the rate of industrialisation, or about the best means of inducing the
peasants to grow grain to feed the towns, or even to the personal ambitions of rival
leaders, he will feel that these are rational and historically significant explanations, in the
sense that they could also be applied to other historical situations, and that they are 'real'
causes of what happened in the sense that the accident of Lenin's premature death was not.
He may even, if he is given to reflection on these things, be reminded of Hegel's much
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